He stays. The warmth of his mouth is constant, not the wet heat of a human mouth but something deeper.
“Right there. Don’t move.”
He doesn’t move. He holds exactly where I told him and does something with the tip of his tongue, a slow circling pressure, and I hear myself make a sound that I will never put in any notebook.
“How are you doing that?”
He can’t answer; his mouth is busy, and the vibration of the sound he makes instead goes through me and I stop asking questions.
I’m loud, and I don’t care. I’ve been quiet for months, quiet in the towns that turned me away, quiet on the roads, quiet in the auction hall, and I’m done being quiet.
I say his name and I say other things that aren’t words, and his hands are on my hips holding me steady because my body is trying to come off the ground. He finds my rhythm and holds it, the texture of his tongue, the steadiness of his grip, my hand in his crest, my heels against his back, his scales under my feet.
I come with his name in my mouth and his hands on my hips and his tongue inside me, and the noise I make fills the cave.
After, he rests his head against my thigh, and I’m shaking, not from cold. He shifts up beside me, his weight settling on the furs, and I reach for him.
My hand finds the ventral slit, which has opened, the scales around it flushed and finer than anywhere else on his body, softer, the skin between the scales bare. When my fingers trace his opening he goes rigid, a full-body response, the temperature in the cave rising.
“Tell me,” I say. “Show me what you like.”
His hand covers mine and guides me, showing me pressure, speed, where the ridges are most sensitive. He’s hot under my fingers, the heat coming through the skin, and when I find the right pressure his breath stops.
“There?”
“There.” One word. His voice is wrecked, and I’ve never heard him like this, stripped down, nothing held back. The controlled, careful creature who measures every sentence has been reduced to single words, and I did that, and the power of it hits the same way the venom does.
I keep going. His hand drops away from mine because his body has taken over and his hands are gripping the furs, his breathing ragged, his eyes closed, his jaw open. I watch his face while I touch him because his face is doing things I’ve never seen and I don’t want to miss any of them.
When he finishes against my palm, his whole body shudders, and a sound comes out of him, low, raw, broken open, older than language.
Then he goes still.
We lie on the furs. The fire is low. I press my face into his neck, his arm around me, his scales bright where I’ve been touching him, the healthy color spreading. His free hand rests on his chest, open, the fingers loose. Still.
The notebook is on the shelf where I left it. I don’t reach for it. I don’t want to. I want to stay here, in the warm, with his arm around me and his heartbeat in my ear.
“Sirath?”
“Mm.”
“Your cooking is terrible.”
What comes out is a laugh, a real one, and it moves through his chest and into mine, and it’s the best thing I’ve heard in months.
I close my eyes. I stay.
SIRATH
She’s asleep against my chest when I wake.
Her hair is in my face, and her hand is on my arm, fingers curled into the scales, holding on in her sleep the way she holds on to everything, with her whole grip.
I don’t move. My scales are brighter than they’ve been in two years, and her heart beats against my ribs.
I could stay here. My scales settle, my jaw unclenches, and the thirty years of argument don’t arrive. I could stay here, with her weight against me and her breath on my neck and her fingers wedged between my scales.
I could stay. I don’t examine it. I don’t argue with it. I let it sit.
