The door is open, and I’m walking through it.
RUELLE
The bond settles into my body over the next hour. I feel each tolerance settle like a door closing softly, the quiet click of a lock turning on a room I don’t live in anymore.
He holds me through all of it, sitting on the flat rock by the vent, his chest against my back, his arms around me, his chin resting on the top of my head.
When the settling finishes, I turn in his arms and face him. The last dull patches are gone.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hi.”
I kiss him, and the kiss is different now, a kiss between two people who chose each other with their eyes open and no wall left between them. His hands move up my back, under my shirt, his palms against my skin.
“Here?” he says: the vent, the steam, the open air, the flat rock where I said thank you and meant something larger.
“Here.”
I pull my shirt off. He pulls the vest over his head. I push my trousers down and he loosens his wrapping, and the last of the fabric goes, and we are skin and scales and nothing between us.
The steam wraps around us. The sulfur smell is sharp and clean, and I will never smell sulfur again without thinking of this moment.
I run my hands down his chest and take my time. The scales under my palms are smooth, alive, the venom production humming underneath at a level that feels settled for the first time, and I trace the center of his chest from his collarbone down to his sternum, but different now. His thumbs trace the hollows above my hip bones.
“You’re not holding back,” I say.
“No.”
“I can feel the difference.”
“What does it feel like?”
He pulls me closer, into his lap, his shoulders down, his jaw relaxed, his hands on my back firm without being careful. He’s not being careful, and that’s the difference; every other time, the care was a cage. Now the care is just care.
I kiss his neck, where the scales along his throat are fine and thin, and when I press my lips to them I feel his venom humming steadily underneath. I kiss lower, his collarbone, the ridge where the thick shoulder scales meet the finer ones at his chest, tracing the boundary with my tongue, and his breathing changes.
“Tell me what you want,” he says. His voice is low and rough.
“Everything.”
He takes my hand, pulls me up from his lap, turns me. My back against the flat rock, the stone warm from the vent, the steam drifting across my skin, and he lowers himself over me and the size of him blocks out the sky.
I pull him down, his weight settling against me, not all of it, the instinctive restraint of a creature who knows what he could crush, and I wrap my legs around his waist and pull harder, and the care gives way.
“Don’t be careful,” I say.
“I’m not being careful.”
“You’re distributing your weight.”
“That’s physics, not caution.”
I reach between us and find him. The ventral slit is already open, both shafts extended, hotter than I’ve ever felt them, the ridges flushed dark with blood and heat.
His mouth finds my neck first, the fresh bite mark, and he bites again, and the venom goes in at full strength, heat blooming out from the bite into every place he is about to touch.
He presses into me. We know each other’s bodies now, the angles, the way I open for him, and when both shafts enter together the stretch is a white line behind my eyes that breaks into warmth.
