She holds.
Then she lets go, stands, wipes her thumb on her pants, and walks down the corridor without a word.
I stay on the stone floor, my hand open on the nearest coil, the scales where she touched me flushed dark, two shades deeper than the rest. The secretion is still pooling in my palm. My body is still producing, the glands firing on what her touch started. The compound drips from the edge of my hand onto the stone.
The stone does not go gray.
I stare at the droplet on the flagstone. Every morning for five years I have poured venom into stone and watched it powder and pale and die. What her touch pulled from my body sits on the surface. Clear. Faintly teal in the corridor light. The stone beneath it is unchanged.
The production takes a long time to slow. I stay in the corridor and wait for my own body to stop responding to a woman who touched my palm and walked away.
I want to put my hand on her back. Between her shoulder blades, where the fabric pulls when she reaches into the channels. I want to feel the line of her back under my palm. I want to know if the sound she would make is the same sound she makes when she stretches after a long section of wall work, the small exhale through her teeth.
I have not wanted to touch a person in twenty years. I have wanted to not harm them. That is different.
There is one want I do not let finish forming. Her mouth.
Everything else on my body, her skin has met and answered. My tongue carries the venom at its strongest, drawn from the glands behind my jaw. Skin can shed what touches it. A mouth swallows.
I put the want away with the rest of them. It does not stay where I put it.
BRYN
On the eighth morning I stop pretending.
I am done pretending. My mother flew a glider into magical wards because she couldn’t leave a mystery alone. I walked onto a slave block because I couldn’t either. Pretending I don’t want this male’s hands on my body is a lie I’m not good enough to maintain.
After breakfast, I say, “I found the springs my first night. The lower level. I want to go back down.”
“The hot water will help my shoulders. I’ve been clearing channels for a week and everything from the neck down is sore.”
This is true. It is not the whole reason.
“Yes,” he says.
“Come with me.”
His hands go still on the bread.
His eyes stay on mine for a long count. He knows. I know he knows.
“I will come,” he says.
The springs are as I left them, steam rising off the green-clear water, the moss at the lip untouched.
I strip down to my shirt. Boots first, set beside the basin. Belt. Pants folded. Each piece placed where I can reach it fast.
I stand at the edge for one breath. Then I step down into the water.
It takes my legs. My hips. My stomach. I wade to the center. The water comes to just under my collarbone. I turn.
He is at the edge. He has not moved.
“Get in the water, Vadh.”
He comes. Deliberate. The length of his body unwinds down the steps and into the basin and the water level rises with him. Nearly to my chin. His coils fill most of the pool. I am surrounded by a ring of teal-green muscle under the water, his humanoid torso rising from the coil a pace away.
“Take off your armor.”
