He hesitates. I wait.
He does it.
He unbuckles the chest plate. The shoulder guards. The arm braces. He stacks them on the lip of the pool.
His upper body is all scales. Teal-green across the chest and shoulders, the plates broad and flat, overlapping downward like shingles on a roof. Where the armor has been rubbing for years, the edges of the plates have been polished gold-bright. Between the plates, in the valleys, the scales are darker, finer, the color of deep water.
The width of him without the armor is different than with it. Broader through the chest than the gold suggested. The plates across his shoulders are thick, heavy, built for impact. At the sides of his torso the scales thin. Softer. His ribs move through them when he breathes.
A pattern of darker scales runs down the midline of his chest, narrowing as it descends. Where his torso meets his serpentine body, there is a seam of softer scales. A place the armor was hiding. The scales there are pale and fine and his pulse moves through them.
“You’ve been hiding that under gold plate,” I say. “That seems like a waste.”
He says nothing. But his pulse, in that soft seam of scales, picks up.
I step forward.
The venom hits.
His scales are in the water, and the water has taken everything his scales are producing. The whole basin is saturated. It soaks into my skin everywhere. My back. My shoulders. The hollows of my throat. The insides of my thighs. Between my legs where the spring feeds up through the basin floor.
My knees loosen. Heat runs up from my ankles, through my calves, into the backs of my thighs. Specific, alive, chemical. The compound reaching places it has never reached through hand-to-forearm contact.
“That’s,” I say, and stop.
“I know.” His voice is lower than I have heard it. “I can smell it on you.”
His tongue flicks out. Long. Forked at the tip. He tastes the air between us.
I move closer. Two steps. The water shifts around my hips as I close the distance.
His tongue finds my shoulder. It follows the curve to my neck. The fork splits at my collarbone. One tip traces the hollow of my throat. The other traces the line of my jaw below my ear. Both tips are wet and smooth, and I feel them register my pulse at two points simultaneously.
The heat between my hips tightens.
I put both hands flat on his chest.
The plates are smooth under my palms. Cool where the water has been sitting against them. In the narrow channels between each plate, the finer scales give under my fingers, the texture ofit, the way it yields where the armored plates do not. I press my thumbs into one of those valleys and he draws a breath that I feel through both my hands.
I follow the midline down to where the flat chest plates give way to softer scales at his sides. I trace that border with my thumbs. The scales thin here, yield under my fingers. His ribs rise and fall beneath my touch, and I feel each breath enter and leave his body.
His coils move in the water. A loop rises and circles my waist. Scale against the wet fabric of my shirt, then against bare skin at my hips. The compound soaks through at every contact point. The flush spreads across my stomach, my sides. Teal where it is deepest.
I stop.
My body wants to go further. The compound in the water is making everything below my navel ache. I stop because I want to choose the next step when I can think clearly. When every nerve in my body isn’t lit up.
I put my hands flat on his chest. I hold them there.
“Not tonight,” I say. “I want to. Not tonight.”
His coil at my waist loosens from a grip to a hold.
“All right,” he says.
I lean against his chest. The coil at my waist supports my weight. I rest inside the circle of him. His tongue finds my shoulder again and traces down my arm, slow, the forked tips reading the surface of my skin.
I tilt my head back against his shoulder. His face is right there. His mouth.
