I go to my chamber and settle on the stone. Through the doorway I can see the edge of her bedroll. The corner of the cloth, the strap of her pack.
Six feet between my door and where she chose to sleep. She did not ask. She just moved.
I wait until her breathing slows. Then I go to the corridor window. The slit is clogged with vine growth, the thick stems blocking whatever light would reach this section of the passage in the morning. I pull the vines clear. The stems come away in long strips. Behind them, the opening faces east.
She will wake to light now. I cannot stop seeing it. That grin. Wide and fast and directed at a leaf.
BRYN
Iwake on the eleventh morning in the corridor outside his sleeping chamber. He is coiled beside me.
His tail has come to rest alongside the edge of the bedroll during the night, a loop of muscle as wide as my thigh lying parallel to where I slept. He is still asleep. His breathing is slow and even, the scales at his chest rising and falling.
His tail is warmer than the bedroll. If I had known that a week ago, I would have skipped the bedroll entirely.
I look at the loop of tail beside me. The underside of the scales is paler than the top, softer, the grain running in a different direction. I reach down and put my palm on it. The scales are cool in the morning air. His pulse is there, distant, slow.
He wakes. I feel the change under my hand. The pulse quickens. The muscles tighten.
He sees his own tail lying beside my bedroll and I see the moment he registers what his body did in the night.
“Sorry,” he says.
“Don’t be.”
“I sleep better out here than I did in the chamber,” I say. “In case you were wondering why the bedroll moved.”
I keep my hand on his tail. We stay like that for a minute, quiet, the morning light coming down the corridor from the high window in the hall.
I have been thinking since the pool. About his tongue. The way it traced my shoulder and my throat. The fork of it finding two points on my skin at once. The sensation of being read by a sense organ I don’t have.
I have been thinking about it when I work. When I chip calcification from the channel walls and my hands ache and my mind goes somewhere else. I have been thinking about it at night, lying on the bedroll with his coils near enough to feel the warmth through the stone. The thought comes back the same way each time. The fork splitting at my collarbone. The tip on my pulse.
It has gone further than that in my head. Further than the shoulder. Further than the throat. I know where I want that tongue and I have known since the water rose to my chin and his eyes changed.
His hand rests on the stone near my bedroll. I could reach for it. I could let the morning pass and go to the channels and work and not say anything and come back to this bedroll tonight and think about it again.
I am not going to do that.
“I want to ask you something,” I say.
He is fully awake now. His attention on my face.
“Your tongue. In the pool. You tasted me.”
“Yes.”
“I want you to taste more of me.” I hold his gaze. “Lower.”
The muscles along his jaw plates go still. The faint sheen of venom appears on the scales of his forearms. He understands what I am asking.
“The venom will be stronger there,” he says. His voice is careful. “The skin is thinner. You will feel it more than anywhere I have touched you.”
“I know.”
“You are sure?”
“Vadh. I am sure.”
