The next morning, there are berries in the bread.
BRYN
On the fifteenth day I go to him.
I have been planning this since the pool. I have been waiting for him to come to me first. He has not. He smooths the stone where I sleep. He clears the vine from my window. He puts berries in the bread. He does not cross the distance.
So I will.
He is in the main hall. Late afternoon light falls through the upper openings in long bars. He has not put the armor back on in days. The chest plate sits on the stone near the supply room entrance like something he set down and forgot to pick up.
He is bare from the waist up. The teal-green plates of his chest catching the late light. The darker midline descending. The softer scales at the seam.
I start across the hall.
I am halfway there when he moves.
His coils unwind from the steps. The sound of scales on stone fills the hall, fast, and he is coming toward me, and his eyes are not patient. The eyes of a creature that has been holding still for twenty years and has stopped.
“Bryn.”
My name in his mouth like a thing breaking. He reaches me before I reach him. His hand goes to the back of my neck, and his mouth finds my throat and the sound he makes against my skin is low and desperate and I have never heard it from him before.
“Vadh…”
His hands are on my shirt and the fabric tears. He doesn’t stop. His coils wrap around my legs, my hips, lifting me off the stone, and his hands pull the pants from my body with a motion that has nothing to do with care and everything to do with want. His mouth moves from my throat to the hollow of my collarbone, and his tongue presses flat against my pulse.
“I can’t,” he breathes against my skin. “I can’t wait anymore.”
Twenty years of restraint breaking open in his hands.
I am bare inside his coils. The teal deep at my wrists and throat. His color, written into my blood.
His mouth is at my throat, my jaw, the corner of my lips. It goes no further. Even now. Even with twenty years breaking open in his hands, that one door stays sealed.
The seam at his lower body is open. I look down between us and my breath catches.
Two shafts, both out, both heavy, both dark teal and slick.
I have felt one against my thigh in the pool. I have imagined. I did not imagine this.
“Two,” I say.
“Yes.” His voice is rough.
I reach down. I wrap my hand around the nearer shaft and his whole body shudders. The scales on it are the finest on his body. Smooth between the ridges, textured on them, and hot. He makes a sound, a sound that has been locked inside him for years.
“Bryn.” My name again. Ragged. “I need…”
“Yes.”
He does not wait for me to guide him. His coils shift my hips, tilt me, position me, and the first shaft presses against me and then inside me and the stretch is real and I grip the plates at his shoulders and the heat floods from his body into the deepest part of mine. The heat from inside meets the heat from the coils on my skin and the venom reaches places nothing has ever reached and my head empties.
“More.” The word comes out ragged. Begging. “Vadh. More.”
He drives deeper. The coils compress around my body, a rolling pressure that pushes me onto him and pulls me back. His hands grip my hips hard like he owns me. Each finger finding its place.
This is the grip of a male who has stopped being careful.
