The second shaft presses against my stomach, trapped between my belly and his body. I reach for it. I wrap my hand around it and the one inside me flexes. The nerve line between them carries every touch in both directions.
“That,” he says. His jaw plates are locked. “Don’t stop.”
I grip and squeeze. His coils answer with a thrust that lifts my whole body and drives the first shaft so deep my vision whites out at the edges.
His tongue traces my throat. Both tips. He tastes my pulse while he is inside me, and the dual contact sends a line of heat straight down through my chest to the place where he is buried.
I’m close.
It comes from every direction. From his coils on my skin. From the shaft inside me. From my hand on the second shaft and the sound he makes when I tighten my grip. Everything feeding everything.
“Look at me,” I say.
He does. His pupils are blown wide. The look on his face is not patience, not control, not the measured restraint I havewatched him carry for weeks. It is want. Pure, raw want, naked, wrecked, and aimed at me.
The coils compress. One hard wave. Every loop tightens. The shaft inside me drives deep. The one in my hand jerks in my grip.
I come.
The sound I make fills the hall. My body grips him and does not let go. The wave runs through my legs, my stomach, my chest. I hear it come back to me off the stone walls. His name in pieces. I am loud. I am his. I do not care who hears it.
He holds me through it. His arms locked around me. His face buried in my hair. His body shaking with the effort of holding still while I break apart against him.
“Your turn,” I say against his chest, my voice wrecked. “Let go.”
His coils lock. Every muscle fires. Both shafts pulse as he holds it in as long as he can. I feel both releases, the flood pouring through me, the heat of it making everything brighter and louder and I hear his voice. Not my name. A word in his own language, pressed into my hair. Low and broken and full.
The green spreads. Moss across the stone. Vines pushing up through the floor joints. A fern uncurling between two flagstones. Flora erupting across surfaces that were gray an hour ago.
He pulls me closer as if he’s afraid to let go. Every coil tight. His chin on the top of my head. His breathing hard against my scalp.
I put my face against his chest. His pulse is fast under the scales.
“Look at the wall,” I say.
He turns his head. His eyes shift from want to wonder.
“That’s us,” I say. “That’s what we do.”
He wraps his coils around me. My body pressed into his body. The hall greening around us.
Later, when he sleeps, I carry my bedroll from the corridor to the stone beside his coils. I do not ask.
VADH
On the sixteenth morning, she sits on my stone.
Mine. There is only one stone now. I have been eating on this stone for five years. She has been here fifteen days. The stone is hers. I do not understand how this happened, and I do not want it back.
Her bedroll is beside my coils. I do not know when she moved it from the corridor. She brought hers over at some point during the night. I did not hear her do it. But both stones are side by side at the base of the steps, and she sits on the one that is warm from my coils and eats her breakfast.
She leans against the loop of me that rests beside the stone. Her shoulder blade against the scales. Her weight settling in while she chews. There is nothing performative about this. She is leaning because the coil is there and she wants to lean.
She puts her hand on my coil while she eats. Casual. No intent. Her palm resting on the scales as it would on a table or a knee. Neither of us mentions it.
The stew is for the evening, but I start the preparation early because the dried meat needs soaking and the root needs cutting. She comes into the anteroom while I am cutting.
She picks up the second knife and starts on the root. She cuts it small. She has been cutting it small since the first time.
