He sets the chip down and pours water into my cup. His fingers brush the cup and stay.
“Good,” he says.
“Still just good? I found the original channels intact under all of it, and all I get is the same word as twenty feet of debris.”
“It isnotthe same word.” His eyes stay on the chip between us. “It is the same sound. The word is larger now.”
I decide to accept that. It might not be the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me with a straight face, but I’ll take it.
On the twenty-first morning I bring him a leaf from the garden. I have been going out to the beds on my own, checking the basil, pulling the overgrown onion back from the border. I hold the leaf up.
I say the Naga word for it. The one he taught me in the anteroom. I get it right. Every syllable. The sounds land where they belong.
He doesn’t say anything. I look at his face and I grin.
“Told you I’d get it,” I say.
On the twenty-first night, it starts with his tail.
I am lying against his coils in the hall, half-asleep, the warmth of the stone and his body blurring at the edges. The lamps are low. The green on the walls catches the last light.
His tail moves first. The tip traces my ankle, slides up the outside of my calf. Slow. Deliberate. Not an accident. Not the unconscious reaching he does in his sleep. This is intentional.
I open my eyes.
He is watching me. The pupils wide in the low light. His hands are still. His tail is not.
The tip traces the inside of my knee. Higher. The teal scales warm against my skin. My breath changes and he sees it happen and the tip moves higher still.
“Vadh.”
“Don’t move,” he says. His voice is quiet. It’s not a request.
The tip of his tail reaches the crease of my thigh and pauses. The warmth of the scales soaks through the thin fabric. My bodyanswers before my mind does. My hips shift involuntarily and his hand comes to my stomach and presses me flat.
“I saiddon’t move.”
He is playing with me. This careful, restrained male who has held himself still for twenty years is playing with me.
The look on his face is something I have not seen before.
Intent.
Hungry.
Patient in a way that is the opposite of restraint. He is taking his time because he wants to.
His other hand finds the hem of my shirt. He lifts it slowly. His palm skims my ribs, the curve beneath my breast. His thumb traces the underside, and I arch into his hand. His tail presses harder between my thighs.
“Please,” I say, almost begging. I have never said please to him.
“Not yet.” The words hang in my mind. Agony.
His hand closes over my breast. The heat of his palm blooms through my chest and down and meets the heat his tail is building between my legs. I make a sound that has no consonants in it.
He pulls my shirt over my head, then runs both hands on me. His tail still works between my thighs through the fabric. He cups both breasts, runs his thumbs across the peaks. His tongue flicks out and tastes the hollow of my throat. I am being touched in four places at once and every point is connected and I am losing my mind.
“Vadh. I need you inside me.”
