It is not a word you say to someone. It is a word you carry until you can set it down.
I say the word.
She listens. She does not try to repeat it. She listens to the shape of it in my mouth. The vowels that a human throat cannot make. The length of it. The weight.
“I love you too,” she says. “In my language it’s shorter.”
I look at her. She is kneeling where the glow reaches the floor. Dust still in her hair. She is looking at me the way she looked at me on the auction block. No flinch. No performance. Her eyes on mine as though what she sees is enough.
My coils move. The nearest loop slides across the stone and circles her, settles at her waist, rests there. The same motion my tail makes in sleep, reaching for her in the dark. But she is here.
“Say it again,” she says.
I say it again. She closes her eyes and listens. The pool light moves across her face.
She opens her eyes.
“I’ll get it,” she says.
The last time she said that, she was holding a leaf in the anteroom and grinning at a word for an herb.
I believe her.
BRYN
We eat in the anteroom. He made the stew while I washed. His coil presses against my hip at the counter. The same spot. The same warmth. We have been inside each other’s bodies. We have repaired a building together. And he is beside me while I cut root vegetables and I do not want to be anywhere else on this earth.
He tears the herb. Drops it in. The scent fills the anteroom.
“It needs fish,” I say.
“The trader comes in ten days.”
“Ask him.”
He nods. The slow nod from the first time I asked for berries. Filing the possibility that food is something you can have preferences about when you are not eating alone.
In the evening I go to his sleeping chamber.
He is coiled on the stone. The lamp is low.
I sit down beside him. I put my hand on his coil.
“I’m staying,” I say. “Not because of the seal. Because of you.”
He turns his body toward me. The coils shift. The loop nearest my legs opens and I lean into it.
Then he reaches for my face. His fingers along my jaw. The pad of his thumb on my lower lip. He tilts my face up. He hasnever done this. Before, he has always asked first, the stillness, the tail at my ankle, and let me be the one to cross. He has waited. He has held still.
He is not waiting.
His mouth comes to my throat. Not the tongue. His mouth. The jaw plates part and I feel the pressure of his lips, the softer scales at the inner edge, held against my pulse. Then his hands find the hem of my shirt and he pulls it over my head and his hands are on my bare back before the cloth hits the stone.
The warmth hits bare skin and my back arches into the contact.
The coils move. The loops arrange around me, opening, drawing me deeper into the center of his body. I push my pants down and his coils take them the rest of the way. I am bare inside him. Every inch of my skin reading his and his reading mine.
His tongue finds my throat and seals flat, both tips against my pulse. Then lower. Down between my breasts. Down my stomach. The fork opens against me. I am already there, already aching, his mouth and his coils arriving at the same answer from every direction.
