I do not guide him. His body knows mine the way it knows the channels and the grooves and the pour.
Both at once.
They press into me together. The stretch is real and total and my breath leaves my body. My body opens because my body has been opening for him since the river.
Full. Both. The coils tighten.
“Vadh.”
“I know.” He is breathing hard. “I feel it.”
He moves. A slow roll. Deliberate. The coils around my body shifting in a wave that starts at my calves and travels up to my ribs. The wave pushes me onto both shafts and releases. A rhythm that matches breathing.
I match it. My hips rolling against the coils.
His heartbeat. I feel it inside my own chest. His pulse alongside mine, two rhythms overlapping, and then not overlapping. Matching. The same speed. The same depth.
Both shafts pulse together for the first time. Synchronized. Both crests hitting at the same time. The sensation starts deep and spreads outward and I cannot find the edge of it.
His tongue returns to my throat, tasting my pulse through my skin. Reading me the way I read stone.
My hands find his face. My palms against the jaw plates. My thumbs on the softer scales below his eyes.
“There you are,” I say. As if I have been looking.
His jaw plates shift under my hands. His eyes are on mine. Not patient, not controlled, not the measured restraint I have watched him carry for weeks. Open.
The deliberate pace breaks.
Both shafts drive deep. The coils lock around me.
I come, feeling my walls grip his shafts.
His face in my hands. His name on my tongue. The sound fills the chamber and comes back from the walls. I clench around both and he follows. Both releases at once. The flood pouring through me and the green rising through the floor and the walls and the chamber alive with it.
“Vadh.” My voice is wrecked.
“Yes.”
“Your scales.”
I run my hand down his chest. The warmth. But something has changed. The faint sheen of venom that has been on his scales every time I have touched him, the wetness that is part of what he is, the baseline secretion that has been there since his venom came in.
It is gone.
I press my palm flat against his chest. The scales are warm. Smooth. Dry.
I have never felt this. I have never touched the scales themselves. Without the venom, the texture is different. Smoother. The edges of the plates more distinct. A thing I have never been allowed to touch.
“Vadh. Your scales are dry.”
His eyes are open. Something between disbelief and recognition.
“For the first time in my life,” he says. “My scales are dry.”
I go still.
Dry. All of him. Even the mouth he has guarded for twenty years.
