“That was terrible,” I say.
“Yes,” he says. A pause. “It was the worst sound I have ever heard.”
I look at him. His face is straight. His jaw plates are set. His eyes are not straight. His eyes are doing something I have never seen his eyes do.
I am grinning. Wide and fast and aimed at him. His jaw plates shift a fraction. He does not know what to do with his face. He is going to figure it out if I give him long enough.
“Say it again,” I say. “Slowly.”
He says it again. The vowels long and deep. The sound fills the chamber. I watch his mouth. The way the jaw plates open wider than a human jaw. The way the sound comes from lower in his throat.
I try. The first syllable holds. The second syllable holds. The third collapses.
“Better,” he says.
“Don’t lie to me.”
“The first two sounds were correct.”
“And the third?”
“The third was not a sound any living creature has made before.”
I press my face against his coil and laugh again. The second laugh is easier than the first. Less surprise in it. More of the warmth that has been building in this building for weeks.
His tail shifts. The tip finds my ankle and curls around it. He does this now. In sleep, awake, without deciding to. Hisbody reaching for mine the way a hand reaches for a railing. Automatic. Sure.
“Once more,” I say. “Just for kicks.”
He says the word. I close my eyes this time. I listen to the shape of it without watching his mouth. The vowels are long. Open. The sounds my throat cannot make are the sounds that require a different architecture. A throat built for different music.
I try.
Wrong. But the shape is closer. I feel where my mouth fails and where it holds and the distance between the two is narrower than it was ten minutes ago.
“What does it feel like?” I say. “When you say it. In your mouth. Where does the sound come from?”
He pauses. No one has asked him this before.
“Behind the jaw,” he says. “Below where you place your words. The sound starts in the same place the venom starts.”
“The glands.”
“The muscles around the glands. The vibration passes through them.”
I put my hand on his throat. I feel the muscles under the scales.
“Say it again.”
He says it. I feel it. The vibration under my palm, low and specific, starting deep and moving upward through the throat and out. A sound that begins where his body begins. A word built from the same architecture as the venom and the coils and the pour.
I take my hand off his throat. I put it on my own.
I try.
The first syllable. The second. The third.
Wrong. But closer than before. The third syllable does not collapse. It wobbles. It leans. But it arrives.
