Page 39 of Something Human

Rus moved the bowl of ink and the stylus he had been using to draw with back off the bed, and settled against Adares’s side again. He felt awkward doing it, and knew he was beginning to blush, thinking how obvious his intention must have been. Adares just smiled at him and drew him closer.

“May I kiss you?” It was charming that he asked, since surely he had not been told “no” many times in his life.

“I—I was hoping that you would.”

He leaned over, and his mouth was warm and gentle on Rus’s, his hand stroking through Rus’s hair. They moved apart again and lay looking at one another.

“I love kissing you,” Adares said. He ran a thumb over Rus’s lips, parting them a little. “Your mouth is so … I don’t know how to describe it.” He laughed softly as Rus opened his mouth to the probing thumb, caressing it with his tongue. “Inviting. It’s very inviting.”

He talked like this, joking and tender at the same time, easy compliments one moment and teasing the next. It wasn’t something Rus had ever imagined, that he might want it, but it was wonderful.

“So,” said Adares. “What would you like me to do?”

“Ah, well … ” Should he say, Whatever you want? But he was learning the things Adares liked, and that giving pleasure was high on the list. “Touch me.”

“Somewhere in particular?”

“Yes, my … ” His face was probably bright red by now. He waved a hand indicatively.

He was wearing one of the Phemian tunics again, with nothing under it. Adares pushed up the skirt of it, delicately, touching only the fabric. He was naked already himself—he tossed his clothes off without ceremony now, although he had been more circumspect in their first days together, when he had still thought Rus was a respectable Luth.

“Can you not say the word ‘dick’ or something?”

“Of course not.” Rus squirmed, arching his back. The Phemian was just looking at him now, and he felt exposed and absurd. “I didn’t know that word.”

He hadn’t known an appropriate Kosoth word at all. He’d seen the body part mentioned only in medical treatises, and once in a Kossian poem, where it was called “the staff of manhood,” which he was certainly not going to say. But perhaps he should have, because then his beautiful Phemian would have laughed—he laughed almost as easily as he smiled—and it was one of the wonders of the world.

Later, he would find a time to mention all this. Right now, his dick—that was a good, plain word—was in Adares’s hand, and he couldn’t form words in any language. He let his knee drop to the side against Adares’s flank, his hips making small, jerky thrusts up into Adares’s hand. He was lost to everything but the feeling of Adares’s fingers, too light on his hot skin, moving with a teasing gentleness.

“It’s a lovely dick, by the way. The size, the shape—the decoration. Definitely one of the best I’ve encountered.”

“Do you want me to—penetrate you with it?” There was probably a short, plain word for that, too. It was a joke, in any case. It was something you did to a woman.

Adares raised his eyebrows, one of them higher than the other. Rus fell off several horses at the same time.

“Do you want to?”

“What?”

“Penetrate me—as you so scientifically put it.”

“No!” It had been a joke. What if it weren’t a joke? “I mean—how? Where?”

“Oh, Rus. Immortal gods.” Adares was giving him a genuinely appalled look. “Is that a real question?”

“Ah. No.”

It had been, but only because he’d been momentarily out of his mind and forgotten that of course there was that way, you could do that to a man—just as a woman could do what Adares had done earlier in the day, take a man into her mouth—and he knew about a number of ways like that, because some of the kahar talked openly about things they could do with women without risk of getting children, though of course they never admitted having actually done them, but …

With a heroic effort, he stopped himself saying any of that. Adares was still stroking him, with a steady, leisurely rhythm.

“Doesn’t it … hurt?” Rus managed.

“What, hurt you?”

“No, you!”

“Oh, well, not … not much. Not if you do it properly. And it’s, uh, it’s worth it.”