Page 40 of Something Human

Rus wasn’t sure that made sense to him, but he realized they had landed on a thing that Adares wanted and was—a little—embarrassed about. It was an amazing discovery.

“I want to do it,” Rus said fervently. “How do I do it?”

He did it lying on his back, with Adares kneeling astride him—surely not the usual way, but of course Adares was still worried about Rus’s hurt leg. There was lamp-oil involved, and Adares guided Rus’s hand and showed him where to slide his fingers—it was very strange, but it was clear the Phemian liked it—and Rus’s own dick, unattended, felt like a tent pole.

There is no way Adares can take that inside him, he thought—he will be hurt. But he did it, though in truth it didn’t look easy, and Rus felt he would prefer their positions not be reversed in the future. Adares looked down at him with a raw expression, like a boy.

“I haven’t done this in a long time,” he said, and however he meant that to sound, it came out like a whispered confession.

Rus held hard to his slim, bronze hips, and pushed up into him, setting the rhythm, because he’d discovered already for himself how good that felt, to be at the other man’s mercy in such a small, safe way. He watched to see if the Phemian would like it too, and everyone in the world fell off all the horses that had ever been bred.

Adares had raised his arms, hands clasped behind his head, eyes closed, his whole body thrown into a pose of impossible abandon, and the evening sun from the doorway glowed on his smooth, bare skin, all down one side, golden-bronze, as if he were kindling into flame. Rus reached that moment when his body seemed to contract into one pure arc of pleasure and then release, slowly, shuddering. It was smaller than the first time, not so overwhelming, and he was glad of that, because his beautiful Phemian had not reached his own ecstasy, and Rus knew what he wanted to do, while his body was still primed for it.

He rocked Adares forward and then back, catching him and putting him down on his back without breaking their union—he had trained from childhood to jump on and off horses and ride wild animals that didn’t want to be ridden, and a little bit of athleticism in bed, even when he was injured, was no kind of a challenge—and he shifted his grasp from Adares’s hips to his shoulders, pressing their bodies together, thrusting faster and harder, feeling the Phemian’s beautiful dick rub against his belly. Adares yelled—not words, just a sound of delight—and his seed came hot against Rus’s skin.

They collapsed together in a tangle of limbs, Rus on top. He shifted after a moment to pull out of the Phemian’s body. Adares made a noise, and Rus looked up and saw that there were tears on his cheeks. He pushed up onto his hands, alarmed. He forgot about his leg then, and was rewarded with a bright stab of pain, but it barely registered.

“Ah, no! What is it? I hurt you! Did I hurt you?”

Adares turned his face away, scrubbing at his eyes.

“Speak to me! If I hurt you, I will never forgive myself.”

Adares groaned, covering his eyes with his hand. “Immortal gods! Rus! Did I flip out on you like this when you started crying after the first time?”

“No, you did not, but I’m not like you, Adares. You’re a sophisticated man from Pheme who”—who rules a whole colony, he was going to say, but he was still pretending not to know that—“who’s had countless women and men. Of course you do not ‘flip out.’”

Adares looked at him, half-smiling now. “I don’t usually cry, either. That was … You’re like a force of nature, when you want to be.”

“You liked it. I didn’t hurt you.”

“No. Only in a good way. I liked it a lot.”

“Good. Good.”

He lay down again beside Adares. What a man you are, he thought, to be able to want that and not be ashamed. And, he thought, I have just taken the archon of Tios, the headman of the colonists, like a woman. Let anyone try to tell me I’m not a man.

They were lying the wrong way around on the bed now. Rus moved to retrieve the pillows and make them more comfortable. He rearranged himself carefully, because his leg was aching again.

He said, “Now we have both been a little bit like women to each other. I think it is good to be like women. They are mothers and brave, loyal wives and take care of the hearth. We should want to be like that if we can.”

Adares was silent for a moment as if thinking about that, as if perhaps he hadn’t before. “Yeah,” he said finally. “You’re right. When you said that before, I thought you were insulting yourself.”

“Ah. No, not really.”

Adares got up then—wincing slightly as he climbed off the bed—and brought water and a cloth to clean them up. Rus honestly rather liked being sticky with the Phemian’s seed, if only for the bizarre novelty of it, but he would not say so and invite remarks about his dirty barbarian ways. He let Adares run the cloth over his skin, and then took it away from him to return the favour. He took his time with it. He wanted to say something about how lovely Adares was, but he had no idea how to put it, what to say.

What he found himself saying instead, as he fingered the damp black curls at Adares’s groin, was, “You do not have any other hair on your body but here. You don’t shave it off, do you, as with your beard?”

“Um.” Adares gave him a tolerant look, as if maybe he could tell Rus had been trying to come up with something more poetic. “Not exactly. We use wax.”

“Wax?”

“It’s completely normal, all Phemian aristocrats do this—don’t make that face.” He sat up, tossed his pillow back to the head of the bed, and scooted around to lie back down the right way. “You see, this is what I was talking about, why our women don’t talk about their beauty regimes—you may think you want to know, but actually you want to go on thinking it’s all a gift from the gods, and they don’t have to do anything.”

“It—it looks nice,” Rus ventured.

Adares snorted. “Yeah? I’m glad you approve.”