Under the Rushes

by Amy Lane

  “Sweet,” Taern murmured, and Dorjan nodded, fighting the tightness in his chest.

  “If that could feel new, if it could feel hopeful, that, Taern, which… which churns my stomach to even think that it was me….” He trailed off, not sure how to put the rest into words.

  “You think that you could feel shiny new to me,” Taern finished for him, and Dorjan felt a small smile flutter at his mouth.

  “Is it too far away to reach?”

  Taern shook his head. “It’s right on target, Nyx. From my first taste of you, everything about you is new.”

  Dorjan slept after that, but he held the words and their promise to his heart. They sustained him, really, for the next four days. He was careful—exceptionally careful—after that to make sure to meet Taern at the conveyance, no matter what their plans had been during the day proper.

  Taern fretted on the last day of the working days, because he hadn’t been able to connect with Madame M. He’d left her notes and cash to distribute, but in spite of their final peace at the end…. “Our last words were hard, and we were both upset.”

  “Why?” Dorjan asked, thinking he felt just well enough to stay awake for dinner this night. “What was happening?”

  “I was looking for you,” Taern said sourly. “But you’re taking so long to get better, I’m starting to wonder if it was worth the effort.”

  Dorjan chuckled softly. “I always thought you were a smart boy, Taern. If you were to answer that truthfully, you’d know the answer was no, it never was.”

  Taern had already set the controls, and he came to spend the rest of the journey much like he’d spent all of their time in the rabbit or in bed before they slept—leaning over Dorjan and studying his face, his hair, the texture of his skin, his expressions. Sometimes it made Dorjan acutely uncomfortable, and he’d contemplated pushing him to the other side of the rabbit, until a touch, a smile, the way his eyes were starting to crinkle in the corners with maturity—those things would catch Dorjan’s attention. He found he could stare at them constantly, and with the way Taern could look at him, the contact, the proximity, didn’t seem so hard to bear.

  “Dorjan,” Taern said, and then stopped, and then started again. “Dorjan, you do mean for this to end sometime, don’t you?”

  Dorjan nodded. It was the second time Taern had asked him that. “Yes.” He’d always meant for it to end. “As soon as Septra is out of power and our province is stable, the Nyx will not be needed. I can have a proxy work in the government or do what the others have done and leave the city. And I will tend to my father’s keep and… I don’t know, play with the niskets, mine asteroids, that sort of thing.”

  Taern searched his face. “That sounds really wonderful. Is your keep… is it illegal? To be sly there?”

  Dorjan snorted. “Not even before I told my father that I was. No—Kyon would have said he was too lazy to enforce something that useless. The truth was, he was too much of a good man. Too good, I guess.” Dorjan had a hard time saying this, although it had lain quiet in his mind for a long time. “He—he didn’t expect it. He didn’t expect his government to lie about needing to go to war, didn’t expect them to betray him to end his life. Just too good. I wish I could have been like him. I wish I could have been that good.”

  Taern jerked back. “Why on Karanos’s black soil would you say an arse-stupid thing like that?”

  Dorjan blinked, closed himself off, realized he’d shared maybe too much. “It was a silly thought,” he said, closing his eyes against Taern’s horrified face. “I’m sorry I gave it voice.”

  “No!”

  Dorjan’s eyes flew open in shock.

  “No, no, no, no—answer me, dammit! Your father is dead! Why would you want to be just like him?”

  Dorjan raised his eyebrows, thinking Taern was very naïve. “Do you think he’d want to live, seeing what I’d become? What I’d let our province become? Do you think he’d be proud?”

  “Do you think my father would be proud I spent the last three years whoring myself on the streets?” Taern retorted, visibly upset, and Dorjan closed his eyes again because it had been a long day and he’d been on his feet for much of it, though he hadn’t told Taern that.

  “Yes,” Dorjan said softly. “Because you’re an honorable man, and you’ve never caused anyone harm who didn’t deserve it, and you’ve followed your conscience in as many ways as you could.”

  Taern gathered him carefully close, and Dorjan felt tears in the hollow of his ear. He wanted to smile because Taern was so sweet, so soft—ripe fruit, a kitten’s prickly claws and trusting heart. So sweet. Could Dorjan pull him in through his skin, like some creatures gathered in air? That would be lovely.

  Dorjan fell asleep dreaming of having Taern sprawled over his body, skin to skin, and lying in a field of butterflies and niskets, the two of them breathing the smells of home.

  He awoke in his own bed with the early winter’s light streaming in from the window over him, feeling a warm washcloth moving along his body carefully. It started in his hair and scrubbed away, leaving the faint smell of lavender and ambergris, before moving gently to his face.

  He closed his eyes and let the massage take its course. From his forehead down his nose to the whorls of his ears and behind, he was bathed and rinsed and bathed and dried, made clean and new in the slanting sunlight. The washcloth was careful around his stitches, and in its wake, there was the mild discomfort of some of the stitches being pulled, snipped, and removed.

  “The big one across his stomach, you think?” That was Taern’s voice, and he was bathing and (Dorjan came to believe) sanitizing the area before someone else took care of the stitches.

  “Still looks a little raw,” said Krissa’s voice, and Dorjan made a sound, a weak attempt to cover up. He was naked, he thought painfully. Taern he could bear to have look at him, but Krissa? Again? That was like going naked in front of his older sister!

  “Stop it,” Krissa said crisply, batting at his hands. “Go back to sleep. Dream of whatever you were dreaming about a moment ago. I’m trying to make a decision here!”

  “How did you know I was dreaming?” Dorjan slurred, and her snort was reassuring.

  However, her reply of “Do you think I don’t know what’s causing that thing to get bigger?” was not reassuring in the least.

  The luxuriousness of the sponge bath gave way to embarrassment, and he struggled for speech. “Do we have to do this with an audience?” he begged plaintively.

  Krissa’s short laughter disabused him of that notion. “Don’t worry, Forum Master. I was going to leave before things got too intense.”

  Dorjan didn’t want intense. He wanted pleasant. Intimate. He wanted Taern to look at him with desire, not pity or irritation. Was it really too much to ask? It was a rest day, after all.

  “Well, whatever it is he was thinking about,” Taern said happily, “it seems to have returned. Yes, Krissa, I say snip as many of those stitches on the belly as you think—but don’t leave them all. He’s too active for them, see? Some of them are already ripping, and that’s worse than taking them early.”

  “Right. Some of them, then.”

  The bath resumed, and the stitch removal, and then the second set of hands moved and there was a whooshing of skirts at Dorjan’s side. “Don’t let him tax you too hard, Forum Master,” Krissa said into his hair, “but don’t worry too much either. I don’t think hurting you is what’s on his mind.”

  She moved near Taern too and told him to be careful, to which Taern replied, “You do realize I did this professionally for a bit, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” she retorted. “But now that money isn’t going to change hands, I want to hold you to your standards.”

  Taern made a rude noise and Krissa swooped out of the room like a queen.

  Dorjan would have laughed then, but he was too comfortable. The washcloth continued to move down his abdomen, around his upper thighs, in the crease in his leg. Ooh, yes, that would be… bu
t no. Taern swooped the washcloth down over his thighs and then propped both Dorjan’s legs up, knees bent and lewdly splayed. Dorjan grunted and tried to press his legs together, and Taern flicked his knee with a bony finger.

  “I’m cleaning your private places. Calm down and spread your knees, Forum Master—don’t make me wrestle you, that will wreck the mood.”

  Dorjan sighed and let his knees fall open. The stretch along his inner thighs was painful but in a good way, and for a moment he was too preoccupied with making the most of that to realize what the washcloth was doing.

  Calves, shin, ankles—Taern kept it warm and moist but not dripping wet, and it felt just gorgeous to be clean again. There had been no baths because of the stitches, and Dorjan had missed them. But all of the attention to his legs, his upper thighs again, his—

  “Roll over, Nyx,” Taern said cautiously. “On your stomach. Keep your legs spread, though.”

  Dorjan was relaxed enough, open enough, to emit a little whimper, and the laughter in Taern’s voice was unmistakable.

  “So, you seem to think I’m neglecting something.” He chuckled. “Here. I’ll take care of it for you.”

  The words were promising, but Taern cleaned off his genitals with brief, thorough touches, and Dorjan groaned when he was done.

  “Feeling a bit aroused, there, Nyx?” Taern murmured smugly. “I know it’s a hardship. Too bad we’re all tired and hurt and everything. It would be wonderful to be able to take care of that condition, you know it?”

  “You’re a hideous, obnoxious brat, and if touching my privates is such an imposition, I can retire to the bathtub and continue to do it myself,” Dorjan snarled, and his hips arched up a little and thrust, because he needed. Oh hells… it had been so long since he needed that it was frightening to be aroused, to be gentled, to be seduced.

  Taern laughed dryly and bent down close enough for Dorjan to see the dark ring around his midnight-blue iris. “Patience, Nyx.” He bent closer, brushed Dorjan’s lips with his own, and backed away. “Remember, I’m good at this. There’s some things I’d like to teach you, yes?”

  Dorjan grunted, and Taern laughed again. “Now turn over—I need to wash your back.”

  Dorjan’s back was scrubbed thoroughly, and so were his neck, the back of his head, his shoulders, ribs, and under his arms. He had a couple of gashes that extended around his side, and Taern snipped some of those stitches too, but mostly he cleaned. When he’d gotten as many stitches as he could, he went directly to work on Dorjan’s backside, and Dorjan found himself panting into his own pillow.

  First Taern traced the crease of Dorjan’s bottom with the cloth, then down between the crease of his thighs. He nudged Dorjan’s thighs until Dorjan’s knees were under his stomach, spread wide. His backside was open in vulnerable invitation, and his cock and balls dangled, fat and thick, between his feet. Taern spent some time there with the washcloth, over, under, around. Dorjan moaned into his pillow, and Taern used his finger through the textured fabric, pushing into Dorjan’s entrance. He dipped the cloth into the water again and again, then pushed gently, and gently, until Dorjan started to feel a tingle where before he’d felt only a burn, and his bottom felt loose, spread, and bare to the world.

  The thought made him harder, engorged him, and he let out a shuddering breath that had his cock bouncing painfully between the bedspread and his stomach.

  “You like this,” Taern murmured. “You like being handled, fondled. I knew you would. Weeks ago I saw you with a mask on and knew you hungered for touch.”

  Dorjan was going to reply, tell Taern he could live quite well without it, when Taern spread his clean backside and started licking at Dorjan’s entrance with his tongue.

  Dorjan let out a long, breathless moan, and Taern came up laughing. “That was a yes, wasn’t it?” he laughed.

  Dorjan groaned into the pillow.

  “I would have settled for a kiss!” he moaned, and then Taern, the brat, bent his head and did it again. Ah… it was such a gentle sensation, a caress, a promise of something more violent—that was never followed through. Taern kept licking, invasively, aggressively, and then, with his hands, he reached down and started a maddening, slow caress of Dorjan’s manhood.

  Dorjan moaned some more. “Oh!” And that’s all he could voice. It was an amazing feeling, a stroking from the base, hard at the bottom, still firm at the top, Taern’s thumb and forefinger seizing Dorjan’s slippery foreskin and dragging it over the sensitive head. Dorjan started to pant, to squirm, to wriggle. Taern used his other hand to smack him smartly across the bottom, and Dorjan grew very still.

  “But… but Taern!” Dorjan complained, because his entire groin was throbbing, and his cock was sore it was so swollen, and because he thought he knew what he was supposed to do with it, but that wasn’t the position he was in.

  “No, wait,” Taern murmured, and he fumbled on the end table for something Dorjan couldn’t really see. In a moment there was another feeling at his backside, a slickness, a pressure, a stretching, a finger, then two, pushing past his softened rim and stretching him full.

  He screamed into the pillow, but not because it didn’t feel wonderful. It did—oh Bimuit, it did! Taern kept penetrating him slowly, gently, with one hand while stroking him with the other, until Dorjan started gibbering, offering, begging, pleading, exulting, because it felt good, felt so good, and he wanted more, more, oh hells yes! “Yes! Oh Bimuit, please… please… oh hells yes!”

  He shuddered, and his stomach clenched and released, and Taern dug his fingers in deeply and pushed hard against something inside Dorjan’s body. Dorjan screamed again until his throat was raw with it, and he clenched and shook and came.

  He collapsed then, facedown, and his bottom would have just stayed there, up in the air, stretched and dilated, but Taern gave him a gentle pull, and his legs straightened out behind him, and there he was, still shaking and exhausted and sinking into the spatter of his own spend.

  Taern was at his shoulder as he sank. “Did that feel good?” he asked softly, and Dorjan looked at him and nodded wordlessly. “Good. That’s what it should feel like. What you and Areau were doing, it didn’t have to be an abomination, do you hear me? It could have been just this good, but he didn’t let it be. Don’t ever say you want to leave this world, Dorjan. You hear me?”

  Dorjan groaned and buried face against the coverlet again. His entire body tingled, and his cock was trying to tell him that they weren’t near done.

  “Promise me you’ll stay by my side, Taern,” he mumbled before he fell back asleep. “Promise me you’ll stay, and I’ll take it back.”

  “I’ve been promising that same bloody thing for weeks, Nyx. Karanos, you’re dim! Now go back to sleep. If you think we’re done with this, you’re going to be sorely disillusioned.”

  The Betrayal of Touch

  Taern watched him sleep for a few moments and then stripped off his smallclothes and crawled in bed next to him.

  He’d been up already and had run the regimen Areau had set, which was one of the things he’d done regularly when Dorjan was in with the Forum. It had been good for him in several ways—made him stronger, faster, more resilient.

  And it had stilled that omnipresent, ever-painful ache of worry.

  It had been so close.

  He’d thought it had been close when he’d arrived in time to help Dorjan fight, but every step closer to the house had driven the point home. It was something he should have learned when he was nine years old and that he thought he had learned by living his life exactly as he saw fit, right down to fucking men for money because he liked it. It was the thing that allowed every touch of Dorjan to be new and shiny again.

  You couldn’t be too careful with time. You couldn’t use it well enough or take those things you wanted quickly enough. He’d wanted time with Dorjan, time to gentle him, to seduce him, to make him pursue Taern (who had gotten rather used to being pursued) instead of the other way around. But for nearly a for
tnight, Taern had been worried about Dorjan, and the one thing the worry had brought home was that there was not enough time for pride.

  Krissa must have thought so too, or she wouldn’t have agreed to take out some of his stitches, even if she suspected what Taern had in mind.

  “Why can’t we leave them until the end of the rest day?” she’d asked as Dorjan slept when they ventured into the room with a basin of warm antiseptic water and the sterilized sewing scissors.

  “Because he will have popped them by then,” Taern responded equably, and she looked at him with wide eyes. “A hazard of the profession,” he said blandly. “We’re all chair-rutting perverts, you know that.”

  “It’s no longer our profession, Taern. Not even mine, and that’s probably what’s on my contract. Why? Why can’t you wait until next rest day? Or the one after that?”

  “I don’t know,” he snapped, feeling miserable and vulnerable at once. “How many times must I almost lose him before I have him?”

  Krissa blew a breath out. “I understand, Taern—I do. But… I worry. So much—more than this household, even—hinges on his well-being.”

  Taern grinned cheekily, then sat down to bathe him. “Well, that’s what I’m talking about! Making sure his being is as well as it can be!”

  And now, when it was just him and Nyx alone and Nyx was naked and replete, Taern was willing to make himself naked and climb into the bed and stroke the patches of Dorjan’s bare skin that held no lasting marks from one near miss of many. He was even willing to admit to himself that it was more than need and more than want, and more than curiosity and more than concern, and definitely more than gratitude. Yes, Taern had been with plenty of men in his past, but they had all ceased to exist the moment he’d squatted in a dark alley and touched his mouth to a masked man’s most vulnerable parts. It was a good thing Dorjan had bought his contract the next day, because the thought of being with even one more man after that made Taern sick and sweaty and weepy, and generally it didn’t bear thinking about.