Under the Rushes

by Amy Lane

  “That’s good right there,” Taern murmured. Then he pulled his arm away, seized Dorjan’s hand, and placed it on his own member. “You can do that for a moment too,” he said while reaching for the oil.

  Dorjan grunted as Taern stretched over his back, and Taern looked down and saw his eyes, wide and sober, taking in Taern’s drenched fingers as he brought them back over Dorjan’s body, dripping one thick drop over Dorjan’s ribcage. When Taern fumbled between Dorjan’s thighs and started probing his crease, Dorjan gasped and crooked his leg up, giving Taern better access—and a great deal of relief.

  “You want this, do you?” he asked, rubbing softly around Dorjan’s rim.

  Dorjan didn’t have to answer him, because when his finger slid in, his low groan said everything.

  “I told you,” Taern gloated. “I told you it was good.” He slid the finger in and out, in and out, and Dorjan bucked backward to meet him. “Stop that,” Taern whispered. “Just wait, be patient. The good things will keep coming, and then you will too.”

  With that, he added a second finger, and Dorjan’s hand started to quicken on his own cock. “No,” Taern hissed. He pulled his fingers away and knocked Dorjan’s hand off his cock. Dorjan moaned, and Taern positioned himself at Dorjan’s stretched entrance. “Are you ready for this, Dorjan? It will burn some, and stretch….”

  “Yes. Please, Taern,” Dorjan begged, his body undulating, begging, but not forcing Taern in any way. “Please. I’m at your mercy. Please do anything to me, please!”

  Taern hmmed then and very slowly, very carefully, thrust forward. Dorjan keened in his throat, but he didn’t drop his leg, and he didn’t try to get away.

  “How’s that?” Taern asked, keeping up a sinuous rhythm, forward, back, forward, back, forward, until he was all the way in, wedged completely in Dorjan’s backside. Dorjan was rocking in a gentle rhythm to keep that glide, in and out, continuing the pleasure, but not controlling it, not even a little.

  “Ahhh….” Dorjan sighed and then shuddered around Taern’s cock, and Taern wanted to chuckle with the flood of power through his body, but he was too euphoric. It wasn’t about the power, it was about the pleasure, and Dorjan was immersed in it, and that was all Taern’s doing.

  Taern reached round then and grasped Dorjan’s cock, feeling it grow iron hard again in his grasp as he stroked. “How’s that feel?” he murmured again, and Dorjan threw his head back and groaned.

  “That’s amazing, thank you!”

  Taern chuckled, the sound raw and strained, because it was amazing, and it was glorious, and he wanted nothing more—not even his own orgasm—than to feel Dorjan spill, helplessly and gratefully, over Taern’s fist on his cock.

  He wasn’t sure what made him look up in that moment, as his hips were pulsing back and forth and his hand was stroking in counter rhythm. Dorjan had placed himself at Taern’s mercy sweetly and without fuss or ego or fear, and Taern was being all merciful in an effort to please him. He didn’t hear a noise or a gasp or even get a feeling, but he did look up then, over Dorjan’s shoulder, and then had to force himself to keep moving smoothly and gently, without stop. Dorjan’s head was back against the pillow, and his eyes were closed, and Taern didn’t want to do anything that would change that or kill what was happening between them in this magical, weighted moment.

  Especially because Areau was watching. Taern locked eyes with him as he peered in the crack of the open door, and bent to kiss Dorjan’s vulnerable nape. Dorjan dropped his head and kept meeting Taern thrust for thrust, but that was his only power, his only action here, because Taern literally had him by the cock.

  Taern never, ever abused his power. Dorjan whimpered and Taern started to thrust harder, more insistently, and it became harder to keep his stroking in rhythm.

  “Take it in your fist again,” Taern whispered. “C’mon, Nyx, let me see you come.”

  Dorjan did, and Taern used his freed hand to brace himself on Dorjan’s hip and start thrusting harder, harder, faster. Dorjan let loose a groan, low in his stomach and seemingly ripped from his soul. Taern reached down and squeezed his bollocks while Dorjan shuddered hard and spurted hot, making helpless little sex whimpers as he did.

  And Areau watched with large, haunted eyes.

  Taern groaned too and deliberately closed his own eyes, allowing his orgasm to wash over him, through him, flooding his body with lightning and Dorjan’s with his spend. He groaned and buried his face against Dorjan’s sweating back and clenched Dorjan as close to his heart as he could, all the while still joined, still hard and spasming inside Dorjan’s willing flesh.

  When they finally stopped coming, when their breathing finally evened out, Taern licked happily at the salt on Dorjan’s shoulder, and Dorjan kept shivering in his arms. Taern looked up then and to his relief saw that Areau had gone, leaving Dorjan happy and replete, and finally, finally, taking his rest days to do exactly what rest days were for.

  Areau

  DORJAN had been the gentlest child. He’d had big, limpid brown eyes, and his dark-brown hair had always needed combing. He’d had a shy smile, the kind that invited grown-ups to just shelter him and spoil and pet him, and a fluid, noncompetitive intelligence that meant that even if Areau got his way about something, he would realize later that Dorjan had been right all along. Areau had always thought growing up that if Dorjan hadn’t been such a kind soul, so determined to rescue niskets, kittens, and butterflies, that Areau himself would have been a spiteful git.

  Areau’s father and mother were good people—they’d raised him well, with a desire to succeed. He’d also been the eldest, a boy, and told again and again and again that he was beautiful. He had three younger sisters, and their prettiness had been made much of as well. He had been nineteen, in the height of vanity, when that one virtue had been stolen from him.

  Growing up next to Dorjan, he had felt like the prettiness and the science were the only things he had.

  And it wasn’t as though Dorjan was one of those obnoxious children who always had to do the right thing, either. Dorjan was as adept as Areau at getting into trouble. As a very young child, he’d had a fondness for sweets—had, in fact, been plump, pudgy, and freckled. He’d stolen an apple pie once as it was cooling on the kitchen table. The entire keep went searching for him, Areau included, and Areau had been so mad, because he’d wanted some pie too. And then, as Areau was passing their hideout in the front yard by the jasmine bushes, Dorjan had called his name. Areau had wriggled in with him, and the two of them had spent a giddy afternoon indulging in pie and watching quietly as people’s feet passed back and forth in search of two small boys and one large pie.

  They’d been hideously sick afterward, but that moment—the two of them, breathless, stuffing pie down their maws, giggling in the close dark—that was one of the best moments of his childhood. Dorjan had included him, had given him a treat, and finally, when they’d been caught, had taken all of the blame.

  Areau let him, and felt vaguely ashamed afterward. But after Dorjan was allowed out of the house again, he hadn’t held a grudge. He’d been the one to steal the pie; he’d been the one to rope Areau into his (admittedly brilliant) prank. Dorjan was the one who got the spankings and wasn’t allowed to go out and play for two days. According to Dorjan it was only fair, and Areau? Had been enchanted. Dorjan was the best friend ever.

  That hadn’t changed after they’d gone to stay in the city and then come home when Karanos had been nearly destroyed by an earthquake. Areau had loved the city residence far more than the country and the keep, and he’d been bitterly disappointed to have their time cut short. But Dorjan had understood.

  “Don’t you see?” he asked quietly when they’d been in the darkened compartment of the millipede, sharing quarters because they were boys of an age as well as friends. “Father allowed something bad to happen. He feels responsible. He’s going to be spending his time fixing it.”

  Of course, Areau had spent a lot of time fixing it too. When t
hey’d returned to the keep, the other children had been angry—they’d been proud of Kyon’s status and success, and suddenly he was out of favor, and their parents had grumbled and Areau and Dorjan had ended up fighting quite a lot. Dorjan hadn’t been good at the fight then; this was before military school and training, and he spent far too much time trying to talk the other children out of fighting and not enough time planning to hit the big one in the nose. But Areau had been good about hitting the big one in the nose, and he’d kept Dorjan from getting pounded. Of course, once Dorjan started throwing punches, he could land them like a cannon shot, and that had been good too. The two of them had spent some time back to back, fighting for love, honor, and the thrill of it.

  And again, Areau had been taken. His father was a good man and believed very strongly in duty, but his mind was like Areau’s: an endless puzzle of numbers and forms, duties and facts, mechanics and details and creative plans for things nobody else could understand. Coreau channeled this into running the keep and calculating how much could be mined and when to set an asteroid free and when to harness another one to keep the complex mechanics of gravity in check. Areau had channeled his gift into developing new machines. When he’d been twelve, he’d shown Dorjan a diagram for a functioning vehicle with long-range travel capacity, short-range launch, and a weapons function, all run off of lumium, the same power source he later used for the steam armor. Dorjan had shown the drawings for the cricket to his father, and his father had been the one to submit them to the leading scientists of the province.

  The military had picked it up and paid his family a fortune for the plans, actually. Even if Areau hadn’t wanted to join when he and Dorjan turned sixteen, he still would have had a place with his province’s military research department for the cricket alone. Dorjan had told him it was brilliant, and until Dorjan had told him that, Areau had never believed it. Through his best friend’s eyes, Areau saw that he was as brilliant as his own father, that he could do amazing things, had a mind that worked like nobody else’s. His father loved Kyon’s Keep, and his family had no reason to leave, but Areau—he’d hitched his star to being the man who could make that, could fix things, could create what nobody else could.

  It was his defining quality, the thing that made him. That, and his friendship with Dorjan.

  He’d enjoyed talking to Dorjan about girls. Areau had thought they were the world’s most amazing discovery, better than the cricket, better than the steam armor he’d been asked to set his mind to, just better. He’d been disappointed when Dorjan’s reaction to them was not nearly as enthusiastic—he’d wanted his gentle friend’s perspective. Dorjan’s knack for talking his way out of trouble impressed Areau. Areau hadn’t been that good with people, and he’d tried. But enthusiastic or not, Dorjan was still good at coaching Areau on what to say. The first girl Areau ever made love to had fallen for the lines Dorjan had given him before they’d joined the military and the academy outside of Thenis had become their lives.

  Dorjan had been so nervous—so very nervous—about telling Areau he preferred boys.

  Areau had been upset at first. All those late-night confidences, all of those back-to-back fistfights, all of that shared brotherhood—that had been a ruse? That had been an angle so Dorjan could kiss him?

  “Don’t flatter yourself, you git!” Dorjan had snapped. “You’re pretty, and I can’t say I’d mind, but you’re certainly not the only pretty boy out there, and some wouldn’t even mind a kiss or two!”

  And that had irritated Areau too. “Who! Who out there would you rather kiss than me?” he’d challenged, and Dorjan had assumed a superior smile of his own.

  “Your cousin Ciaran, for one,” he’d said smugly.

  “The weaver’s child?”

  “That’s the one,” Dorjan gloated.

  “He’s my second cousin,” Areau replied automatically. “You kissed that simpering prat? Bimuit, Dorjan, I thought you had better taste than that!”

  “I did,” Dorjan said shortly, “but that git likes girls.”

  Areau had laughed then, and so had Dorjan. “I’ll always love you, Ari,” Dorjan had said with that sweet smile, the one that seemed to broker peace in any strait. “However you want me to love you, I’ll love you. But I’m not going to whither and pine because you love women instead of me.”

  Areau had shaken his head. “Well, you could be a little more broken up about it,” he groused, but he’d been happy then, honestly relieved. Dorjan was sly, but he was still Dorjan, and Areau wouldn’t have to lose his brother or sacrifice his best friend to a desire he didn’t understand.

  That night, that terrible night at Kiamath Keep, Areau had been honestly surprised that his country was in the wrong. He’d sincerely wanted to help fix it. And, of course, he would have followed Dorjan to hell and back.

  But he’d had an arrogance, a blind arrogance, that Dorjan was the one who was at risk, that Dorjan was the one who needed protection. He hadn’t seen, then, the way Dorjan had grown those three years in military school. It hadn’t impinged on him that Dorjan had his own battalion now. Dorjan—the Dorjan Areau had grown up with—wouldn’t have taken that much responsibility if he hadn’t been sure he could lead those men better than anyone else.

  So when Dorjan had landed on that cricket, telling Areau to jump aboard, they had to save people, Areau hadn’t thought twice. This was Dorjan, and Dorjan wouldn’t do anything he didn’t think was rock-solid right.

  That wasn’t what the people in the asylum had said.

  They’d been terrible people, cruel in the worst ways—objectively, Areau had known that as he’d lain there at their mercy, waiting for them to sprinkle a severely weakened form of dust into his festering wounds. But pain and addiction are not objective. Pain and addiction are a deeply personal whirlpool, and from the moment they’d first rubbed the dust into his skin, addicting him to the pain when the withdrawal from the drug faded, everything in Areau’s life had been about Areau.

  He hadn’t mourned Dorjan’s father when he’d lain gasping at their feet. He’d cursed him, because Kyon hadn’t gotten him out of that hellhole fast enough. He hadn’t rejoiced to see the man he’d loved like a brother alive and whole after his own injuries. He’d envied him with bitter, bilious intensity because Dorjan—in spite of his own wounds, scars, and disgraces—seemed to have gotten off easily, unscathed, the spoiled little keeper’s son, hauling the entire world into hell and then skipping away with nothing but a dead father and wounds that might never heal to show for it.

  Areau could show him pain! Areau could show him craving! Areau was the one who awakened every hour, jerking, shivering, craving that thing they had given him in the asylum, and, barring that, the thing that had accompanied the ease of the longing: pain.

  He had planned Dorjan’s first assault on him. He’d built that armor to help Dorjan on the streets, but with every cut of metal, every tempering of the plating, every twist of every tiny screw, he’d giggled, chortled, danced with glee at causing so much pain Dorjan had to inflict some upon him. And oh, how delicious! Dorjan would hate it! Loathe becoming a bully, a villain, no better than a common rapist on the street, but Dorjan would do it, would have to do it, because Dorjan, the fool, the single-minded, dedicated fool, loved Areau, loved Areau. He’d said it before, he would love Areau no matter what form the love, and Areau needed—wept for—the pain, the humiliation, the self-disgust. Without those things to keep him grounded, he could hear the mockery and the derision of those voices, the many voices, in the asylum, calling him dirt, calling him guinea pig, calling him nothing, and telling him that his hopes for rescue were fruitless because a great man like Kyon wouldn’t bother with some shite-crusted steward’s son.

  Areau, to his shame, had finally believed them. When Dorjan and his father had come to fetch their beloved friend, Areau had been more like a time bomb. They thought they were rescuing an ally, but truth? Hard truth? Areau was ticking, ticking, ticking, ready to become a seething ball of emo
tional shrapnel that would take out all in his path.

  Of course, Areau was smarter than that. He didn’t need to take Dorjan out quickly and mercifully. He’d leveled Dorjan at the knees, and then built him up, and then leveled him again. His fault, his fault, all Dorjan’s fault. Dorjan did this to him, Dorjan didn’t care. Dorjan addicted him. It was Dorjan’s job to fill the craving, to fill the emptiness to make Areau better by his own suffering, but it wasn’t enough, wasn’t enough was never enough and Areau shook with pain when pain was in absentia, and craved more and more and more and—

  Watching Dorjan’s look of utter self-disgust and abandonment in the morning was almost worth having sex with a man to see.

  Or that’s what Areau had told himself for nearly ten years.

  Krissa had disabused him of that notion right quick.

  Areau had learned to be carefully cruel with Dorjan. He’d waited, behaved, been quietly courteous on occasion, and anticipated that flicker of a child’s smile on his old friend’s face. As soon as Dorjan smiled, laughed at a joke, trusted—even a little—once more, Areau went searching for the pain again. Areau had to do that. Dorjan couldn’t be driven to hurt Areau unless he had hope. If he didn’t think the pain was making Areau better, making him sane, making him Dorjan’s friend again, he would refuse, would think that kindness was the better option not just because he’d been on the streets and had the sense of an addict’s behavior now, but because Dorjan, for all his so-called “love” of Areau, was not stupid. So Areau would wait and then inflict that final wound of shrinking from their bed like what they had done disgusted him, and then string Dorjan along for a seven-day, a fortnight—once, even a month.

  What they had done in bed did not, in fact, disgust him. He was not attracted to men, no, but he was aware that he had the same nerve endings in his sphincter and inside his bowel that any other man did, including the sly. When he baited Dorjan, offered the rough and bloody sex, begged for it hard, he knew the abuse of those tender nerve endings would be exquisitely painful, and that pain would satisfy his increasing yearning for more and more and more.