“Yes.”
“So am I. Still, the power dynamic is a little troubling, so I’ll let you take the lead.”
I nodded, desperately relieved. “Okay.”
He lay down on his back. I lay down next to him, on my side, our bodies not quite touching. I had lived this moment a thousand times in my imagination. Now, as I leaned over and pressed my lips softly against his, it felt less like a conscious movement toward him and more like an inevitable yielding to some hitherto undiscovered law of the physical universe. And why not? I thought a bit giddily. This was Rikasa. Anything was possible.
Three months ago, with Fletcher, I had savored the pleasure, at once new and familiar, of discovering another body. This was like discovering lovemaking all over again. I was vividly reminded of the immensely cautious explorations of my first nights with my high-school boyfriend. I was glad Hathan had told me he planned to let me take control. If he hadn’t, I might have mistaken his restraint for indifference. I counted each tiny proof of his desire as a unique triumph.
When we had been kissing for a little while, I slid my knee between his legs. An instant later I felt the warmth of his hand on the back of my knee. His fingers trailed upward along my thigh to my hip. The lightness of his touch was maddeningly erotic. I felt the chill of the night air as he lifted my shirt. Then his fingertips brushed the bare skin at the curve of my waist. His hand slid upward over my ribs, still with that same infuriating slowness. When he touched my breast, I gasped with pleasure and pressed myself closer to him. Then I froze.
He pulled back to look at me. “Did I hurt you?”
“No. I just—I’ve wanted this for a long time. I’m trying not to overwhelm you.”
“Overwhelm me,” he whispered.
It was all I needed to hear. I abandoned any attempt at self-control and climbed on top of him, pressing my body eagerly against his. I kissed his lips, the line of his jaw, his throat. He took my shirt off, then my pants, fumbling a little with the drawstring. Anticipating his next challenge, I pulled my bra over my head with practiced ease and heard his soft laugh of comprehension.
Shortly after that, when I summoned the courage to slide my hand down inside the waistband of his pants, I was shocked and disappointed to find no physical evidence of his arousal. Hathan, seeing my dismay, laughed again. “You’ll have to be patient. Apparently we take things a little more slowly than you do.”
Encouraged by his total lack of concern, I said, “How much more slowly? Because the nights here are about four hours long.”
“We have time,” he said, and pulled me down to him again.
He was right. Not more than a minute or two later, his energy changed completely. The dreamy languor was gone, replaced by an urgency as passionate as my own. I gasped when I felt his hands clamp down with sudden force on the backs of my thighs. “If you’re going to stop,” he said in my ear, “stop now.” There was a new and thrilling roughness in his voice.
“I’m not going to stop,” I whispered.
In an instant he had pinned me under him. With quick, deft movements he shed his own clothes. Feeling his bare skin against my own, I felt a delirious relief that there were no more barriers between us, no more distances to be closed. I reached down again, confidently now, and guided him into me. A sound came out of him that I had never heard before. I cried out too, then bit my lip, terrified that he would mistake the sound for pain. He didn’t. Or he didn’t care. Either one was fine with me. I was still terrified beyond all reason that he would stop. I kissed him hungrily, laced my fingers in his hair, locked my legs around his narrow hips, all the physical signals I knew for yes. I had no idea if they were the right ones. I was operating purely on instinct, in a realm beyond thought. Every point of contact between our bodies was a distinct and separate pleasure. Entirely too soon, they merged into one. Ecstasy rose in me like a tide. I surrendered to it. As if from far away, I heard Hathan, moving above me, murmur something indistinct on an indrawn breath. Then he shuddered and lay still.
I blinked, coming back to myself slowly. My face was buried in his shoulder. I licked my lips and tasted his sweat, which was salty, with an unfamiliar metallic tang. His hip bone was pressed into my thigh in a manner that was going to become excruciatingly painful very, very soon. If he had been Fletcher, I would have said so. I didn’t say anything. I knew that any movement on my part, however slight, would trigger the inevitable separation, the disentangling of our limbs. I could bear any discomfort if it kept him in my arms a little longer.
Eventually he stirred, then shifted his weight, lifting his body away from mine. I let him go. I had no idea what would happen next. Would he withdraw completely, seek solitude elsewhere, leaving me alone in the tent? Some human men would have. I was thrilled beyond all reason when he rolled onto his back and drew me gently toward him again. I nestled into the crook of his arm, my head tucked neatly under his chin. There were a hundred things I wanted to say to him, or possibly just one, but I knew it would be a mistake to say it. I focused on the subtle rise and fall of his chest beneath my hand. His breathing was fractionally too slow for me to match it. I wondered if my own seemed unsettlingly fast to him, if my skin felt fever-hot to his fingers, tracing the line of my hip in a deliciously idle caress.
“What was it you said before?” I asked after a while.
“Did I say something?”
“It sounded like the Northern dialect.”
He shrugged slightly. “I have no idea. Probably something about sigils.”
“Huh. That’s a first.”
“One among many, I assume.”
I started to giggle. After a moment I felt him trembling against me. It took me a moment to realize that he was laughing too.
Another stirring of wind rattled the leaves around us. Hathan reached down and drew the edge of my sleeping bag up over both of us. As he settled back into place, he said, “I had no idea you were so aptly named.”
“Am I?”
“Don’t you know what your Vardeshi name means?”
Baffled, I said, “Eyvri? Isn’t it just Avery with a different accent?”
“Yes, but it’s also a word.”
I shifted to look up into his face. “It is?”
He said, “You really don’t know what I'm talking about, do you? Do you know what an eyvrith is?”
“Never heard of it.”
“It’s a desert animal native to Arideth. A type of cat. They have golden fur and green eyes. Zey saw the resemblance immediately. Actually we all did, but he was the one who pointed it out.”
Trying unsuccessfully to keep my voice steady, I said, “You mean my name is a joke? Like the ahtziri? All this time you guys have been calling me Eyvri, you’ve been making fun of me?”
“Not at all. It’s a compliment. They’re beautiful. And exceptionally rare.”
I was too distracted by the music his voice made of the word beautiful to process his original point. Then it hit me. “Aptly named. Oh my God. You’re saying I’m a wild animal.” I pulled the edge of the sleeping bag up to hide my face.
Hathan tugged it down again. “That was a compliment too.”
“If you say so,” I said dubiously.
I had just begun to relax when a sound shattered the quiet: the unmistakable chime of a flexscreen. I gave a convulsive start. Hathan went perfectly still. Then he got up and went away, presumably in search of his pants. He returned presently and slipped under the sleeping bag again. I watched while he typed something into his flexscreen.
When he had tucked it out of sight again, I said, “Who was that?”
“Outmarch Control.”
“What did they want?”
“They sent a status request. Our medical transponders flagged unexpected activity for this time of night.”
“Oh my God.” I slapped a panicked hand to the back of my neck as if stung by an insect. “The transponders! I completely forgot about them!”
He laughed. “I know. I didn’t. It’
s all right; the telemetry is purposely vague about some things. To anything but a very close-grained examination, what we were just doing looks indistinguishable from, say, high-speed bodyweight exercises. The message was automatically generated. I sent back the all-clear. I doubt we’ll hear anything more.”
“What did you tell them we were doing?”
“Calisthenic exercises.”
“In the middle of the night? Will they believe that?”
“They should. We’re from offworld. Our internal clocks are out of step with the rhythms of the planet. I’m sure the transponders are picking up all kinds of odd activity at odd hours.” He sounded, again, supremely unconcerned. As before, his certainty eased my doubt.
We were both quiet for a while. I lay feeling the rise and fall of his breath, tracing aimless patterns among the stars, connecting them in impossible trajectories.
“Tell me something,” he said at length. “What proportion of the Outmarch have you spent trying out different schemes to get me alone?”
His tone was light. I said airily, “Oh, all of it.”
“Did you break your ankle on purpose?”
“I would have, if I’d had any idea how well it would work out for me.”
“For both of us.” I heard the warmth in his voice and allowed the correction.
When he didn’t speak again, I ventured a question of my own. “When did you figure out that I wasn’t just being polite about being alone with you?”
“Somewhere between swimming and stellar cartography, I suppose.”
I sighed. “I don't know what I would have done if that hadn’t worked. Bourbon and moonlight are pretty much my whole playbook.”
“It’s a good one. The first thing I learned in my tactics seminar was never to reject a strategy just because it’s simple.” He raised himself on one elbow to reach for my water bottle. He drank from it as casually as if it were his own, then passed it to me. “Of course, as a fallback, there’s always the old broken-tent trick.”
“I thought about that. But I figured you’d just be noble and offer to sleep out in the open.”
“I wouldn’t have.” He considered. “But I might have called in for a replacement.”
Diffidently I said, “It’s none of my business, but did anyone pull that broken-tent trick on you during your Institute survival trials?”
I felt another of his soundless laughs. “No one, I’m sorry to say—although it would have been difficult, given that we didn’t have tents. No, I spent the first trial starving in the desert, the second one starving on a glacier, and the third one starving in the jungle. Also hallucinating, because someone in my squad picked up an especially virulent local pathogen, and by the third day we were all running dangerously high fevers. My memories of that week aren’t especially clear. But I’m reasonably sure alien seduction didn’t figure into it.”
“Oh my God,” I said abruptly.
“What’s wrong?”
“What you said. It just clicked. I’m the alien seductress.” I groaned in dismay. “I’m a huge cliché.”
“Galaxy-spanning, in fact.”
“Don’t tell me you guys have that one too?”
“We do. I always found it wildly improbable.” He added quietly, “It’s not the first time you’ve proven me wrong, and not the first time I’ve been glad you did.”
Time, I thought, to ask the pointed question. “When you volunteered to come out here with me, was there any part of you that hoped this would happen?”
He put off answering for so long I began to wish I hadn’t spoken. Then he said, “What did you see about yourself in the Listening?”
“I’m not sure. There were flashes of something . . . I thought maybe you were attracted to me. But it was confusing. I might have just imagined it.”
“You didn't.” He paused; I lay silent, stunned by the raw simplicity of the words, the way they crashed through months of accreted doubt like floodwaters through a makeshift barricade. Eventually he said, “I would never have spoken up if I thought my motivations were a shade less than honorable. I really did think I was just trying to protect you.”
I settled more comfortably into the crook of his arm. “I feel very protected.”
I was drifting off to sleep when I felt Hathans gently freeing his arm from beneath my head. I sat up. “What’s wrong?”
“You were falling asleep.”
“Is that a problem?”
“No. I’ll go to the other tent.”
Fully awake once again, I frowned up at him. “Why?”
“Vardeshi don't”—he gestured—“sleep together.”
“Um. The evidence suggests otherwise.”
“No, I mean really sleep. As infants, we share a bed with our mothers. After that, we never sleep in the same bed as another person again. It’s too intimate. Intrusive, even.”
Suddenly I understood the narrow single bed in his quarters. “Oh. Okay. I can go—”
“Sleep,” he said firmly. And almost at once I did.
CHAPTER TWENTY
I awakened all too soon to the uncompromising brightness of day. I rolled onto my back and lay blinking in the light that sifted down through the delicate fans of crimson leaves overhead. Memory and slightly guilty consciousness flooded over me. How many times in the past year had I fantasized about spending the night in Hathan’s arms? Now I had actually done it. I wasn’t sure which was more startling: the fact that I had dared to make a somewhat fumbling overture in his direction, or the fact that he had accepted it. The events of last night defied reason and all good sense. But they had happened. Nothing would ever be same between us again.
I sat up, holding the sleeping bag against myself in a pointless attempt at modesty, and looked around. Hathan was nowhere to be seen. The clothes I’d been wearing the night before were neatly piled within arm’s reach of my tent. I put them on, made myself presentable, and went in search of the makings for coffee.
I found Hathan sitting against the same rock outcropping where we had drunk our whiskey the night before, senek cup in hand, looking out at the sunlit river. When I dropped down beside him, a carefully judged distance away, he glanced over at me. His gray eyes were as direct as ever; I read inquiry in them, as well as humor. I smiled at him, an impulse which felt as natural as breathing, then turned my attention to my coffee.
He said lightly, “No regrets, I hope?”
“None.” I hesitated. “You?”
He shook his head and mouthed the word no.
I felt a rush of affection that was both sweet and piercing. It was true; I didn’t regret what we had done. What I had done. But it had been one thing to long for him from afar. Now I had had him, if only for a few hours, and it was going to make leaving him so much harder.
But that was a sorrow for another time. I cast around for a distraction, any distraction, and noted with surprise that his hair was wet. “Did you go swimming again?”
“Briefly. You may want to as well. We smell like the woods, which everyone will expect, but they won’t be expecting us to smell quite so much like each other. Someone would notice. Probably Reyna.”
Reyna was the least worrisome of the many possibilities, but I kept that knowledge to myself. I started to get up. His voice stopped me. “Eyvri? That wasn’t an order.”
“Oh.” I laughed a little self-consciously. “Habit, I guess.”
“Sit,” he said. “Drink your coffee. There’s no hurry. They won’t start the party without us.”
“That would be too much to hope for,” I muttered.
“You’re not looking forward to the reception?”
I settled back against the sun-warmed rock. “You know that cliff we rappelled down yesterday? I’d rather climb back up it. In the dark. In a snowstorm.”
“I understand the force of your objection,” he said, “but not the reason for it. What’s so terrible about standing around sipping wine and making conversation?”
I wrinkled my nose. “Standin
g around isn’t the problem.”
“Ah,” he said. “What happened to the dance lessons with Zey?”
“They ended,” I said grimly. “He gave up. Your people have perfected artificial gravity, but apparently teaching one uncoordinated human to dance exceeds the scope of their powers.”
“That may be a false equivalence. We’ve had artificial gravity for a few centuries now. Zey wasn’t exactly a major contributor.”
I laughed, partly at the joke, mostly out of relief that we still sounded—and felt, from my side of things, at least—exactly like ourselves. I’d been afraid he might shut me out completely, out of self-consciousness or fear that I would mistake friendliness for something more. Last night might have changed things between us, but it appeared to have left the essentials more or less intact.
When my thermos was empty, I went to retrieve my bikini from the tree branch where I’d hung it the night before. I slipped it on, grimacing as the damp fabric settled onto my skin. The sensation was unpleasant, but nonetheless preferable to having to explain to another platoon of Echelon officers, if one should happen along, why I was bathing naked in full view of my khavi. I found my sandals and towel and made my way down to the beach.
Last night, warmed by the brief Rikasan day, the water had been bracingly cool. Now it was frigid. I soaped up hastily and ducked under to rinse my hair. By the time I emerged onto the beach, my teeth were chattering. I dried myself aggressively with my towel, trying to scrub a little warmth back into my limbs, and pulled on my hiking clothes for the eleventh day running. Typically I would stay in my camp clothes for the last day of a long trek, but I had been wearing them for quite a lot of last night, and I was still wasn’t sure exactly how sensitive Vardeshi noses were. It seemed wiser to play it safe.
I returned to camp to find that Hathan had already packed away our tents and most of the cooking gear. I stowed the last of my personal belongings, and we headed down to the beach. We crossed the river, as Reyna’s team had done, by way of the stepping stones. Hathan led the way. Midway across, he slipped, submerging one leg up to the knee in the icy water. He regained his balance, swearing more creatively than I’d ever heard him do, and went on.
Bright Shards (The Vardeshi Saga Book 2) Page 38
