“I don’t—”
“Want to be seen?” Lisinthir leaned down and bit him beneath the collarbone on a piece of innocuous skin nowhere near any erogenous zone that might have accounted for its electric effect on him. Maybe it was the way his cousin rolled it between his teeth, pricking without digging, a promise of cruelty like the bouquet of a wine before it touched the palate. “I know very well you don’t want me to watch you climax, cousin. That would be a bridge too far, would it not? Too great a vulnerability. Not only that, but a witness makes it impossible to deny the event happened.”
“Cousin—”
“Don’t,” Lisinthir said, and there was anger there, enough to stipple Jahir’s sides with gooseflesh. “You forced my hand yesterday. I understand why you did it. I even allowed it. But you will not lead from behind, cousin. If you are here to be beneath me—” That knee between his thighs shoved them apart—“then beneath me you will stay. Do we understand one another?”
Could he speak past desire that strong when fear kept his mind clear enough to recognize it? He could, but his voice was hoarse. “Cousin… forgive me.”
Lisinthir met his eyes, searched them with an implacability that transfixed him, prey before the predator. Then his cousin’s gaze softened. He touched a fingertip to Jahir’s lips. “Always. But don’t push me on this one, Galare. I gave you what you needed because otherwise you would have flown apart. But I am charged now with your physical wellbeing, and I will not be managed when I am… busy…” Said with a kiss just beneath Jahir’s closed eye, “…seeing to your ecstasies. So. Are we understood?”
“Yes,” he managed.
“Good. Then this time I want to watch your face. And you….” A trailed finger up Jahir’s throat, “may watch mine, if it pleases you. But I am planning to make you suffer, cousin, and the first thing you must suffer is the knowledge that you are naked before me.”
“And you?” Jahir asked, unable to help the question. “Are you naked before me?”
Lisinthir gripped his chin. “Get your intellectualizing in now, cousin. You will forget words soon enough.”
Jahir shuddered. “And if I said that soon enough was not soon enough….”
“Then I would agree. And in fact, as you seem nearly incapable of silence, I will see to it.”
“See to—” Jahir stopped at the fingers that appeared on his mouth, and then slid into it. Startled, he looked up at his cousin and found him looming with a sly smile and a heavy-lidded look.
“Fingers, tongue, other things,” Lisinthir murmured, hooking his fingers behind Jahir’s teeth and shaking him lightly by that grip. “But I won’t leave you an empty mouth so you can fill it with words that order your thoughts. So—we begin. Suck, cousin.”
The next hours were torment in a way Jahir would have been hard-pressed to imagine prior to his deflowering. He’d thought he would always need physical pain to drive his thoughts into abeyance. Lisinthir taught him otherwise; he could reach that place of perfect calm merely by being forced to experience his own dissolution and know it was being seen. And then doing it again… and again… and again, until he no longer fought it, until the satisfaction that oozed from his cousin’s skin sank into his own and became pleasure that he could please someone so… utterly… demanding. He even earned his mouth back, later in the night, but by then he’d forgotten how to use it for words. He existed as a series of sensations: the ache of a jaw held open too long, the pounding of his pulse in his throat, the cling of the bedsheets to his back when he arched off them.
It was a gentler transition into the peace of submission, and it was easier to drift back from it. Did he like it better than the shock of crossing over due to violence? He couldn’t tell. They were different experiences… they both had something to recommend them.
Lisinthir’s low laugh brought him from the reverie. He tried to ask what had inspired his cousin’s mirth and discovered that he’d been idly sucking on one of Lisinthir’s fingers while thinking.
“That lesson took, I see.”
“Pardon me,” Jahir murmured, finding it odd to be speaking again. He moved until he could put his cheek on his cousin’s sweat-slick chest. Their state could charitably be called messy; despite his habitual fastidiousness, he found he didn’t mind so much.
“So,” Lisinthir said, using that damp finger to trace Jahir’s lips. “Fin for your thoughts.”
“Are we done then?”
“I think I have wrung us both out enough,” Lisinthir said. “So yes. You may return to psychoanalysis if it pleases you.”
He considered that, drowsy. ‘Wrung out’ was an inadequate description of his lassitude: he truly had been ridden hard and put away wet. “And if it doesn’t?”
“Please you? To psychoanalyze?” Lisinthir snorted, smiled. “I would wonder if I had accidentally concussed you.”
“You did nothing rough enough to merit the concern,” Jahir murmured, eyes closing. Lisinthir was still petting his lips—his very bruised lips, by now—but that ache was pleasure, too. “Though had you asked me, I would not have believed it possible to… convince me… to enjoy myself without violence. Not like this, with you.”
“There is more than one sort of violence, is there not?”
That brought Jahir’s head up. He sampled the emotions he could feel through his cousin’s skin and said, “You want to drink.”
“I’m thirsty, yes. But I don’t actually want alcohol. What I want is a smoke.” Lisinthir grinned crookedly. “The healers-assist gave me some variant of it involving water vapor and healthsome herbal extracts, if you’ll believe.”
Jahir laughed. “I do believe. And also that you found it unpalatable as a replacement for the hekkret.”
“Medicine is no replacement for vice, no.” Lisinthir chuckled and left his lips alone, transferring his attention to hair tangled and wet, stuck to Jahir’s neck and shoulder. “I enjoy a post-coital smoke, but somehow it’s not the same, knowing it’s good for me.”
“You would make me worry about you….”
“No.” Lisinthir tugged at a knot in Jahir’s hair. “Brace yourself.” As he pulled it out, he added, “So is this pain arousing?”
“I don’t think so,” Jahir said from between gritted teeth.
“Because?”
“The context lacks poetry.”
Lisinthir laughed. “Ah! So without an experience to remind you of possibilities, you default to normality? Is that it? And if I were to eroticize the untangling?”
“Is that possible?” Jahir asked, and knew the moment he’d asked that he should have thought through the repercussions of asking. It was too late when he found himself bent backwards by the fingers pulling his hair, arched like an offering.
“And now?” Lisinthir asked. “Your throat is nicely exposed. Your chest as well. If I continued, I might peel the rest of you back for… examination.”
“I am going to regret using that metaphor earlier, aren’t I?” Jahir asked, breathless.
“You did want my cruel hand,” Lisinthir observed, amused. “Don’t complain when I use it.”
He couldn’t help it—he laughed, and it was happiness. “Oh! But how I love you, cousin.”
Lisinthir brushed his nose down the line of Jahir’s neck, and his smile was in his voice when he said, “I love you too, Galare. And now… will you ask for release?”
“Should I ask for release,” shaded red, “or release?” Shadowed. That earned him a long lapping kiss along his collarbone and he shivered and chose the shadowed. “Release, certes. You have used me up, I vow it, I can take no more.”
A glimmer off dark eyes, looking up his throat at him. “Are you sure?”
“Absolutely. And… I believe we were on the topic of violence.”
“In more ways than one.”
“And you were saying,” Jahir said, his thoughts clarifying as the pressure on his hair eased and his cousin returned to idle stroking. “About emotional violence. Which… I imagine you
have a great deal of experience with, don’t you.”
“Ah?”
Jahir glanced at him. “Your family.”
Lisinthir sighed and stretched back, pressing the back of his free hand against his brow. The other rested loose on the back of Jahir’s shoulder. “Yes. That would be where I learned to recognize it, I suppose. The Pelted would have called it an abusive situation.”
“And we would have called it…”
“Normal for a noble Eldritch family?” Lisinthir asked, dark.
“Fraught,” Jahir said firmly.
“A euphemism.”
The disgust underlining the word throbbed in the skin beneath Jahir’s cheek. He set his hand on his cousin’s chest, spreading his fingers. “We are past masters of such doubletalk, yes. I don’t imagine they laid a hand on you, ever.”
“Of course not. We’re Eldritch. We don’t touch.” The disdain now was palpable. “Doing something as honest as hitting someone we’re disappointed in would be gauche, when we could and should destroy them with words instead. And no, cousin, I do not want your pity, so you can stay its flood, if you will.”
“Can we dissemble thus?” Jahir asked suddenly. He felt his cousin’s sharpened interest, his blade of a cousin. Looking up to meet Lisinthir’s eyes, Jahir said, “Is there any use in doing so, when we are lying skin to skin?”
That must have evoked a memory, because he felt the piercing melancholy, the shock of the rightness of it. Lisinthir said, low, “No. No, there’s no lying with skin. And this is what we have together, isn’t it.”
“I like what we have together.” Jahir kissed him, a bare chafe of his too swollen lips.
“Like it,” Lisinthir repeated, and there was some amusement there, and a great deal of tenderness.
So he admitted, husky, “Crave it, truthfully.”
Lisinthir drew his hand up Jahir’s shoulder to the back of his skull and cupped it, gentle. Jahir wondered what he was thinking that he wouldn’t say, and why it hurt so much… but he knew his cousin well enough to know asking would not yield him the answer. Not yet. So he let the silence stretch, rubbing his nose lightly against skin, feeling the ache behind his teeth, under his tongue, where Lisinthir had been curving his fingers and the nails had scratched wet flesh.
“No cruelty in your family,” Lisinthir said after a while. “Not to produce someone like you.”
That compliment was so intense, and so painfully revealing, that Jahir pretended he didn’t recognize its significance. “No, nothing like. We both grew up loved. Amber tended toward rebellion but though he was upbraided he never felt belittled or unwanted.”
Lisinthir chuckled softly, his fingers idly petting again. “I’m surprised he wasn’t the one who fell in love with your cousin. She’s a radical herself, is she not? Carnal relations with a human or two, one of them female….”
“Oh, he loves her,” Jahir said, smiling. “But more as a partner in crime and a sister than as a love interest. In fact….”
“In fact?”
Jahir sat up, pushing his hair back from his face. “Mother and I always wondered if he and the heir might make a match of it.”
Lisinthir’s brows rose. “The princess? Bethsaida?”
“Liolesa’s heir, yes.”
“After her turn in the Empire, I imagine she won’t be making a match of anything with anyone,” Lisinthir said after a moment. “She did not come back whole.”
Jahir balled his fists against his knees, tensed. Did it make sense? It had to make sense. When Lisinthir pushed himself up and searched his gaze, Jahir said, “Did anyone ever say why she left the homeworld? I can’t imagine the Queen approving of such a jaunt.”
“I doubt she did,” Lisinthir said. “You’re thinking that the princess decided to go after your brother.”
“Amber left long before she must have,” Jahir said. “And he is a terrible correspondent. If they had wanted to talk….”
“Ah.” Lisinthir leaned back on an elbow. “So, the infatuated heir decided to follow her beau off-world.”
“Possibly with his encouragement,” Jahir said, low. “God and Lady.”
“Small wonder Fleet recruited him,” Lisinthir said. “Having seen his lady fair taken by the Chatcaava? He is probably on the border, doing his best to punish them for their temerity.”
“Do you think?” Jahir asked, startled.
“That Fleet recruited him? Absolutely. That he might have been involved, perhaps accidentally, in inducing the heir to leave the homeworld? And that her disposition thereafter might have infuriated him into a life of vigilantism?” Lisinthir’s smile was faint. “You know him better than I do, cousin. You tell me.”
“I’m afraid it sounds all too plausible. And I fear for Amber’s heart...what a blow to have sustained! For them both! God and Lady, to think our family might have some share in the responsibility for the heir’s destruction....”
“How serendipitous that your family also has a licensed xenotherapist!” Lisinthir said. When Jahir stared at him, he finished, “If you are to shoulder the blame for Bethsaida’s mental breakdown, cousin—and the pretext for your doing so is shaky indeed—then you will have to accept the neatness of the solution to that guilt. Yes?”
Jahir’s laugh was unwilling, but he let it leave him anyway. “You are terrible, cousin.”
Lisinthir caught his hands and tugged until Jahir was straddling him. The palms that reached up to cup his face were warm and he surrendered to their demand that he lean down for the kiss that stripped his thoughts from him. When Lisinthir let him breathe, he gasped in, shaking, and then sighed and rested his brow against his cousin’s.
“Beautiful lover.” Salacious in their tongue. In Chatcaavan: “My Delight,” a reminder of too many hours beneath him, gasping. Lisinthir trailed the backs of two fingers down Jahir’s temple, cheekbone. “You tempt me.”
“You can have me,” Jahir whispered. “I won’t say no.”
This kiss he received on the tip of his nose and the reprieve it implied seemed less whimsical now after hours of lovemaking, and more like a gift. “And because you won’t, it is mine to stop you.”
“Such a wanton, I,” Jahir murmured.
Lisinthir rested a finger across his mouth. “You are a generous and irresistible lover, Jahir Seni Galare, and I will not hear you denigrate yourself, even in jest.”
“Is it denigration? When it’s true?”
“Therapist.” Lisinthir nipped his lower lip. “Words have context. Our culture gives that one a negative cast.”
Jahir accepted that, head lowered, knowing Lisinthir would sense his capitulation through their skin and not wanting to interrupt the caress on his back, the little touches on his face. Was he a wanton for needing them? Or was he trying to make up for decades of starvation for physical affection? He could have sought that from Vasiht’h, and his partner would have given it gladly… but how could it have meant what it needed to mean when the Glaseah could not understand how painful giving and receiving that touch was?
He was grateful, suddenly and intensely, for his cousin, and dropped a kiss on his throat by way of thanking. The hand on the back of his head made him shiver, and it was as much fatigue as longing.
“Me too,” Lisinthir said against his hair. Sighed. “Let us wash and go to bed. We have a long day before us.”
“More riding?” Jahir asked, sitting up reluctantly.
“You will wish it when you hear what I plan—”
Jahir eyed him. “Which is…?”
Lisinthir grinned, resting his hands on Jahir’s thighs. “Tomorrow, cousin. Let us not borrow its troubles before time.”
The nursery was quiet the following afternoon when the Slave Queen entered it with the Knife at her back. Was it always thus? That she didn’t know enough about the normal rhythms of life there struck her as pitiable, and she no longer liked the idea that she might be pitiable. She had too much to accomplish to allow herself the luxury of subsiding once again into
passivity.
The Mother was awaiting her, trying to hide her anxiety and failing, and her distress was communicating itself to the children. Most of them had dispersed to the edges of the room where they might be overlooked; all save the ferocious Gale, naturally, who hovered near the Mother with a scowl worthy of the Emperor’s get. His meek companion was with him also, though. What relationship obtained there, she wondered? And who had allowed him to sustain that connection when doing so was weakness?
“You trust the guards this shift?” the Slave Queen asked the Knife, quiet.
“I trust all the guards in the tower, my Queen. They are my choices.”
She nodded, using the gesture purposefully to begin preparation for the Change. “Stand by the door, though, please.” At his hesitation, she added, “You will be able to see.”
His eyes glowed. “Thank you, my Queen.”
“See what?” the Mother hissed. “What is it you plan?”
“I plan to bridge a gap,” the Slave Queen said, watching the female slaves see to their chores, ignoring the visitors.
“What does that mean?” Gale asked the Mother, anxious. “What’s she going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“This is your birthright,” the Slave Queen said to him. “Watch and learn.” She dipped her head and spread her hands, palms up… thought of the Ambassador, so long sped to have been gone so few days. Oh, my lord! She thought. We will meet again. Surely we must. With a breath, she closed her eyes… and Changed. She had sought this form so often the differences no longer staggered her. These eyes, placed so strangely, and yet they had seen the face of the beloved. These breasts, unexpected, which had known the touch of lovers. The solid bones that had taken the weight of the males she had fallen in love with—the skin that reminded her of one of them. She turned her palms to watch that skin crinkle around the bases of her fingers, so fragile, so translucent. All the air petted her, as if in apology for the caresses she could not ask for, the kisses she could not receive.
And yet, such a gift the Ambassador had made her, had made them both! Because this frangible shape, so delicate, so easily broken, was also powerful in ways her Chatcaavan body wasn’t, could never be.
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