Page 63

"Fenris told me his name. Hyren." He says it carefully, the way he says things he has been turning over in his head and has committed to memory. "He had a shaved head. A jagged scar, all up one arm. He's the chieftain of the Jakadi."

Eskil says nothing. He leans down and presses his mouth against the top of Indrie's head and holds it there, and his eyes are open and they are not soft. Indrie cannot see his face. That is on purpose.

Indrie is quiet against his chest for a long time. Then he pulls back, just a little.

"You don't have to kill everyone who touches me," Indrie says.

Eskil does not say anything.

He does not say anything because the answer is yes. Yes, he fucking does. He knows exactly what Indrie would say to that. He would talk about his vow, gently, and he would talk about mercy, and he would look up at Eskil with those worried eyes and ask him whether the world really needs any more of it. And Eskil loves him for every single word of it, and not one of those words is going to change what happens to the next man who lays a hand on him. And he is not going to lie about it in this room, and so he says nothing.

But there is a name now.

It goes into the place Eskil keeps a tally.

He feels Indrie understand. He feels it go through him, a small stillness against Eskil's chest. Then Indrie swallows, and pulls back just far enough to look up, and he searches Eskil's face for a long moment. He sees the whole of it. Eskil watches him see it, and watches him decide, deliberately and knowing exactly what he is deciding, not to fight him on it tonight.

Indrie puts his hand on Eskil's face. His thumb goes along the line of Eskil's jaw, through his beard, up over the scar. Then he smiles, small and entirely real, the one that shows up in his eyes before it gets to his mouth.

And the door Eskil has been leaning his whole weight on for three days swings open, and he lets it.

He kisses Indrie's palm. He kisses his wrist, and then the inside of his forearm, working down, and none of it is about washing anymore. He turns Indrie as he goes, with his hands on his waist, and Indrie lets himself be turned, lets himself be arranged, and Eskil presses him back down into the water and leans over the rim of the tub and takes his mouth.

He takes his time with it. It is a slow kiss and a deep one, a kiss that ought to be happening in a bed after a month apart and not on a stone floor beside a copper tub. He has gone three days without this mouth and he is going to have all of it.

Indrie's hands come up into his hair and find the base of his skull and hold on, and Eskil groans into him. Indrie's grip tightens. Eskil opens him up with his tongue and tastes him and catches his lower lip in his teeth, and Indrie makes a sound Eskil feels all the way down his spine, straight into his cock, which is already straining against the wet leather of his trousers.

His hand goes into the water and finds Indrie's hip and grips hard. Indrie arches up into it and the water slops against the sides of the tub. Eskil's other hand slides down, under the water, and wraps around Indrie's cock. He is hard now, fully, the head of his cock wet even in the bath, and when Eskil thumbs over the slit Indrie breaks the kiss with a gasp that is almost a whimper.

Eskil strokes him once, slow, from root to tip, and watches his face come apart.

"Okay," Indrie says in a breath. "Either get in here or get me out."

He hauls him out of the water.

It is not graceful in the slightest. Indrie is wet and slippery and barely weighs anything, and Eskil drags him up out of the tub with both arms and Indrie yelps and grabs him around the neck and water goes everywhere. Eskil carries him across the room dripping a trail over the stone, and Indrie has his legs wrapped around his waist and his arms around his neck, and the feel of all that bare wet skin pressed against his clothes is going to kill him. Indrie's cock is trapped between them, hard against Eskil's stomach through the soaked shirt, and every step makes him twitch.

He puts him down on the bed. Their bed.

He stands over him with his hands braced on the mattress and looks, and Indrie looks back up at him with his short hair sticking out in wet dark spikes against the linen and his mouth swollen and his eyes enormous, water running in thin rivulets down his chest, over his nipples, into the dark hair at his groin. His cock is lying dark and wet against his belly, the head of it shiny, a bead of precome already welling at the slit. Eskil has to stop and breathe.

Indrie reaches up and starts on the buckles of Eskil's jerkin. His fingers are shaking a little. They are not slow. Eskil holds still and lets him work, and the buckles go one after another, and Indrie shoves the leather back off his shoulders and Eskil shrugs out of it and lets it drop. The shirt goes after it. Indrie's palms are flat on his bare chest before the fabric has cleared his head.

"You're still in your trousers," Indrie points out. “You’re supposed to be helping.”

Eskil huffs out a laugh and gets his trousers off. His cock slaps up against his stomach, thick and dark and leaking, and Indrie looks, and goes red from his hairline to his collarbones, and it goes straight to Eskil's core the way it always does. He has been hard since the tub, since Indrie was lying in the water with Eskil's hands on him, and Indrie looking at him now like he wants to put his mouth on him is not helping.

He climbs onto the bed and over him and holds himself there on his arms, one knee between Indrie's thighs. His cock hangs heavy between them, the head of it dragging a wet smear across Indrie's stomach.

There is so much less of Indrie than there is of him. It is always there and he never once lets himself forget it. He could hurt this man without even meaning to. He has spent a year making very sure he never does, and he has spent that same year trying to make Indrie feel the size of him as something that keeps him safe rather than something he has to be careful of. Some nights Eskil thinks he has managed it.

Indrie puts both hands on his face.

"I missed you," Indrie says. "Every night. Thinking about you was the only thing that kept me in one piece."

Eskil puts his forehead down against Indrie's.

"I was never going to leave you there," Eskil says. "There is nothing on this earth that would have kept me from coming for you. Nothing."