Chapter Ten
Soft birdsong far away. A cool breeze on distant skin. Limbs moving smoothly through motions perfected over hour after hour of practice. Ashenivir hurled himself across the stone platform; a spin, a leap, arms out wide. His knuckles clipped the edge of a pillar as he passed, but the pain was far away. Off the altar and out into the grove, between the trees and the bright, fragrant blooms, bare feet faster and faster over stone-studded earth until he was running more than dancing, begging the motion of his body, the surge of his pulse, to carry his mind away further, further; to let him breathe, please, Maiden, let me breathe!
He skidded to a halt by the largest, oldest oak, and pressed his forehead to the bark. His chest heaved, his legs trembled, all of him sticky with sweat. Aching. Sore. Tired, so endlessly tired.
A tenday since he’d come here, and he felt no better than he had that first awful afternoon. If anything, his thoughts were more of a mess. His heart certainly was.
He leaned back against the tree, squinting up at the speckled light through the canopy as he rubbed his knuckles. The skin hadn’t split, only bruised. It was the fourth or fifth such injury he’d inflicted on himself while dancing, and he doubted it would be the last. Motion kept the hurt at bay as long as he didn’t stop, but the moment he did, it all came crashing back into him. A full tenday. Rizeth hadn’t sent so much as a note.
“You’ll go mad if you keep on like this.”
Xalin, with Zelka alongside her, had come up the path behind him, unheard beneath his panting breath and pounding heart. The smell of warm bread drifted from the basket on Xalin’s arm, and his stomach growled, hollow, suddenly aware of how starved it was.
“I’m fine,” he said.
“No, you’re not.” She guided him to a nearby bench, the same dark wood as the pagodas, and Zelka pressed a waterskin into his hand as the two of them sat either side of him. He drank until he felt sick, too much, too fast. Xalin put a hand on his knee.
“You can’t dance your way through this,” she said. “You need to talk to him.”
She’d repeated the same line since he’d gotten here—and yesterday, when Elian’la had come by, had tried to get him to talk to her, too. He’d flat out refused, harshly enough that she’d left him alone for the rest of the day. “And say what? I’ll just make it worse.”
“I do not see how,” Zelka said. “He clearly doesn’t care enough to come and make his apologies. How could you make it worse than he has already made it himself? Frankly, you deserve better than a male who abandons you at the first sign of trouble.”
“He hasn’t abandoned me, he just…doesn’t know where I am.”
“We all know that’s not true. You come to the Haven often enough, he could at the least try and look for you here.” She sniffed. “Though I cannot say I am entirely surprised. He is as every male I grew up with; thoroughly spineless when it counts.”
Ashenivir’s nails dug into his palms. “Don’t talk about him like that.”
“You must face the truth sometime or other, Ashenivir. He was happy to wear you on his arm when all was to his ease, but—”
“Zelka, will you stop!” She flinched away from him, and he winced. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to…I’m sorry.”
Xalin passed him a bread roll. “We’re not saying give up on him,” she said gently, though Zelka muttered something that might have been a rebuttal of that idea. “Just that you can’t hide here forever. Avoiding each other isn’t going to fix anything.”
“I know.” He fought to swallow the crack in his voice. He’d cried more than enough lately. Every moment there was something else he missed. Morning tea. Reading on the couch together. Rizeth recounting with dry humour his latest meeting with Lyzira, or indulgently listening to Ashenivir ramble about the newest instalment of one of his serials. Kisses on his wrists just before the manacles locked around them. His Master’s hand on the back of his neck. Commands to follow and the comfort that came after.
The word Ra’soltha.
Xalin didn’t press him. The three of them finished breakfast, and he stayed on the bench when they went back into the villa. They had duties; he did not. He’d have taken some if they’d been offered, only no-one had, and so he was left to wallow in his self-inflicted misery.
He wished he could talk to Keszriin. She’d know what to say, tell him what to do—she’d advised him on dozens of boy problems before.
Rizeth wasn’t a boy problem. This wasn’t an incompatible bedmate, this was a real relationship, and he had no idea what he was doing, which was exactly why he’d made every possible mistake. A part of him wished he’d never said anything, that they’d stayed as they had been: Master and Ra’soltha, nothing more, nothing less. Easy. Uncomplicated.
He fingered his collar, following the links around to his mark. He hadn’t taken off the former, but nor had he allowed the divinations of the latter to activate again. Zelka was right on that point; Rizeth could easily have found him if he wanted to.
He’s giving you space. You ignored him when he cast that sending, so he’s giving you space. He won’t push you.
“Maybe I want to be pushed,” he muttered. Maybe he wanted Rizeth to track him down, to come here and apologise—he was the one who’d started this!
Ashenivir leapt up from the bench and dragged his protesting body back into a dance. It wouldn’t fix anything, it wouldn’t give him the comfort he craved or the answers he wanted, but it would clear his head for a few seconds at a time, and enough of those seconds would add up to minutes, to hours, to another day he could end passing out, exhausted, so he didn’t have to think about the fact he was ending it alone.
The morning Lyzira showed up had not been one of Rizeth’s better days. Her knock startled him from a thin reverie on the couch, and he went scrambling to the door with his heart in his throat and a thousand apologies colliding on his tongue. She’d taken one look at him—half-dressed, unwashed, and unable to conceal the despair at it being her, not Ashenivir, standing before him—and wrapped him in a rib-cracking hug. She made him eat, then made him explain what the Hells was going on. He’d told her what he could, about Ashenivir and Elian’la both, every word like pulling a tooth, every stark admission of his own failure another knife in his gut. He’d expected her to understand at once that he was worth neither her time nor her effort.
“You’re an idiot,” she’d said. “Now go take a bath. You look like shit.”
Every morning since then she’d come by—very often waking him by being inside the apartment, despite his not having given her anything resembling a key. She was an atrocious cook, but he didn’t have the energy to stop her burning her way through his food stores. It hardly mattered. He didn’t taste what little he ate.
She went to the meetings he’d stopped caring about, and chattered away at him about them when she came back while he nursed yet another bland mug of tea he had no intention of drinking. When she was gone, he ignored the growing mess of the apartment, failed to read, and spent blurred hour after blurred hour sat at the table, staring at the door.
He didn’t know where she was staying. She never pushed to sleep at the apartment, for which he was grateful, since it meant he could continue to give himself backache on the couch and avoid the bed. He couldn’t stand the thought of lying alone, of waking up and reaching for a warm, familiar form that wasn’t there.
“You know, I’ve been here for most of a tenday now, and I have yet to meet your dog,” Lyzira said one morning.
“I do not have a dog,” he muttered, poking at the mutilated fried breakfast she’d presented him with.
“Then you ought to give whoever does their leash back.”
Rizeth’s eyes flicked to where Ashenivir’s leash still hung on its hook alongside their cloaks in the entryway. A pained longing gripped his heart, followed by a surge of disgust at himself for pining after such things at a time like this. He stabbed at a charred slice of bacon. “You do not need to keep doing this.”
Lyzira snorted.
“Because you’d take such good care of yourself if I didn’t.” She thunked his boots onto the table. “Dog or not, I’m taking you for a walk. Come on.”
“Absolutely not.”
“You haven’t left this apartment since I got here, so absolutely yes. Don’t make me cast a compulsion, you know how terrible I am with enchantments.”
He didn’t doubt she’d do it, and in his current state he had little enough willpower to resist. So out they went, with the sky very blue and the sun very bright and the whole damn city intolerably cheery. There was a flower-seller on one corner making eyes at the bard opposite—for goodness’ sake, did the world need to be quite so picturesque?
A sharp jolt snapped in the back of his mind, and he flinched, cutting off the instinctive mental reach for the mark. The spell had alerted him a handful of times since Ashenivir had left, and every time Rizeth clamped down the urge to go racing into the magic. The divinations remained blocked—though he couldn’t help picking at them like a scab—which meant Ashenivir still wanted nothing to do with him. He’d feel any other touch of the mark, and how obsessive would that look? How controlling, how pathetic; not concerned enough to come and find him, but entitled enough to know what he was feeling.
“You need to go and talk to him,” Lyzira said.
“After all I’ve told you, you ought to know that is a terrible idea.”
“I don’t see how saying, ‘I’m sorry, Ashenivir, I was being a tarrasque-sized ass,’ is going to make things any worse.”
“He doesn’t want to talk to me.” If he did, he’d cast a sending. If he did, he’d come home. “If I go chasing after him as though I cannot understand the simple fact that he wants to be left alone, all I do is upset him further.”
“Mm, I don’t know,” Lyzira said, as they rounded a corner. “Sometimes it’s nice to be chased.”
She stopped, and he along with her, and it was only then he realised how far they’d come, and where it was they’d ended up.
“No.”
He turned, putting his back to the Dancing Haven. Lyzira grabbed his arm. “This is where he is, isn’t it? There’s nowhere else, not unless he’s staying with one of those friends you mentioned. Go in there and apologise.”
“I said no, Master Xiltael.”
“Who are you, and what have you done with Rizeth Velkon’yss?” she demanded. “Too afraid to go into a building, sitting around moping for days because you had a fight with a boy—”
“I am not moping.”
“Then you’re doing a damn good impression of it.” She released him. “Just go in. If he’s not there, you can go right back to not-moping, and if he is, you can act like the grown drow you are and make things right.”
Such sincerity in her face—why she cared he couldn’t fathom, but care she did. He turned back to the Haven. The roof was still half a canopy of leaves, rustling lightly in the faint breeze. Someone had re-painted the door recently by the looks, for it gleamed bright white beneath the summer sun. Ashenivir might be just beyond it, a few steps and a handful of words away from being back in his arms that very night.
“Alright,” Rizeth started, “you may have a point, I…”
He trailed off. A dray had just pulled up, and out of the small crowd that spilled from it was one form he recognised. Elian’la paused before crossing the street to the Haven, a hand raised to shield her eyes. Her hair was up, half-braided, the way she used to do it before she went out to some party or other he knew nothing about until she returned with wine on her breath and denials on her tongue.
Little enough things he needed magic for then save burning it all on sendings that went soundly ignored. An evening came where he decided enough was enough, and bullied her location out of a friend—his arrival had been neither expected nor wanted, and though he’d tried to be polite, she’d had no inclination to be.
“One night!” She stormed out ahead of him, gown glittering, face thunderous. “I can’t go out for one night without you chasing after me!”
“I had no idea where you were! You cannot just ignore me and expect me to—”
“Maiden’s tits, I don’t need you breathing down my neck all the time!”
He grabbed her wrist, pulling her to face him. Behind them, the music and laughter continued, oblivious, the cavern ceiling shimmering late-night dull blue above them. “You are mine,” he said, low, mere words inadequate to impart what he really meant. “I only want to know that you’re safe.”
Elian’la jerked free. “You don’t own me, Rizeth. I’m not a thing,” she snapped. “This isn’t a playroom, it’s real life. Get that through your damn head already.”
The dray rattled past, pulling him back to the present, where Elian’la was disappearing into the Haven. He released a breath and felt no better for it.
“That’s her, isn’t it?” Lyzira said. He nodded once. She carefully hooked her arm into his and steered him away from the Haven. “I think that’s enough outside for one day.”
Her chatter turned to months-old Arcanum gossip, and Rizeth gratefully let it wash over him. Things had gotten so bad, that last decade with Elian’la. With the agonising clarity of hindsight, he could see every stupid, arrogant mistake he’d made, but at the time they’d just slid day by day into one argument after another, until neither of them had any grace left to give. If he’d given her the space she wanted, the freedom she needed, she never would have grown to hate him so much.
If he went barging into Ashenivir’s place of safety to drag him out against his will, it wouldn’t take a decade to earn his hatred.
Rizeth let Lyzira escort him home, and once she’d gone, he took up his place at the table, ignored his tea, and watched the door that stubbornly refused to open, wondering how it was he could be quite so adept at ruining his own life.
Hot and miserable, Ashenivir lay in the shade of a rhododendron bush, picking at the grass. The day before, Mara and River had dragged him to the Sea Maiden’s Faire in an attempt to cheer him up. He’d trailed after them, silently miserable, able only to think of how much he wanted Rizeth’s wry commentary on the extravagant frivolity of it all, and when he’d begged off after an hour, he’d come back to the Haven and danced himself into exhaustion again. He’d paid for it later, and though he’d forced himself to join the others for devotions this morning, he’d spent the rest of the day in the gardens, reluctantly letting his body recover.
Xalin had come by twice to bring him water and food, and Zelka kept making excuses to check up on him, asking over and over if he needed anything. He tried not to snap, but he was sick of it, and sick of himself. Just get up! he admonished his unmoving limbs. Just get up and walk over there and find him and fix this.
He could picture the walk. The stairs to the apartment, his key in the lock, stepping through the door, seeing Rizeth…
After that, his imagination failed. He ran the scenario over and over and every time he opened his mental mouth, nothing came out. I’m sorry no longer felt like enough. I’m upset covered nothing at all, and do you still love me? was a question he was too petrified of the answer to ask.
Somewhere down the path, someone was calling his name. Not his proper name, but Master Zauvym. Ashenivir sat up. Emmyr Lightfist stood on the other side of the bush.
“Ah, there you are!” The dwarf hurried over to him. They had a large, cloth-wrapped bundle in their arms, bound with strips of braided leather, which they set down by Ashenivir with a sigh of relief, drawing a handkerchief from their pocket to mop their reddened brow. “Lord Stillgleam said I might find you here. I know it’s a bit of a risk to deliver like this, and ordinarily I’d wait until Master Velkon’yss came by for it, but it’s taking up a lot of space in my very small workshop, and I’ve just had a rush of new commissions.”
“What is it?” Ashenivir reached for the binding straps. Emmyr put a hand on his shoulder.
“Maybe when you’re home, eh? Not sure how much you want your priestess friends to know about, ah…House-related matters.”
They gave Ashenivir a knowing smile, mopped their brow once more, then hurried back the way they’d come. The moment they were out of sight, Ashenivir drew the package into his lap. It was heavy, with something firm yet flexible beneath the cloth. He made quick work of the knots, pulled away the wrapping—and his breath caught in his throat.
Armbinds. Long sleeves of black leather, the laces capped with silver to match the neat stitching. Ashenivir’s fingers shook as he ran them over the exquisite material, breathing in the earthy scent of fresh leather. Raised bumps at the cuff made him pause—they were embossed letters, styled exactly the same as the ones on the end of his leash.
R.V.
He pressed a hand to his mouth. At that moment he would have traded the binds, his leash—his collar—just to have Rizeth’s hand in his again.
“Ashenivir?”
That was Zelka calling him again. Ashenivir flung the cloth over the binds just as she rounded the rhododendrons. “There you are. Dinner is soon, and I have not seen you eat since breakfast.” Her eyes fell on the package in his lap. “What’s that?”
“Nothing. Just post.” He tried to keep his face impassive. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
For a moment it seemed as though she wanted to say something more, but she didn’t, and headed back towards the villa in silence. Alone again, Ashenivir pulled back the cloth. He traced the embossed initials, and warmth swelled in his chest, a flutter of moth-wings that had been silent and still for far too long.
Anything you want, you can have. He had to go home. Tonight. So what if he didn’t know what to say—his Master would understand. Even when he couldn’t speak at all, Rizeth understood him.
Ashenivir re-tied the wrapping around the arm-binds and got to his feet. The sun was starting to set, and he could hear laughter and the clatter of plates drifting from the open windows of the villa. He cut through the gardens to slip out a side-gate and into the gold-shadowed streets.
He’d been hiding long enough.
Dinner sat cold on the stove. Probably he should do something about it, if only throw it out. Rizeth couldn’t bring himself to care. Lyzira had left hours ago, and he’d promised to clean up the apartment in her absence; had made a reasonable start, picking up a shirt here, a days-old mug there—then he’d come across one of Ashenivir’s terrible serials stuck down the side of the couch and given up. Let the place stay as it was. What did it matter if it was a mess?
Then he’d tried to take a bath, thinking one might induce something closer to real reverie than he’d had in days, but the sight of the runes on the porcelain in Ashenivir’s neatly painted strokes punched all the air out of him like a fist to the gut, and he wanted both to smash the bath to pieces, and to beat his own head against the basin. He’d gotten worse since Lyzira had tried to take him to the Haven, he knew he’d gotten worse, but he couldn’t snap himself out of it. The last time he’d come this unscrewed had been the awful years after Elian’la had left him. He hardly remembered that whole decade. It was nothing but a flat, blank blur.
That pain, this nightmare; it was all his own fault. This is what you get, Rizeth. This is what you knew was coming, you selfish, arrogant, controlling—
A knock startled him from the dark spiral of his thoughts. The hope that it might be Ashenivir flickered, barely more than a dull spark—far likelier it was Lyzira having forgotten something or other. He made a token effort of appeasement, loosely tying back his hair and rolling up his sleeves as if he’d been in the process of cleaning as he’d promised.
“Hello, Rizeth.”
Elian’la stood in the doorway, with a look in her eye he recognised from too many years of it preceding a fight. It took him a moment to find his voice.
“Why are you here?”
“To talk to you, I would have thought that was obvious.”
She held his gaze, daring him to slam the door in her face. Expecting it. Rizeth stood aside and motioned curtly for her to come in. The awful state of the apartment grated on him as she took it in, casting her eyes over the mess in quick judgement. They lingered on the leash hanging in the entryway, her jaw tensing. Rather unlike her to swallow commentary—perhaps she’d matured over the past few decades.
Elian’la trailed a finger over the spines of Ashenivir’s serials, crammed tight on their shelves. She tugged one out to see the cover and huffed a laugh. “Nice bedtime stories you have. Your boy pick them out?”
Perhaps she hadn’t. “What do you want, Elian’la?”
“Oh, now he remembers my name.” She turned and leaned against the bedroom door. “Kelran says this is the first year you’ve come by the House in the last thirty.”
“Kelran is a gossip.”
“He’s an overprotective old queen who meddles like his life depends on it.”
“On that point I will agree with you.”
Rizeth perched on the edge of the table, unable to look directly at her. She was too bright, always had been. A star around which he’d been privileged to orbit, until her fire had incinerated them both.
“Have you talked to your boy?” she asked.
“His name is Ashenivir,” he corrected. Her chin angled up.
“Fine. Have you talked to Ashenivir? Don’t bother answering, I know you haven’t. I might not stay at the Haven, but I do visit—apparently he’s left it maybe three times since he came stumbling in, crying his eyes out, and you haven’t come by once.” She shoved away from the door. “Only place you’ve been is the House to chew Catriona out for no fucking reason—”
“I had plenty of reason for my words with Miss Hanali.”
Elian’la rolled her eyes. “Oh, get over yourself. You never liked her. This time you just had an excuse.”
“Is there a point to your sniping, or did you come here only to make me feel worse?” Rizeth snapped. “Because if so, you are—as always—doing a most excellent job of it.”
She stalked towards him, motioning sharply at the window, out towards the city. “He’s over there, dancing until he collapses like it’s some kind of penance, while you sit here on your high fucking horse ignoring him. Same tactics as always, right? Give him the silent treatment until he comes crawling back, begging you to forgive him, even though he’s done nothing wrong—”
“I know!” He hadn’t meant to shout. He never meant to shout at her, but she had a way of inspiring his ire. The years apart had done little to dull that particular skill of hers. “I know this is my fault! I am as useless now as I was with you, and I do not need you to come here and eviscerate me for my incompetence.”
“Maiden’s fucking tits—you jackass, why do you always have to make everything about yourself? He’s a wreck, and all you can do is hide in this slum of an apartment like a coward!”
They were no longer in Waterdeep then. They were back in Mythen Thaelas, in the small rooms they’d shared in Draix’ress, with no space to breathe or think or escape the tension and frustration that simmered constantly beneath their surface.
“And what do you want me to do? Chase him down? Throw sendings at him?” A cold facsimile of a smile twisted his mouth. “Order him to come home?”
“You slapped a brand on the back of his neck, isn’t that what it’s for?”
He didn’t ask how she knew. “Yes, that’s precisely what it’s for; to take away all his free will and replace it with my own.”
“You finally grew a sense of humour while I was gone, huh?” She crossed her arms, cocking her hip. Feet stanced wide, settled in for the night—she’d happily go to bed on an argument, as long as she was the one to get the last barb in. “Didn’t grow a brain though, did you?”
“Don’t be so childish.”
“Don’t be so stupid,” she retorted, and he scoffed. “Insufferable man. Go over there and say you’re sorry, is it that fucking hard?”
Rizeth ground his teeth. “He doesn’t want to see me.”
“Yes I do.”
They both looked round at the small voice—Rizeth hadn’t even heard the door open, he’d been so wrapped up in their argument. Ashenivir stood in the doorway, his eyes very big and his shoulders very tight, a cloth-wrapped bundle in his arms. Elian’la glanced from him to Rizeth, her lips pressed into a thin line.
“Have a good night, boys,” she forced out, then pushed past Ashenivir, slamming the door behind her and leaving the two of them in taut silence. And though he’d hoped for this moment since the day he’d come back to an empty apartment, now that it had arrived, Rizeth could only stand there, staring at him, without the slightest idea what to say.
As he climbed the stairs to the apartment, Ashenivir promised himself he wasn’t going to cry again. The moment Elian’la was gone, he broke that promise. He dropped the arm-binds and flung himself into Rizeth’s arms, choking on a sob.
“Ashenivir,” Rizeth whispered, cracked and unsteady and—crying. Rizeth was crying; crying and kissing him and holding him not nearly tight enough.
“I’m sorry,” Ashenivir gasped out. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have…you told me not to, and—”
“You have nothing to be sorry for.” Rizeth held him back from the kiss, searching his face, something desperate shining behind his eyes. “You did nothing wrong, do you understand?”
“But I lied to you, I—”
“And if I hadn’t acted like such an ass in the first place, you never would have needed to. I should have listened to you, not shut you out.”
“It…you…” Ashenivir shook his head. “I don’t want to talk right now.”
Rizeth kissed him again and he tasted like home. Ashenivir wrapped both arms around his neck and pressed closer, tangling his fingers in Rizeth’s hair. It felt wrong, unwashed, in as poor a state as the apartment—he should have been here to care for it and Rizeth both. Rizeth’s hands came to his waist, started to push beneath his shirt—then hesitated. Ashenivir put his own over them.
“I need you,” he whispered. “I need you, Master. Please.”
Something shifted in Rizeth’s gaze, and he wasn’t sure if it was pain or relief. Then his hands were everywhere, and Ashenivir’s were everywhere else, and they were in moments entangled on the floor, lost in quickening breath and urgent touch.
“Master,” he repeated; said it, sighed it, over and over as Rizeth kissed him, hard and hungry. He kicked at the tangle of his half-off leggings, enough to get a leg around Rizeth’s back to pull him closer, fumbling at the fastenings of Rizeth’s shirt. It took a furious and frustrating amount of wrestling to get his own off, with Rizeth mapping warm hands over his stomach and chest all the while. One settled at his collar.
“Ra’soltha,” Rizeth breathed, tentatively hooking his fingers into the chain, and a great tightness that had lived in Ashenivir’s chest since he’d gone to the Haven finally released itself. He took Rizeth’s hand and pulled it to cup the back of his neck, then drew him down into another kiss as he released the divination block.
Magic brushed him, a light touch at first, then firmer as his Master connected fully to his mark—to him. Every rune, every word, every line burned into his neck lit up, and all of him sang with the rightness of it.
“There you are,” Rizeth murmured. His thumb brushed the top of Ashenivir’s spine. “My Ra’soltha. Tell me what you want.”
“I want you to remind me,” Ashenivir said.
“Of what?”
“Of who I belong to.”
In the space of a heartbeat, Rizeth had him pinned, arms above his head, one hand wrapped around both his wrists. The hold tightened as he strained against it, and Ashenivir soared—he was back on the floor of Rizeth’s Arcanum quarters, in Rizeth’s bed, in their bed; he was everywhere his Master had ever claimed him and made him feel whole and entire. He tipped his head back so Rizeth could savage his neck, sucking bite after bite in an endless line of bruising pleasure, while cantrip-slick fingers worked into him, the burning stretch quickly resolving into a steady, comforting rhythm.
“More,” he whispered, and his Master obliged. The head of Rizeth’s cock pressed in slowly as he dragged his teeth over Ashenivir’s pulse, stretching him one glorious inch at a time. Full and needing to be fuller, Ashenivir hooked both ankles around Rizeth’s waist, linking them over the small of his back to pull him closer, draw him deeper, every thrust putting the shattered pieces of his heart back together.
“Hold your own wrists,” Rizeth ordered, a breathless lack of weight to the words. Once Ashenivir complied, leaving him with both hands free, he took hold of Ashenivir’s legs and pushed them up until he was folded near enough in half—a distant part of him laughed; all that dancing was good for something, or you’d never bend so easily. Rizeth gripped his calves firmly, keeping him pressed against the floor as he fucked into him harder; yet all the while his thumbs stroked soft lines by Ashenivir’s ankles, a sweetly satisfying contrast.
“Good boy,” Rizeth said, and kissed him so fervently he forgot the very concept of breathing. His mouth, his jaw, his neck, his mouth again, Rizeth’s tongue sliding over his to claim it; letting Ashenivir’s tongue press into his mouth to re-stake his own claim there.
His cock dragged against Rizeth’s stomach, irregular sparks of pleasure licking up his spine. Moths filled his chest, a thousand-thousand wingbeats in place of his pulse. He wanted to form them into words, but they were a language he couldn’t speak right now, and all he could do was let out a low whine. The way Rizeth’s cock hit within him, he wasn’t going to need anything else to get him where he was inevitably going.
Rizeth got there first. Ashenivir greedily swallowed his cry as he buried himself deep, releasing Ashenivir’s legs to clutch at his hair. The single sharp tug sent him over the edge—as he came, he locked his legs so tightly around Rizeth’s back his Master couldn’t have moved away if he’d wanted to.
Ashenivir desperately hoped he didn’t want to.
Finally, the tremble of his muscles forced him to let go. Rizeth rolled to his back and Ashenivir followed the motion, sprawling across his chest as a cleansing cantrip flowed over him. He couldn’t stop touching him—what if he lost him again? Said something stupid, did something worse? Rizeth stroked slow, soothing lines down his spine, and calm gradually followed in their wake. When at last Rizeth spoke, it was no set of words he wanted to hear.
“We need to talk.”
He buried his face in Rizeth’s neck. “Later. Later, later, I don’t want to think about any of that right now. I missed you.” A sniffed laugh broke out of him. “It wasn’t even two tendays, and I missed you so much.”
Rizeth chuckled. “Too long, regardless. I missed you too.”
He ran his fingers through Ashenivir’s hair, picking out tangles with a practised touch. They lay like that a long while, the evening melting away around them, until Ashenivir yawned, and Rizeth made him sit up. He clung as Rizeth lifted him into his arms and carried him to the bedroom, every place their skin didn’t touch cold with absence. They curled tight together in the heart of their bed, too close to know where one ended and the other began.
“I love you,” he mumbled into Rizeth’s chest. Rizeth’s arms tightened around him, and for the first time in days, reverie came swiftly, sweetly, and for a long, long time.