by Amy Lane
So now he slid into bed and simply touched him, savored his skin, kissed him randomly, licked the bare parts of his shoulder, his neck, his ears, until he was squirming on the bed, groaning in arousal, but unwilling to bring himself release because that would mean he’d have to break contact with Dorjan’s naked skin.
He groaned in Dorjan’s ear and thrust up against his thigh, and Dorjan groaned in return, rolling over to his side and fluttering his eyes open. Taern lay face-to-face with him, touched his chest, and tweaked his nipples between his thumb and his forefinger until Dorjan awakened a little more and started to thrust up against Taern randomly, without rhythm, sleepy enough to be aroused without shame.
Taern kissed him, gratified by his response, and pressed his bare body gently against Dorjan’s while Dorjan wrapped his arm around Taern’s shoulders and ground against him, his still damp cock growing harder with every meeting of their wet, open mouths. Taern reached down between them and grasped both their cocks in one hand, thrusting against Dorjan and feeling the silk of his skin as his member engorged even further. Dorjan groaned into his mouth and bucked more, and Taern murmured, “Patience!” and then sank down below the covers, needing to taste him before he was sheathed securely in Taern’s arse.
It took a touch of his tongue to the pink end to have Dorjan dripping wet, and Taern bobbed his head twice and twice only, tightening his lips as he pulled back and looking forward to another time when Dorjan would dump come down his throat in quantity. But that’s not what Taern desired now. He’d told Dorjan what he’d needed before, when Dorjan had just awakened, and Taern had resolved to keep doing that. Dorjan needed to know what Taern needed, and right now, Taern needed to be filled, thrust into, fucked. Taern scrambled up to the top of the covers and reached over Dorjan to the end table, dipped his fingers into the little plate there, and pulled back his hand.
“What’s that?” Dorjan mumbled, and Taern rolled away from him and then pushed down the covers and reached behind his bottom.
“Vegetable oil,” he said, thrusting two well-slicked fingers into his backside, and the gasp/moan Dorjan let out made Taern’s cock even harder. “You see what I’m doing?”
“Nungh….” (Also a good sound. Taern planned to hear that one as often as possible in the future.)
“Yes,” Taern gasped. His fingers fit just fine, but he knew Dorjan’s cock was much thicker than they were. “See? I’m spreading th—eeem, so you can see I’ll be… oh Karanos and Bimuit! I’m stretched, ready, made for your cock, right?”
“Oh,” Dorjan breathed, and Taern scooted closer to him, close enough to reach behind him and seize Dorjan’s thick, fat cock in his hand and rub his slick fist all up and down its length. “Taern!” Dorjan gasped, and Taern squeezed tighter.
“I need this,” Taern whispered. He swung his leg up, spreading his thighs and holding them, and scrunched his bottom down until he felt Dorjan at his stretched, waiting entrance.
“If you need it,” Dorjan whispered, “climb on and ask me face to face.” And with that, Dorjan’s presence at his back was gone.
Taern rolled over in surprise and saw Dorjan was on his back, his cock in his fist and his legs spread wide. “Dorjan?”
“Do you think I don’t need?” Dorjan asked, his voice gentle and exasperated. “Do you think I don’t dream? Every dream of this for me has been when I can see your face and you tell me that it’s good.”
Taern scrambled up and got closer, close enough for their skin to touch again, then sat up on his knees and swung one knee up over Dorjan’s thin, scarred midsection. He positioned Dorjan’s erection right back where he belonged, and sat very carefully down.
Dorjan let out a long sigh as Taern’s body gripped him tightly, in spite of the easing of the oil. Taern threw his head back and allowed a shiver of desire to pass along his spine, and another, and another, as his bottom stretched and stretched and he took Dorjan farther and farther inside. “Ahh…,” he breathed and lowered himself down completely, Dorjan so far inside him that when he cocked his hips forward, he pressed against his stomach and—
“Oh!” Dorjan breathed when Taern took his hand and stroked it over the slight bump in Taern’s lower abdomen. “That’s me!”
“Only because I’m starving!” Taern confirmed, laughing, and then he clenched his bottom and rose and lowered, sheathing Dorjan’s cock with his body again, and Dorjan groaned. Oh yes! Again, again, again…. Taern’s head tilted back, his eyes closed, and he became lost in the rhythm, the glory of having Dorjan inside him, giving pleasure, receiving it, lost in this act as a joy and not a defilement. Through his haze, Taern felt a hand stroking along his cock, and his eyes flew open. He smiled at Dorjan, who smiled shyly back.
“Good?” Dorjan asked hesitantly, and Taern closed his eyes again and kept moving.
“So good you can’t stop!” Taern told him back and kept that gentle, quickening rhythm while Dorjan’s hand kept stroking, stroking, easing—“Oh hells, Dorjan! Tighter! Harder! Oh fuck, faster!” And with that, Taern’s rhythm increased, grew maddened, frenzied, and Dorjan made his caress harder and more aggressive. Taern wiggled, maneuvered, and oh… oh… oh yes! He groaned as Dorjan scraped that place, right there, and again and again and faster and faster!
Taern moved his legs underneath him so he could bounce up and down while putting less weight on Dorjan’s middle. When he was situated, he reached back to fondle Dorjan’s bollocks in a rough caress. That lasted a moment, though; Dorjan groaned and Taern felt bad about having to stop, but he had to move faster. It was imperative.
Oh yes! Yes! He knew this! This was sex at its best! Its hardest! Its most perfect! And suddenly Dorjan groaned and spurted, his hips pumping quickly all on their own, and Taern shuddered with the knowledge that Dorjan’s spend swam hot and liquid inside of Taern’s body. The thought alone made him tingle, and then Dorjan’s hand tightened convulsively on his cock and—
“Dorjan!” he gasped, and Dorjan’s head was still thrown back in that tight, beautiful grimace of a man pleasured beyond endurance.
That was it, all Taern needed, and Dorjan’s next stroke sent him over the edge. He came, sticky, warm, white, all over Dorjan’s hand and Dorjan’s stomach and his chest, and Taern let him keep milking, keep squeezing, until the goodness of it hurt and Taern threw himself forward so he could just shiver on Dorjan’s chest.
Dorjan’s grin was blinding and had nothing to do with darkness in the least. “We’re shiny and new,” he panted, and Taern grinned back, his eyes still stinging but his heart as whole and bursting as it ever had been.
“Like silver or the sky after rain,” he said softly. He leaned forward some more, and Dorjan slid out of his body, but that was fine. Taern leaned over and kissed him, and Dorjan’s arms slid up around his shoulders and cradled him like he was precious. Taern was precious, important, special, shiny and new.
Taern had always silently laughed at men who’d cried after sex—it had seemed so incredibly emotional for an act that had been, for him, a purely physical release.
Not this time. Not after seeing Dorjan suffer and bleed, no. This act, with this man, was suddenly of paramount importance, more to Taern’s heart than Taern had reckoned his heart could hold.
Of course he cried. And because Dorjan was worthy, he didn’t question a single tear.
HE GOT up eventually, cleaned them both off, and helped Dorjan scoot up and lean against the pillows. He put on some smallclothes and a dressing gown and went to open the door to the hallway when Dorjan snickered.
“What?”
“You put clothes on. We’ll civilize you yet!”
“Hush and let me go fetch food. I’m starving!”
Dorjan nodded and went to swing his feet around to the side of the bed.
“And where do you think you’re going?” Taern asked, indignant, as he let the door close and came back into the room.
Dorjan smiled at him with a little indulgence, and Taern thought about slugging him. �
�I’m going to get dressed. I could use a good work—ouch!” Because Taern did slug him, right in the shoulder, the one without any gauze, stitching, or blood. “Taern!”
“Rest. Days,” Taern said implacably, pointing a finger at the bed. “You will sleep and recover for the two rest days. You may, if you are able, start easing back into your regimen, but you need to stand up without bleeding first, and that’s already not happening!”
Dorjan looked down, and Taern walked to the end table to grab a clean square of linen and dab at the stitches and lacerations that had opened while they’d been making love.
“I thought you were getting us food,” Dorjan said mildly, and Taern narrowed his eyes. Without further ado, he dropped the square of linen, walked over to Dorjan’s drawers, and started filling his arms with Dorjan’s smallclothes—particularly the pants, but he got as many shirts as he could find as well.
“Taern—ack!”
“Hurt?” Taern asked, his face buried in the smallclothes. He had to look around the pile to make it to the door.
“It all hurts, damn you—”
“Yeah, it hurts. It hurts because you’re not supposed to get out of bed!”
“But it’s all well if I exert myself in it?” Dorjan asked, the irony searing, but Taern wasn’t going to hear it.
“Yes. Sex is good. Getting up is bad. Excuse me, I’m going to go dump these in my room.”
“But Taern!”
Taern peered around the mound of clothes in his arms and saw Dorjan struggling to pull the blanket up over his groin, the bruises on his hips, stomach, and thighs standing out in stark relief to his pale, sweating skin.
“If you don’t get in bed right now, I’ll take out those women’s funeral dresses you’re so fond of and then the silk dressing gowns.” Taern leveled a look at him that brooked no argument.
“But Taern!” Dorjan protested, half laughing and half shocked. “How am I supposed to get out of bed if—”
“You may either wear your fancy clothes without your smallclothes, which I suspect would chafe you like rope or worse, or you aren’t supposed to. Naked. In bed. Sleeping. Eating. Reading if you like.” Taern’s voice dropped, because he couldn’t say this with insouciance, not anymore. “Making love. Healing. And,” he added as Dorjan opened his mouth, “if you bring up my contract into this, I’ll take scissors to the shite I hate the most!”
Dorjan fell back against the pillows, a furrow of hurt wrinkling his brows. “I would never,” he said deliberately, “bring your contract into this.”
Taern scowled, the shame killing his appetite. “Good,” he whispered. “Because I have better things to do than destroy your underwear.”
He stomped out the door and down the hall, being good to his word and dropping Dorjan’s smallclothes on the unused bed in the room Dorjan had brought him to that first night. Then he went down the stairs into the kitchen, surprised when he got there and found the two girls hard at work. Evvy was in the process of cutting up fruit and putting it into bowls, and Alla was putting butter on thick slices of fresh bread and stacking it next to sizzling cuts of ham.
Taern looked at the tray in bewilderment. For the past week, he’d come down and Mrs. Wrinkle had made him breakfast as he’d sat down, but the girls, apparently, had made their own niche since they’d arrived nearly ten days before.
“Where’s Mrs. Wrinkle?” he asked curiously, and the girls looked up at him and added some more linen napkins to the tray.
“She’s at market with Lady Krissa and Master Areau,” Alla said confidently, and Taern blinked.
“Areau? Went outside?” Well, Areau did run his own exercise regimen, but besides the courtyard, he was usually to be found in the gymnasium or his bedroom doing whatever (and Taern truly didn’t want to know whatever) or, usually, in his laboratory, doing unwholesome, unhealthy things with dead animals and poisons.
“He did it to please Lady Krissa,” Alla said knowledgably. “I hope she gets offered more on her contract. She seems to be getting attached.”
Taern grunted. “Yes, well, it’s going around. Thank you for the breakfast tray, sweetlings. I trust Madame M knows where you are?”
“Yes, sir,” Evvy said, looking up at him and smiling. “Master Dorjan already sent to her, asking to allow us to change residences. Our mothers are thrilled, and our clothes and such are due from Madame M’s at any time, so we can make our rooms our own.”
“Really? I had no id—when did he do this?”
“When Mrs. Wrinkle took up his tray earlier in the week,” Evvy said, smiling a little. “You were outside, running your regimen at the time.”
Taern shrugged. “I can’t believe he was feeling well enough to—”
“What’s wrong with him?” Alla asked. “Everybody’s so concerned, but he keeps going to Forum, same as other days.”
Well, maybe all of Dorjan’s hard work wasn’t for naught, if the girls living in his own house didn’t see his weaknesses.
“He was hurt during the riot,” Taern said simply. “He’s recovering.”
“Well, good,” Evvy said, adding one more thickly buttered slice of bread to the top of the pile. “The bread is fresh, and it tastes wonderful. That should help.”
Taern grinned and ruffled her pretty blonde hair. He remembered her mother, who had often snuck him extra food, even when there wasn’t extra to be had.
“There’s not much that can be bad in the world when the bread is fresh,” he said soberly and then took the loaded tray very carefully upstairs.
When he got there, he found Dorjan rooting through his work satchel, and Taern wanted to smack himself, because trust Dorjan to find the one thing Taern hadn’t thought to hide. But Dorjan didn’t seem inclined to settle down with it. Instead, he pulled out one flat piece of cheap parchment and grunted, shoving the rest of the satchel between the end table and the bed.
“Please tell me that’s not what I think it is,” Taern began and then was almost shocked into dropping the tray when Dorjan ripped the damned thing in half, and then in half again, and then in half again and again, until it was only a pile of tiny pieces of paper stacked on his lap.
Taern set the tray down on the end table and picked up the pieces, looking at Dorjan with stunned eyes. “My contract?” he asked, not certain what this meant.
“Yes, Taern, your contract. If you stay, it’s out of your own free will, and that includes putting on the armor again and tending to my wounds and… and….” His hands flailed about, sending little pieces of paper scattering over the counterpane and drifting down unheeded onto the floor.
“Making love?” Taern said through a dry throat, and Dorjan nodded, the hurt still there in his eyes.
“Or that,” he said shortly, and Taern sat down next to him and moved the tray into position, thinking that food was the more neutral activity right now.
“Here,” Taern said quietly, putting a piece of soft bread in his hands. “I’d be less inclined to hover if you didn’t look so thin.”
“Eat your own,” Dorjan said before taking a bite. “You could shine a light through your hands right now.”
Taern took a piece of bread for himself. “You could shine a light through your entire chest,” he muttered. “Now eat.” He took a bite. “Was that really my contract?” he asked through a full mouth, and Dorjan nodded.
“Worst investment I ever made,” he said after he swallowed.
Taern slugged him once, gently, on the arm, and then they continued to eat. The contract was not mentioned again by either of them, at least for the two rest days. When they were done with the meal, Taern put the tray back outside the door, shut the door, climbed back into bed naked, and watched until Dorjan fell asleep.
THE tactic worked. Dorjan didn’t do much out of bed for the two days, and the things they did in bed were stunning and poignant.
Taern’s mission was to teach Dorjan the things that sex should be instead of the misery that it had been, and it seemed Dorjan’s mission was
to teach Taern that sex wasn’t anything without the tenderness behind it.
Dorjan awoke from that first nap and cajoled Taern to let him out of bed long enough to brush his teeth and relieve himself. When he was done, he came obediently back to bed and pulled out some documents to read. Taern pulled the documents out of his hand and replaced them with a book—the same book he’d given Taern, actually. Taern had long since finished it and enjoyed it, and read another much like it.
“I hear it’s very good,” he said soberly, and Dorjan shook his head.
“It was one of my favorites,” he said, “but I have things I need to—”
“Ignore,” Taern said shortly. “Lay down and read your book, Dorjan. Don’t worry. You won’t be reading long.”
Dorjan did, settling down on his good side, and Taern spooned him from behind. Dorjan let out a sigh as Taern’s naked frontside made contact with his naked backside, and Taern used that, undulating gently, massaging Dorjan’s body with his own. Dorjan sighed and wriggled backward, and Taern reached around and (very gingerly) started playing with his tiny brown nipples.
Dorjan gasped and pressed back harder.
Taern pinched just a little, and Dorjan made as though to roll over. “I thought I was reading,” he breathed, and Taern pushed on his shoulder.
“I didn’t say you could stop!” he complained. “Keep reading.”
Dorjan groaned but did as he was asked, and Taern continued to drive him mad on purpose. He kissed the space between Dorjan’s shoulder blades and flattened his palm over Dorjan’s abdomen, all the while grinding himself gently against Dorjan’s backside.
Dorjan tried to put the book down more than once, and each time, Taern stopped moving, stopped caressing, stopped playing, and whispered, “Read. You were the one so hells-bent on doing something, now read!”
When Taern reached around Dorjan’s hips and seized his now erect manhood in his grasp, however, that was when he allowed Dorjan to put the book down.
“What am I supposed to do with my hands?” Dorjan complained, grasping Taern’s forearm as Taern stroked him slow and hard.