by R. Lee Smith
“Are you awake?” he asked, meaning, ‘Are you going back to sleep or do I have to carry you upstairs now?’
“Yeah, probably. You go ahead, though.”
He grunted and left without a goodbye or a backwards glance.
Amber reached out and groped until she found Meoraq’s sword-belt hanging on the cupboard door. She unclipped his kzung and made the day’s mark.
“Do you guys have to talk so much?” Crandall muttered behind the curtain.
“What do you want us to do, pass each other notes?” Amber replaced the kzung and rolled onto her back, staring at the familiar and hated sight of the cupboard ceiling.
She could hear Eric muttering, probably telling Crandall not to be such a dick first thing in the morning, because the next thing she heard was an angry sigh and Crandall saying, “How you feeling, Bierce?”
“Got a stitch in my side,” she replied flatly. She said that every time someone asked her that. One of these days, it was going to be funny.
“See? She’s fine.”
Now it was Dag muttering, but it was Eric who got up. He pulled back the curtain to open up the room, folded his blanket, packed his pack—a Fleetman still, after all this time—and came over to the cupboard. “Let me see it,” he said.
Amber’s hand clenched on the blanket over her side. “Fuck you! Why?”
“Because it’s making you miserable to keep it a secret. Let me see.”
Amber stared at the ceiling for a few more seconds, hoping he’d go away, not enough to actually tell him to go away, then finally threw back the blanket and lifted her tunic to the waist.
“Wow.” Eric’s eyebrows rose appreciatively. “That’s pretty gruesome.”
She felt herself relax without ever feeling herself tighten up. She’d been so sure she was about to hear him tell her all the ways it wasn’t so bad when it plainly was. “Yeah,” she said and looked at it herself. It was just as ugly as it had been yesterday, but for some reason, with Eric standing there, it also looked rounder. Her stomach clenched; the scars buckled.
“Does it hurt?”
“Not anymore. Sometimes, if I move just right, it kinda stretches and feels tight, you know? And sometimes the new skin hurts if you touch it.” She prodded at the dimple, resisting the urge to shudder. It felt firm, if alien and horrible. She was not getting fat. “Feels like wax.”
Eric touched her stomach. She could feel the heat of his hand, but not the texture. Looking at her scars, Eric said, “I don’t think anyone’s said this yet, but you really showed your stuff out there.”
She frowned, ready to be offended if that was the insult it sounded like. “Is that a joke?”
“I don’t mean just the porcupine-thing. I mean how you went after it. For us. After everything…” He looked her in the eye at last, his hand heavy over her unfeeling scars. “You even stood up for Scott and I know you don’t like him. I guess…I guess you deserve to hear someone say thanks.”
She hadn’t realized how completely she’d given up on that until she felt how shocked she was to finally hear it. Her mouth was actually open. She was gaping.
“I’d really like it if we could start over,” said Eric. “I realize that’s asking a lot, but…Do you remember when I told you how friends matter?”
“Yeah.”
“I was trying to tell you how important it was for you to get along with us.” Eric smiled crookedly. “We really should have been making more of an effort to get along with you. It’s not too late, is it?”
Eric’s direct stare was getting hard to meet. Amber looked away and, like a ghost in a bad movie, Meoraq’s head was there, floating in the shadows just over Eric’s left shoulder.
Eric saw something in her face. He turned around and promptly tried to jump back, banging his shoulders into the cupboard frame and his hand into the door in his hurry to take it off her. “Oh, you’re back. That was quick,” he said, trying to laugh.
Meoraq did not respond, unless you counted a very slight tilting of his head.
Obviously, Eric knew what that meant now. “We were just talking,” he said, holding up his hands.
Meoraq didn’t answer, even with a grunt. He also didn’t step back, forcing Eric to retreat by sidling along the cupboard door until he had enough room to make a dive for the stairs. Meoraq watched him go, then glanced back at the others.
Dag and Nicci got up immediately and left the underlodge. Crandall followed at his own deliberate pace, laughing.
When they were gone, Meoraq unexpectedly flared his mouth open in a lizardish grin and coughed laughter of his own.
“Tell me you didn’t scare the crap of him just because you could,” Amber said.
“He put his hand on you,” Meoraq replied with a casual shrug. He went to light a fire in the hearth. “How did it feel?”
“His hand? What kind of question—”
“His words. His…” Meoraq snorted with extra-special sarcasm. “…gratitude.”
“Don’t say it like that,” said Amber, annoyed. “At least he’s making an effort.”
“He certainly is,” Meoraq murmured, smiling.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
Meoraq set the heat stones in the fire to warm up, filled his stewing pouch with water and hung the half-emptied flask back on the wall. He was still smiling.
At last, exasperated beyond belief, she got it. “You think he was coming on to me, don’t you?”
“I suspect that is just what I think.”
Amber slammed the cupboard door on him.
He opened it and leaned inside, spines relaxed, smirking. “How long would you say we’ve been here?”
Amber moved the blanket and checked her notches. “Fifty-three days,” she said and heard, like a ghost of a ghost, Nicci whisper, When was your last period? She shivered.
Meoraq didn’t notice. His spines were at full attention as he leaned into the cupboard to look at her calendar. “Why are you defacing my bed?”
“It’s how prisoners keep track of time where I’m from,” she told him, making sure there was an extra emphasis on ‘prisoners’. “Don’t change the subject.”
“I don’t have a subject. I merely observe that a man doesn’t take fifty-three days to say things he feels strongly about. He had another motive.”
“You don’t believe that,” said Amber, watching him withdraw to his chair at the table.
“You sound very sure.”
“He still has the hand he put on me.”
“Ha! But I don’t need to defend my woman from his conquest,” he added. “She defends herself.”
It was praise and she knew it, but all the same, she felt that phantom tug of resistance as the fish hook tore through flesh, felt the sting where Zhuqa’s heat splashed over her eyes, tasted blood and cum in her mouth. She defended herself all right. Fierce little thing that she was.
She couldn’t hide that shiver. Meoraq noticed, but obviously didn’t know what to make of it. “Are you angry?” he asked cautiously, flaring his spines to suggest that, if she were, he was prepared to insist he was not at fault until she agreed with him.
“No. I’m not, I just…hate lying here!” she finished in a sudden illogical rush of fury. She shoved the door over as far as it could go and swung her legs out, sitting up. When Meoraq only twitched his spines, she stood. After another pause to assess him, she walked over to the table and stood in front of him.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
“Fine.”
He raised his chin, his eyes narrowing.
“A little shaky,” she admitted and sat with relief on the table.
“Truth,” he declared, leaning out to put the first heat stone in the water.
“But that’s only because you never let me get up.”
“Evil Uyane,” he agreed and hissed to himself, heaping embers over the remaining stones. “Vindictive brunt, who in his cruelty, would not allow his wife to tear open her soft skin.”
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“My skin has been all sealed up for days.”
“Only in seeming.”
“I’m better now,” she insisted.
“Truth, but ‘better’ is not ‘healed’.”
“When are we leaving?” she asked.
“When leaving will not kill you.” He slid a pointed glance her way. “I feel I’ve said that before. No matter. Your clay requires time to strengthen. Shall we say—”
“Six days?” she guessed.
“How well my wife knows her man’s mind.”
“And then we go on to Xi’Matezh?”
“Xi’Matezh,” he agreed, or maybe he was correcting her pronunciation. “We aren’t far.”
“Half a brace, right?” she said, rolling her eyes. “You’ve been saying that since the mountains.”
“Less than that. Perhaps even less than half that.”
“So…You could have been there and back, like, three times by now.”
“No arguments, woman. This is not a discussion. We go to Him together.” He looked past her, loudly flattening his spines. “I have not invited you back.”
“It’s raining,” Eric said on the stair.
“Excellent. Keep me informed. Get out.” Meoraq continued to stare until Eric and the others turned around and tromped back upstairs. “Raining,” he muttered, and prodded at the heat stones.
“How long are you going to keep them outside?” Amber asked.
“They aren’t ‘out’ anywhere. They’re in the foreroom. Listen.” Meoraq looked up at the ceiling, scowling at the sound of footsteps pacing above them. “I ought to make them stay up there until we move on. I’m sick of having humans underfoot.”
She looked at him.
He noticed and predictably misunderstood. He scowled back at her, saying, “I’ll call them down once I’ve had my bath. Enough. I am still the master of this camp and I am not a harsh one.” His spines lifted in an overture of peace. “An hour, eh? A private hour, you and I, and all the world outside.”
For Nicci’s sake, not to mention the other three, Amber knew she really ought to do some of the standing up that Eric found so praiseworthy, but the idea of privacy was a powerful temptation. “So,” she said, beginning to smile. “Did you have any ideas on how to pass the time until the water heats up?”
He changed out the stone in the pouch for a hotter one. “We can walk down to the stream, if you’re feeling strong enough. We’re going to need more water if you want a bath too.”
The sight of her words going over his head made whooshing sounds in Amber’s mind. She waited a second or two, then stood, moved the stewing pouch out of his reach and sat down on his thigh.
“What are you doing?” he asked, by all appearances with genuine surprise.
Amber wordlessly took his favorite bone-handled knife out of its sheath and stabbed it meaningfully into the back of his chair, above his head.
He looked at it. “Ah.”
She caught him by the jaw and aimed his face back at her so that she could kiss his rough mouth. He allowed it, but certainly did not encourage it, and when she was done, he said simply, “It is an unforgiveable sin to lie with a woman in her sickbed.”
“I don’t appear to be in it at the moment.” She loosened her tunic and slid it off one shoulder so he could see his bite-marks. “You made me certain promises, lizardman.”
He eyed the scars with distinct pride, only to glare at her. “Your humans are right above us.”
“We’ll be quiet,” she promised.
“I don’t like being quiet.” He paused, frowning as he watched her unbuckle his belt. “And I don’t think you can be.”
“Then we’ll be noisy, but we’ll be quick and finish up before they come down to investigate,” said Amber, now at work on his breeches-ties.
“My desires come from God. They should not be hurried.”
“Then they shouldn’t ought to be denied, either,” she said piously, and slipped her hand beneath his loin-plate.
“You may have a point,” he said after a moment’s meditation. “Are you sure you’re strong enough?”
She kissed him again. This time, he kissed back at her, his broad, dry tongue nudging at her lips and into her mouth to taste her. His hands caught at her thighs, kneading lightly before moving up to wrap her waist. He didn’t try to undress her; he’d probably never heard of doing it in a chair, she thought, remembering Zhuqa.
She broke the kiss with a shudder and looked away, waiting to feel arousal curdle into shame, but it didn’t happen. Meoraq, oblivious, saw the sudden exposure of her throat as an invitation and leaned forward to nuzzle at it, reaching beneath her wrap to cup her breast. He was never quite sure what to do with it once he had it in his hand, but at least he tried.
She looked down at him, faintly smiling, watching his spines flex and quiver with restraint as he fit his teeth into the impression of his scar, nuzzled, fit them again.
He was never going to be Zhuqa, no more than Zhuqa could have ever been Meoraq. It didn’t matter what he did, what he said, how he looked. Zhuqa had tried to be her lover as part of his little game, but his gentlest touch was loathsome. He didn’t deserve the hold he had on her memories now.
Amber brushed the back of her hand over Meoraq’s brow. He grunted pleasantly without opening his eyes, lost in her shoulder. Nothing they did together could ever be ugly, she thought. Nothing they did together belonged to Zhuqa.
She knelt down.
He started to move out of the chair and join her on the floor, but stopped, puzzled, at her silent insistence. When she started in again at loosening his loin-plate, he tried to help.
“Let me do this,” she said, pushing his hands firmly away. “I want to please my man.”
“It does not please me to see my woman on her knees.”
She looked at him, crookedly smiling. “I want to please my man. Whether I’m on my knees or on my feet or standing on my head.” ‘And I want to take every ugly thing he did away from him,’ she thought, but didn’t say that. It was bad enough that she could still see Zhuqa with them in this moment; she didn’t want Meoraq to see him too.
“This is a human mating technique, is it?” Meoraq asked uncertainly, watching her peel away his loin-plate. “Do I take my boots off or do you remove them for me?”
She leaned back to look at them, then up at him.
“Humans take their boots off for formal matings,” he explained, looking very mildly embarrassed. “This is a formal mating, isn’t it?”
“Do I dare ask why you were watching humans have sex?”
He mumbled something, scratching at his snout, then shook his head and snapped, “I am not to be blamed if humans insist on mating in the open wilds where anyone can see them! Do you want the boots off or not?”
“Take them off,” she said decisively. “Take everything off. Let’s do this right.”
Muttering under his breath, Meoraq stood up and shucked out of his clothes. Amber did the same, still giggling now and then, even though she honestly didn’t know what struck her so funny about the whole thing. It wasn’t the concept of Meoraq as a Peeping Tom, which was pretty ludicrous all on its own, as much as it was the idea of human mating techniques (step one remove boots step two insert penis), formal and otherwise.
“And now?” Meoraq asked, standing naked and proud above her with his hands on his hips and his best glare on.
“Now sit down again.”
“Sit?” He looked at the chair and back at her. “In the chair?”
She nodded, trying to hide her grin under her hand.
“I thought we were going to have sex.”
“We are. Sort of.” A sudden sobering thought occurred as he gingerly lowered himself into the chair. “Is it, um, against God’s laws to do things that can’t, strictly speaking, produce babies?”
“Things?” He frowned. “How strict do you mean?”
She put her hands lightly on his thighs and leaned between them to lick all
along the tight crease of his slit, penetrating at the crown to tongue at his sa’ad.
He watched her very closely. Apart from the immediate and forceful extrusion of his slick cock, he did not move and did not make a sound until she leaned back to look at him again. “I have to pray about this,” he said seriously.
“I’ll wait.”
He tipped his head back and closed his eyes.
A few minutes ticked by. She changed out the stones in the stewing pouch. Meoraq breathed.
His eyes opened. “You are mine,” he told her. “And I am yours. Nothing we take as our pleasure together offends the eye of God.”
“Really?”
“He was quite clear.” He looked upwards, thoughtful. “Unusually clear, one might say.”
She cupped the hot swell at the base of his cock and bent again, this time sucking the nub of his sa’ad between her tight lips to flick it with her tongue. His taste was strong, yes, and sweet and intoxicating and entirely his own.
A pair of heavy feet came across the ceiling and started down the stairs.
“If no one has been killed,” Meoraq called, “someone is about to be.”
The feet stopped, turned, galumphed away.
Amber giggled around his clit, which made the muscles in both his thighs jump.
“Ease off a moment,” he ordered, resting both hands on her shoulders. “Just a moment. This is…this is very different.”
“Do you need to pray again?”
He tried to glower at her, but was too obviously flustered to be effective. His eyes closed. His breath deepened and slowed. He appeared to fall asleep.
Amber rolled off her knees and sat cross-legged. The floor was very cold on her ass. She dragged her discarded wrap over and sat on that instead. She traded out the stones again and waited.
Meoraq’s eyes opened. “Proceed.”
“Everything’s still all right with God?”
“Yes.”
She weighed the pros and cons of her next nagging doubt while she stroked his shaft gently in her fist, but in the end, felt she just had to ask. She wasn’t sure how…but she really felt she had to.
And then she remembered Meoraq’s ‘anatomy lesson’ the first night they’d made love. This is my masculine member…it will go here…