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Raider whipped around, wincing at the sudden movement.
“What the hell are you sneaking around for?”
Seth said calmly, “Just because you didn’t hear me doesn’t mean I was sneaking.”
What it really meant was that Raider was in too much pain to pay attention. Seth walked from the shade of the trees into the sunlit meadow to face Raider, who eyed him warily.
Seth scanned Raider’s body, noting the stiff way he sat, the contracted muscles of his abdomen that said he wasn’t breathing easily.
Seth asked, “I hurt you, didn’t I? Last night.”
Raider closed his eyes with apparent annoyance. “I cannot deal with your exhausting self-recriminations this early in the morning.”
“You don’t get to blow me off, Raider, not about this. You’re obviously in pain.”
Raider’s eyes opened, the right one flaring as it seemed to do when he was upset. “Whatever I am is none of your goddamn business.”
“It’s absolutely my business when I saw you walking like …” Seth’s gut knotted as he made himself say, “Like I tore you up inside.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, I thought you were an investigator of some kind. That is not how I was walking. I was walking like I was stiff as shit from sleeping too hard. I’ll be fine in an hour or so. Now can you please fuck off?”
“No, I cannot fuck off. Sleeping hard does not explain—”
Raider lurched up from the boulder. “Goddamn it, you relentless asshole, it’s the quicksilver, okay? It settles overnight. I slept too hard, like I said—I don’t know why the fuck you never listen to me—on my bad side.”
Raider was nearly Seth’s height and was standing only a few feet away, so Seth got a good look at his face: the tightness of pain around his usually sensual, teasing mouth, the amber eyes so furious at his intrusion.
It frustrated Seth that Raider was being hostile when he was trying to talk to him about something important, so it took a moment for those words to sink in. It took another moment for Seth to do the math—and it added up to something he should have realized before.
“This is why you’re shitty in the mornings. You’re in pain. Every fucking morning?”
“Since you’re so damn eager to blame yourself for something, you are the one who made me come so hard that I slept like a fucking rock. Of course, there was also the raaki and the fact that I was still exhausted from trekking the Kesh. I’m stiffer than usual, that’s all, I’ll get over it.”
Seth clamped a hand on Raider’s left shoulder. He didn’t squeeze very hard, but it still dropped Raider to his knees.
“Goddamn it, you asshole!”
Seth knew he deserved that, so he didn’t object, nor did he fight back when Raider slugged him in the gut as he tried to help him up. Raider climbed to his feet and leaned on the boulder again, canting to one side. He closed his eyes, his muscled abdomen contracting as he breathed through it.
“That’s not ‘stiff,’” Seth argued. “That’s serious. Why the hell would you have an arcane implant that causes that kind of pain?”
Raider didn’t open his eyes as he said, “I told you that I don’t know and I told you that I don’t like to talk about it. And you agreed not to ask me.”
Seth had known, even when he’d made that promise, that he would probably break it—and that was before he and Raider had had sex. It was different now. He’d sucked this man’s cock. He’d come inside him. He’d cared for him after and had loved it. He’d slept entwined with him all night.
If Seth had believed he could step back from that kind of intimacy into we’re-just-traveling-together indifference, he’d been wrong. He couldn’t.
Raider had opened eyes and was studying him. He said harshly, “Nothing’s changed just because we fucked.”
“Yes, it has.”
A strange expression passed over Raider’s face, a complicated one, like a lot of emotions were jumbled together. One of those emotions, Seth thought, was fear. Another was pain. Or maybe yearning? Raider stood from the boulder and turned away before Seth could decide.
Maybe avoiding him, Raider looked out to the distant sand dunes, that harsh reality almost dreamlike beyond the lushness of the oasis.
Raider stilled suddenly and said, “Caravan. The Sudai.”
Seth followed the direction of his gaze, squinting at the undulating sea of sand. “I don’t see anything.”
