He nodded. “Yes. Let’s walk to the count of one hundred in a more or less straight line, and once we’ve reached that, we can move freely. We each have five minutes to plant our ribbon, and then we’ll head back to the camp so that neither of us gets outrageously far, either. We want this to be within the realm of possibility.”
“Sounds good,” Perian agreed.
“And you can get back to the camp?” Brannal asked without judgment.
Perian looked up and made sure he could see where the late afternoon sunlight was coming from.
“Yes, I should be fine. If all else fails, I’ll walk away from my ribbon and then yell for help, all right?”
Brannal leaned in and kissed him. “You’re amazing, and I love you.”
Perian deepened the kiss, because hehadbeen lured here under false pretenses, after all, and a little bit of payback was fair.
Brannal finally pulled away, and he looked nice and ruffled, his lips red and puffy and his eyes dark with lust.
“You don’t play fair,” he muttered, voice low.
Perian beamed at him. He absolutely didn’t. He turned resolutely around and raised his ribbon.
“Count to onehundred?”
He heard Brannal huff a breath, listened to the sound of him rearranging himself in his trousers, which made Perian grin, and then more sounds which he thought meant he was turning around.
“One,” Brannal said.
“Two.”
“Three.”
By twenty, they were far enough apart that they couldn’t really hear one another, and Perian switched to quiet muttering as he made his way through the trees, keeping to a more or less straight path.
When he hit one hundred, he stopped for a minute and tried to figure out what the smartest thing to do was. He could head back to camp now and tie it on a tree there in the hopes the opposing team would quickly overshoot it tomorrow. But if it wastooclose to camp, then there was a higher chance that it would be spotted at the beginning, and he decided that would be worse. He set out in the opposite direction.
He didn’t think his team would blame him if he messed this up; he was going to do his best, but it wasn’t like this was a skill he’d honed.
He wondered if Brannal had done exactly what he’d done, or if Brannal had assumed this was what Perian was doing and so he was doing something more clever…
He decided not to overthink it. Even if his ribbon got found quickly, he’d learn something about what to do better for the future.
Perian stuck with his original plan, breaking into a jog and veering further to the left because he needed to make some sort of decision. Eventually, he just picked a tree that he could actually get his arms and the ribbon around. He knotted the ribbon securely and stared at it for a minute to make sure it was tight enough.
And then Perian jogged in the opposite direction for a couple of minutes before he started to head back to the camp, not wanting to come from exactly the direction where he’d left his ribbon when he might run into Brannal.
Sure enough, Brannal was waiting for him in the trees not far from their camp.
“You’re late,” he said.
“Your legs are longer,” Perian told him.
(Maybe by a couple of inches. It was a specious argument, and Perian knew it.)
Before Brannal could do more than open his mouth to point out that leg length shouldn’t affect time, Perian leaned in and kissed him, and Brannal seemed amenable to being distracted, hauling Perian up against him and kissing him back hungrily.
They ground against one another a little more than was actually wise given how close they were to camp and the fact that they weren’t about to get off. Perian hummed a happy noise, loving that feeling of joint arousal growing between them.
“Now we’re going to look like you didn’t do a very good job,” Perian said.
Brannal hauled him closer and devoured his mouth once again. Perian just leaned into it and took it, melting into the other man, glorying in the aggressive kisses and the intensity of the want that snapped between them.
