The sun doesn’t rise until you awaken, love,
I see your face, and the light comes in.
But trying to speak any of the words aloud felt like trying to swallow a stone. I shook my head and cleared my throat. “Just, like, things he felt about her. How beautiful she was. How much he loved her. That sort of thing. He’d put his feelings into beautiful words.”
Gahn Thaleo gazed away from me, into the depths of the spinner-lit cave. I didn’t think he had an answer to an idea as foreign as the one I’d just described – using words, and poignant ones at that, to express your feelings.
I wanted to bring his eyes back to me.
“What were your parents like?”
“I remember little of them,” he replied. “My father was Gahn Seerak’s brother. He and my mother both perished in a landslide when I was very young. My uncle assumed guardianship over me after that.”
“And what…” I paused, then steeled myself, knowing that if I didn’t ask now, I might never get another chance. “What made him give you that scar?”
His sight stars did come back to me then. As brilliant as the glow of the spinners lighting up the cave.
“I told you,” he said. “It was a lesson that-”
“No, I understand that,” I cut in. “I mean, what made him do it in the first place? Why did he think you needed to learn that lesson at all?”
I didn’t want to ask something like, “What did you do to make him react that way?” because that would be abhorrent victim blaming. But I remembered something that Linnet had said. That Gahn Thaleo hadn’t smiled since he got that scar.
Which meant he had smiled, once. Maybe all the time.
Gahn Thaleo released his hold on me. In an affectless voice, he said, “It was the day after we’d burned my parents upon their funeral pyre. I asked him to hold me in his arms. The way a parent might.”
Stunned to the point of nausea, I almost wished I hadn’t asked.
A grieving child, bereft of his parents, had asked for affection. Had wanted love. And had received the cut of a blade instead.
“Thaleo,” I whispered, my voice thick with gathering tears.
He hasn’t been touched since then.
He hadn’t been touched in fuckingdecades.
“A foolish request,” he added softly, as if his childhood need for a hug after the deaths of his parents required some kind of justification or deflection. Like I would judge him for it.
And I had judged him, hadn’t I? This entire fucking time, riding the high horse of my human morals, I’d judged him. He had lied and done wrong, certainly. But I’d never understood why until now.
I wished I could say my hands moved of their own accord, but they didn’t. I was entirely in control as I raised them, trembling, to his waist. The muscles of his abdomen lurched, cording beneath my touch, as did his back as I slid my hands behind. He was so big I couldn’t even get my arms fully around him, but I did my best. Then, I pressed my cheek –damp– against his skin. My ear was flat against his chest. I listened intently to his heartbeat, learning the heavy, alien rhythm of it.
He might not have known what poetry was. But this was close enough.
13
THALEO
Iwondered then if I’d never woken up this morning at all. The pale, fluttering light of the spinners gave everything the quality of a dream.
A dream. That would explain why Nazreen was willingly pressing herself against me, as if initiating an embrace.
Dream or not, my body responded at once. My cock thickened.
“What are you doing?” I rasped.
“Just…Holding you,” she said.
