“What happened?” I dropped down beside him.
There was a small, thumbprint-sized burn on his thigh, red and angry, and just bad enough to be slightly blistered.
I also noticed the bow drill used to start the fire last night had tipped over, one end smoking like the doused fire.
Nakht gestured to it, head ducked in shame. “I knocked it into the fire while I was putting it out, and when I retrieved it, I lost my grip and... cursed luck like only I could manage.” Nakht turned his head farther away from me, voice breaking as if morefrom devastation than pain. “What do I do now? I am marred. Ruined.”
I couldn’t help but smile. He always took things harder than most, immediately assuming the worst. But it was difficult to keep that smile, for he might not be wrong when it came to Pharaoh’s whims. “Hush,” I assured him anyway, gripping his shoulder to shake him and coax him to look at me. “You are beautiful.”
He turned somewhat but still kept his chin tucked. “We are meant to be perfect, especially tonight.”
It was an important evening for us. We had danced before Pharaoh and his elite before, but as children, more as spectacle and distraction than with any allure. That changed tonight. It was the first time we would be presenting a sensual dance, with the promise of being chosen to join some noble or soldier’s bed.
I looked again at Nakht’s blistered wound. It would surely scar, I could see that already. Perhaps someday it would fade, but that would take years.
I grabbed the bow drill’s spindle, placed its blackened end back in the extinguished fire against the reddest remaining embers, and once I deemed it hot enough—
“Mer? What are you—?”
I pressed the end against Nakht’s other inner thigh, parallel to the first.
“Ah!” he yelped, and shot an accusing glare at me. “Whydid you do that?”
I had to commend myself for replicating the first burn so perfectly. I set the spindle aside to cool. “We will keep them hidden tonight. Keep them hidden until they heal.”
“But how—”
“We are one entity, twin dancers never to be separated. Whoever chooses one of us, chooses us both, and I will be sure to entice them to take me first and wear them out so they cannottake you too. You can pleasure them in other ways, so adeptly as I know you are capable of, that they will be only too happy with your mouth and hands.
“Then, when your wounds are healed, we will paint them, so that if they are ever discovered, we will say they are the imprints of the gods who could not resist claiming you and wanting you for themselves.”
Nakht laughed through the pooling of tears in his eyes. “Who would ever believe that?”
With his smile smoothing away his worry and his beautiful bronze eyes on me, I wanted to tell him he was a fool for not seeing what I saw, but I had done that before. He never believed he was as radiant as I knew him to be. “They don’t have to believe, only to be charmed by the story. And if even a part of them does believe they follow in the gods’ footsteps, they will want you even more.”
I kissed him, at first sweetly upon his forehead, then his cheek, and finally his lips, pouring all my rampant desire into the deeper connection so he would believe what only words might never be enough to convey.
I would treat the wounds, soothing his pain and helping the burns to heal with honey or animal fat, and do all I had said. Since Nakht would be too sore to have someone between his thighs, later, I would let him between mine, to reclaim what would be taken by another, but would be no other’s, not truly, except his forevermore.
It would happen just like that. I knew it would, because I had already seen it.
I had already lived it.
“Nakht...” I whispered as I pulled from our kiss.
“Yes? I'm right—”
But I didn’t mean him.
I turned my head in frantic search of him. Therealhim.
There! Through an archway where normally there wasn’t one stood Nakht, older and even more ravishingly beautiful, just like I knew he would be. He was so close. Closer than the other times.
Ohgods, there had been other times. There had been many times like this strange moment, where I didn’t truly know what was real.
What was happening? Why was I moving backward through life, and he...
He...
