Page 31 of Tending the Ache

He had not considered it. Had not imagined it. That someone might look at him across a pool of steaming water and see something worth pursuing. That are you interested in me was a question people would ask him now, in this new life, where he is not property, where he is not invisible, where he is a person who is seen.

He is mortified. He is bleeding. He is sitting in a hot spring with water lapping at his collarbone and blood running down the side of his face, and a kind man who did nothing wrong is reaching for him with stricken eyes, and Indrie needs to not be here.

He stammers out an apology. It comes out in a garbled mess of Kalkoan and Rengaran that probably makes no sense in either language, sorry, I'm sorry, I didn't mean, I didn't understand, it was a mistake, I'm sorry, the words tripping over each other in their haste to leave his mouth, as though sheer volume of apology can undo the last thirty seconds.

He hears Ermin calling his name from across the springs, alarmed. The boy must have heard the crack of his head against the stone, or seen the commotion, or both. Indrie cannot face him. He cannot face anyone. He scrambles out of the pool with the frantic ungainly desperation of a man fleeing a fire, water cascading off his body, his hands shaking, his temple throbbing.

He grabs his clothes from the bench. His hands are wet and trembling and uncooperative. He pulls on his shirt and it clings to his wet skin and the hem sticks to his thighs and it is not enough to be decent but it is enough to be not-naked, which is the only criterion that matters right now.

He does not stop to put on anything else. He clutches the rest of his clothes in a bundle against his chest, a wet and disheveled armful, and walks as fast as he can toward the exit. The stone is slippery beneath his bare feet and the lamplight blurs through the water in his eyes, tears or pool water or both, he cannot tell, and he hears Ermin's voice calling after him, closer now, sharp with the alarm of a friend who can see something is wrong and is coming to help.

Indrie does not stop. He cannot stop. He needs to get out of this cavern and back to his clinic and into his bed and he needs to pull the quilt over his head and he needs to stop existing for approximately the next several years.

He makes it through the stone passage and up into the keep, barefoot and dripping, leaving a trail of water on the stone floor behind him. He is just trying to reach the front entrance as quickly as possible when he rounds a corner and collides with someone with enough force to send his bundled clothes flying from his arms and himself stumbling backward.

There is a strong arm at his waist. One on his bicep. The grip is immediate and sure, catching him before he can fall, and the hands are large and calloused and the chest he has stumbled against is broad and solid and smells of leather and iron and something underneath both that Indrie would know in the dark, would know at the bottom of the ocean, would know anywhere.

He looks up and he is in Eskil's arms.

The king is staring down at him. Blue eyes wide, lips parted, expression caught in the act of rearranging itself from startled to concerned. His hands tighten reflexively on Indrie's waist and bicep, steadying him, holding him upright, and Indrie is pressed against his chest with no trousers and his heart hammering so hard he is certain Eskil can feel it through the thin damp fabric between them.

Indrie stares up at him and cannot speak. Cannot move. Cannot do anything but stand in the king's grip and bleed and drip and wish, with a fervor that borders on manic, that the stone floor would open beneath him and swallow him whole.

Chapter 10

Eskil

Eskil has done a piss-poor job of not thinking about Indrie for the past week.

He has, however, done a remarkably good job of avoiding him, which he has convinced himself is for the best. It is for the best because every time he considers walking to the clinic (which is every morning, every afternoon, and every evening, a relentless three-times-daily compulsion that he stamps down with the grim determination of a man smothering a fire that keeps relighting) he runs into the same immovable wall.

He does not know what to say.

That is the entire obstacle. Fourteen years on a throne, wars, famine, and a treasury he built out of nothing, and the thing that has him pacing his own keep like a caged dog is that he cannot work out the first fucking sentence.

He is a king. He has led men into battle. He has stood before hostile councils and belligerent chieftains and the assembled might of enemy forces and found the words, or the blade, to make his position clear. He has never once in his life been at a loss for what to say, because what he says has always mattered less than how he says it, and how he says it has always been loudly, with conviction, and with the implicit promise of violence if his point is not received.

None of that works with Indrie. With Indrie, volume is a weapon that wounds the person he is trying to reach. With Indrie, conviction sounds like command. With Indrie, every instinct Eskil has built over fourteen years of ruling is wrong, and the right instincts, the gentle ones, the patient ones, the ones that require him to open himself and let another person see what is inside, are instincts he does not have and has never cultivated and does not know how to grow.

So he has avoided the problem. Like a coward. Like exactly the kind of man he has spent his life despising, who sees what needs doing and walks the other way because doing it would cost him something he has decided he cannot spare.

Gutless. There is no better word for it and he has looked.

He is disgusted with himself. The disgust is familiar and almost comfortable, a well-worn garment he has been putting on every morning since the ship, and he wears it through meetings and meals and the interminable hours of governance that fill his days, and no one notices because disgust, on Eskil, looks indistinguishable from his baseline expression.

It is evening. He has spent three hours in council on supply lines and border rotations and whose cousin is owed which stretch of road, which is the kind of governance that makes a man understand why some kings simply start wars. His head aches and his patience is a thin, frayed thing barely holding, and he is walking through the keep toward his quarters with the single-minded focus of a man who wants nothing more than to sit in a dark room and not be spoken to.

He rounds the corner of the east corridor.

And Indrie is in his arms.

The collision is sudden. A body hitting his, smaller and lighter, momentum arrested by Eskil's reflexes before his mind has caught up. His hands move on instinct: one to the waist, one to the bicep, gripping and steadying, and the body he is holding is wet and warm and wearing his shirt and not much else.

Indrie's face tilts up toward his.

He is wet. Hair dripping and skin damp, the dark strands plastered to his cheeks and his neck, and Eskil's shirt is clinging to his body, to the curve of his collarbones, the dip of his waist, the line of his thighs where the soaked fabric has gone translucent against his skin. He is wearing nothing else. His legs are bare beneath the hem of the shirt, water tracking down his shins to pool around his bare feet on the stone floor, and the shirt has ridden up on one side where Eskil's arm is gripping his waist and there is so much skin visible, wet and flushed and close enough that he can feel the heat of the springs still trapped in it, that Eskil's mind goes momentarily and catastrophically blank.

For one reckless, ruinous second, there is only Indrie. Soft and wide-eyed and startled, bare legs pressed against Eskil's clothed thighs, small hands braced against his chest, dark hair dripping onto Eskil's forearms. And Eskil forgets. He forgets the week of avoidance and the wall he has been maintaining and the reasons, the good, sound, morally unimpeachable reasons, why Indrie is not his. He forgets everything except the feeling of this man in his arms and the staggering, bone-deep rightness of it.