Page 61 of Something Human

“Thanks. I wasn’t expecting that.”

“I assumed you knew.” He went back to Firhat Kosoth for that; it felt more natural.

“Yeah, well.” Adares gave a small shrug. “It doesn’t hurt to be reminded.”

Rus laughed out loud. The sound echoed faintly in the steep valley, and he put his hand over his mouth. Adares’s hands had found their way under his kilt again, this time at the back.

“I’d like—” Rus switched back to Firhat Luth, though he had to force the words out: “I’d like to see you naked again.”

“Would you? There aren’t any of those poisonous white mushrooms around here, are there?”

“Of course not. They don’t grow out in the open like this.”

“Out in the open,” Adares repeated, raising one eyebrow the way he did. But he reached up and unpinned his cloak.

He took his time shedding his clothes, and he made Rus help, sliding Rus’s hands under the thin fabric to glide over his skin. They ended up with Rus sitting on the steep hillside, all his clothes still on except his loincloth, and Adares naked on his knees in front of him. Rus dropped onto his back in the grass, and Adares pushed up his kilt.

“I keep promising myself I’m going to see what it looks like when you get hard, the way this business transforms.” He was trailing a finger around Rus’s dick as he spoke, tracing the tattooing. Then he seemed to realize what he had said. “I mean, it was something I’d thought. Before.”

He leaned down, and his mouth was as warm and soft as Rus remembered, lips and tongue and even just a suggestion of teeth, but so gentle and careful. Rus remembered Adares saying that when he had done this before, it had been his first time, and he wondered now if this was the second. But that was a fleeting thought, soon buried in the flood of sensation as Adares got to work on him.

Not that the Phemian made it seem like work. He so clearly enjoyed Rus’s reactions, holding him down with a teasing lightness that just encouraged Rus to push back, and making little noises of satisfaction when Rus moaned. And he was doing something else that he hadn’t done that first time. He was making it take longer, drawing it out. It was exquisite, and Rus didn’t know how long he could stand it.

Adares drew off altogether and pushed up on his hands to look at Rus. His lips glistened wet in the moonlight. His hair was very, very slightly mussed. Rus nudged him with one knee, flipping him over onto his back in the grass, and swung his other leg over him, gathering up the front of his kilt with one hand.

The position was shocking, and he was fiercely amazed at himself for daring this. Adares slid his hands over Rus’s hips and took him eagerly in again.

Rus moved gingerly, afraid of choking him, but he had guessed right that Adares would like this. He could feel Adares make a sound almost like purring, his beautiful hands roving under Rus’s kilt. He thrust in tiny, careful motions, the tension in him building and building to the moment of release, like an ache in his thighs and a warmth in his belly, and the heat suddenly and slowly flooding his whole body, like the slowing of time in the exhilaration of a fight, and like the opposite of that, as far from it as the distance between hatred and love. He cried out, and it echoed off the mountains.

He knelt there catching his breath, one hand braced in the cool grass, the other holding onto his bunched-up kilt. He felt so good, he was afraid to move or speak and break the spell.

Then Adares half-slid, half-wriggled up under him, and tipped his head back to look Rus in the eye, and the expression on his face—open, easy, obviously pleased with himself—made Rus want to cry out again, with simple joy. Made him feel there was no spell here that could be broken, just the two of them back together, the way they were meant to be.

He dropped his kilt and backed down the hill over Adares, putting one knee between Adares’s thighs, which were already sprawled apart, his dark bronze dick looking like something fresh from the forge, hard as a weapon.

Adares was watching him with a look that was hard to interpret in the dark. He slid a hand down his own flank and over his thigh, fingers and thumb framing his genitals as if offering them to Rus.

“That’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” Rus whispered.

And a small dog barked—yap-yap-yap!—somewhere quite close by.

Rus started and froze. The dog barked again, even closer, and then a woman’s voice—Genet’s voice—called from above: “Kaily!” Rus had thought he recognized the bark. It was a puppy beloved of Kuth and Genet’s children, especially Meret. Adares had rolled half over beneath him, pushing up onto one elbow. Rus scrambled to his feet, scanning the hillside. He couldn’t see Genet yet, but he could see the puppy, and now the puppy had seen him. She came barrelling down the hill, yapping excitedly. Rus reached down and put a hand on Adares’s bare shoulder.

“Go.” Adares touched his hand, his voice barely above a breath. “I’ll be fine.”

He felt strangely unworried as he strode up the hill to meet the bounding dog. Maybe it was the afterglow of love-making still warming him—it was certainly partly that—but it was also joy in that easy understanding they had between them still, so that they hardly needed words for each to know what the other wanted to say.

He caught the puppy just as he heard Genet call for it again, sounding mercifully far away still. He tucked the furry bundle under one arm and went loping at a diagonal up the hill, using his free hand for balance, moving as far away from Adares as quickly as he could. The night air felt cool under his kilt, because he was still missing his loincloth. At least that was all the clothing he had shed.

“Kaily!”

The dog yapped and wriggled under Rus’s arm. “Over here!” he called back, because at this point it would seem strange if he didn’t. “I’ve got her!”

“Rus?”

Genet emerged on the ridge above him. He didn’t dare look back to see whether Adares was still visible below.

“Ah, there you are! Thank you, Rus. I knew she wouldn’t have gone far. She’s been missing since supper. Meret was worried about her, so I said I would come look.”