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“Do you feel up to underwater exercises?” Enzo asked him.
Fiore, poised to embrace his long-awaited Nerites, balked. He knew whatever exercises Enzo had in mind weren’t anywhere near his own erotic hopes.
But Enzo seemed so happy to have found another way to bring Fiore nearer to health that Fiore could hardly do less than acquiesce to his scheme.
Fiore supposed he could wait just a little longer for his own satisfaction.
And besides, even purely healthful exercises involved Enzo swimming closer to him and catching him up in his arms.
With Enzo’s support, Fiore entered deeper waters. The underwater exercises proved less draining than those Enzo and the chirurgeons made him perform on land. They swam together, playful as porpoises, with Fiore slipping in and out of Enzo’s grasp and Enzo perpetually welcoming him into his arms. His body floated all but weightless, and what little weight remained was borne up by Enzo’s strength.
The weight returned in force, however, when it came time to haul himself up out of the water. After toweling Fiore off and wrapping him up in his own gown just as if he were his valet, Enzo half-carried him back upstairs to their bedchamber.
The servants had changed bedclothes whilst he and Enzo were out. Fiore wondered if he’d ever get used to that.
In addition to his leaden limbs, Fiore felt hungry—as he always did after a swim, but moreso now he felt a very particular sort of ravenous that only Enzo could satisfy.
Yet though Enzo laid him down on the bed, he did not join him in it.
Fiore thought he might draw him down with a kiss. A glance from Enzo’s eyes to lips and back again sufficed to hint at what he wanted. But while Enzo did bend to kiss him, the rest of him did not follow. Not even when they broke off for breath and Fiore’s fingers remained tangled in his hair.
“What’s wrong?” Fiore asked, working double to keep his tone light. If Enzo thought him soiled by what had occurred in the catacombs, Fiore knew not what to do. He’d never get cleaner than he was at this very moment. If this didn’t suffice, then—
Or, worse still, his scars—which would never wash away. Perhaps they reminded Enzo of the craven circumstances that had caused them. Though he’d said he didn’t hold it against Fiore, that was whilst the hideous wounds remained concealed beneath clean white linen. Now, fresh and scarlet as his former sash, they felt like a brand that emblazoned Fiore’s cowardice. No wonder the sight of them failed to inspire Enzo’s passions.
Enzo, meanwhile, stared at him in alarm. “Nothing’s wrong.”
An obvious falsehood. If nothing were wrong, they’d be fucking right now instead of talking. Fiore pressed on. “Is it the scars? Or what happened in the crypt?”
“Neither,” Enzo insisted, his eyes flying wide.
A wiser courtesan would accept defeat and preserve what precious little dignity remained to them. Fiore instead heard himself ask, “Then why don’t you want me?”
Enzo blinked. “I do want you.”
Fiore stared at him in total incomprehension.
“But your wounds,” Enzo continued as the gears in Fiore’s mind tangled together and caught fire. “I didn’t want to risk imperiling your recovery.”
“My wounds are closed now.” Fiore’s voice sounded dull and pathetic even to his own ears.
“They are,” Enzo conceded.
“Then why—?”
“I didn’t want to press you. To make you uncomfortable. After all that’s happened—after all you’ve unjustly suffered—I don’t want you to feel obligated to return my affections.”
Fiore felt nothing of the kind. He did feel as though he’d waited forever to regain strength enough to enjoy intimacy with Enzo again. The knowledge that even now his Enzo wanted him and had only held himself back to protect him threatened to overwhelm him. The terror in his heart turned to joy and brimmed over. His eyes burned with tears he couldn’t let gather, much less fall, lest Enzo mistake them for sorrow.
“I want you,” Fiore blurted. “Desperately. But,” he quickly added, horrified at how much had slipped past his lips already, “if you don’t desire me now—if you just feel guilty or obligated or—I understand entirely, and I don’t hold it against—” He was rambling, spiraling, and with an effort silenced himself. But not soon enough.
Enzo didn’t look half so horrified as Fiore felt to hear his own words. Instead he took Fiore’s hand in his own and brought it gently to his lips to press a soft kiss against his knuckles.
Fiore’s traitorous tongue stilled at last.
“So we’re agreed,” Enzo concluded. “We both want this, and we both want the other to do this because they want to and not because they feel obligated.”
“Well,” said Fiore, “when you put it that way, we sound foolish beyond all measure for not realizing it sooner.”
