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They’d shared that bed, so many times, over the years and also now. Holding each other, tumbled together, simply entwined.
Ollie added, “If it’s about the wedding, I’m drawing the line at the white samite floor-length robes suggestion, thanks. I’d spill something on it at the first fitting. You know I would.”
“I like the way you look in blue,” Tir said. “All sort of blue and gold and big and tawny. Like an oversized version of that historical sun-god from the old Southern kingdoms. With a pencil behind your ear. Sorry, what was I asking you?”
“You got as far as asking whether you could ask me a question, and I said yes. The sun-god who gets chopped into pieces and swallowed by an alligator?”
“And brought back to life, and it’s a metaphor for the flood season. No. I remember. You don’t…we’re not having, ah, sex, yet, because…it’s not because you don’t want me, right?”
“Because I don’t what,” Oliver said, or thought he said. His lips moved, at least.
“We keep stopping,” Tir explained, sitting up more. The hair got in his eyes again. “You—you kiss me, because I ask you to, and then you stop and pull away and tell me you don’t want to tire me out, or you’re worried about me breathing unevenly, or—or whatever it is next time, and I know I’ve wanted you for years but this is new for you and if you don’t—”
Ollie dove across the bed. Ended that sentence right there. Tir’s arms slid around him, holding him close, pulling him down on top. Ravishment, he thought, fairy-stories, seduction, and love. He demanded, lips brushing lips, kisses between words, “You think I don’t want you?”
“I said I was trying not to think you didn’t want me—”
“I am worried.” They’d ended up sprawled across the bed, Tir on his back amid pillows, hair dark and long against creamy sheets, eyes wide and not yet convinced but wanting to be, hopeful grey rivers under clouds. Ollie took his own weight, balanced on top. “I don’t want to—to—we might, I don’t know, set back your recovery or something—”
“I asked Fadi, you adorable rutabaga.” Tir managed to kick him in the ankle, no force behind it; the rivers got exultantly relieved, maybe because Ollie’s answer had been right somehow. “Which you could’ve done if you were worried. He said I should be fine as long as we don’t try anything more than normally strenuous, and also that it’s about time we got around to this, because he was tempted to lock us in a broom closet.”
“You and the root vegetable comparisons,” Oliver grumbled, nibbling at his lips, his throat, the enticing newly familiar spot just below his jaw. “Is that a thing? Do you have a thing about root vegetables? Should I bring a carrot to bed? And is this okay?”
“I do not have a thing about—oh yes that’s very much okay, thank you—remind me to make a joke about the size of your carrot—” They were mostly dressed; he’d got Tir out of the top layer of banquet clothes and into a quilted robe, earlier, but hadn’t bothered with himself. The robe was nice; he could slide hands under it. Apparently the hands could make his fairy stop talking and gasp in pleasure.
He did that again. Tir made a tiny thrilled sound, a sound that went straight to his heart and shivered down his spine and made his toes tingle, a sound he’d remember hearing for the first time forever.
Nimble fairy-fingers were unlacing his shirt; they ran over his chest, interested and enchanted. “I admit to having had dreams about this…every time we went swimming, or you ran around the training yard in the summer with your shirt off…”
“Okay, unfair, now you have to tell me about those dreams—” His fingers froze on Tir’s hip. “You. Um. You, um. That—it’s not just—you have, um. In. Sort of. Reality. Have you?”
“What?” Tir managed to give him a quizzical head-tilt while lying down. “Would you please get back to what you were doing? I liked what you were doing. I love your hands. Artistic hands.”
“Tir,” Ollie said, not moving the hands, “that’s—that’s not helping.” Tir liked what he’d been doing. This sounded a lot like someone who maybe hadn’t in fact tried that, or the other thing, or the soon to be next thing, before. “You, ah…you know our wedding…”
“Yes,” Tir said, with the expression of a man trying to be patient but on the verge of kicking Ollie in the leg again, “our wedding, what about it?”
“The, um…the wedding…night…”
“Are you inquiring about the mechanics? I’m absolutely sure you know what we’re doing. You said as much to me after nearly every experience you had, growing up.”
“No! I mean, no, I’m so sorry about—how did you ever put up with me, I was awful, I’m awful to you, why didn’t you throw a book at my head—not, um, not me…are you, you know…you haven’t, um…” Now would be a perfect time for magical underhearing. It refused to assist.
Tir’s mouth fell open. This was unfairly attractive, though that might be because he was lying in bed with his legs parted for Oliver to fit between, robe puddled in quilted invitation beneath him. “Are you trying to ask whether I’m a virgin?”
Put this way, the question sounded vaguely ridiculous. Oliver himself hadn’t been anything anyone’d call chaste—though he had been careful—and being untouched hadn’t been a requirement for marriage in Bellemare for over a century. He, and Cedric, and Em before her marriage had certainly—and he wouldn’t’ve expected abstinence from Tir either, of course not, being raised alongside them, but…but he didn’t know.
They were in love and betrothed and he didn’t know and he’d told Tir everything, every adolescent passion, and Tir had listened and had—had—had never said a word about sex. About finding a newly stationed Home Guardsman or pretty-eyed Council member aesthetically attractive, yes. That much, yes. But—
“I’m so sorry,” he mourned into Tir’s shoulder, letting his head rest there. “I should’ve—I can—I can make this good for you, I swear, we can take it as slow as you want, anything you need—”
Tir was shaking under him. Too much weight, he thought, petrified; too much stress, exhaustion, physical and mental—
He lurched upward; and realized that his fairy was laughing when Tir held on and tugged him back down. “Ollie. Listen. Sorry, I shouldn’t laugh, but I can’t…sorry, sorry, I’ll behave, I promise…”
“You don’t use the nickname,” Oliver said dazedly. It was true; Tir rarely did, most likely because Oliver sounded better for dryly affectionate sarcasm. “Are—are you saying…I’m confused.”
“I adore you with every single beat of my heart,” Tir said, “and no, Oliver, I’m not a virgin. What about the carrot jokes would make you possibly think so?”
