Page 58 of Salt in the Wound

He doesn't know what he's bracing for. He doesn't know what comes next. He has no experience, no map, no guide, and the man before him is burning with a fever that could kill him and looking at Indrie with something words have failed to convey.

And then Eskil leans forward and kisses him.

And, oh.

Oh.

His lips are warm. Soft. Perfect. The contact is gentle, careful, full of intention, every fraction of pressure placed with precision despite the fever burning through his blood and the urgency screaming through his nerves, handling something he's decided to treat with extraordinary care.

Indrie's hands find Eskil's shoulders of their own accord. His palms land on bare skin that is scorching, slicked with sweat, the muscles beneath rigid with restraint, and the feeling of Eskil's body under his hands, the heat, the breadth, the barely contained power, makes Indrie's entire system go bright. Every nerve ending lights up simultaneously. The flush that was confined to his face spreads downward, across his chest, down his stomach, and lower, and he makes a sound against Eskil's mouth that he will be embarrassed about later but cannot control now.

Eskil moans against his lips and the sound goes through Indrie with force, travelling from his mouth to his toes, and Indrie flushes down to his bones. The king is huge compared to him, muscular and broad and strong, his body a weapon that Indriehas watched cut through storms and oceans, but his hand on Indrie's neck holds him with an impossible gentleness. With a deliberateness that says I know what I could do and I am choosing not to, even while the world burns down around them.

Indrie leans into him. Leans into the kiss with everything he has, everything he is, because if this is the only time, if this is the one night he gets to have this man's mouth on his and this man's hands on his body, then he is going to be here for it. Fully. Completely. He is going to kiss Eskil back with the whole of his heart and he is going to feel everything there is to feel and he is going to carry it with him for the rest of his life.

He kisses him back, and Eskil's hand curls around his hip and pulls him into his lap, and Indrie goes willingly.

Chapter 24

Every nerve in Eskil's body wants him to ravage this young man senseless.

The fruit is a wildfire in his blood, consuming reason, consuming restraint, consuming the control he's spent his entire life constructing. It screams at him to take, to flip the smaller body in his lap, to press it into the mattress, to bury himself in the heat and the tightness and the breathtaking sounds Indrie makes when Eskil's hands find bare skin. The fever has reduced his world to sensation, to need, to the primal imperative of a body that has been handed the antidote to what's killing it and wants to consume it whole.

He fights it.

He fights it the way he fights everything, with stubbornness, with fury, with the bone-deep refusal to be controlled by anything that isn't his own will. The fruit wants a beast. It's not going to get one.

Because Indrie is in his lap. Indrie, shirtless and flushed and trembling slightly, his dark hair falling around his shoulders, his dark eyes wide and uncertain and so fucking brave it makesEskil's chest ache, is sitting in his lap with his palms on Eskil's shoulders and his heart hammering hard enough that Eskil can feel it against his own chest. And Eskil can see the fear beneath the courage. Can see the tension in his jaw and the white of his knuckles and the way his body holds itself with the rigid preparedness of someone waiting to endure.

He will not have the boy lay on his back and close his eyes and wait to be taken by a savage he thinks owns him.

If this is going to happen, and it is happening, gods help them both, then he's going to make it as good for Indrie as he can. Better than good. He is going to take this terrified healer apart piece by piece and put him back together and ensure that every second of it is something Indrie chose and something Indrie wanted and something Indrie will remember not as a requirement but as a moment they shared.

He pulls Indrie into his lap properly, one hand on his hip, the other still cradling the back of his neck, and settles the younger man's weight across his thighs and kisses him with the intent of making him forget every reason he's afraid.

Indrie makes a sound against his mouth. Small. Startled. The sound of someone overwhelmed by how good a kiss can feel, deep and thorough and unhurried, even with the fever screaming through Eskil's veins and the urgency pounding in his blood. Eskil takes his time. He maps Indrie's mouth with his own, learns the shape of it, the taste of it, herbs and salt and something sweet beneath, and when he angles Indrie's head with the hand on his neck and deepens the kiss, licking into him slow and filthy and deliberate, the sound Indrie makes is no longer startled. It'swanting. A soft, breathless moan that hums against Eskil's lips and goes straight to his cock and it takes every shred of discipline he has left not to grind up into the body above him.

"Oh," Indrie whispers when Eskil breaks the kiss for air. Just that. Justoh, breathed out like he didn't know a mouth could dothat, like the concept of being kissed until his thoughts dissolve is something entirely outside his experience. His lips are wet. Swollen. His eyes are unfocused. He looks like he's been ruined by a kiss alone, and the sight of it makes Eskil want to ruin him further, slower, in every way he can think of.

He lets his hands roam. Slowly. Down Indrie's back, over the ridges of his spine, still too prominent, still too sharp, but less than they were, to the curve of his waist, the flare of his hips. Indrie's skin is smooth under his palms, warm but not hot the way Eskil's is, and the contrast makes every point of contact feel electric. Indrie shivers under his hands. Not from cold. From the touch itself, from the careful attention behind it, from the experience of being handled by someone who is watching his responses and adjusting accordingly.

Eskil coaxes intoxicating sounds out of him. A brush of his thumb across a hipbone earns him a sharp inhale. His palm flattened against the small of Indrie's back, pulling him closer, earns him a gasp that breaks into a whimper. Fingertips trailing along his ribs, featherlight, teasing, earn him a shudder that runs through Indrie's whole body and makes his hands clench on Eskil's shoulders.

"Ah —" Indrie bites his lip, trying to cage the sounds, his brow furrowing like the noises coming out of him are a betrayal he didn't consent to. His body can't decide whether to press into Eskil's hands or flinch from the intensity of what they're doing to him, so it does both, arching and trembling and arching again, and every aborted movement grinds his hips against Eskil's in a way that is clearly accidental and clearly affecting them both.

Eskil mouths against his neck. He presses his lips to the column of Indrie's throat, finding the sensitive skin and kissing it with an open mouth that's half kiss and half breath, his tongue dragging hot and wet against the tendon, tasting salt and the rapid flutter of Indrie's pulse. Indrie's head falls back. Themotion is involuntary, instinctive, the total surrender of a body that has no defense against pleasure and isn't trying to build one, and the long line of his exposed throat in the lamplight, the way it bares him completely, makes Eskil want to mark every inch of it with his mouth. So he does.

He works his way down. Indrie's collarbone. The hollow at the base of his throat where his pulse hammers, where Eskil seals his lips and sucks until the skin flushes dark and Indrie whines, high and thin and confused, his fingers scrabbling at Eskil's shoulders like he doesn't know if he wants to push him away or pull him closer. The curve where his neck meets his shoulder, the spot that makes Indrie jerk and gasp and grab fistfuls of Eskil's braids when he finds it.

"Eskil—" The name comes out strangled, half-formed, like Indrie started it without knowing he was going to and couldn't stop it. His voice cracks on the second syllable. He sounds wrecked already and they've barely started, and the sound of his own name in that broken, needing voice does things to Eskil that he will have to reckon with later.

He stays there. Mouths and licks and sucks gently until the younger man is writhing in his lap, his hips moving in small, unconscious circles, the cleft of his ass dragging against the hard line of Eskil's cock through fabric, and the friction of it is so good and so agonizing that Eskil's vision blurs. He can feel how hard Indrie is against his stomach. Can feel the hot length of him pressing through the thin fabric of his too-large trousers, the damp patch spreading where the tip rests, and the thought of it makes Eskil's blood run even hotter than the fever already has it.

Once or twice he bucks his hips up into Indrie, rolling the thick ridge of his cock against the younger man's ass, just to feel him gasp. The sound is addictive. A sharp, punched-out intake of breath, followed by a full-body shudder, followed by a flush that spreads from Indrie's face to his chest in real time, vivid andgorgeous. Indrie looks down between them, eyes wide, mouth open, taking in the mechanics of their bodies together with an expression of open wonder and then looks back up at Eskil with a look so overwhelmed and so earnest that Eskil has to kiss him again immediately or he's going to say something inadvisable.

"What — what do I —" Indrie stammers between kisses, his breath hitching, his hands flexing helplessly on Eskil's shoulders. "I don't — I don't know what to — is this — should I —"

"You don't have to do anything," Eskil murmurs against his mouth. "Just let me take care of you."