Page 15 of Setting the Break

He fucks him in long, measured strokes that hit the same place every time, and Indrie comes apart beneath him in stages. The gasping gives way to keening, and the keening gives way to a high, breathless, continuous sound he could not stop making if his life depended on it. He has gone unsteady from the hips down, and Eskil can feel it through his own grip, and his cock is leaking against the edge of the desk, untouched, a thin strand connecting him to the wood every time Eskil's thrusts rock him forward.

Eskil is close. He has been close since he pressed inside, and the sight of Indrie gone to pieces and gripping the desk with white-knuckled hands while Eskil takes him is pushing him toward the edge faster than he wants to go. He grits his teeth and holds on, because Indrie is not there yet and Eskil will not finish before him. That is a point of pride he has held since the first night and he will die on this hill.

He reaches forward and takes a fistful of Indrie's hair, winding the long dark strands around his fingers, and pulls. Not hard enough to hurt. Hard enough to arch his back, to lift his head off the desk, to expose the line of his throat. Indrie gasps and his eyes are closed and his mouth is open and there are tears on his lashes, not from pain but from the sheer overwhelming intensity of being fucked this thoroughly by a man twice his size who knows every nerve in his body.

"Come for me," Eskil says, and his voice is commanding and tender and in pieces all at once. "Let me feel you, sweetheart."

Indrie comes with nothing on him but the desk. Everything in him pulls tight at once, and the sound he makes is Eskil's name broken across two syllables, and the grip of his body around Eskil's cock is so intense and so rhythmic that Eskil follows him over before the first pulse has finished. He drives in deep, burying himself, and comes with Indrie's hair in his fist and Indrie's body gripping him, and the low guttural sound that comes up out of his own chest is not a word in any language.

He pulses inside him in long shuddering waves that seem to go on forever, filling him, and Indrie shakes and milks every last drop of it out of him with the helpless spasms of a body that has been pushed past its limits and is still coming down.

Eskil's hand loosens in Indrie's hair. He lets the strands fall across his back, and both his hands find Indrie's waist, and the hold is not a grip anymore. His thumb strokes the skin above Indrie's hipbone in slow circles. He is breathing hard with his forehead resting between Indrie's shoulder blades, and for a long moment neither of them moves.

Then Indrie laughs. It is a small, breathless, incredulous sound, muffled against his own forearm, and it is the most beautiful thing Eskil has ever heard. He laughs with him, a huff of warm air against Indrie's spine, and eases himself out carefully, and Indrie hisses at the withdrawal and Eskil's hand finds the small of his back at once, soothing.

"All right?" Eskil murmurs.

"Mm." Indrie does not lift his head from his arms. His voice is boneless and deeply satisfied. "I can't feel my legs."

Eskil snorts. He retrieves the cloth from beside the washbasin in the corner of the study, the one that has been living there since the second time he bent Indrie over this desk, because at a certain point practicality demands preparation. He wets it from the pitcher and comes back and cleans him with slow careful strokes, wiping the oil and the mess from his skin, pressing the cool cloth against the reddened marks on his hips where Eskil's grip was hard enough to bruise. Indrie sighs at the touch. The sigh turns into a shiver when the cloth moves between his thighs, and Eskil is thorough about it, and gentle in a way that has nothing in common with anything that preceded it.

He cleans himself. Tucks himself away. Does up his trousers and retrieves Indrie's shirt from the floor and sets it on the desk within reach.

Indrie peels himself off the wood slowly, surfacing, and stands on legs that are visibly unsteady. He pulls his trousers up and laces them, and then gets the shirt over his head. His hair is a disaster. He gathers it over one shoulder and finger-combs through the tangles Eskil put there, and the pink in his cheeks has not faded and does not look like it intends to.

Eskil drops back into his chair, leaning back, stretching his legs out in front of him. His body feels wrung out and heavy and good, the kind of exhaustion that only comes after.

Indrie finishes with his hair and turns and looks at Eskil in the chair and hesitates for a fraction of a second, and Eskil opens his arms. The hesitation disappears. Indrie crosses the room and climbs into his lap, curling against his chest, and Eskil's arms close around him.

The fire pops. The light has shifted, the amber deepening toward the copper of late afternoon.

They talk about small things, the way people do when the large things have been handled and the body is settling and the mind is floating in the aftermath. The clinic. A child Indrie saw that morning with a wet cough that is not settling, and the quiet worry in his voice when he describes it tells Eskil the cough is worse than the child's mother thinks.

"How long has it lasted?" Eskil asks.

Indrie glances up at him, surprised. "Nearly two weeks."

"Fever at night?"

"Low grade. Comes and goes."

"Siblings?"

Indrie blinks. "Two. Neither is showing symptoms."

"Keep it that way. If the fever spikes or the cough deepens, separate the child from the household. I've seen it before. It runs through families in the winter if it isn't caught, and by the time the adults show symptoms the youngest ones are already in trouble."

Indrie is looking at him with an expression Eskil does not immediately recognize, and when he does recognize it he feels momentarily winded, which is ridiculous and undignified and he is going to pretend it is not happening. It is the look Indrie saves for unusual information, delighted and focused and pleased to have found something valuable where he was not looking for it.

"What?" Eskil says.

"Nothing," Indrie says, and his smile is radiant. "I didn't know you knew that."

"I've been ruling a kingdom for fourteen years. You pick things up."

They talk about Ingrid's plan to expand the herb garden behind the clinic before the ground freezes. About a birth Indrie has been asked to attend at a farm an hour out on the east road, any day now.

"The midwife there is better at this than I am, honestly," Indrie admits, rubbing the back of his neck with a cheerful self-deprecation that makes Eskil want to kiss him again. "She's delivered a hundred babies. She only wants me there in case something goes wrong."