…and I didn’t really think about it, because I’m a biter, but I put my teeth on his shoulder—
—and he made the most. Amazing. Sound.
Oh god, aunera. That sound. I was still recovering from it when he compounded it with my name, thick with supplication.
“Ajan…”
“Master,” I answered around his flesh, lips drawn back from my teeth.
“Kor,” he whispered, and my heart skipped.
“Kor,” I whispered back, and bit him, hard, and brought him wrenchingly against the bed.
For so long he’d accepted my allegiance, aunera. He had loved me enough for that, for me to call him masuredi, to call me menuredi. But that was all he’d allowed himself or me.
He gave me his name.
I admit, after the blinding orgasm passed, I found myself crying against his neck and trying my damnedest not to let him know. And for a long time, we just rested like that, with me on his back and him under me, panting into his forearm. Until finally, he said, more gently, and more normally, “Ajan.”
I tried it again, without the distraction of the sex. “Kor.” And hell if it didn’t make my eyes start watering again. So I said it again, to work past the emotion. “Kor.”
“Yes,” he said, soft.
“Why?” I asked, trying to get an anchor to hold on to. “Why not when we first kissed?”
There was a hint of humor and bemusement both in his voice when he said, “Apparently, being bitten there has a habit of clarifying matters in my mind.”
I sat up just enough to look over his shoulder at him. “And how did this habit develop?”
“That’s where the Decoration bit me when he raped me,” he said, giving me the straight answer I hadn’t been expecting. “And where Farren bit me to show me that I had made it too important.”
I craned my neck back enough to look at his shoulder. Then touched it a little, parting the fur until I could see the hint of insult in the skin. Which I’d multiplied, of course, by digging my teeth into it. I licked it by way of apology and won myself another of those whole-body shudders.
“Can I keep it?” I asked, only half-joking.
He looked at me over his shoulder without lifting his head.
“This part of your shoulder,” I said. “Can it be mine? I promise to bite it whenever you need to clarify things in your mind.”
His laugh was soft. “It’s yours, Ajan. Along with the rest of me.” A little smile as he closed his eyes. “I trust you.”
I brushed my nose against the rent and then cuddled onto him, resting with him. Usually when one decides to become family, there is a formal discussion… and we had it, eventually, we two. But I had been his Guardian for ten years, had worked intimately with him for all that time. I knew how he thought well enough to understand what he’d done. He would never have asked me to call him by name had he not made the decision to make me his family, as well as his lover.
There was more after that. But slower. More of an exploration than exercise, urgency, want. He has this thing with his hands, aunera. He can sit forever, it seems, and let me kiss and touch and rub them, and I can make him relax by massaging his fingers and palms and bring him by biting and sucking them, and over the years I admit it’s made me hyper-sensitive to the sight of people’s hands; I see erotic possibilities wherever I go, which is hell for a Guardian… Vekken tells me (dryly) that it’s an opportunity to practice self-discipline. Do you know how many hands I see a day? Vekken has a twisted sense of humor.
Me, I like biting. Nibbling, teeth-scratching (do you have a word for that? We say gafen, and that’s scraping only with the teeth, not with nails or objects). Biting, yes. Hard enough to draw blood? That’s fine too. When he learned about that, he started this… habit… of just putting his teeth around my throat. Never biting or crushing, just… holding me in place, and that was… well, that for me was like me sucking fingers was for him. And now and then, he does it to the back of my neck, framing but never touching that sacred place on the nape that is only for our lords and masters and that… that wrecks me for weeks, aunera, and it is the most wonderful ruination I can describe.
But all we did after the name-trading was gentle versions of all the things we’d learn to do in the future. And… there was poetry.
Right? You do that too, don’t you? Maybe with music? I sang a little, also, under my breath, into his ear. Ereseya’s not the only erotic poet in the Ai-Naidari library, but she’s a favorite of ours, so I chose several of hers. She also wrote a book of erotic exercises for lovers (there’s a matching volume for ajzelin, I bought a copy of it later for Farren to share with him, and let me tell you it’s crazy how hard it is to commission a book without a calligrapher finding out!). I hadn’t memorized the erotic exercise one, but he remembered some of it, so we did those too… the breathing together entwined. Sharing breath. That’s sacred for us, aunera. Farren said something about it maybe: about the space between two people. We honor that space, and we honor the breath we can share because of the separation.
To this day, he likes me to sing to him in bed. Breathy-soft, in his ear, for him alone.
The fire of your sun
is the fire in my body
you burn me away
you burn me away
you burn me away
you burn me away
you are the star
too close to my skin
you are the light
too close to my eyes
