19

Dragon

            Before my departure for Zyss, Kyet wanted to take us all sailing, but in the end Goal caught a chill from the twins and Ray decided to play nurse, so it turned out to be just the two of us. I am sure that suited Kyet just fine. Vai explained to me once that Eden had an engineer calculate the highest water level the lake would eventually reach before he finished the designs of the Pallas-Thor summer villa, so each time I walk down the half-mile to the shore I count my steps to see if the lake level is rising. In my two years with the Pallases, the path has shortened maybe two paces. I fear Alnos may have reached the apex of its new climate, and in my nightmares I see myself enduring so many short summers and long winters that I actually grow accustomed to the cold. But I am assured that a temperate equatorial zone has established itself on this igloo of a planet, with less merciful sub-arctic and arctic zones to the north and south, and I am told this by O’bonne experts no less!

In the boathouse, Kyet and I helped each other into insulated sailing suits designed to safe-guard our body heat, and I immediately felt the beneficial effects. Kyet made sure the catamaran—a sleek, perfectly maintained 45-footer—was ready, and joked, “For a ship this size I’m gonna need a crew.” He directed me to take the rudder, jumped back out to push the ship off, waited until he was sure of the ship’s motion, and then leapt back in. When we had cleared the boathouse, he instructed me to stay where I was and hoisted up the sails.

“Where to?”

There was a ring of excitement in his voice.

I looked up and down the lake, then pointed to a little island far down the lake that had always caught my eye from Eden Tower.

“Pirate Island! Great idea.”

Kyet joined me, put a hand over mine, and guided my steering. With his other hand, he grasped a number of ropes tied to the mast and to each side of the ship. He adjusted the direction of the sail until it was braced stiffly against the prevailing wind, and the ship took off. Gradually, I began to understand the eddies and currents which determined the catamaran’s direction, and I felt his hand relax over mine until it turned into something closer to a caress.

Kyet breathed a kiss down my neck and murmured, “Go ahead and explore. I’ll handle it.” I let go and he took over, angling sail and rudder to take advantage of a new gust. I stepped around the cabin roof to a platform at the front, where I could put my face into the wind. The sound of waters shooting between the two keels made me feel like a great adventurer, and the occasional sprays spattering over the deck only increased my delight in our little adventure. Though weak, the autumnal sun still bathed the lake in its equatorial light, and that luminescence was a balm to my winter-weary soul. When I rejoined Kyet, I felt wrapped in a cocoon of calm and happiness. He reached out and pressed me to him, still mastering both sail and rudder as effortlessly as if he had been born to it.

After about an hour of sailing we reached Pirate Island. We anchored the catamaran in a small bay that formed a natural harbor, and after encouraging me vainly to join him, Kyet jumped into the glacier-fed water. He swam ashore and teased me one more time, then disappeared in the underbrush. I climbed to the cabin-roof and was content to lay down and soak up more of the autumnal light (heat it could not be called, alas), and when I heard Kyet swim back, I barely even lifted my head. He crawled up a small ladder at the back of the ship, joined me on my platform, and handed me a small bag full of blue and black berries. When I looked at them rather doubtfully, he smiled at me with that considerable charm he could muster, and showed me his darkened tongue. But when he followed up that baring with an approach, I held up both hands, “Ooo, get away from me, you’re wet!”

Kyet laughed and shook his hair menacingly, and when I rolled myself into a defensive ball, he took it as a personal challenge and started to dart all over me, planting wet kisses on my neck and hands. I pushed and struggled against him until we both ended up wrestling like adolescents on that cabin roof. Kyet let himself be overpowered and I towered over his pinned-down body threateningly before I pronounced the ritual formula, “Do you yield?”

He nodded. I let go of him and he stayed down, puckered his full mouth seductively, then passed his tongue over his lower lip. I wanted to ignore the invitation, but couldn’t help and reflect, “Did your father teach you how to make love, too, in addition to training you in the fighting dance?”

Kyet threw back his head for a full-throated laugh. After he recovered, he shook his head, “Mm-mm, that taboo even we Alnese libertines observe.” I didn’t care to continue my line of inquiry, but he felt no such reticence, “I did start early, but the usual way. With someone my age, a cousin.”

Someone his age—unlike now. He saw the thought in my face and reached for me, “That came out wrong.”

I seized on one of the many questions about my host clan idling in my mind as a diversion, “Why did your parents agree to the contract?”

Turning around for a lazy stretch, Kyet obliged with, “Probably because it was convenient.”

“Convenient?”

“Well,” he rolled around again and pushed himself up on his elbows, “you know my father. He started making ravages oh, before he reached my age, and it was almost time for Lady Ciani to commit fully. Who would consent to give a man like that a child? His only chance was an alliance child, and he knew it. And my mother . . .” he thought about it for a minute or so, “It’s always been Lann with her. I don’t think she really wants involvement.”

“Does she have lovers?”

“I think . . . once. When I say she doesn’t really want involvement, I mean, with anyone. Not even with me, even though she tries.”

Is that why I am so attractive to you? We had circled right back to the topic I wanted to avoid, and the Freudian misgivings always hovering at the edge of my consciousness when I contemplated our circumstances came circling back like moths around a summer night flame.

“I did surprise him once,” Kyet continued as if he sensed my urge to retreat again, “Ever since passion struck he has tried to be faithful, but . . .,” he hesitated, stared out over the lake, then concluded, “Maybe it’s just not in his nature.” Then he turned to face me and surprised me with, “You really think I take after him?”

Oh, to be put on the spot by one’s own words! I squirmed a little, and considered lying, but knew perfectly well that Kyet had his own Dragon eyes in matters concerning him, especially with me, “Physically, you do. The way you move, the way you use your hands.” I let the words trail off.

He lay back down, “I was fifteen. His paramour was from his order. She was all muscle, and short and lithe enough to ride him. It gave me ideas.”

The image he had conjured had the intended effect. When I saw him smile up at me, I shook my head, “Lithe I am not.”

“Mm. We adjust. You work more, I work less.”

I had a sudden urge to throw him back into the water, but he isn’t particularly lithe himself. Then it occurred to me that letting him bear my full weight for a few minutes might accomplish the same effect, and I rolled onto him.

“Oof!” he started to brace himself and I pressed down on his rib cage until his breathing became audibly more difficult. “I yield! I yield!” he squeezed out between labored inhalations.

I broke off my satisfied chuckle when he pulled me back down to him. After he let go again it was my breathing that had increased audibly. Once again I found myself enveloped in a warm blanket of desire, a stirring for him that started in my loins and ascended through my breasts, then went straight to my head. “I think it’s good you take after your father physically,” I hushed against him. He curved an arm around my head and kissed my temple, but made no other move.

We lay there in each other’s embrace until the weak sunlight started to fade. Kyet sighed contentedly, then sat up and asked, “Ready to go back?”

We rode a rising wind back to Eden Hamlet. To our right, in keeping with its equatorial position, the sun was setting fast, covering the lake with a golden, then an orange, then a rich carmine sheen. I felt as if I were savoring a last reprieve, both from the coming cold season and from Alnos’ impending moment of truth, which I was apparently destined to witness. My entire being recoiled at the idea.

Once back in the boathouse, after the sail had been folded back, the anchor lowered, the catamaran secured, Kyet asked me to wait and not look into the cabin, then disappeared into the bowels of the ship. When he called me in, a half dozen lit candles greeted me. The whole cabin glowed softly, framing my radiant young lover like an exotic candy. I let my eyes linger on him: Wild, tangled mane, long, muscled dancer’s limbs, thin, long hands like those of the tall, graceful mountain people on O’bonne. And he even had their black eyes!

Kyet closed the cabin door securely behind us, and we moved to one of the narrow bunks that lined the cabin-walls, sat and started fumbling with our sailing suits. I snapped his open first, tore it clear to his navel and let my mouth follow the trail readied by my hands. His breathing caught, then he rolled each shoulder out of his suit top and leaned back against the cabin wall. I grabbed the suit sleeves and pulled, kept pulling as his second skin peeled off his arms and exposed his dark blue torso, then tackled the lower half of the suit, peeled it off his waist and buttocks and thighs. After stewing in desire all afternoon, I was hungry for him.

Kyet let himself be stripped, slid down and stretched himself languidly onto the bunk. When I kneeled to turn my attention to the one part of him clearly responding to my advances, he closed his eyes and hummed with satisfaction. I nibbled at the tip, savoring the swell and pulsation of his flesh and absorbing his musky scent, licking off occasional milky tears seeping up under my tongue. Tension was building, his outstretched hands grabbed hold of the bunk rim and his voice turned into a breathy moan. I wanted to possess him, to bring him to crisis the way he always did with me, but when I closed my mouth around his shaft in earnest, he broke off his low hum and caught my head in his hands to stop me, whispering between thick inhalations, “Not yet, not yet.” I laid my head against his taut stomach and let a little note of triumph pass through me, then ran my tongue back up and down his hard indigo flesh while feeling for his tremors through my cheek.

He let go of the bunk rim and directed one arm at my suit, tugging until he had secured an opening off my right shoulder, then he reached in and started to knead one breast. The joint pressure of skin-suit and hand on my hardening nipples made me interrupt my own ministrations to give the surging heat within me voice. Kyet propped himself up with his other arm and finished opening the top of my suit. My breasts spilled out and he rolled over, reached to bring me up to him and lifted both breasts to the bunk. In one of his fluid dancer’s motions he was up, out of the bunk, and kneeling behind me, and he pressed his torso against mine while moving his free hand down to the part of the suit still imprisoning my lower body. First his hands pushed against me through the insulating fabric, then he slowly started to peel it off my abdomen. He inserted one hand through the slackening at the top of the garment and cupped a buttock, continued to peel the rest of it off my bottom with his other hand. I was beginning to shake against the hard wood of the bunk, and when I finally felt his hand slip down to the juncture of my thighs for a first, teasing rub, my head flew back and I turned boneless, melted against the bunk and dropped against him, breaking the contact between hand and flesh.

He caught me in his arms and gave me time to inhale and come back to my senses. My frenzied heart found an echo in his own racing pulse against my back. Kyet backed off, let me take off the trunks of my suit, then climbed back into the bunk and guided me next and over him. I kneeled over him, and once his sex was secured at the juncture of my legs, he leaned back again and started to rock from side to side, brushing it against my lower lips again and again. The pure sensual delight spiraling up with each contact tempted me to dance and thrash about with abandon. Mindful of the consequences of collapsing on top of him, I grabbed a hold of the cabin wall to my left and whimpered quietly to myself. He stopped.

“No,” I protested in O’bonne.

He understood it, made another teasing pass, then reached up and guided me down until I was crouching over him and leaning on my elbows. Pushing up a little, he caught one breast in his mouth and bit me, and I started to move up and down on top of him until I felt my inner trembling spread to him and his head fell back for a low, guttural groan. Shifting to one elbow, I grabbed a hold of his hard member and steered it into its waiting nest, and when he thrust upwards, I resumed my narrow circles. His arms writhed back over my torso until he could cup my buttocks and anchor himself for harder thrusts. I leaned back onto my haunches again and let his rhythm be mine, focused on bearing down on each upward thrust. We undulated all over the small bunk until I felt him stiffened beneath me. He threw his head back again and his nails buried themselves painfully into my bottom as he shuddered through his release, with rhythmic pulsations racking through the shaft buried in my flesh. “Oh!” Kyet let go of me and brought both hands up to cover his face.

I slid to his side and once again leaned against the cabin wall, and in the moment it took him to recover I grew aware of the waves lapping at the catamaran on the other side of that wall, almost forgetting the burning still arrowing through my body. Then Kyet again slid a hand between my thighs and shocked me back into body awareness. He reached up and pulled my head down to him, found my half-open mouth and invaded it, too. Soon I was back into my own sexual haze, cooing my delight as he bore down with tongue and thumb and index finger until it was my turn to stiffen and cry out. His strokes grew more gentle, but each one made roiling sensations cascade through me, and I forced myself to stop him. Kyet let go and embraced me, held me as, my breathing ragged, I lay on top of him and let the last little waves lap up and down.

“Not too bad, our adaptation,” my young lover whispered into my ear. I couldn’t answer. After a few minutes, he added more audibly, “You’re right about the weight.” Though I took the hint, squeezing myself against the cabin wall while propping myself up with one hand, I replied somewhat tartly, “Well, I’m sure your father didn’t have to contend with the same space limitations.”

He smiled. The calm satisfaction that always followed our love-making rippled through me, and I adjusted into a seated position with my back against the cabin wall. In spite of the limited space, I was strongly tempted to push him to one side, stretch out next to him and let the lake sounds lull us to slumber. I did not want to separate, as we always did, each going off to our allotted space; yet this longing for prolonged contact could simply not be indulged.

As if guessing my thoughts, Kyet sighed, then said dreamily, “Would be nice to stay here, but not very discreet. Mom’s already suspicious, you know. We better be getting back.” He rolled himself into a sitting position next to me and before we knew what we were doing or why, we were enmeshed again, Kyet nibbling at the corner of my mouth while I rained butterfly light kisses on his nose and brow.

“It’s okay,” he soothed against my efforts, “it’s okay.” And with a sense of dread rising I realized: That’s not what I wanted to hear. I was ready for a challenge to the agreement I had extracted before giving in to him, ready and yet not courageous enough to break the agreement myself. Kyet got up, disappeared to the back of the cabin and came back with sponge and towels. Cleaning up, we almost fell several times, steadying each other with giggles and laughter. Then, in a curious reversal of our usual pattern, we helped each other into our day clothes. I opened the cabin door and braced myself against the autumnal evening chill, and Kyet blew out the candles behind us.

Our hands interlocked for half the path up from the lake, then, as we were coming closer to the house, despite the protecting darkness, despite my reluctance, I let go and stepped ahead of him.