The Last Hour of Gann (159 page)

“You don’t believe that,” said Amber, watching him withdraw to his chair at the table.

“You sound very sure.”

“He still has
the hand he put on me.”

“Ha! But I don’t need to defend my woman from his conquest,” he added. “She defends herself.”

It was praise and she knew it, but all the same, she felt that phantom tug of resistance as the fish hook tore through flesh, felt the sting where Zhuqa’s heat splashed over her eyes, tasted blood and cum in her mouth. She defended herself all right. Fierce little thing that she was.

She couldn’t hide that
shiver. Meoraq noticed, but obviously didn’t know what to make of it. “Are you angry?” he asked cautiously, flaring his spines to suggest that, if she were, he was prepared to insist he was not at fault until she agreed with him.

“No. I’m not, I just…hate lying here!” she finished in a sudden illogical rush of fury. She shoved the door over as far as it could go and swung her legs out, sitting up. When Meoraq only twitched his spines, she stood. After another pause to assess him, she walked over t
o the table and stood in front of him.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

“Fine.”

He raised his chin, his eyes narrowing.

“A little shaky,” she admitted and sat with relief on the table.

“Tru
th,” he declared, leaning out to put the first heat stone in the water.

“But that’s only because you never let me get up.”

“Evil Uyane,” he agreed and hissed to himself, heaping embers over the remaining stones. “Vindictive brunt, who in his cruelty, would not allow his wife to tear open her soft skin.”

“My skin has been all sealed up for days.”

“Only in seeming.”

“I’m better now,” she insisted.

“Truth, but ‘better’ is not ‘healed’.”

“When are we leaving?” she asked.

“When leaving will not kill you.” He slid a pointed glance her way. “I feel I’ve said that before. No matter. Your clay requires time to strengthen. Shall we say—”

“Six days?” she guessed.

“How well my wife knows her man’s mind.”

“And then we go on to Xi’Matezh?”

“Xi’Matezh,” he agreed, or maybe he was correcting her pronunciation. “We aren’t far.”

“Half a brace, right?” she said, rolling her eyes. “You’ve been saying that since the mountains.”

“Less than that. Perhaps even less than half that.”

“So…You could have been there and back, like, three times by now.”

“No arguments, woman. This is not a discussion. We go to Him together.” He looked past her, loudly flattening his spines. “I have not invited you back.”

“It’s raining,” Eric said on the stair.

“Excellent. Keep me informed. Get out.” Meoraq continued to stare until Eric and the others turned around and tromped back upstairs. “Raining,” he muttered, and prodded at the heat stones.

“How long are you going to keep them outside?” Amber asked.

“They aren’t ‘out’ anywhere. They’re in the foreroom. Listen.” Meoraq looked up at the ceiling, scowling at the sound of footsteps pacing above them. “I ought to make them stay up there until we move on. I’m sick of having humans underfoot.”

She looked at him.

He noticed and predictably misunderstood. He scowled back at her, saying, “I’ll call them down once I’ve had my bath. Enough. I am still the master of this camp and I am not a harsh one.” His spines lifted in an overture of peace. “An hour, eh? A private hour, you and I, and all the world outside.”

For Nicci’s sake, not to mention the other three, Amber knew she really ought to do some of the standing up that Eric found so praiseworthy, but the idea of privacy was a powerful temptation.
“So,” she said, beginning to smile. “Did you have any ideas on how to pass the time until the water heats up?”

He
changed out the stone in the pouch for a hotter one. “We can walk down to the stream, if you’re feeling strong enough. We’re going to need more water if you want a bath too.”

The sight of her words going over his head made
whooshing sounds in Amber’s mind. She waited a second or two, then stood, moved the stewing pouch out of his reach and sat down on his thigh.

“What are you doing?” he asked, by all appearances with genuine surprise.

Amber wordlessly took his favorite bone-handled knife out of its sheath and stabbed it meaningfully into the back of his chair, above his head.

He looked at it. “Ah.”

She caught him by the jaw and aimed his face back at her so that she could kiss his rough mouth. He allowed it, but certainly did not encourage it, and when she was done, he said simply, “It is an unforgiveable sin to lie with a woman in her sickbed.”

“I don’t appear to be in it at the moment.” She loosened her tunic and slid it off one shoulder so he could see his bite-marks. “You made me certain promises, lizardman.”

He eyed the scars with distinct pride, only to glare at her. “Your humans are right above us.”

“We’ll be
quiet,” she promised.

“I don’t like being
quiet.” He paused, frowning as he watched her unbuckle his belt. “And I don’t think you can be.”

“Then we’ll be noisy, but we’ll be quick and finish up before they come down to investigate,” said Amber, now at work on his breeches-ties.

“My desires come from God. They should not be hurried.”

“Then they shouldn’t ought to be denied, either,” she said piously, and slipped her hand beneath his loin-plate.

“You may have a point,” he said after a moment’s meditation. “Are you sure you’re strong enough?”

She kissed him again. This time, he kissed back at her, his broad, dry tongue nudging at her lips and into her mouth to taste her. His hands caught at her thighs, kneading lightly before moving up to wrap her waist
. He didn’t try to undress her; he’d probably never heard of doing it in a chair, she thought, remembering Zhuqa.

She broke the kiss with a shudder and looked away, waiting to feel arousal curdle into shame, but it didn’t happen. Meoraq, oblivious, saw the sudden exposure of her throat as an invitation and leaned forward to nuzzle at it, reaching beneath her wrap to cup her breast. He was never quite sure what to do with it
once he had it in his hand, but at least he tried.

She looked down at him, faintly smiling, watching his spines flex and quiver with restraint as he fit his teeth into the impression of his scar, nuzzled, fit them again.

He was never going to be Zhuqa, no more than Zhuqa could have ever been Meoraq. It didn’t matter what he did, what he said, how he looked. Zhuqa had tried to be her lover as part of his little game, but his gentlest touch was loathsome. He didn’t deserve the hold he had on her memories now.

Amber brushed the back of her hand over Meoraq’s brow. He grunted pleasantly without opening his eyes, lost in her shoulder. Nothing they did together could ever be ugly, she thought. Nothing they did together belonged to Zhuqa.

She knelt down.

He started to move out of the chair and join her on the floor, but stopped, puzzled, at her silent insistence. When she started in again at loosening his loin-plate, he tried to help.

“Let me do this,” she said, pushing his hands firmly away. “I want to please my man.”

“
It does not please me to see my woman on her knees.”

She looked at him, crookedly smiling. “I want to please my man. Whether I’m on my knees or on my feet or standing on my head.”
‘And I want to take every ugly thing he did away from him,’ she thought, but didn’t say that. It was bad enough that she could still see Zhuqa with them in this moment; she didn’t want Meoraq to see him too.

“This is
a human mating technique, is it?” Meoraq asked uncertainly, watching her peel away his loin-plate. “Do I take my boots off or do you remove them for me?”

She leaned back to look at them, then up at him.

“Humans take their boots off for formal matings,” he explained, looking very mildly embarrassed. “This is a formal mating, isn’t it?”

“
Do I dare ask why you were watching humans have sex?”

He mumbled something, scratching at his snout, then shook
his head and snapped, “I am not to be blamed if humans insist on mating in the open wilds where anyone can see them! Do you want the boots off or not?”

“Take them off,” she said decisively
. “Take everything off. Let’s do this right.”

Muttering under his breath, Meoraq stood up and shucked out of his clothes. Amber did the same, still giggling now and then, even though she honestly didn’t know what struck her so funny about the whole thing. It wasn’t the concept of Meoraq as a Peeping Tom
, which was pretty ludicrous all on its own, as much as it was the idea of human mating techniques (
step one remove boots step two insert penis
), formal and otherwise.

“And now?” Meoraq asked, standing naked and proud above her with his hands on his hips and his best glare on.

“Now sit down again.”

“Sit?” He looked at the chair and back at her. “In the chair?”

She nodded, trying to hide her grin under her hand.

“
I thought we were going to have sex.”

“
We are. Sort of.” A sudden sobering thought occurred as he gingerly lowered himself into the chair. “Is it, um, against God’s laws to do things that can’t, strictly speaking, produce babies?”

“Things?”
He frowned. “How strict do you mean?”

She put her hands lightly on his thighs and leaned between them to lick all along the tight crease of his slit, penetrating at the crown to tongue at his sa’ad.

He watched her very closely. Apart from the immediate and forceful extrusion of his slick cock, he did not move and did not make a sound until she leaned back to look at him again. “I have to pray about this,” he said seriously.

“I’ll wait.”

He tipped his head back and closed his eyes.

A few minutes ticked by.
She changed out the stones in the stewing pouch. Meoraq breathed.

His eyes opened. “You are mine,” he told her. “And I am yours. Nothing we take as our pleasure together offends the eye of God.”

“Really?”

“He was quite clear.” He looked upwards
, thoughtful. “Unusually clear, one might say.”

She cupped the hot swell at the base of his cock and bent again,
this time sucking the nub of his sa’ad between her tight lips to flick it with her tongue. His taste was strong, yes, and sweet and intoxicating and entirely his own.

A pair of heavy feet came across the ceiling and started down the stairs.

“If no one has been killed,” Meoraq called, “someone is about to be.”

The feet stopped, turned, galumphed away.

Amber giggled around his clit, which made the muscles in both his thighs jump.

“Ease off a moment,” he ordered, resting both hands on her shoulders. “Just a moment.
This is…this is very different.”

“Do you need to pray again?”

He tried to glower at her, but was too obviously flustered to be effective. His eyes closed. His breath deepened and slowed. He appeared to fall asleep.

Amber rolled off her knees and sat cross-legged. The floor was very cold on her ass. She dragged her discarded wrap over and
sat on that instead. She traded out the stones again and waited.

Meoraq’s eyes opened. “Proceed.”

“Everything’s still all right with God?”

“Yes.”

She weighed the pros and cons of her next nagging doubt while she stroked his shaft gently in her fist, but in the end, felt she just had to ask. She wasn’t sure how…but she really felt she had to.

And then she remember
ed Meoraq’s ‘anatomy lesson’ the first night they’d made love.
This is my masculine member…it will go here
…

A smile tugged at her lips. She rubbed his cock in one hand and pointed at it with the other. “I would like to suck this
.”

His spines came forward.

“And lick it all over until you cum in my mouth.”

His cock twitched in her grip.
He frowned.

“I just want to be sure that’s okay.” …
the most profane thing I have ever seen
… “Especially if I swallow it.”

She watched his face closely, where ‘Yes, do it now,’ fought a visible war against ‘Sex is for procreation only’ and finally he passed his hand over his eyes and looked at her through his fingers. “
Give me a moment.”

“Take all the time you need
.”

He did some muttering, but closed his eyes
and that was all for a long time.

She found herself watching the way the light played along the wet shine of his oiled cock—red light and black shadow, stark and smooth and beautiful. She wanted to feel it in her hands again. She wanted to kiss it, taste it, not to kill a ghost or prove a point, but just to hear Meoraq’s hiss and feel his hands clench in her hair. She imagined that penultimate spasm, the flood of his heat across her tongue, the roughness of his scales under her hands as she held him close to drink…