Desert World Rebirth (40 page)

“A twinge. It means a little, tiny pain.” One of Shan’s arms was still under Temar, so he held up the hand with the medical cuff on it and showed how very small the twinge had been with a finger and thumb. “Tiny,” he repeated.

“We shouldn’t do this.”

“Temar.” Shan tightened his arm, not above begging at this point.

After a half second, Temar relaxed back into Shan’s embrace, and only then did it occur to Shan that he’d been physically restraining Temar. He stopped breathing and searched his lover for any signs of distress, but all he could see was a sort of amused exasperation in Temar’s face.

“We are so going to get caught by the doctors, and I am not going to explain how you pulled stitches.”

“It’ll be worth it.” Shan pulled Temar close enough to kiss again and ran his hand over Temar’s backside and down to a well-formed ass.

Temar pulled back no more than an inch, so they were nose to nose, Temar’s breath warm against Shan’s skin. “Just lie there. No moving, no damaging internal organs that haven’t completely healed.”

“Still. Got it,” Shan agreed. Slipping his hand between Temar’s legs, Shan slowly stroked Temar’s hard cock through his pants.

Throwing his head back, Temar groaned. “Oh God, yes.” Temar was two groans into a very good time when he reached down and caught Shan’s wrist, pressing it down to the bed and holding it there. For several seconds, Temar panted as he clearly tried to get control of his lust. It felt good to make a lover that needy, although it’d feel better to finish him.

“I thought you were going to just lie there,” Temar finally asked, his voice still breathy.

“Just offering a hand.”

“You are bad. You’re also going to be stuck here longer if we do this wrong.”

“I don’t think there is a way to actually do it wrong.”

Temar blushed again, and Shan had the feeling he had so totally missed something. Before he could ask, Temar was pushing the sheets down, revealing Shan’s cock pressing up. Shan hadn’t seen his body before; his midsection was encased in a silver cocoon. However, his cock stood proudly at attention. Temar’s hand slid down over his chest, and then Temar moved below the wide band of metal encircling him.

“Let me touch you,” Shan begged in a whisper. He wanted to. He wanted to feel Temar come under his hands, and if he got a few twinges, he could live with that. Instead of granting permission, Temar let his hand rest on Shan’s hip, an island of warmth that made his cock twitch with need.

“You want to touch me, even if you hurt yourself doing it?” Temar asked. He slipped his fingers under the waist of his own pants and arched his back. The hungry noises Temar was making were enough to make Shan come right there. Temar fondled himself with this look of ecstasy on his face. “I love the way you smell, the heat when we lie close, and the feel of your hands against my skin,” Temar whispered.

Shan groaned with need, and his machines clicked out a merry tempo, recording the accelerated heartbeat. “The doctors… they’ll hear,” Shan suddenly realized.

“I told them we needed privacy,” Temar admitted wryly, and Shan’s cock was even harder at the thought that Temar had actually made arrangements for all this. Temar definitely needed to be the plan-maker in the family. Shan slipped his hand under Temar’s shirt, stroking his back, and Temar’s groans grew louder. Squirming with need, Temar pulled his hand out and slowly pushed his pants down to his thighs, his darkening cock now visible. Shan reached down, his medical cuff trailing tubing as he stroked the hot flesh, feeling the muscles twitch under his touch.

Temar was breathing faster now, and Shan could feel his own breath speed up, his injuries a faint annoyance as he stared at Temar’s hand around his own cock. The pants slipped farther down so that Shan could see the darkening shaft, the head of the cock slipping out of the foreskin, the slit slick. Temar pressed against Shan’s side, and Shan wrapped his fingers around Temar’s cock, pushing Temar’s hand to the side, but Temar captured his wrist. Leaning close, he whispered in Shan’s ear. “You’re injured. Let me do this.”

Shan licked his lips, but he let his fingers open as Temar moved Shan’s hand up to rest against Temar’s hip. Temar started stroking his own cock faster. A tiny line of moisture appeared at the slit, and Temar arched his back and cried out, coming on Shan’s hip, the white catching in the tiny, dark hairs of Shan’s body. Then Temar’s whole body went limp. He lay with his forehead pressed against Shan’s chest, panting and radiating heat. Shan’s own cock jutted up unhappily, but Shan couldn’t repeat Temar’s performance, not when the medical band around his center made it hard for him to reach between his legs.

“Now there’s no more reason for you to be squirming around to try and reach me,” Temar finally said.

“I don’t need a reason. I happen to just like touching you,” Shan pointed out.

“Well, this is my ambush, so lie there and take it like a seriously injured man,” Temar advised him. Shan laughed.

Temar slowly leaned in. Shan had leaked some pre-cum, so when Temar pulled the sheet to cover him, it made a small, dark spot on the fabric.

“Is someone coming?” Shan asked, checking the closed door. If someone was, Temar’s bare butt was still fully exposed.

“Nope,” Temar said before he bent down and mouthed the dark spot. The featherlight pressure against his hard cock and the feel of fabric across the sensitive head made Shan gasp. He tried to thrust up and get more pressure, but Temar braced his hands on Shan’s hips, holding him down.

“My ambush. Lie there and be injured.”

Shan panted, his cock aching with need. “I can’t. Oh God, I need more,” he finally gasped out.

Temar lowered his head and sucked harder, right through the sheet. Shan gasped as the pressure started building, painfully fast. Then Temar started a soft hum, the vibration of it travelling through Shan’s cock.

“I need to come,” Shan cried out, not even caring if some random hospital person overheard.

Temar’s hands shifted, stroking down Shan’s legs and pushing the sheet to the side. Shan pressed his head into his pillow and grabbed the sides of the mattress while Temar’s hands explored down his inner thighs and then up to torture his balls with a gentle stroke, no more than a feather against his skin.

Shan cried out, the need erasing everything else. He squirmed as Temar’s fingers teased the head of his cock, a finger running along the slit. Then Temar took Shan in his mouth, his cheeks hollowing as he sucked at Shan’s hard shaft. When Temar started lowering himself, taking more and more of Shan into his mouth with each stroke, Shan had to close his eyes before he came right in Temar’s mouth. But that made the rest even more intense. In the darkness of his closed eyes, he could feel the wet heat as Temar worked him, sucking and sliding and denying Shan the very ability to breathe as his tongue explored the vein on the underside of Shan’s cock. Temar’s hands rested against Shan’s hips, so even though Shan tried to thrust up, he was caught, unable to do anything except feel as Temar teased him until the world grayed out at the edges. He wanted this moment to last forever, and he wanted it to end, to come right now.

Shan felt himself get dizzy, and he forced his body to suck in air as Temar teased him. “Temar, please,” he pleaded, his brain fogging with pure lust. Temar pulled off, nestling close to Shan’s side as he wrapped fingers around Shan’s shaft and gave the fast, purposeful strokes that let Shan slide away into oblivion. It took several strokes, but then Shan came, a strangled cry wrested from him as his whole body jerked and then settled back into pure bliss.

Shan panted, his remaining brain cells scattering to the four corners of the world. That was fine; Temar had sucked most of them out, so there weren’t all that many to scatter.

Temar settled down next to him, his head resting on Shan’s shoulder. The sounds of the hospital slowly started reminding Shan that a nurse could come in any time, and considering that they were two ambassadors carrying the dignity of their world, they looked… well, they looked like they’d just had really, really good sex. Temar had a blurred, satiated look on his face that Shan could only imagine mirrored his own. With a happy little hum, Temar reached down and caught the sheet, pulling it up.

For a long time, they lay in silence, their bodies slowly cooling and the machines clicking and whirring around them. Shan wondered if some nurse was watching the machines count out his accelerated heart rate and fever-hot body. If so, they had the good manners to not mention it.

Shan was drifting off to sleep before Temar asked softly, “If Ben had gotten this far, do you think he would have come back for the rest of us?”

That wasn’t the sort of question to answer blithely, and Shan fought back some of the lethargy to really consider his answer. “I don’t know. I like to think he would. The easy alternative would be to tell them that we were dead and to leave us to die out. If he had come back, they would have asked some difficult questions.”

“Like how he stole water from the planet,” Temar agreed. “Somehow, after seeing the way they live, I’m not sure they would ever understand what that meant to us.”

“Probably not,” Shan agreed. Livre would trade with these people, but they wouldn’t be able to live with them, not most of them, anyway. In a hundred years, something fundamental had changed, and Shan was so very grateful that he had ended up on Livre’s side of that divide. “And considering how well Ben could tap dance around the truth…. I doubt he would have gotten into much trouble over that. They might have written it off as a bold move by an insightful leader.”

“Yeah, they might. They’d love Lilian, if they didn’t kill her first.”

Shan laughed. It was true enough. However, most of Livre wasn’t like her. Most of them never wanted more than existed beyond the farm and family, and the longer they were away, the more Shan realized those were the only two things that did matter. “They wouldn’t have forgiven his other sins,” Shan said softly, not sure if this was a particularly appropriate time to bring up the subject, but asking about Ben and not bringing it up felt a lot like avoidance.

“Raping me,” Temar said quietly.

“That’s not something civilized people easily forgive,” Shan pointed out. He suspected that the PA would be less brutal in their punishment, but they wouldn’t simply forgive a rape.

“I know.”

“What are you thinking?” Shan ran his fingers through Temar’s hair. At the part it was slightly darker, where the sun hadn’t yet had a chance to bleach it.

“I’m wondering if Ben even knew what he was doing.”

“If he….” Shan frowned. “What do you mean?”

“He used to talk to me… talk playfully, like he expected me to share a laugh with him. It was like he had this switch in his head and he could convince himself that I wasn’t really hurt… that he was taking care of me. God, I sound crazy.”

Temar pressed his forehead to Shan’s shoulder. Shan wished he could pull all these feelings out and burn them in front of Temar, erase them so they would never exist again, but he couldn’t.

“No, no, you don’t sound crazy. You have a right to feel what you feel.”

“I felt so scared and then angry and then scared and angry, and I guess I’m settling on something between disgust and pity.” Temar shifted so he could look up at Shan, and Shan waited through the silence. Silence and time were the only gifts he could give Temar. “He was a sad little man who acted big. He acted like he had power, but real power is Lilian, who can sit in a room with someone strong and know she’s still a lot stronger. Power is you doing what’s right even when you don’t know how it’s going to turn out.”

Shan stroked a hand over Temar’s cheek. “Power is you not wanting to step up, but doing it and doing it well because you know it’s the right thing to do.”

Temar smiled. “What he had was an illusion, and to feel powerful, he had to make everyone else weak. That’s just sad. Not scary, not evil, just sad.” Temar blew out a breath and tried to sit up, but Shan wrapped Temar in a hug and held on. “I’m saying it wrong,” Temar said miserably. “I’m making it sound like I’m okay with it, and I’m not.”

“You’re saying it perfectly, Temar. My father was the same way. I don’t think he ever understood that he’d hurt Naite. If he did, if he knew that he’d ripped Naite into emotional shreds, he would have known why Naite kept striking out. But he didn’t. When Naite got slaved out to Tom, our father was so confused and angry and hurt.” Shan remembered his father’s face when he would stare out over the fields like he expected to see Naite out there, working. His father would get drunk and go up to sit on the boulder high above the house, and Shan always thought it was because he could see the top of Tom’s house from that spot. He’d watch that house and drink until Shan had been sure he would fall down and break his neck on the rocks. “He was hurt,” Shan admitted. “He didn’t understand how people could betray him, and he never understood that he’d betrayed all of us first. The first lesson Div taught me was to forgive. We all sin, and some of us more than others, but the important thing is to forgive ourselves first and to forgive others second.”

“No sermons. You already got me to pray once, so let’s call that a spiritual success and move on.”

Shan gave a huff of laughter. “Deal. No sermons. And no feeling guilty for being a strong enough man to leave the fear and anger behind you. He’s gone. He’s not worth being angry at.”

“Naite would call us both idiots.”

“Yep.”

“He will call us idiots if he hears us talking about this.”

“Personally, I plan to never let him hear this conversation.”

“Good plan.”

“Every once in a while I do have a good one. The rest of the time, I’m leaving it up to you to make the plans.” Shan wasn’t even kidding on that front. Temar might not like to take charge, but he did it a good deal better than Shan ever had. Shan cringed as he remembered getting in fights with Naite right in the middle of council meetings. That wasn’t the way to inspire anyone to listen to your arguments fairly.

“And if my plans involve going back to our quarters the second you can walk without twinging so I can slowly and carefully ambush you again?”