Pulling her leg up over his to open her up more, Alonnen thrust deeply, if carefully. He had to grit his teeth against the urge to buck and pound in fast, holding back against the demanding needs of his own pleasure. Each inward stroke delved a little deeper. Once he was fully inside, he returned his hand to hers and pulled the buzzing crankman up to her breasts. Only then did he move, using her gasp and twitch to pull his shaft partway out, then he pressed back inside. That in turn pressed her forward, bringing her nipple once again into contact with the machine.
Rexei gave up control of the device. Gave up control of her pleasure. In absolute trust, she cried—with a spill of tears as well as with her sobbing voice—while he teased and tormented her nipples. He almost stopped, hearing her breath hitch in sobs, but she caught his wrist and held his hand close, then released it to reach back to his hip.
Relieved, Alonnen resumed making love to her, wanting her to forever associate pleasure with him, with this moment in his arms, rather than all the fears she had suffered while hiding for over a decade from the False God’s minions.
He did his job well; Rexei pulled on the blankets and sheets when he tucked the tapered metal cylinder between her legs, but she knew better than to close her thighs against the vibrating invasion. And when he started thrusting in earnest, picking up speed in compliance with her broken pleas for more, more, more, she pushed back into every stroke, for it was just one more layer of deep, passionate stimulation in her mind-shattering pleasure.
Her writhing and trembling made it hard for him to keep the crankman positioned just right. During one of her thrashings, he tried a little too hard, bumped the tip past her sheath opening along the sensitive span of skin between it and her cog-star, and right up against his own flesh as he thrust. That not only stimulated the underside of his shaft, it also brought the buzzing metal up against his scrotum, vibrating straight through his flesh to his own perineum. Stars exploded behind his eyes.
Vaguely, he got the machine back into place; he knew he did because of the way she hollered and clenched up in pleasure with hands and toes and buttocks, limbs straightening and spine stiffening, but it was too late to stop his own eye-blinding, toe-curling bliss. His own body tensed, shuddered, then jolted like a bowstring snapping back and forth now that the arrows of his seed were being released. He shouted, too, a strangled sound that was too far gone to be her name, though he tried.
White-blinding bliss drained away rational thought. When it ended, he found himself shaking almost as hard as the still-rattling device. Carefully thumbing it off, he dropped it onto the bedding, then wrapped his arm around her waist. She, too, was still trembling hard from her own climax. Spooned together, still connected piston to cog, he held her while their hearts slowed and their breathing steadied. Every few seconds, her inner muscles clenched just a little in pure post-bliss reflex, making him bite his lip from the lingering pleasure of it.
Finally, the twitches ended, and Rexei could think again. Think and have enough energy to speak. “I . . . I don’t know if I can . . . do that again . . .”
Alonnen lifted his head a little, alarmed. “You can’t? Why not?”
“Because if this . . . if this is how the back door feels with you . . . I don’t think I can survive the front door version,” she half complained, half complimented him. “But . . . I, uh . . . think I’m insane enough to try. When I’m not a puddle of limp jelly, that is.”
This time, the sound-masking spell was needed to hide his hearty laughter from the rest of the building.
FOURTEEN
Nothing seemed able to ruin his good mood, come morning. Not the drizzling rain on the way from Heiastowne to the dam, and not the information that his scrying spies had found no recording of what the Patriarch’s right-hand man wanted from his fellow ex-priests in this corner of the land. Not even the frowns his mother gave him when he went down to the dining level to get something to eat at mid-morning could spoil his happy mood.
His brother Dolon came close to puncturing Alonnen’s ebullient attitude. Having invaded the dining hall of the inner circle for much the same reason—oven-baked flatbread topped with slivers of onion and scattered with cheese—Dolon ate slowly, frowning several times at his older brother. Toward the end of the snack, he finally smiled. Grinned, rather, with the predatory look of a sibling who had figured something out.
“Why, Alonnen, I didn’t know you liked men,” Dolon teased slyly.
Alonnen frowned in confusion. “What? Since when?”
“Since, oh, last night? When you took Master Rexei into town . . . and came home this morning sporting that unbelievably silly grin?” his brother said, pointing at Alonnen’s lips. “You haven’t done that since the last time you got to piston someone . . . or was he pistoning you? All those protests to the contrary . . . what a smoke screen! You should be nominated for an apprenticeship to the Actors Guild.”
For a long moment, Alonnen did not feel like smiling. His brother’s comments were crude, rude, and . . . well, typical hazing from a brother. This wasn’t the first time either of them had tormented the other verbally. But it wasn’t the teasing that bothered him; it was that as much as Alonnen wanted to correct his sibling’s mistaken impression, he didn’t know if he had the right to correct Dolon’s view of Rexei as a male.
“Rexei” was not an unusual name for both boys and girls; just about any name ending in ei was gender neutral in Mekhana. Many parents used it to ensure a casual conversation would not give away a child’s gender identity whenever a priest was around. His own name wasn’t gender neutral, nor was Dolon’s, but then their parents had raised them and their siblings mostly within the protections of the Vortex. But naming conventions were not the same as permission to speak.
Sighing, he settled on a different tactic. “Does it really matter whether or not the person I love is a male, a female, or . . . or some weird gender the Gods Themselves haven’t yet invented?”
“Oh-ho!” Dolon crowed, distracted as Alonnen had planned for him to be. “So my middle brother is in love, is he?”
Alonnen narrowed his eyes and peered over the top of the green-lensed spectacles he had not bothered to remove. “Are you going to keep giving me grief about being in love, or are you going to go do something more productive, like actually work?”
Dolon mock swept his strawberry blond curls back from his face, lifting his hawkish nose into the air. “I’ll have you know I’m quite competent at doing both.”
Alonnen relaxed. This was just typical teasing. “You have a low threshold for competency, I see.” He started to say more, but the talker-box rang. He rose to go answer it, but Dolon beat him to the machine. “I was going to get that. It’s probably for me.”
“Hello, you’ve reached the inner dining hall,” Dolon offered into the speaking cone, lifting the matching earpiece to his head. “What? . . . He’s right here. I’ll let him know.”
The way his brother hung up the ear-cone, ending the conversation instead of offering the cable-connected device, annoyed Alonnen. “I could’ve spoke to them myself, you know.”
“Yeah, but you’d just hear the exact same thing, and this’ll get you upstairs faster,” Dolon told him, shrugging. “The Guardians have called a conference, and they need you up there, since it’s apparently about you.”