Page 22 of Palaces and other Prisons
Great, now he needed to get naked, and everyone was going to realize he was wearing underwear under his tunic. The same underwear that he washed and dried in front of the fire every night.
He smiled. “Thank you.”
Dear God, kill me now.
This is where he made a mistake that caused an international incident or something. Why had he volunteered for this? Because he wanted off the fucking platform and he’d rather be doing something than sitting and going hungry. He’d done enough of that as a kid between paydays, and that was assuming his father had work. Assuming his father bothered to turn up and hadn’t spent all the money at the pub or gambling. By the time he was ten, he’d learned how to scab free meals and dumpster dive. His mother would’ve been horrified, but it was better than the alternative, which was going hungry.
His younger brother had joined the military as soon as he was old enough. But the moment Dawson heard about oil platforms, he knew that’s what he wanted. He wanted to be able to see the horizon and be away from the rest of the world. He liked the isolation. He was not the kind of person who should be in charge of meeting a king.
Once the king learned English, he wouldn’t be needed. Management could negotiate for food until a boat turned up to collect them.
Dawson hesitated, and Ul watched him without hiding his interest, which didn’t help because his dick got all kinds of wrong ideas. He closed his eyes, but all he saw was that stained glass window with the guy fucking the octopus.
Which was even more unhelpful.
He tried to will away his hard-on, but even thinking about the international incident his dick was about to create did nothing.
You’ve never wanted to fuck your calamari, so pull it together.
Except the king wasn’t calamari. He was weird and, yeah, he was pretty despite his pointed ears and teeth and all the tentacles…or maybe because of them?
Fuck, he didn’t know. But curiosity had become attraction, and he wasn’t sure when or how that had happened. Maybe if he’d been thrown in a soggy dungeon, that would’ve helped. He took his shoes off and paused, not knowing if he should remove his underwear or the tunic first. Not that it mattered, as it was a difference of ten seconds.
He opted for underwear first, hoping a quick pinch to his inner thigh would reduce the problem. He felt Ul’s gaze on him, and his skin heated. Was the king curious? Surely, he’d seen humans naked before?
He kept his back to the king and pulled the tunic over his head. His dick bumped in front of him. It had been a while since such an awkward and unwanted erection had appeared. He needed to put his hand over it and act like it didn’t exist.
Classy, real classy, Dawson.
He hoped the water was fucking freezing.
It had to be since the tide must reach these rock pools.
He strode over with his hand over his junk, hoping he didn’t look as awkward as he felt. There was a ledge in the rock pool, which gave him the impression these pools had been specially built. He stepped in and didn’t lose his balance, but the water was not nearly as cold as he’d been hoping for. It didn’t bite his flesh the way the sea had yesterday evening, but it was cold enough to distract him, especially as he sat and his balls tried to crawl inside.
What happened now that he was sharing a bath with the king?
Ul rested both his arms on the edge, and his back tentacles drifted just beneath the surface of the water, close enough that if Dawson reached out, he’d be able to touch one.
That was a bad idea, but the temptation remained. He wanted to watch the king’s freckles turn pink again. Ul glanced past him and nodded. Dawson glanced over his shoulder as the soldiers took up positions further away. The person who had delivered the towels was nowhere to be seen.
Dawson swallowed. Something was definitely up. Had Ul brought him here for a reason?
Did the king want to fuck him?
That was all it took for his dick to become fully hard again despite the awkwardness and the cool water. And he was damn sure Ul noticed.
Ul spoke, and it sounded very much like a proposition. Sure, he’d been with guys before when they didn’t speak the same language, but they’d also been human, and they had both known it was a holiday hook-up. This did not have that vibe.
He wanted to slither out of the pool and bundle himself up in the towels so he couldn’t mess this up.
Ul made the motion for him to speak.
“It’s a lovely rock pool you have, but I’m not sure why I’m sitting in it.” Was it rude to say no to a king? He wasn’t sure he wanted to…which was also fucking weird. “I’m giving mixed signals. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know what you want, and I don’t know what I want, and I’m sitting here with a hard-on because I want to feel those little suckers on my skin.”
Because of the sunlight on the water, he couldn’t tell what Ul had going on between his thighs. He’d been assuming that every blue-skinned person he saw was male because of the lack of breasts, but that might be a wrong assumption.
That realization made everything ten times more confusing.
