Page 141 of A Taste of Gold and Iron

Maybe Kadou was a mountain spirit after all.

The straw tick crackled softly beneath them as they arranged themselves. The bed was just wide enough that they had a very proper foot or so of space between them, though Kadou was crammed against the wall and Evemer nearly falling off the edge. Evemer blew the candle out and carefully lowered himself into the pillows.

The darkness, the warmth, the closeness—it was all immediately, viscerally, compellingly familiar. Evemer gripped two fistfuls of the pillow to keep himself from reaching out and swallowed down the reflexive clench of desire in his stomach.

He heard Kadou take a breath several moments before he actually began speaking. “I don’t want this to be unpleasant for you. You said you—you wouldn’t stop wanting me, and I would be terribly upset with myself if that became a burden. I don’t want it to become difficult for you to serve me.”

“It isn’t,” Evemer said firmly. “It could never be.”

He felt Kadou’s fingertips just brush the side of his hand. It made all the hairs on Evemer’s arm stand up in goose pimples, made his grip on the pillow instinctively loosen. “I’ve been wishing I was more like you,” Kadou said. “Steady. Calm. You always know what to do.”

Evemer did not feel like any of those things were currently true. It felt like he had been set off-balance from the very moment he set eyes on Kadou, and even after weeks it had only become worse instead of better. He was not calm, and he had no idea what to do now.

So he turned his hand up, under Kadou’s touch, so that his fingertips fell on Evemer’s palm. He curled his fingers, brushing them against Kadou’s inner wrist, and he felt Kadou shiver all those miles and miles across the bed—he’d shivered when Evemer kissed him, too.

For several long minutes, their hands were tangled so loosely that Evemer was nearly in physical pain. It was unbearable, agonizing—neither of them gripping, neither of them holding or pulling, just . . . there.

Evemer curled just one finger tighter, just enough to make it a real touch, substantial. He heard Kadou breathe again, felt Kadou’s thumb slide over his skin, followed by his fingertips tracing the lines of Evemer’s palm. It felt like the first roses of spring, like dawn after a long, starless night.

It was somuch,and it was not at all what Evemer had ever once pictured for his life.

“Do you want to stop?” Kadou whispered. His gentle strokes stilled on Evemer’s inner wrist.

Evemer, dying of barely leashed desire, whispered, “No.”

The strokes resumed, brushing blindly over the lines in his palm and wrist, the swell of his thumb, the length of each finger. It sent chills up Evemer’s arm and down the length of his spine. All he could do was keep his hand very, very still, and breathe carefully, and feel. His heart was a burning ember, but so too was the rest of him, filled up with glimmering soft heat, a low yet urgent pulse of want. How was it possible for him to feel so unraveled, sodestroyed,just from a few touches to his hand?

It was too much—he was going to go mad if he had to endure it an instant longer. Evemer caught Kadou’s fingers in his own and squeezed them, felt his heart nearly beat out of his chest when Kadou squeezed back.

“I’ve never wanted anyone so badly before,” he said, because the truth of it filled up his mouth and throat until there wasn’t anything he could do with it but say it, impulsive.

Kadou gripped his hand tight, and Evemer could feel—he didn’t know if it was his own heartbeat or Kadou’s or both, butsomeone’sheart was racing and he could feel the insistent hummingbird beat between their joined hands.

“We could—if we were careful—” Kadou said. He sounded breathless. Evemer heard him swallow, felt his hand tremble and grip tighter. “If you wanted. You could do something about it.”

Evemer couldn’t speak for a moment. He wet his lips and whispered, “I could.”

Kadou’s hand trembled again. “Do you think you might?”

“It’s quickly becoming a very real possibility,” Evemer said, and he’d meant it seriously but Kadou turned his head and muffled his laugh in the mattress, and . . . There, that.

That.

That laugh tipped Evemer over, blew a gust of wind over the shimmering embers of Evemer’s heart, and suddenly the whole of him was engulfed in a conflagration. There was no more resistance left in him—he might as well have stopped the moons in their orbit.

He tugged at Kadou’s hand to get his attention. When Kadou lifted his beautiful face, still huffing little breathless hiccups of laughter, Evemer reached out with his other hand and just touched his lord’s cheek, stroked the backs of his fingers against his jaw.

Kadou’s breath caught, and he went quiet and still. Evemer shifted a little closer, partway across the inches (miles) of bed between them. He hadn’t let go of Kadou’s hand. He found a lock of Kadou’s hair, soft and loose-curling, and twisted it around his finger.

He’d wanted people before. Hehadbeen a teenager once. But it was always a vague, desultory kind of inclination, and there had always been something more important. That girl he’d kissed when he was sixteen was the only one who had ever noticed that she’d turned his head.

But this.This.Kadou only had to laugh and Evemer was hopelessly enraptured, entangled.

Kadou squirmed a little closer, impatient, close enough for Evemer to feel the warmth radiating off him like a tiny sun. His free hand touched Evemer’s where it lay against his jaw.

Alight with desire, Evemer succumbed to gravity.

Kissing Kadou was, he noticed with a jolt, beginning to be familiar—and that wasstrange,alarming, terrifying. Perfect. Kadou’s mouth, soft and warm, opened sweetly with a small noise and his grip on Evemer’s hand tightened nearly to the point of pain. Icy heat crackled and sparkled down Evemer’s spine.

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