Page 41 of Inferno
“What’s upstairs?” Nerik asked, apparently missing his point.
“The… my… uh…” Yorin stumbled over the words, then tried again. “My bedroom.”
Nerik’s eyebrows rose as he suddenly understood the request. “Oh! Um…” His surprise turned to a frown. “You mean, you want to… Me and you, I mean… But, we… I’m ademon,” he blurted out eventually.
“I thought we’d agreed that you’re not a demon,” Yorin scolded him gently. “And besides which, you just said you could have sex the same way as any human.” His face flushed bright red, though he somehow managed to plough on with the conversation.
Nerik stared up at him in disbelief. “You really don’t care, do you?”
“It doesn’t bother me, no,” Yorin said. “I realise there will be some complications. And that the public can’t know what you are. And goodness knows how this fits in with the other Chalandrians in Minia. There are others living here, right?”
“Yes, but…”
“I don’t expect you to tell me who they are,” Yorin clarified quickly. “It’s probably a case of the less I know, the better. For their safety, as well as mine.” Gods, that could be a problem, he realised belatedly. If Nerik was ever exposed somehow, then it would put Yorin in the firing line. The best he’d be able to do in those circumstances was plead ignorance and hope for the best. “I’m not trying to pressure you into anything,” he said, realising how this might come across. “If you think this is all too complicated, I’d understand.” He’d be sorely disappointed, but he’d understand.
“It will be complicated,” Nerik said, his forehead creasing in a frown. Yorin couldn’t resist the temptation to run his finger over the ridges, marvelling at how real they looked. To think that a witch had invented all this from scratch – Nerik’s dark eyebrows, the exact shade of blue for his eyes, the line where a dusting of stubble grew over his chin. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to give it a go,” Nerik said. He plucked at one of the buttons on Yorin’s shirt. “So we should probably go upstairs, right?” he said, a playful edge to his voice.
Yorin nodded, his knees suddenly feeling weak. They were really going to do this. “Right. Yes. The… um… Yes. This way, then…” He moved on shaking legs to the stairs and led Nerik up them, glancing back several times to make sure he was still there and Yorin wasn’t hallucinating all this. At the top, they had to weave between tables laid out with ongoing projects, and Yorin shoved one of them to the side, impatient to get to the bed.
And then he had to backtrack to close the curtains. Being on the second floor, they weren’t likely to have any stray passers-by looking in on them, but there was the slight possibility someone from the upper storey across the street might look out across the road, and the last thing either of them needed was to inadvertently draw unwanted attention to themselves.
Job done, he turned around and had to stifle a moan as he saw what Nerik was doing.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Yorin stood frozen in indecision, not sure whether he should go to Nerik or keep watching him from a distance. Nerik was sitting on the side of the bed, his shirt already off, and in the process of hastily removing his boots. He glanced up and saw Yorin watched, and smirked at him. “Oh, come on,” he said, his usual cheekiness back in full force. “Nothing you haven’t seen before, right?” He stretched his arms over his head, showing off the full length of his torso, muscles standing out in stark definition. He toed off his boots, then pulled each foot into his lap to tug off his socks, giving Yorin a fine view of the bulge in his trousers as he did so. Then he sat back, leaning on his arms as he waited for Yorin.
Yorin’s legs felt like lumps of wood, but he somehow managed to get them moving, plodding across the floorboards one step at a time. He stopped when he was in front of Nerik, entirely unsure about how to proceed.
“Don’t mind if I do,” Nerik said, reaching for the buttons on his shirt. Yorin watched numbly as Nerik undid them one by one, then allowed the man to slip the shirt off his shoulders. Nerik ran a gentle finger down Yorin’s chest, causing goose bumps to stand out all up and down his torso. “Take your shoes off,” Nerik prompted him, so Yorin bent down and did so. By the time he looked up again, Nerik was lounging back against his pillows, stretched out on the bed like an offering to the gods.
Yorin sat down gingerly on the edge. Nerik scooted over, patting the space he’d just made. It wasn’t a wide bed, and it would be a tight fit for the both of them… but Yorin supposed that being close together was kind of the point of this exercise.
Gods, he was nervous.
He stretched out on the bed, shuffling closer to Nerik at his urging, and then he felt Nerik’s warm hand on his chest, stroking soothing lines up and down through the sparse hair there. Yorin knew that plenty of men had far more hair than him, though he himself had noticeably more than Nerik. In fact, Nerik’s torso was almost entirely smooth, with only a thin strip of hair running from his belly button down into his trousers.
“She… the witch, I mean… She made this as well?” Yorin asked, teasing Nerik’s belly button with a tentative finger.
“Yeah. She went into a fair bit of detail.”
“She did well. I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between you and a human.”
Nerik flinched, and Yorin wondered what he’d said wrong. “That’s a serious point, actually,” Nerik said, avoiding his gaze. “If anyone found out you’d slept with a demon, they’d probably kill you.”
It was the same idea Yorin had had earlier, but to hear the concern in Nerik’s voice about it was touching. “If anyone finds out youarea demon, they would definitely kill you,” Yorin replied.
“That doesn’t mean that you should… I mean, you have achoicein this,” Nerik said, worry lining his features. “I don’t.”
“I’ve spent far too much of my life worrying about what other people think,” Yorin told him. He settled more comfortably on his side and ran a hand down Nerik’s chest, around his very well made belly button, and down to the trail of hair, where it disappeared into his trousers. Then he trailed his fingers lower, over the top of the fabric, and down to Nerik’s groin. Nerik’s abdomen twitched when Yorin probed the bulge there.
“What about this?” he asked, hoping to lighten the mood a little. “Did she design this as well?”
Nerik blushed, squirming a little. “I suppose she would have had to.”
Yorin felt a sudden longing to undo Nerik’s trousers and take another look at what was inside. But his fingers felt frozen, his courage ending abruptly with those teasing words, unable to take the next step. Attempting to salvage the situation, Yorin rolled over a little and captured Nerik’s lips with his own.
A moment later, he realised he’d miscalculated the move. It pressed their naked chests together in a way that made Yorin’s breath hitch in his throat, and it put his groin into direct contact with Nerik’s very firm, very warm thigh. He felt a hand on his hip, pulling him closer, and he moaned, the sound seeming wanton and needy to his own ears.