Page 18

Chapter Seventeen

P erian waited for a moment, but Brannal still didn’t emerge from the bedroom, and now Perian was actually a little bit worried. Unless the other man had gone in there to get Perian a shirt and fallen asleep, there was really no reason for him to be gone this long or ignore his friends leaving.

Perian approached the room, stuck his head cautiously inside, and looked around. For a moment, he couldn’t see Brannal at all, and he had a wild, irreverent thought that maybe the man had gone out the window or through a secret passage… and then Perian spotted where Brannal had slid to the ground next to the wardrobe where Perian’s clothes were, knees pulled up to his chest and face buried in his knees.

Perian’s heart lurched, and he crossed the room before he even realized he’d thought about moving. He went to his knees beside the other man and laid a hand on his back.

“Hey, it’s all right.”

Brannal looked up at him, and that was when Perian saw he had one of Perian’s shirts in his lap and had buried his face in it. His red-eyed, tear-streaked face. Given that he was still wet from where Molun had drenched him, he was the most bedraggled, most pathetic version of himself Perian had ever seen.

Perian’s heart twinged again.

“I’m so sorry,” Brannal said, voice rough. “I should have been paying more attention. I shouldn’t have come up with that stupid idea to begin with. I didn’t know he burned you, I swear. I didn’t want anything to happen to you.”

Perian blew out a breath.

“I believe you,” Perian told him. “I understand what you were thinking, logically. And it is your job to make sure the Mage Warriors function.”

Brannal flinched like Perian had hit him. Perian reached out and tangled their fingers together where Brannal still had them clutched against his knees, buried in Perian’s shirt.

Reflectively, Perian said, “I even understand that it probably seemed like a good idea, and also like something I’d be willing to do after the training session with Molun. This was a bit more of a free-for-all, and it was with the express intent of capturing me when I didn’t have any good tools to defend myself. That was, um, harder for me to experience than I thought it would be.”

Brannal made a scoffing sound. “I didn’t even ask you if you wanted to do it.”

“Well, to be fair,” Perian conceded, “you did ask me about the training this morning. I think we can both agree the format and details turned out to be important, and knowing about it and consenting to it in advance would have been helpful. I mean, I could have said no when you announced what was happening, but—”

Brannal was already shaking his head. “That was not a fair opportunity to refuse.”

“Truly, though,” Perian admitted, “it’s the sort of thing I probably would agree to. If you’d asked, I probably would even have agreed to this one, without realizing it would be harder than I thought to have all those people coming after me.”

“I should have thought of that,” Brannal said, face a mask of self-recrimination.

“But I didn’t even think of it,” Perian pointed out. “Are you saying you’re smarter than me?”

Brannal opened his mouth, stared at Perian, and then closed it again.

“Good answer,” Perian said, smiling faintly. He sighed and grew more serious again. Quietly, he admitted, “It felt a lot like you set me up. That was not a nice feeling.”

Wincing again, Brannal nodded. “That’s because I did set you up. I didn’t think of it like that, but it’s I was doing. I thought I had a good idea, and I thought I could execute it without anyone getting hurt. I should have asked for your involvement.”

“That would have been better,” Perian agreed.

Brannal blew out a breath. “I’m not planning on doing anything like that ever again, I swear, but I will definitely, absolutely talk to you first should anything remotely similar reoccur.”

“Thank you,” Perian said quietly.

The other man still looked like he was beating himself up, and it was hard to watch.

“Listen,” Perian said, “I’m still a bit upset, but it’s not entirely at you. I think I had every right to be upset, and your attitude was not helping, but—”

Brannal groaned. “I was an ass.”

“Yes, you really were,” Perian agreed.

That was not at all what he’d been intending to say, but he couldn’t help but agree when it was brought up. He hesitated for a moment, and then decided it was mostly out there already.

“Why were you?”

Brannal was silent for a long moment, and then the words spilled out of him.

“A lot of reasons. None of them particularly good. I’ve never been in a relationship before, and navigating it has proved more challenging than I anticipated. Cormal has already accused me of letting my feelings get in the way of my judgment when it comes to you. I was trying to make sure they didn’t, with the result that I overcompensated drastically. I really did think I’d come up with a clever way to get Cormal off your back, and instead, you got hurt, and you were so upset. It turns out I really don’t like it when you’re angry with me, and I didn’t deal with it very well.” He scrubbed at his face. “And I already missed you and was worried you were going to decide I wasn’t worth it, and then of all the ways you could get hurt, you were burned, the one thing that a Fire Mage most worries they can do, the one thing that most scares people about Fire Mages. I mean, you can hurt someone with any of the elements, but the idea that someone can conjure fire in their bare hands and burn you—”

Perian reached out and cupped Brannal’s face with his hands. He sucked in an unsteady breath.

“I need you to listen to me. Are you?”

“Yes,” Brannal murmured, his gaze caught by Perian’s.

“I am not scared of you,” Perian told him firmly.

He felt the shudder that ran through the other man’s body and watched his eyes get glassy and wet. After a moment, his hands came up to cover Perian’s.

Perian continued. “I haven’t been in any proper relationships either, and this one has definitely been more complicated than I expected.”

Brannal huffed something that was almost a wet-sounding laugh, and Perian released Brannal’s face, but continued to clasp his hands where they came to rest twined on Brannal’s knees.

“We clearly have some things we need to work on,” Perian acknowledged, “but I want to work on them. I really like you, all of you, including the fact you can conjure fireballs in your bare hands. That’s amazing. You and Cormal are completely different people no matter that you can both control fire.” Perian made sure he sounded extra repulsed as he said, “I definitely don’t want him in my bed.”

Brannal’s lips tipped up slightly.

Quietly, Perian admitted, “I was upset and hurting, and I think I wasn’t wrong in a lot of what I said, but I wasn’t right, either.”

“You have every right to be upset!” Brannal jumped to his defense immediately, making Perian smile.

“Well, yeah. And if you try to tell me I’m overreacting or dictate where I sleep again, I’m going to ask Molun to drench you with water every time he sees you, understood?”

Brannal made a face but nodded. “That’s fair. I was out of line.”

Perian nodded firmly, because as much as he now understood where Brannal had come from, that really hadn’t been acceptable.

“I think we were talking but not really listening to each other. I hope that, in the future, we can actually communicate our way through a misunderstanding. But if that’s not working, if we need space, either of us, then we need to be able to take it.”

Brannal looked chagrined. “The night in the bedroom, you didn’t get why, but you knew I was upset and you accommodated me and listened to what I needed. I will do better.”

“Thank you,” Perian said. “I do also understand that’s easier to do when you’re not angry. Tempers flare, we say things we don’t mean or shouldn’t have said. I told Molun and Arvus that you didn’t want to touch me, and that was inappropriate too. I apologize for lashing out with that, and I especially shouldn’t have done it with other people listening.”

“It’s all right,” Brannal told him immediately.

“Truly,” Perian added, feeling like he still hadn’t apologized enough. “I’m sorry. I haven’t actually got in a lot of fights, and I don’t like what it says about me that I attacked like that.”

He mostly hadn’t been thinking, but he’d been hurt, physically and emotionally, and he’d just sort of… snapped.

Squeezing Perian’s hand comfortingly, Brannal said, “Like you said, it’s easy to say something we don’t mean in the heat of the moment.”

Perian swallowed. “I guess so. We both lost our tempers. And we can both work on it.”

Nodding once more, throat bobbing as he swallowed, Brannal said earnestly, “Thank you. Every time you say that we can do anything, you make me feel better, even when I don’t think I deserve it.”

“Well, look, here’s the thing,” Perian said earnestly. “We’ve already talked about how I feel about the set-up, and you’ve already agreed to improve on that front. It hurt me.” Brannal flinched again, and Perian said hurriedly, “No, listen. It hurt me emotionally , and we’ve talked about how we’re not going to let anything like that happen again.” He waited until Brannal nodded. “Yes, your whole idea was for Cormal to be able to beat me, but at the end of the day, the only person responsible for Cormal’s actions is Cormal.”

Brannal frowned, looking puzzled.

Perian continued, “He didn’t have to throw a fireball at my face. He made it through that whole room not throwing fireballs at anyone else, or at least not at their faces or at people who couldn’t counter it. No matter what the set up was, that was how he chose to act, so when it comes down to it, that was all on him. Some of the anger I was expressing earlier was absolutely at you, but you didn’t deserve the anger I felt towards him.”

Brannal was still frowning. “I don’t think—”

“Let me ask you this,” Perian interrupted. “If any of the others could throw fireballs, do you think they would have? They were all in the situation he was. Half that room was supposed to capture me. Do you believe any of them would have thrown a fireball at my head?”

And after a long moment, Brannal could only shake his head because they both knew the truth of that.

And then Perian’s lips tipped up. “I mean, I don’t actually know everyone in the room, and I don’t think I’ve annoyed anyone as much as I’ve annoyed Cormal, but maybe there are some others who just wish they could throw fireballs at me.”

Brannal didn’t look amused. “Don’t joke about such things.”

Perian made a face. “Too soon?”

Brannal sighed, sounding a mixture of exasperated and entirely fond. “May I hug you?”

“Yes, please,” Perian said immediately.

And there on the floor, tucked in the corner by the wardrobe, Brannal widened his stance so that Perian could shuffle in between his legs and Brannal could wrap his arms carefully around him. Perian sagged against the man’s chest and brought his arms up—the right rather gingerly—to wrap as far around Brannal’s shoulders as he could. Brannal leaned his head against Perian’s, getting as close as he possibly could. Brannal was still rather wet, and Perian was kind of damp too, but he didn’t care.

“I’m sorry,” Brannal whispered against Perian’s skin.

“I know you are,” Perian said. “I’m sorry too.”

“You don’t need to be sorry.”

He huffed a laugh. “Well, we’ll have to agree to disagree. I mean, I do think you have more to be sorry for…”

And Brannal snorted a laugh, which was exactly what Perian had been going for.

They stayed there for a long time, just hugging one another and basking in the connection.

Eventually, though, Brannal made a sound.

“I’ve lost all feeling in my ass.”

Perian pulled out of the hug, snorting with laughter. “That’s a serious shame. It’s such a nice ass.”

Brannal smiled at him, something still a little vulnerable about it, but closer to normal than it had been.

“Let’s get up,” Perian said definitively. “There’s a perfectly nice bed right next to us, and it makes far more sense to be in there.”

Perian then made the mistake of trying to get up with the aid of his right hand. Although his hand wasn’t burned, his arm did not appreciate the stretching that was required, and he sucked in a sharp breath.

Brannal’s face fell, and he managed to stand up between Perian and the wall and then offer his hand.

“Let me help?”

Perian put his left hand in Brannal’s and braced himself better, allowing the other man to help pull him to his feet. He let out a pained groan as his muscles protested.

Brannal looked immediately alarmed. “Fire and water, did I hurt you? I’m so sorry!”

Perian shook his head. “That wasn’t you. That wasn’t even Cormal. That was deciding it was a wonderful idea to ride like the wind for an extended period yesterday after not having ridden in quite some time. My legs were just letting me know I should maybe try some more regular forms of exercise.”

Brannal did not look the slightest bit amused. “Is there any part of you that doesn’t hurt?”

“Most of me, actually,” Perian said.

“Except for your legs and your arm,” Brannal said flatly. “I think that’s more than half of you.”

Perian regarded him with bemusement. “That is definitely not how that adds up. There are two incidents, one of them self-inflicted. I’ll be fine.”

Brannal blew out a breath. “I really hate seeing you in pain.”

“I’ll get better,” Perian assured him. He yawned suddenly, surprising himself, and realized he was exhausted. He was pretty sure this was the emotional crash from everything that had happened. “I’m sure it will be helped by some sleep. I neither know nor care what time it is, but I definitely need sleep.”

He was pretty sure it wasn’t even dinner time yet, but he could tell he was reaching the end of his reserves.

And just like that, Brannal looked awkward again.

“Oh, of course. Did you want me to get anything ready for you?”

Perian eyed him uncertainly.

“To take to Molun and Arvus’s.”

Oh . That was the last thing he’d told Brannal, wasn’t it? And Brannal hadn’t been present for the further discussion with his friends. Perian had also made very clear what would happen if Brannal tried to decide what Perian was going to do in the future.

“Molun and Arvus have very kindly extended an open invitation. But when you’re not being an ass, I rather like being here.”

The tense stance of Brannal’s shoulders relaxed a little.

“Yeah?” he asked cautiously.

Perian nodded. “You have a very comfortable bed, and I really like it when we’re in it together.”

“Me too.” Brannal looked rather wistful.

“Then that’s definitely what we should do,” Perian said cheerfully. “I will let you know if I need some space. But just at the moment, I would like to cuddle somewhere that’s not as hard as the floor.”

Brannal’s face softened. “I’d like that too. And maybe to put on some clothes that are dry.”

Perian nodded. “Yes, Molun is very good with the deluge.”

They carefully cleaned up and made use of the water closet. Brannal hovered a bit, but Perian didn’t really mind. He hadn’t had a lot of people be that concerned when he was injured as an adult, though he thankfully hadn’t gotten hurt often.

He hoped Brannal wasn’t being too motivated by guilt. He’d keep an eye on it. For now, it was helpful having someone to assist him with all the things he usually did with his right hand.

Perian couldn’t help but grumble as they climbed into bed, even as he realized this would probably not help with Brannal’s feeling of guilt.

“Think of all the things that I usually do with my right hand! This is going to be really annoying.”

Perian wondered if he could train himself to block fireballs with his left arm. Or, you know, anything that might be dangerous and flying at his face. It would still be painful and annoying, but not quite as much of an inconvenience.

“I’ll help you,” Brannal promised.

They actually had to rearrange the entire way they slept because Perian couldn’t lie on his side with his right arm against the bed.

He grumbled some more. “This is going to be so hard.”

Brannal cuddled up to him so that Perian’s back was plastered against Brannal’s front. His right hand settled on Perian’s hip.

“I’d be happy to help with that.”

It was a similar group of words, but the tone was entirely different, voice lower and warmer. His fingers brushed across the fabric of Perian’s sleep trousers, toying with the waistband.

Perian could feel his body begin to respond immediately, and he could feel that Brannal’s body had begun to respond, a thickening pressure against Perian’s ass. He sucked in a breath.

“Uh,” Perian said intelligently.

A finger slipped under the waistband but didn’t venture any further.

“Would you like that?” Brannal asked. “For me to help with everything that’s so hard right now?”

Perian huffed out a laugh. He’d been so busy complaining that he hadn’t noticed all the innuendo. The finger brushed along the skin of his hip just under his waistband, making him shiver.

“Would you like that?” Brannal repeated, his finger still just moving back and forth slowly, lighting Perian up.

“I, uh, would really enjoy that,” he admitted, his voice thick, “but there’s a ‘but’.”

Brannal’s finger froze immediately, and Perian mourned the loss of sensation.

Perian tried to explain: “I’m mindful of where we were before I was injured, so while I would like you to help me with everything that’s hard for the foreseeable future”—probably way more of the future than was feasible, in fact—“I really couldn’t bear the idea that you’re doing this when it’s not really something you want because you feel guilty.”

Brannal sucked in a sharp breath.

Perian swallowed again and admitted in a low voice, “I swear I’m still interested, and I’m going to keep being interested whether we have sex or not. And my forgiveness of what happened today is not in any way connected to what is happening right now. So, if you’d rather not do this, it’s totally fine. What I will not forgive is if you put yourself in a position you don’t want to be in, all right?”

For a moment, there was complete silence, and then Perian could hear and feel the shaky exhale as Brannal’s breath gusted past his cheek.

Perian was pretty sure that was the end of that, and while his body was a bit annoyed, he meant what he’d said.

Only then Brannal pressed a kiss to the skin behind Perian’s ear, and it was his turn to suck in a breath.

“Thank you,” Brannal whispered, voice quiet but perfectly audible because of how close they were together. “Thank you for caring about me and what I feel no matter what. This isn’t guilt. It’s maybe a little bit of relief, and mostly, it’s the realization I could have lost you today—if not through Cormal’s actions then through my own—and the realization of how much I want you, even if it’s sometimes complicated. I appreciate more than I can say that you have been giving me space to figure this out. I promise this isn’t doing what I think you want, this is me wanting to make you feel good, for us to do what we want together.”

Perian felt tears sting the back of his eyes and just breathed for a moment because that was exactly, precisely the answer he’d wanted, even though he hadn’t known it.

After a moment, he managed to say, “It is definitely what we want.”

“Are you sure?” Brannal asked. “Because now I sort of feel like I ruined the moment.”

Perian sniffed. “Not at all. I mean, really, is there ever a time when a hand job is inappropriate?”

Brannal snorted a laugh and obediently began to slide his finger back along the skin under Perian’s waistband.

Ignoring reality, he agreed, “Absolutely not. Hand jobs are appropriate at all times.”

He rolled his hips, making sure Perian could feel that he was back on board with everything they were doing. Perian squirmed, trying to get closer.

Brannal clucked his tongue. “Ah, ah, ah. You’re injured. You’re not going to move, and I’m going to take care of you.”

Since this was very clearly a form of pleasurable torture, Perian didn’t protest. Apart from all the times he did protest and try to convince Brannal he should do more, for the sake of all the elements.

But they both knew Perian didn’t actually want him to.

Brannal continued to tease him slowly and steadily, taking what was truly an absurd amount of time to get his hand down to the one area Perian desperately wanted him to touch. He hadn’t been aware he possessed so many sensitive areas, but Brannal found every one located between his hip and his groin with impeccable skill.

Perian was actually astonished he didn’t come the moment the man wrapped his hand around his erection, but with more of that incredible skill, Brannal made his touch too light at first, just teasing for several long minutes, listening to all of Perian’s begging before he finally grasped him more firmly and pumped him until he came.

Perian was so wrung out by the end of it that he almost didn’t remember Brannal, but he could still feel that erection pressed against him, and he wanted Brannal to feel as good as he did.

“What ’bout you?” he managed to say with more effort than he thought it should take.

“I’m fine.”

“Come for me,” Perian requested. “Want to feel it.”

Brannal pressed another kiss to the back of his neck—Perian hadn’t known just how much he liked that, either, until Brannal—and rocked against Perian’s body until he came with a sucked in breath. Brannal cleaned them up, and they fell asleep together, spent and replete.