Page 5 of The Offering of Four

“Oh,” Mendas said, the word drawing out at the end into a moan. Then he tightened around Amenzu in quick flutters and spilled wet warmth between their bodies, coming untouched as he rose and sank on Amenzu’s cock.

“You—did you,” Amenzu said, then fumbled to a stop. The heady scent of Mendas’s spend rose between them, further clouding Amenzu’s foggy mind. He slid his hands up Mendas’s back, struggling to put a single coherent thought together.

“Oh, I did.” Mendas gave a sigh and drew back. His smile was lopsided and real. “And if you don’t mind, we probablyshouldmove to the bed now for the next part.”

Amenzu licked his dry lips. “The next—what is it that comes next?”

Mendas’s eyelids were heavy with satisfaction. “You’re about to find out.”

He rose and went through the same door he and the priestess had come out of. Amenzu stood on wobbly legs and followed him, self-conscious of his fully erect cock distending the front of his robe. Through the door was Mendas’s bedchamber, a small room with a single window that contained little other than a bed and a rug beneath it. Mendas went to the window and drew the drapery across it, blocking out the sun. The dimness made the room seem cozy, and Amenzu felt something in him relax.

Mendas pulled his robe over his head and dropped it on the floor. Amenzu stared at his lithe, nude body, his cock half hard again. His scent coated Amenzu’s mouth and stirred an unfamiliar hunger. Amenzu had desires, but he had learned to acknowledge them and set them aside, and they didn’t trouble him much on a day-to-day basis. But he was sorely troubled now.

“Well, come on, then,” Mendas said, reclining on the bed and propping himself up on his elbows. He lifted his chin. “You’ve never knotted, I assume.”

“I’ve—no.” Amenzu’s ears rang. “I can’t say I have.”

“I’ve heard that the first knot can be a somewhat overwhelming experience. Let’s get that out of the way, shall we?” Mendas patted his thigh. “Come, in here.”

Amenzu’s face burned hot as he struggled out of his robe with far less grace than Mendas had managed. He knelt on the bed at Mendas’s side and laid a hesitant hand on Mendas’s knee. “Should I?—”

“Here.” Mendas crossed his ankles and gestured at his thighs, pressed tight together. The position lifted his balls and cock and presented them to Amenzu like ripe apricots set out on a platter. “I’m wet enough that we won’t need any oil.”

“You want me to—your thighs? But I thought you would want—” Amenzu gestured vaguely. “You know. Inside.”

Mendas was watching him, his expression more somber than Amenzu thought was called for. “There’s time for that,” he said gently. “It’s still early in my heat. If you knot me now I’ll go insensible, and I’ll do more than enough mindless begging later. And I think—well, I’ve never taken a knot, so better not to have two overwhelmed novices at one time.”

Amenzu had never expected he would be so frankly discussing knots with the crown prince. “All right,” he said, voice faint.

He wasn’t sure how to get into position. He straddled Mendas’s knees, then aimed his cock at the seam of Mendas’s thighs. But he couldn’t see how it would go in; he had to lower himself down, but then his cock slipped off to the side instead of sliding between. He carefully braced his weight on one hand to guide himself in, and then he had it and sank into the warm cleft.

Mendas’s thighs were as slick as he had promised, and tight and so soft. Amenzu couldn’t hold back a groan as he rolled his hips in a first tentative thrust. He was hard enough to ache after feeling Mendas come apart around him, and now the warmpressure had him biting down on his own lip to take the edge off the spine-melting pleasure.

He had slid in right below Mendas’s balls, so that each glide out and push back in dragged against Mendas’s sac. Mendas sighed and squirmed, then reached down to touch himself. His cock was fat and full in his hand. Raised up on his arms as he was, Amenzu could see everything, every flicker of Mendas’s expression, the way his mouth dropped open to show the wet inside.

A warm pool of sensation filled Amenzu’s lower belly and spread outward from there. He wasn’t going to last, but he didn’t think Mendas expected him to. Still, he slowed the movements of his hips, driven by some vague notion that Mendas’s pleasure should come before his own.

Mendas was watching him, hand moving on himself with lazy strokes as he gazed upward at Amenzu’s face. “Are you trying to wait? I wish you wouldn’t.”

“I’m trying,” Amenzu said, “to,” and then couldn’t think of how to finish his sentence. He rolled his hips again. His pulse throbbed in the base of his cock, steady beats in time with his heart. He knew, in theory, what was going to happen, but theory wasn’t much use to him now, with Mendas beneath him and watching him not with mockery but with reverence. He was at the precipice, and as Mendas tightened his thighs with a faint smile, Amenzu’s first knot began to bloom.

His arms buckled as he plunged headlong into ecstasy. He collapsed onto Mendas, his hips jolting in hard twitches, his knot trapped in the vise of Mendas’s thighs. He buried his face in Mendas’s neck, struggling to withstand the tremors rolling through his body.

“Ah, Amenzu,” Mendas said, his voice faint through the roaring in Amenzu’s ears. Mendas’s hands stroked down Amenzu’s back, soothing him through the first shock, untilAmenzu’s shaking eased into sweet pleasure as his knot throbbed. Then Mendas pushed at his shoulders and rolled him over onto his back.

Amenzu sprawled in the sheets, thighs open and lax, knotted cock rigid against his abdomen as it spurted with every pulse. He groaned, his hips twitching into open air, searching for the tight clutch of Mendas’s thighs. He fumbled for his cock, needing something, shaky and bewildered and coated in truly startling quantities of his own spend.

“Let me,” Mendas said. He sat on Amenzu’s thighs and wrapped both hands around Amenzu’s knot, gripping hard, and Amenzu groaned again, this time in relief. That was perfect: exactly the pressure he needed. He flexed his hips into Mendas’s fists, emptying himself as his pleasure slowly unwound.

At last it ended. He lay blinking up at the ceiling, limp as if he had only recently recovered from a fever. His knot felt tender and swollen in Mendas’s hands, and almost unbearably sensitive now. Mendas relaxed his grip and stroked the knot with careful fingertips, and Amenzu hissed through his teeth, squirming both to get away and to get more.

“Impressive,” Mendas said.

Amenzu blinked at him. Mendas’s dry tone belied the dark urgency of his gaze and the way his breath came fast through his parted lips. Amenzu slid his hands up Mendas’s thighs toward his straining cock. “Should I?—?”

“You’re already a mess, so we might as well,” Mendas said.

“Is that,” Amenzu began, but his voice came out as a harsh croak. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Is that the only reason?”