27

lazarus

KESTREL CAME INTO my room in the darkness, and he was angry.

I woke up before he said anything. I sat up in bed, alert, and waited, my heart starting to pick up speed in my chest.

He stayed in the darkness, and all I could see was the general, shadowy shape of him, even though bits of him seemed to fade out, insubstantial, against the other shapes of my darkened room. "You think I use him."

He meant Paladin. I grabbed a handful of one of my blankets. "We both do," I said.

"No, you blame me for it."

"I blame myself, too," I protested. We both knew Paladin was fucked up. We both knew he was damaged, deep-down damaged, and we didn't try to fix him. We let him stay that way and took advantage of him. I was well aware, well fucking aware, of what sort of people we were.

Now, Clementine was here, in this mix of us, and she was on the path to being deep-down damaged, too, and apparently, we were all on the let's-just-take-advantage-of-her-too train.

I'd walked by the living room and seen her fucking Paladin. I'd stopped, watching it, because she was gloriously beautiful, her breasts gently bouncing as she worked herself up and down on him, both of them sighing in a rhythm together. I'd watched too long, feeling an ache inside me that was only partly because it turned me on. What the other parts were, I couldn't describe, but they made me ashamed, I knew that.

"Oh, you blame yourself for everything," Kestrel said caustically. "You blame and you blame, but you never stop doing any of the things you blame yourself for."

"You think I don't see that about myself?" I growled.

"Well, whatever, you need to stop taking it out on me," he snarled.

"I'm not ."

"Oh, you…" He was so angry, he couldn't even finish the thought. I could hear his heavy breathing, see his fists lifting in the darkness.

Abruptly, his breathing caught and then changed. He let out a little noise like a gasp. "Oh," he said. "Oh, it is about you."

What the fuck was he talking about?

"You need it," he said in an iron voice. It was a decision.

"Need what?" I said.

"You need what I do for Paladin. Maybe not quite the same way, I don't know, but… you and me have things to work through here, Lazarus. So, get up, come over here, and get on your knees."

I gaped at him. He was not serious.

"I'm going to punish you," he said. "And then you're going to feel better. Get over here."

Embarrassingly, my lower lip started to tremble. "You can't do that. You couldn't possibly punish me enough."

"Oh, try me," he said. "On your fucking knees, Lazarus."

I got out of the bed and advanced on him. As I got closer, I could make out his features in the darkness. He was wearing a pair of pajama pants and no shirt and he had this crazy, wild expression on his face, like he'd come unleashed. I was taller than him, and I stood over him, glaring down at him and he refused to be cowed. He bared his teeth at me and stood his ground.

So .

I got on my knees.

"There," he said, with a little sigh of relief. "That's right."

I was eye-level with his crotch, and I could see that he was tenting his pajama pants and that made my whole body go strangely tight in a very good way. I muttered a series of swear words.

"I'm going to punish you with my cock," he told me in a voice like midnight.

My balls went all kinds of tight and I felt like I had been transported into some other realm of pleasure.

"No," he corrected himself, "you are going to punish yourself."

"Punish myself with your cock?" I breathed. I was violently turned on.

"Yes," he said. "My cock is just the sort of rod you need. You've been spoiled, and you've been spared, and now, you need to take your punishment. Take me out."

I ripped his pajamas down to his ankles and now he was basically naked. And yet, I felt like the one who was exposed. I felt like the one who was vulnerable. I let out a keening noise, and I seized his erection.

I did something I'd never done to a man before, not even Paladin. I started jerking his cock with one hand and I applied my tongue to his balls, lapping at them like I was going to find some salvation there.

He sucked in a hiss of breath through his teeth. It whistled. "Shit," he whimpered. "Shit, Lazarus, shit ."

Hair was getting in my mouth. I stopped licking him to yank it out with the hand that wasn't jerking his cock. I was probably hurting him. I didn't have any lube and I wasn't being gentle with him at all.

He reached down and pushed my face back to his balls. "Take what you need," he gasped.

I moaned and lathed him all over, sucking one ball into my mouth while he swore under his breath and then the other.

"You've done horrible fucking things, Lazarus," he said. "All you deserve is this, and we both know it. "

My cock spasmed in this way where it practically felt like I came, but nothing came out. I screamed into his crotch.

Suddenly, I tucked the head of him into my mouth and sucked hard on the head of him.

He let out a shout. "Baby, it's all there, it's all there. You just do your penance, make me come, and then—"

I stuffed my mouth full of him, all the way down my throat. I swallowed the head of his cock.

He shrieked.

He came.

My throat was full of his release, and I choked and gagged and struggled to swallow all of him.

He stroked my hair, the back of my neck, whispering nonsense words to me, soothing words, praise and my name and the word "good" and the word "right."

Tears were streaming down my face, but that might have been from having a cock shoved down my throat.

I rocked off of him, onto my knees, wrung out, looking up at him in the darkness like he was everything.

He touched my face. He brushed at my tears with both of his thumbs. "Lazarus," he breathed in this soft, soft voice I'd only ever heard him use with Paladin. "Lazarus, baby."

I shuddered. A sob welled up in me.

"Lie down," he told me in that same gentle voice. "Go lie on your back on your bed now."

I shuffled up to obey, my head spinning. I felt lightheaded.

When he touched my cock, the sob came out.

It felt like the warmest, pinkest, safest soft blanket. He was gentle as he rubbed the copious pre-come I'd apparently been leaking like a sieve all over the head of my cock.

I sobbed again.

"Shh," he whispered. "Let go, let it all go."

It built like sweet pressure. It released easy, waves of brightness going all through me, my muscles relaxing—muscles I hadn't known were tense. I felt in it my neck and my shoulders and my forearms and my thighs.

When I was done coming, I was jelly on the bed, more tears slipping down my cheeks. I moaned.

He held my cock gently in his fist. Little tremors went through it and he gave me tiny answering squeezes, which were almost too much. Almost.

I shut my eyes.

"Scoot," he grunted.

I did.

He arranged himself next to me in the bed. I rolled over and pressed my wet face into his bare chest.

He kissed the crown of my head, where my hair met my forehead. "You're not allowed to be embarrassed," he told me.

I laughed. I tilted my head back, offering my lips. Kiss me, please kiss me, I begged silently.

He did. He kissed my mouth and then both of my cheeks and then the tip of my nose. "Better," he pronounced.

It wasn't a question, but I agreed. "Yes, better now."

He sighed, satisfied.

"Stay," I said in a small, ragged voice.

"Obviously," he said.

paladin

WE WERE LYING on the floor of the living room, and I was dressed, and she was not, and I had one hand full of one of her breasts and the other full of her ample, perfect thigh. "So, the difference between humans and a lot of other mammals is that a human woman's body is ready to get pregnant every month—you start building up all this blood, which is eventually menstruation. Most mammals don't do that until after they're already pregnant. That's for a whole bunch of reasons that we don't need to get into—"

"Don't we?" She was giggling.

"No, because it's not important," I said. "The important thing is that it started happening, and that, for whatever reason, we made it work and didn't, you know die out, which it seems kind of like we should have done."

"Really? "

"I mean, think about it," I said. "You're an early homo sapiens and you live in this hunter-gatherer lifestyle, following the buffalo around or whatever—"

"Buffalo?"

"No, fuck, you're right, that comes later," I said. "We're probably in Africa at this point, and I doubt we ate that much meat. We got the meat for you."

"For me personally?"

"For women," I said. "Because you needed fucking iron. You were bleeding every goddamned month, and we had to provide for you."

She threw back her head and laughed, and it was a sound like bells at Christmas, like home and safety and everything I ever wanted. "Of course, right. We were just helplessly bleeding, and you men were out there fashioning spears."

"I mean, basically," I said. "Yes."

She snuggled into my chest. "Okay."

"I'm not saying women didn't help," I said, giving her breast a little squeeze. "I'm sure the women were making spears, too. But all the things we had to do to be, you know, humans, it could have come from this reason. Like, okay, women need meat, so we hunt. It'd be better if we didn't have to disrupt the tribe constantly to follow the herds around because half of us are on their period, and so, we figured out agriculture. We built whole civilizations, whole structures of society."

"Because of periods?" She giggled again.

"Because of women," I said, digging my fingers into her thigh for emphasis. "Because we would do anything to keep our women happy, because, we, you know, need you."

"This is the most chauvinistic thing—masquerading as chivalry—that I think I ever heard." But she kissed me when she said it. She wasn't really annoyed with me.

"This is what the male of the species does," I said. "We sacrifice ourselves to protect the women. Like, why are male birds the bright and pretty ones? To attract predators. Because men are expendable."

She shook her head at me. "No, you are not . "

I shrugged.

She lay her head back down. "It's sort of sweet, this theory of yours."

"But you don't believe it."

"I'm not saying that necessarily. Maybe it's true. It's only that men don't behave that way, at all, most of the time. They don't behave sacrificially. Look at this whole place, the way Griff and the other guys hoarded the tithes like fucking cattle, and—"

"No, I hear you," I said with a sigh. "I think men resent it, is the thing. I think we know it, deep down, that nature considers males to be expendable, and I think it hurts us somewhere, and we take it out on women."

"That's just… incredibly convoluted," she said, furrowing her brow.

I laughed. It was. "Yeah, I maybe think too much sometimes."

"How do you even know all these things? You said you didn't pay attention in class. Did you like science class and not history?"

"No, I hated all school subjects equally," I said. "I read articles on the internet a lot. Mostly when I'm supposed to be doing chores. I waste the whole day going down some research hole and then Kestrel gets pissed and I have nothing to show for myself except incredibly convoluted theories that everyone thinks are dumb."

"I didn't say it was dumb," she said, tracing a little pattern on my chest. "Nothing about you is dumb, Paladin. Nothing at all."

I sucked in a breath and pulled her really close.

Then, we were kissing.

She pulled back, sighing. "Mmm, Paladin, bed?"

"Bed," I repeated.

She was sitting up. "Seriously, this floor is hard and cold, and you need to do everything to keep me happy, right, so…?"

"Yes, ma'am," I said.

"Just to sleep," she said, stretching, her body elongating in mesmerizing and wonderful ways.

My mouth was dry. "I don't deserve you."

"Yes, well, you'll just have to work harder," she said airily, getting up. "At the very least, you must perfect your thumb wrestling skills."

I chortled out a laugh, and I got up, too. I pulled her into my arms.

She grinned up at me, and everything felt like a warm, wonderful world of safety and happiness. I wanted to have her in my arms forever. She was all I needed. "The problem is that we need something to do, too, Paladin."

"Who needs what to do?" I could not think words.

"Women, I mean," she said. "If you guys are all out hunting buffalo and everything, we need something else to do besides lie around bleeding and getting rescued."

"True," I said. "Also, uh, we humans are pretty damned good at survival, aren't we? Even out here, beyond the walls, it's not like people are dying of starvation or exposure or whatever. Maybe a long time ago, it made sense to divide things along gender lines for the purpose of survival, but it doesn't anymore."

"It's just in-fighting," she said, furrowing her brow. "On this side of the wall or in the cities, it's the same thing. It's like we're all very pissed off that the survival issue has been solved, and we don't know what to do with ourselves now, so we feel the need to ruin it just to entertain ourselves."

I grimaced. "That's bleak."

"Right," she said. "Well, it'll look better in the morning." She yawned. "Nothing like the mornings out here on this side of the wall. Nothing at all ."

On that, we were agreed.