AN:// spicy scene ahead, you have been warned
The inn's back door was the kind that inns had when they had been built by people who understood that the most useful entrance in a building was not always the most visible one — a service door, low-framed, opening onto the side passage between the inn and the adjacent building, used by kitchen staff and laundry service and the occasional guest who preferred a route that did not pass through the main hall where the evening trade had gathered at the long table by the fire.
Styrmir used it.
He used it because the main hall was occupied at this hour and because the person he was carrying was unconscious and wearing a boutique fitting coat and had a needle mark on his neck, and the combination of these things was going to generate more questions in the main hall than he had answers for.
He got through the back door without putting Gerffron down.
He got through the door of his room — second floor, east side, the window facing the side passage rather than the street, chosen for its quiet — and he laid Gerffron on the bed with the careful, specific attention of someone placing something they do not want to damage.
He straightened up.
He stood in the room.
He looked at the person on his bed.
The room was a good inn room — not luxurious, clean and adequately furnished, warmed by a small iron stove in the corner whose fire he had banked before leaving that morning and which had maintained itself in his absence with the reliable competence of well-made stoves. The evening light came through the small window amber and domestic, making the room look warmer than it was.
In that light, on the bed he had been sleeping in for two nights, Gerffron Wadee lay with his eyes closed and his head turned slightly to one side and the fitting coat still on.
He was breathing steadily.
He was physically intact in all the ways that mattered.
And he was — Styrmir sat in the chair at the room's small table, because the bed was occupied and he needed to sit somewhere that was not the bed — he was considerably thinner than he had been the last time Styrmir had seen him.
The last time Styrmir had seen him, they had been in the Wadee estate's back corridor on a winter morning three years ago, and Gerffron had been wearing the consort's formal clothes and had pressed two pebbles into Styrmir's palm and had said, in the specific voice he used when he was saying the thing he actually meant rather than the managed version of it: you will not always be here.
He had been right.
But the person on the bed was not the person from that corridor. Not entirely. The frame was the same — the same height, the same bones — but the frame was not inhabited in the same way. The jaw was sharper than it should have been. The hollows under the cheekbones were deeper. The specific, comprehensive quality of a person who had been running at a deficit for long enough that the deficit had changed the shape of them.
Styrmir said, to the room, which was not going to answer but was what was available:
"What happened to you after I left?"
It was not a question.
He had known, in the broad outline, what had happened. Had assembled it from three years of gathering fragments through whatever channels were available — had understood that the Winter Ball had gone wrong and that Gerffron had been punished for it and that the punishment had been both sustained and severe. He had known this.
Abstract and actual were different orders of knowing.
He sat with the actual.
He stood eventually to cross to the corner where the evening's water jug stood on the small table beside the stove — full, clean, the inn's standard provision — and picked it up and carried it toward the bed.
He was approximately four feet from the bed when Gerffron moved.
Not the gradual movement of someone waking normally — the abrupt, uncoordinated surface-break of someone coming up from unconsciousness through a substance that did not provide the usual transition states. Direct from under to above, no calibration, no intermediate gathering of self.
He sat up.
His eyes were open.
They were open in the way that eyes were open when a drug was doing something other than sedating — bright-edged and unfocused simultaneously, the particular altered state of a substance that had moved past its first phase into its second. The second phase of what had been in that needle had, Styrmir now understood with a clarity he had not fully had in the alley, a different character entirely.
Gerffron looked at him.
The look had the specific, unfiltered quality of eyes that had temporarily lost access to the management layer — that were seeing with the directness of something that had not yet relearned the social conventions around what you did and did not show.
"Styrmir."
Styrmir held very still.
Gerffron said his name.
Not clearly — the drug had the consonants, had blurred the word's edges, had made it sound like something heard through a wall rather than across a room. But Styrmir had been carrying his name in this voice for twelve years, in every quality of rendering, and he knew it.
"Yes," Styrmir said, carefully, setting the water jug on the table beside the bed. "I'm here. You're all right. You're safe. You need to drink some—"
Gerffron moved.
He moved with the specific, uncoordinated urgency of someone who had no operational access to caution — the drug had taken caution along with the social inhibitions, along with the careful management he applied in his waking life to the space between himself and the things he wanted.
He crossed the bed.
He reached Styrmir in the time it took Styrmir to understand what was happening.
His hands found Styrmir's coat.
His face found Styrmir's face.
And Gerffron kissed him.
Not gently, not tentatively, not in the careful measured way of someone doing something with appropriate consideration for all the relevant factors — the drug had taken careful and measured along with caution and management, and what was left was the thing underneath all of those, the thing that had been there for twelve years and had never, in twelve years, had an occasion like this one.
Styrmir went very still.
His stillness was not rejection and not simple surprise — it was the stillness of someone who has been wanting something for a very long time and has just had it arrive in a form that was not the form they planned, and who is in the process of deciding, in the rapid and slightly overwhelming way of such decisions, what that meant and what to do about it.
Gerffron's hands tightened in his coat.
The water jug was still on the table.
The figures stumbled back on the bed, kissing fervently. Gerffron broke away to breathe. Styrmir simply stared. Obviously, if one's crush--the one whom he has masturbated to several number of times. He never even confessed but here is his crush who is kissing him under the influence of drug but somehow knew it was him. When Gerffron's brownish blonde head descended on Styrmir to kiss again, the latter stopped the former.
"Gerffron, d-do you k-know who I am?"
Gerffron, stared blankly for a minute as of Styrmir had asked a ridiculous question, then he smiled dreamily, showing off his dimples; "You are Styrmir."
After that no words were exchanged between the two men. Only their body talked. They kissed like hungry animals. Styrmir flipped Gerffron under him as they kept on kissing till their lips hurt and they fought to breathe and dominate each other with their tongues. Styrmir won, Gerffron let him dominate her.
Their hands tore at each other's clothes fervently, Styrmir sucked and kissed Gerffron's fair chest. He took his pink nipples, sucking, biting alternatively making Gerffron moan out. Gerffron clamped his mouth immediately as his moan slipped out his mouth, wide eyed. Styrmir smiled and removed the hand that was covering his pink, swollen lips.
"It's okay, let it out." He went back to fondling the chest of Gerffron.
Gerffron was melting, floating, his legs felt jelly and his pants felt tight with an itch that required scratch and attention. His vision was blurry, eyes unfocused, brain not working, but his instinct made him feel safe with the man with whom he is with currently-due to his blurry vision his face his not visible much to Gerffron but he could only make out the dark hair of the man that was all too familiar with Styrmir since not many people in Zenos kingdom has raven hair. He started rub his bottom part along with Styrmir making the latter man let out a hiss in pleasure.
Styrmir left Gerffron's chest and nipples and started to open both of their pants. He kissed Gerffron again, their tongue and saliva mixing. As they parted a string of saliva attached to their lips.
Styrmir worked his hands on both of their aroused lengths. Their pants and moans filled the entire room, the environment grew hotter, sweat rolled down their bodies but both didn't stop that night.
Gerffron came more than five times that night, only then did his raging boner calm down and he fainted. Styrmir finished four times.
As Styrmir lay beside Gerffron, all cleaned up of their releases, his heart thudded in his chest as realization dawned upon him of what he actually did. He made Gerffron cheat with him on his wife! It doesn't matter if he is not treated properly or not as per the rumours, it doesn't erase the fact that the golden wedding ring shone at the left hand finger of a sleeping Gerffron.
Is this what they call post-nut clarity?