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“Do you like your life?” Sciel asks him.
“Of course,” Verso says, without skipping a beat. “It’s life.”
She hums.
“We’re not too neglectful of you, are we? What you need?”
“I’m surprised you care,” he says, but there’s a little huskiness to his voice.
She looks at him, and it’s a long look. She doesn’t say anything in response, just hums again under her breath, and she reaches over and puts a hand on his forearm. He smiles. She gives him a squeeze.
Lune calls from across camp, and Sciel looks her way and lets her hand drift off him so slowly as she departs. So, so slowly.
The hairs on his back of his neck are standing on end.
—
Under the hot sun and several layers of leathers and thick twill, their bodies soften with sweat. A quick trip to the stream is in order. Still, Verso does not suggest it himself. He has listened to Expeditioners’ voices bounce off the rocks enough that he should grow dull to it, but that day hasn’t come yet. He is hesitant to inflict it upon himself again, another cut in an endless routine.
But today, the women suggest they go bathe.
“Maelle went earlier,” Lune says. A lone girl amongst adults, you know. Self conscious, solitary. “We ought to before we move forward.”
“You don’t mind?”
“As long as as you don’t make it weird,” she says. It’s like nothing to them, men and women gathering together to clean themselves, an efficient little militia with no thought to it.
“I suppose you wouldn’t have asked if you thought I would,” he says.
Lune gives him a humourless smile.
For a blissful, unexpected hour, they lounge in the stream, talking and halfheartedly scrubbing themselves. Verso keeps a polite distance, but Sciel and Lune share no such caution. More than once, Sciel stands up, stretching and sunning herself on the rocks, and Lune scrapes her hair up and out of her face, her breasts lifting high and her nipples stiff and proud. Verso is surprised to find that Sciel’s tattoos extend no further than her breasts, while Lune’s extend far under her conservative clothing. Neither rib him for an extended look. He wonders if it doesn’t bother them, or if they’re being patient with him, loner that he is.
Sciel crouches behind Lune, putting her arms around her, chin on Lune’s shoulder so their faces are close together. Lune rolls her eyes, but she lays her hands over Sciel’s arm, holding her in place. Both of them fix their attention on Verso, one mischievous and the other exasperated.
“Enjoying yourself?” Sciel asks.
“Now you’re trying to make it weird.”
She just chuffs at him, and she presses a kiss to Lune’s temple before pulling away.
—
At first, they let him watch.
It seemed to be an accident at first, but then it clearly isn’t. It doesn’t matter. It feels right to be an observer.
He finds himself enjoying sitting some feet away, hunched over himself, a hand wrapped around his hard cock and tugging at it furiously. They ignore him so often that that he might as well not be there. He could moan and groan, he could hover so close to them that his breath warms their skin, he could smear the head of his dick against their skin and come and still it wouldn’t drag their attention away from each other.
It’s only fair, he thinks. He has many more years to fuck himself while watching Expeditioners. They get to have the fun with what time they have left.
—
One night, he gets touched. It seems incidental. An afterthought, or some strange whim. Usually Sciel’s; she’s so often swept up by those, and when she winds her fingers into the hair at the nape of his neck and pulls him in, he can better appreciate his vantage point. His head is spinning as he looks at her face, her open mouth, her half-lidded eyes. He could kiss her but she holds him at a distance, like he’s an unruly kitten. He gets to watch her tense up and her brows knit and her eyes flutter shut as she comes, her thighs boxing Lune’s ears. He wants to hold her. He wants to glide into the come and spit and press those thighs wide. He wants her to invite him, want him, need him.
“May I,” he pants, furiously jerking himself. He is so lonely. He so wants it to be his turn.
“Aren’t you having fun?” Sciel pants.
“Yes,” he says. “I am.”
She laughs. It’s a breathless laugh, a ghost of a thing, and the air that was in her lungs is in his, and the tip of her nose bumps his, and that’s the most he’s gotten in weeks.
“What do you think, Lune?”
Lune raises her head, rakes her black hair out of her face, and fixes Verso with an appraising look. Her chin is wet. The light from the fire catches her eyes, big obsidian marbles, dangerous and hungry. Her gaze drifts down, between his legs, to where his hand has stilled on his cock, aching and red. Her gaze moves up. Intense.
“He hasn’t earned it yet.”
Maybe next time. There will be a next time.
—
They use him.
Lune likes his cock. It’s the part of him she seems to appreciate most. He knows she’s going to use it when she deigns to take it in hand first, her fingers curled around him like he is a specimen she has caught and intends to mount and display him with a long pin. She could mutter while she did it, ninety degree angle through the thorax, and he would be spread out like the Vitruvian man. He’d come, just like that. She’d loathe the mess, but he thinks she’d tolerate it, for him. Maybe.
She doesn’t pin him, at least not with surgical steel. She sits astride him instead, his cock all stuffed up in her, grinding in tight circles, hard. He can bear the weight, but she probably wouldn’t care if he couldn’t. He wants to look up and watch the two women kiss, if he can, but he’s occupied, timing his breathing to when Sciel lets him. She clamps her thighs around his head and bears down on him and so he is completely buried under the pair, happy to give himself over to whatever they’ll share.
Like this, he thinks he can be something more than a boy. He can be a man. Useful. Of service. There’s some pride in that.
Sciel gives herself over to hedonism first. She always does. While Lune is a steady rhythm, Sciel is erratic, grinding against his face like he’s the sturdy arm of a chair, whichever direction moves her, whatever pace suits her, and he couldn’t be harder for it. His groans are stifled against her lips, and someone’s hand is on his ribs, more weight for his body to bear. His head is spinning. His heart feels like it will burst. It is hot and wet and rapid, frantic everywhere at once.
Pain shoots through his head, so much he’s not sure where from. Sciel doesn’t stop until he shoots a hand out to grab whatever he can, and when she tumbles sideways off him, he feels the hot gush of blood. She gasps –– Sciel, Lune, someone.
“Verso, your nose,” Sciel says, surprised, panting, shameless even as comfort slides into her voice. “I must have gotten a little carried away!”
Her, or at the very least her pubic bone. Verso gasps, sitting up on an elbow, and Sciel clutches his tender face with gentle hands. No movement dislodges Lune, who remains astride with concern behind her eyes and a flushed face. She regards him calmly, appraising what Sciel presents: is he broken? Must they stop, treat him with more gentleness?
Lune puts the pad of her thumb against the bridge of his nose. There’s no pressure there, but it hurts just the same, and Verso drags in a hiss of a breath. Her gaze is appraising once more, measuring with her mind the exact shape of his face. He cannot drop her gaze, no matter how much it hurts.
She says: “He’ll be fine in a few minutes.”
His eyes roll, and he digs his heels into the ground for purchase, so he can press up into her. Let that be an answer. Let that be a demand.
He bleeds quietly while Lune rides him to completion, Sciel’s thumb on her clit.
He thinks he can like being used.
He may always be someone else’s fantasy, but this time it’s a lover’s.
—
How fun it is, to be in this world of women: women who want him even when they don’t like him, women who are thirty-something and thirsting for sensation, women who say yes to pleasure more often than they give in to dark thoughts about the future. They are hungry and they don’t feel the need to ask if he is too. They look at him and listen to his bold little asks for affection and call him foolish for thinking they might not want to give it to him.
Isn’t it obvious? Don’t they share something, these women and him, both wanting to get something out of their remaining sliver of a life?
In another lifetime, he might have pursued them. He might have delighted at a blush or a nudge over drinks, smirked as their eyes roved over the buttons left undone at the top of his shirt. He’d be wine-drunk and happy to hitch their skirts up and find the buckles of their garters. He’d listen to their giggles, their coy remarks. Someone might take him into their arms and mutter that they see now why he’s so popular with women. He could lay them out on his fine four-poster, immerse himself in their intensity. Take his turn in either of them. They’d be a trinity, at least for a time. He might have forgotten about it after, privileged enough to walk away from human touch.
His life, his own.
In this lifetime, where he is surrounded by the dancing toys and long shadows of his own imagination, he gets to work himself inch by inch into Sciel from behind. He looks down at her back, sloping to the ground, and he gets to feel Lune’s hand rove over his ass, guiding his thrusts, coaxing him harder. She can take it, she likes it, harder. He does it, just how she likes. He feels the shallow bite of Lune’s teeth on his shoulder, the tiny kiss that follows after.
Verso breathes in sharply as Lune’s finger slips into him, to the first knuckle. She guides him. He gives over control, and he gives over a little more with every draw back out of Sciel.
He finds his breath short, and his eyes burn, and even as the thickest fog of pleasure overtakes him, he finds hot tears streaming down his face.
“You’re alright, Verso,” Lune says, cool but fond. “You’re alright.”
In this lifetime, he earned his part.