Finrod’s laugh rippled out again as Balan’s gaze drifted back to him, wide-eyed and cautious as though still half-convinced he had not truly wakened. “You look at me as though I am a phantom,” he quipped, shifting to Taliska and arching a brow in feigned complaint.
“Aye, so you are—phantom, spirit, apparition…” Balan regained his voice at last, a strange giddiness rising through him with the torrent of joy, and he pushed up onto one elbow, prodding the other doubtfully in the chest. “You seem solid enough.”
“Naught but flesh and blood, my love.” Finrod grinned up at him from the rumpled nest of pillows. “The fact of which I should be glad to remind you, have you forgotten it already.”
It was Balan who laughed now and slipped his hand beneath the other’s neck, turning so that he rested against him and looked down into his face; and as suspected he found the king attired in the same manner as he. A blaze of fire joined the giddiness in his veins and he leaned down to brush a kiss against the waiting lips.
He had meant to follow it with a jest, some wry responding quip about feigning inattention that he might be granted the lesson, but all such thoughts fled at the touch of the other’s skin. There had been a boundary before, defined edges where Balan ceased and Nóm began—disregarded of course and more often crossed than preserved, but the demarcation had nonetheless existed. Now it was like plunging beneath a river where any movement was wrapped within the current, or where two halves of clay were smoothed till the seams were indistinguishable amidst the whole. He had been overwhelmed by it, he recalled, shaking and dizzy in the small hours of the night when each touch had carried with it the harmony of the other’s senses, every joy had rung out with his lover’s jubilance, echoing one to the other and compounding like voices through a canyon till he had lost all bearing save the grasp of the other’s arms.
They encircled him again now and, as in that first discovery, his heart pounded as though it would burst. Dizzy, he wrapped himself around the anchor of Nóm’s body; and dizzy, he kissed the parted lips, the brow, the lids of his eyes and the sharp line of his cheekbone, sun-painted with the lattice’s pattern in the morning light.
No-pressure tags for @sallysavestheday, @hobbitwrangler, @melestasflight, @ulmondil, @julijbee, and @nynevefromthelake to share any WIPs (writing or art or other) if that sounds like fun!
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