That was part of it. There was another dimension to Dorian’s silence that had nothing to do with modesty, one that he never discussed with another soul, much less the men and women of the guard who had long since grown accustomed to his stony silence when conversation turned to topics more salacious than drills and weaponry.
He had never been with the person his heart desired. Sex and love were unrelated as far as Dorian was concerned. Every encounter he’d had, from his first clumsy tumble with a stable boy in a hayloft in the barn outside the keep to the more sophisticated experiences he’d shared with men who valued discretion as much as he did, had been marked by disappointment.
Until now.
He turned over, slowly, carefully. He didn’t want to disturb the person next to him, but he wanted to look. To remind himself that this was real, that this had happened.
Jasper was enchanting, even in sleep. The early-dawn light subdued the riotous color of his feathers into softer shades of indigo and gold. Dorian felt—insanely, he thought—bereft of the sight of Jasper’s amber gaze. He quelled the urge to reach out and gently wake Jasper just so he could watch him blink the sleep from his eyes. It was a deeply selfish impulse, but Dorian couldn’t find it in himself to be ashamed of it.
Shame had haunted him for years, but not the same kind of shame that plagued humans who desired partners of the same sex. Among the Drakharin—and, he assumed, the Avicen—there was nothing deviant about love between two men or two women. They were a long-lived race, and it made little sense for them to frame sex as useful only for procreation as so many humans did. If Drakharin reproduced at the same rate as humans did, they’d overrun the planet in short order.
Dorian’s shame was of a different sort. It was the shame of someone who had yearned for something he could not have with someone out of his reach. Caius had known, perhaps longer than even Dorian himself, that the love Dorian had harbored for him extended far beyond the loyalty and affection common between guard and prince. Caius had known and, out of kindness, had not mentioned it. He could have sent Dorian away, assuming that such a love would cloud Dorian’s judgment and impair his ability to perform his duties, but he hadn’t. He had kept Dorian by his side, as a guard and as a friend. For Dorian, it had been a special kind of torture, to feel so close and yet so far from the one person in the world he wanted most.
He had grown so accustomed to never getting what he wanted that he was afraid to close his eye and surrender to sleep the way Jasper had so readily. He feared that if he did, he would awake later to find that it had all been an elaborate dream, coaxed from his subconscious by decades of loneliness. Though if he were honest with himself, he couldn’t quite imagine that his own mind would have conjured up an Avicen to heal the wounds of his fractured heart.
But Dorian had been so scared. Scared of losing Caius. Scared of losing Jasper. Scared of losing himself if he lost all of his people. There was only one thing to do that made sense. He would love the people he had while he had them.
And so he had kissed Jasper downstairs, and it hadn’t taken long for that kiss to evolve into something more. Jasper had kissed Dorian like he had something to prove. Maybe he did. Maybe they both did.
The wall Dorian had carefully constructed between them in the wake of Caius’s abduction came crashing down. For the first time in as long as he could remember, Dorian let himself want with abandon. Gone was the not-so-secret shame of unrequited love. Gone was the oppressive guilt that had hounded him in the weeks after Caius had been taken. In place of those things was a feeling so strange that Dorian had trouble naming it at first. The last bastion of resistance in him put up a fight against verbalizing the one fact he knew was completely and thoroughly undeniable. He wanted to say it. He ached to say it. But he couldn’t. Not yet.
Instead, he spoke with his lips and his hands, returning Jasper’s insistent kisses with equal fervor. Those feathers were softer than they looked. He had forgotten how soft they were, and once he’d sunk his hands into them, he couldn’t stop touching them. Jasper hadn’t seemed to mind.
They’d moved to the second bedroom eventually. Dorian would never live it down if Echo caught him kissing Jasper on the sofa like an overeager adolescent. He still had his pride, after all.
What followed was quite possibly the most transcendent experience of Dorian’s life.
After, Jasper had fallen asleep with a smile gracing his kiss-bruised lips. Dorian had tried to stay awake as long as he could, determined to etch every detail of Jasper’s sleeping form into his memory. But inevitably, sleep had claimed him. He’d awoken to the sound of the forest coming alive outside the cabin. Birds sang as the sun inched upward, and Dorian found himself watching Jasper once more. It felt deliciously indulgent.
A knock pulled him from his thoughts. Jasper grumbled something in his sleep and wound his arm tighter around Dorian’s torso. Getting up was evidently not an option. The person who’d knocked didn’t wait for an answer before opening the door. Dorian sighed. They were all going to need to sit down and have a very frank discussion about boundaries.
Echo poked her head through the open door. A single eyebrow quirked upward at the sight of one perfectly made, undisturbed bed. Dorian flushed scarlet. The embarrassment he felt at being caught in bed, hair likely a mess, a slumbering Avicen tucked under his arm, was multiplied by the feeling of Jasper burrowing closer, burying his nose in Dorian’s pectoral muscle as if he were seeking out every bit of heat he could find. With as much dignity as he could muster, Dorian said, “May I help you?”
Echo wisely did not comment on the position in which she found Dorian, a kindness for which he was absurdly grateful. He wasn’t ashamed of what he felt for Jasper or of what they had shared, but he preferred not to be caught with his pants down. Literally and metaphorically.
“Caius is awake,” Echo said. “And you’re gonna want to hear what he has to say.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Ivy slid the empty vial into her bag, its glass stained red from the bloodweed she’d just administered to the man in the hospital bed before her. The machines that kept him alive and breathing continued their steady beating, tracking his vital signs. She couldn’t afford to dally, but she stayed by his bedside as long as she dared to see if the elixir took. It was the last dosage she had. Already, she had given it to a dozen patients in the restricted ward, and all of them had responded favorably. If the man on the bed showed signs of pulling through, Ivy’s day would be a rousing success.