Emma is still awake, God only knew why.
“But I thought you were always drooling after those snakey tan boys. You know, with the tattoos.”
“Oh well, that was before I met you two,” Drin says, with the comfortable, smug tone of the righteously and thoroughly fucked.
Dance is humming something idly, eyes half-shut, smiling a little. God, is it Mozart or something? He looks pretty damn smug too. He ought to, the stuff he’d got up to. Emma could turn that pretty brown body inside out without half-trying. When she had help, she was pretty damn awesome at it.
“What, just because they’re so damn sharp you could make sushi with them?” Arch tone.
Amazing what the powers of jealousy could do. Or maybe it was admiration. Or something. Drin turns his head a tired degree and looks at Emma. He can not believe her stamina. Here she is still alert and thinking, head up, skin flushed, curls tangled around her neck and her breasts heavy on his bicep, and she’s still thinking, working it all out. He and Dance are done, stick a fork in them, hindbrains snoring in prehistoric bliss.
Drin blinks. A thought crawls up out of the primordial ooze. “Yeah,” he says. “I mean, they’re pros, of course. You want somebody who can filet a salmon at sixty paces, sure.”
“But?” Emma says.
“When Dance goes with me to do practice sparring at the gym, nobody messes with him.”
“They don’t mess with the tattoo kids, either,” Dance says, and yawned.
Emma grunts. “They’re bigger and heavier than Dance.”
“I’ll take speed over size any day,” Drin says.
“Easy for you to say,” Emma snorts.
“I’m not going to have that forever, either,” Dance says. He doesn’t sound like he worries about it. “As they’re all very quick to remind me.”
“Who told you that?” Drin says, annoyed.
“Little snots with their ribbons falling out of their gym bags,” Dance says.
“They’re not the sort who just can’t be effing bothered to get up for tournaments,” Emma says, and gives Dance a poke.
Dance grunts. “They’re not the sort who lay in bed for an hour wondering what Auren Han’s penis would taste like going down your throat right before he shot you.”
The jolt that buckles through Drin’s leg muscles made both of the other two bounce in the bed.
“What the fuck was that?” Emma says.
“What did you just say?” Drin says at last, when he can get his breath back.
“You heard me,” Dance says, and stretches.
“How do you know Auren?” Drin says, in a perilously steady, even voice.
“He came to a concert right before Emma went to the convention,” Dance says, curling his fists back and forth until the muscles stand up in his forearms, like a cat in a deep stretch. “Came up and said hello, and did not shake hands with anybody.”
“And you noticed him, how? I mean, it’s not like Auren would stand out at a concert.”
“The eyes,” Dance says.
“Fucking hell!” Drin says.
“I suspect they don’t do a lot of that in hell,” Dance says, and rubs one hot thigh slowly up and down Drin’s nearest shin, with the care that always reminds Drin of the precise touch of an octopus about to rip open dinner. It isn’t always sexy. Sometimes it feels creepy as hell.
“You know, Auren may look like a– like a smirky little geeky Hong Kong boy who’s stayed up too late for years–” Emma says.
Drin stares at her instead.
“He came up and looked me over at the concert too, now that I think about it,” she tells Drin, apologetic. “Dance is right, he doesn’t look at you like other people.”
“You were wearing that blue silk thing that makes me want to rip it open and take you up against the wall,” Dance says.
“You always want that,” Emma says, and pokes him again.
Dance smiles. “Auren should be more careful with his eyes,” Dance says, looking up into Drin’s staring gaze. “He wouldn’t shoot us first. Either one of us.”
Drin can’t stop staring.
“Question is,” Emma says then, curling her toes round Drin’s foot lightly, “How do you know Auren?”
===
Challenge: Twist
Author’s Notes: This one just popped out on the very same prompt, this morning.
know, I know, greenjudy may scream, a lot.
Don’t blame me, I was just standing there in the shower when they mugged me.