“An end?” Appius swallowed hard and let me drag him on to my room. “To what?”
“To your end, I would imagine,” Leander said, laughing.
I took Appius into my bedroom, then slammed the door to make a point to the twins. Then I started undressing.
“Take off your clothes and get on the bed, Appius,” I told him. “We’re going to fuck so that you stop walking around so scared of it all the time.”
“I…we’re…but…what?” Appius’s eyes went as wide as moons as I threw my clothes on the floor, too frustrated to fold them. “I’m not scared of fucking, I’ve just never done it,” he went on, shifting anxiously from one foot to another. “I mean, I haven’t done more than we’ve done these last few weeks. I haven’t…put things…in things. Or had them put in me.”
The situation was so surreal that I felt like the room was spinning around me. I wanted to laugh, but somehow the sound I made was more like a sob.
“Come on,” I insisted, flopping to the bed to remove my boots so that I could throw off my trousers. “Get naked.”
Appius’s gaze had been fixed on me the whole time I’d been undressing, including when he’d been talking. I could tell he liked what he saw, but that I’d overwhelmed him with the suddenness of my demands.
Honestly, I was overwhelmed myself, and I didn’t know what to do.
As soon as I finished undressing, I got up and walked over to Appius. I went straight to work, tugging the thick sweater he wore up over his head.
“Alright, alright,” he said, half wrestling with me, half pushing away so he could peel out of his clothes himself. “I’m undressing. Just…wait.”
I blew out a breath and moved to sit on the bed. Fucking with Appius was supposed to relieve my tension, not fill me with even more. But as I watched him slowly undress, I felt like I wanted to crawl out of my skin.
I wasn’t pressuring him to do something he didn’t want to do…was I?
“The world doesn’t wait for anyone,” I said, getting up—even though I’d just sat down—and crossing the room to fetch a jar of ointment from my bureau. “Especially not now. Everything is falling down around us, and I don’t want you going to your grave without ever truly fucking around.”
Appius was in the middle of tugging off his trousers and nearly spilled forward in surprise at my statement.
“You don’t really mean that,” he said, finishing what he was doing, then straightening. “We’re all going to be alright in the end…aren’t we?”
The slight tremor in his voice and the fact that he wasn’t even a little hard yet should have been clues that I was pushing things too hard too fast, and for all the wrong reasons.
“Who knows?” I asked, walking back to the bed. I tossed the ointment up near the pillows, then swept an arm around Appius as I tumbled onto the bed.
Appius gasped like I’d caught him unaware as he spilled to the bed with me. He flailed like he was trying to catch his balance, but I didn’t let him settle. I rolled him until we were both on our sides, limbs tangling, then crashed my mouth over his.
I needed…something. I didn’t even know what anymore. Talking to Horacio and learning what was going on in the rest of the Old Realm had upset me more than I wanted to let on. Thinking about Dushka and my friends so far away, no idea what I was going through, or what anyone in the Old Realm was going through, made me feel more alone than I’d ever been in my life.
The horrible thing was, wrapping my arms around Appius and kissing him like I would suck his tongue right out of his mouth wasn’t dispelling my lonely feeling at all. Somehow, it made things worse. Appius was tense in spite of his efforts to kiss me back. He was trying, I could tell, but he was just as upset as I was.
“Come on,” I panted, feeling like the kissing wasn’t going to work. “Slap some ointment on that pretty cock of yours and fuck me.”
I rolled to my stomach and crawled to the head of the bed to fetch the ointment. On my hands and knees, I handed it back to Appius.
“Wait, what?” Appius gaped at me. “You want…I thought we…I’m supposed to….”
I let out an impatient breath and waved the jar until he took it. “Did you think I was going to fuck you?” I asked, moving my knees farther apart.
“Well, uh, yeah,” Appius said, staring at the jar as if he had no idea what to do with it. “I mean, you’re the one with experience. I thought you would…you know, to me.”
I tried to laugh, but it came out as an impatient huff. “You didn’t even know that you liked men until Solstice. If I tricked you into thinking you want to fuck with men, then you’ll have an easier time doing it this way. And besides, I need something hard in me to distract me.”
“Um, I only thought I didn’t like men because I thought we could only pick one,” Appius said, shuffling nervously closer to me. “And I wanted to be normal.”
Now my heart was breaking on top of everything else.
“You’re perfectly normal, Appius,” I said, rocking back to sit on my feet and twisting to face him a bit more. “At least, where I come from, it’s considered perfectly normal for men to love other men, or women to love other women, or men and women to love each other. There isn’t time to care who other people want to fuck with when we’re all too busy building a kingdom and keeping people alive.”