Photo credit: Jernej Graj
Aftermath of a night playing music with the clan
She should have been dropping with exhaustion, but she’d never felt less like sleeping. She couldn’t get the strange but compelling music she and Clan Sherv had composed out of her head. Most of it had been Sherv’s doing, showing he truly did have a talent for music beyond the limited howling he’d chosen for a career. He’d written a few lyrics for her to sing too, showing an astonishing grasp of what she was capable of. Some of the notes he’d encouraged her to sing were challenging, but she’d been delighted to work on his ideas until she’d executed them flawlessly.
She was in a thrall to the potential directions their discoveries could lead them. If only she had the option of pursuing such an exciting direction! What they’d done delighted her as much as the first time she’d stepped onstage to sing before an audience.
There was another component to the night’s thrills. Sherv, Rusp, and Jemi excited her too.
It didn’t matter they’d gone no further than the “cashool in-wen-do,” as Jemi and Rusp’s stumbling attempts at pronouncing “casual innuendo” had labeled the trivial flirtations Rusp had begun. His Imdiko clanmate had added to the teasing. In the end, Sherv had given up on trying to stop them and made a few intimations himself. Nothing crude, always in a joking manner, but there had been an underlying tension to quicken Irene’s pulse. It was in a glance, in a lowered tone, and sometimes in a seemingly unintentional brush of fingertips against her hands.
Irene had committed her own subtle sins of attention over the hours they’d been together. Holding a gaze…wetting her lips and noting how her companions’ catlike pupils widened as they watched…moving so the cloak exposed a flash of knee.
She had only her opera castmates to refer to when it came to the art of seduction, and under the watchful gazes of the government’s and Church’s chaperones, those opportunities to witness such had been few. No doubt her repertoire was laughably miniscule, but she’d found herself ready to dare, even if a naked knee was so much less than what her companions had displayed earlier that night.
Such small demonstrations. Yet they would have been more than enough to put her in an Earth prison if her minders had seen.
Irene sat in her huge bed and ordered the lights off. She stared into the darkness, her mind cataloguing every precious second she’d spent with Sherv, Rusp, and Jemi.
Was it the call of the forbidden? Would she find them so attractive if she were at liberty to indulge in intimacy? Maybe not, but it was hard to imagine feeling less fascinated. They were each beautiful men in their own particular fashion.
Releasing this summer.
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