*All characters are 18+*
He woke up before dawn, as he always had. He rested for a few moments with the limp warm bundle of the strange boy in his arms. The boy had to be one of the Merlee; it was the only thing that made any kind of sense.
The boy had also wept while screaming someone's name, right before seducing Christopher. Adriel had known exactly what to do, while Chris was fumbling along. Adriel had guided him.
Christopher was not an idiot. Something bad had happened to this boy's lover, and he had fled. Somehow, he had shed his fish-tail and gotten tangled in his nets. He kept thinking about it, trying to make sense of it. His rational mind kept trying to deny it, but the more he thought about it, the more this seemed like the only way.
Adriel's hair was stiff and matted with dried saltwater. Chris rubbed his cheek against the softness of it. Just holding the sleeping boy in his arms made his cock hard and insistent, so he had to cautiously hold his hips away from the sleeping boy. Last night had been some sort of freak accident. There was no way this could be real.
---
When Adriel woke up, he was alone in the bed. He looked around sleepily and felt the indentation near him with one small sleep-warmed hand. The indentation was still warm. Adriel felt safe. He had never thought that he would feel safe again. He rolled into the slight dip in the fabric and fell asleep surrounded by the warmth and the smell of Christopher.
---
Christopher came inside after a quick masturbation and wash by the well. He was clothed only in a pair of knee-length cotton pants and his sun-gilded chest was bare and shining subtly with trickles of water.
Adriel was sleeping, sprawled over the entire bed. Chris smiled a little at the sight and warmed up his griddle, a flat piece of metal with a handle, over his small wood stove. For breakfast he fried up four eggs from his two laying hens and a bit of dough made with coarse brown flour to make rough flat cakes. Since it was a special occasion, he crumpled a bit of brown sugar over the cakes. Sugar of any kind was expensive, for it was shipped from the Americas.
"Christopher?"
He nearly jumped at the sleepy little voice behind him. He looked behind him to see Adriel yawning and stretching like a cat. The covers had slid off of him and he was unashamedly naked on the bed. His skin was paler then the linen ticking of the mattress, and it looked soft. His hair was a matted silver halo around his head and his eyes were dark and sleepy. Christopher couldn't stop his eyes from sweeping over that narrow muscular torso and those lean triangular hips with the genitals hanging between his slender thighs like mouthwatering fruit. Chris had to swallow and turn away, hiding his erection behind his body, feeling his cheeks burn.
The flush in his cheeks made him realize something and he whirled back around. He felt his jaw drop. Adriel's sunburn was gone. Twenty-four hours earlier it had been so bad it looked like a real burn, and now his skin was perfectly healthy except for a little bit of pink peeling skin at the cheekbones and forehead where the burn had been the worst. The skin on his face, instead of being pearly-pale was now the faintest shade of gold. On any human it would be called white, or pale, but on Adriel's pearl-colored body it looked gold. It was the very tender beginning of a protective tan.
Adriel cocked his head curiously. "Christopher?"
The cakes were starting to burn, so Chris quickly turned back to them, still a little shell-shocked by how fast he had healed. "It's alright Adriel, you just gave me a little shock."
"Shhhhooock....shock!"
Christopher burst out laughing at the parroting behavior of the boy as he set the singed griddle cakes on a battered tin plate.
"Breakfast." He explained, gesturing to the meal.
Adriel copied him. They began to eat, with Chris pointing to every individual thing on the plate and explaining what they were. He was beginning to tell Adriel colors by saying 'Brown' and then pointing to every brown thing in the cabin. Adriel understood and they had gone through red, blue, brown, and yellow when Adriel snuggled under Christopher's arm.
Chris couldn't stand the allure of Adriel's slender ripe body, so he scooted away and covered Adriel with the sheet as well as he could. Adriel looked up at him, confused and a little hurt. Chris wilted under that look.
"Christopher no...want Adriel?"
He spoke slowly and deliberately, using the few words that he knew already to make the clumsy sentence. His eyes were filling with tears.
"I want you Adriel." Chris whispered. "I want you very much, but what about, about him?" Chris tried to pronounce the babble of syllables that Adriel had screamed into the ocean. He found that he couldn't, so he repeated the first two syllables of that long name. "What about Theo?"
Adriel started to cry a little. "Theo...no. Theo is no." Adriel lacked the words to say it, but Chris understood what he was trying to say.
"Dead. That's the word you're looking for. Theo is dead."
Adriel started to cry in earnest, and this time when the frail boy leaned against him Chris didn't push him away. Instead he wrapped his arms around Adriel's tender white shoulders and murmured soothing nonsense. His cock was limp, grief didn't turn him on.
After a few minutes Adriel's sobs tapered off. Chris kept his arms around the small boy and shushed him quietly. After another moment Adriel looked up with those big indigo eyes of his.
"Please Christopher. I hurt...Theo is dead...I want you." Twenty-four hours and he was speaking at the level of a four year old. But Chris could no longer notice that, not when a small hand was clumsily fumbling with the leather tie that served as a belt on his pants. Adriel's voice was raw with need, and he was stiff and needful elsewhere as well.
"Adriel, are you sure you want to do this?" Christopher's voice cracked like that of an adolescent boy.
