He let me up, and I gasped, catching my breath in harsh, overeager breaths, and then he thrust himself into my mouth and down my throat again. He found a rhythm that was just hard enough, just fast enough, just deep enough that it was nearly the perfect blend of force and pleasure.

Rhys liked gentler, but he knew I didn’t, and he’d learned to adapt himself to what I wanted and needed. I rewarded him by screaming my pleasure around him, and then he thrust one last time, deeper, forcing my mouth tight against his body so that every last inch of him was shoved as deep inside my mouth as he could get, and whereas with Galen it had been my control, my choice, so I hadn’t fought, this wasn’t, and I started struggling just a little. Rhys stared down at me, holding me in place until my eyes watered, and when he drew me back I coughed and choked. He drew himself completely out of my mouth.

“Is it too much?”

I shook my head, coughed, and said, “No, it’s amazing.”

“Do you want me to finish that way, or on those beautiful breasts of yours?”

“On,” I said.

He tightened his hold in my hair; if it had been Mistral I’d have asked for tighter, but Rhys was already rougher than he preferred and I appreciated that. He forced himself into my mouth and down my throat again, and this time he was harder, faster, deeper, so that I had to fight for breath, fight not to choke too much; if his hold on my hair had been tighter it would have hit that switch and I could have taken more, but he wasn’t quite rough enough to make me enjoy all of it.

He noticed and drew back. “Am I hurting you?”

“If you tighten your hold on my hair, take control even more, I’ll be able to enjoy it more.”

He looked a little skeptical, but he did what I asked, fingers digging into my hair until it was painful, but for me that translated into finally relaxing into it, giving myself over to the hand in my hair, Rhys’s strength, the thrust of him plunging down my throat as he held me where he wanted me, and began to use my hair as a lever so that he thrust into my mouth and drove my mouth down on him at the same time. It rolled my eyes back into my head and spilled emerald and gold light inside my closed eyelids, so bright that it was like daylight with my eyes closed.

He pulled me off him, hand painful in my hair. I opened my eyes enough to see him stroking himself with his other hand. He spilled in a hot wave of shining white, as if moonlight could be made solid enough to pour down my breasts and drip across them in glistening lines.

He helped me lie down beside Galen, and then he collapsed on the other side of me. “Give me a minute and I’ll get you a washrag.” His voice was breathless with effort and orgasm.

“I’ll get it,” Galen said. “You rest.” I tried to focus on him enough to see the smile I could heard in his voice, but I couldn’t focus that much yet.

Rhys’s hand found mine and we lay there holding hands, relearning how to breathe and letting the fire and light of our bodies began to fade back to something resembling human-normal.

“I so needed that,” I managed to say.

“Me, too,” he said.

I squeezed his hand. “Thank you for being rougher than you wanted to be.”

“I knew that would make it better for you, and if you can’t have intercourse, you need to have the best I can give you.”

“That was good, bestest,” I said.

“I love you, Merry.”

I turned enough to smile at him. “I love you, too, Rhys.”

“I love you both,” Galen said, coming back from the bath with a rag.

“Don’t say that where the reporters can hear you. They’re already foaming at the mouth about Doyle and Frost.”

Galen grinned. “Dude, I love you like a brother. A brother that I get naked with and fuck the same woman silly with, but like a brother, totally.”

Rhys and I laughed, and then he said, “Totally.”

“Very bromance of you both, but it’s starting to run down onto the sheets.”

Galen brought the washrag. Rhys cleaned me up; he had made the mess, as he said. I used the towel he’d brought to dry off, and then we curled up on the bed, with Galen’s tall frame curled around the back of me and Rhys tight against me in front, so that we spooned perfectly. Galen’s long arm came over me and hugged along my arm that was holding around Rhys’s waist, because regardless of sexual orientation most fey had no problem with simple touch. We snuggled under the sheet with the sunlight filling the room and started to doze.

“How can I be so tired?”

“You had triplets less than a week ago,” Rhys said.

“I’m tired because the babies don’t really sleep yet,” Galen said, his voice muffled as if he’d plunged his face into the pillow. If he’d been shorter he would have buried his face against my hair, but if he did that we couldn’t spoon because it moved his body out of position; we’d tried.

“How much of the baby care is falling on you?” I asked.

“Kitto is always there; he helps a lot.”

“What about the rest?”

“Rhys does his share,” he said, and hugged us both with the one long arm.

“I find it restful. It always cleared my head to go hold a baby.”

“Really?” I asked.

“I did some of my best planning rocking babies to sleep.”

“I know you had other children before this, but there are no stories of you as a deity having any.”

His body was tense now, and the doze was no longer relaxing. “It was too long ago, and I didn’t tell my stories to the bards. Holding my son in my arms while he died didn’t feel like something I wanted to be remembered for.”

I hugged him tight, and Galen hugged us both. “I’m sorry, Rhys,” he said.

“I led him in battle, my son. He was tall like his mother, dark-haired like her, too. He was handsome and strong and brave and everything a father wants in his son. He followed me into a battle and he died there. Killed by one of the human inventions, explosives with iron filling. I hunted down every member of the tribe that had fought against us. I killed them all, down to the last baby. I destroyed them as a race, do you understand that, I killed their entire people, even the children, while their mothers begged for mercy. My grief was … terrible, and I tried to quench it in blood and death, and do you know what I discovered?”

“No, I don’t,” I said, voice soft. We held him while he told the awful things in an almost unemotional voice, the way to tell terrible things when they still hurt too much to feel.

“That killing them didn’t bring my son back, and it didn’t make the grief any less. I killed an entire race of people, centuries of culture and invention all gone, because they followed a different god than me, and they dared to fight against me. I forbade anyone to mention the name of their tribe. I wiped them from history itself, and when my vengeance was as complete as I could make it, then my rage left me. All that was left was my sorrow, and that was why I destroyed them, not because of what they had done, not really, but so I could focus my grief into vengeance and not feel the pain of his loss.”

We held him, because it was all we could do. I made comforting noises, but it was Galen who said, “I would die to protect the babies now; I can’t imagine how much I’ll love them in a few years. I understand why you did it.”