She runs her fingertips over his bare chest and he shudders. She has seen him stripped before, has tended his injuries, but that was not the same as this. Not the same as being unravelled by her hands.
‘Are you afraid?’ she asks him, her voice full of concern. He knows that if he says yes, she’ll stop touching him, and fetch their clothes, and they will sleep as chaste as churchmen. And he doesn’t want that. He doesn’t think he wants that.
‘I want this,’ he assures her, tracing her collarbones with the pads of his fingers, and then her shoulders, her arms, the impossible, perfect shape of her. His hands are still trembling, but they both ignore it: she is warm, and he will not let uncertainty make a coward of him. Bisclavret sinks back onto the bed and she follows, curling herself against him, legs twined with his. He leans his forehead against hers and feels her breath againsthis lips, feels the way the air mingles and their breathing steadies to match each other’s rhythm.
He can’t stop touching her. Now that he’s started, her skin compels him. He draws spirals with his fingertips, tracing every inch of her arms, resting on her collarbones and throat. She’s touching him, too: her fingers burn as they trail across his back, light as feathers. They’re so close, her leg pressed between his thighs, her arms around him, his reverent touch on her cheekbones and drifting across to her ears, the pale vulnerable skin of her neck, the sharp jut of her shoulder blades. So close, and yet some final distance remains between them, a barrier uncrossed.
He should kiss her.
They’re barely breaths apart. It would be so easy – hardly even a movement until his lips would be on hers, the natural expression of all the fealty and service he owes her. He has kissed her a dozen times before and thought nothing of it, just as he has kissed his cousin, the other knights, the king—
Unwanted, unbidden, comes the memory of the king taking his hand and raising him to his feet as a knight.
She could kiss him, if she wanted to. She could take the lead, instead of hovering there with her breaths matching his own. He wishes she would: he will happily follow where she leads, give her what she wants, if only he knew what it was.
What doyouwant, Bisclavret?
He doesn’t know. He’s wanted this, something like this, for what feels like a long time. Weeks. Months. Since the first time she dressed him in his armour. Since she gave him her colours to wear. Since he first saw her smile. He must have daydreamed about it a dozen times, imagined the feel of that mouth on his, and yet now that the moment’s here, he’s frozen like a deer trapped by hunters. His breath catches, ragged, and he knows she’ll notice, because she’s too close to him not to.
‘You’re shaking,’ she whispers. He feels the words, breathes them in, tastes them more than he hears them. ‘Are you sure you’re—’
‘I want this,’ he tells her again. ‘I’m . . . I’m nervous. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want it.’
She smiles, small and gentle and understanding, and he should kiss her now, but he can’t. Whycan’t he? Why does he feel torn by his oaths, by everything he has sworn? He is hers, as surely as he is the king’s, the entirety of his being in their hands, and he does not resent that debt nor hope to free himself. But the declaring of it – it’s the declaration that’s beyond him. It’s easier to touch her than to kiss her. Easier to be touched by her than to be kissed.
He shifts slightly and the movement pulls her closer to him. For a moment she tenses, holding herself apart, and then she leans into the contact. Her skin against his is a shock of sensation he wasn’t prepared for. She’s impossibly warm, her breaths ragged and her heartbeat fast; he has the sense that she’s exerting a great deal of self-control to allow him to dictate the terms of this moment.
He’s grateful, and still it seems an unnameable cruelty, to leave this decision in his hands. He wants her to take the responsibility away from him. He has spent his life hiding from his own instincts and repressing the desires that would turn him inside out, until the very thought of acting on them wraps his heart in fear that stings like nettles. How is he to know now what it is that he wants, after a lifetime denying he wants anything at all? What if giving in is a surrender of another kind, one that robs him of his skin?
Besides which, he has never done this before, he does not know where to begin.
She ducks her head and presses a kiss to his neck. And thenanother, a little lower. Soft, careful kisses at first, but she grazes his skin with her teeth and he shifts involuntarily in a way that makes her laugh, low and playful, mouth still against his skin. After that she’s a little less careful, and he feels her fingernails against his back – not hard, but there, the small threat of an edge.
Her mouth is pressed against his collarbone. She lifts it, looks up at him. In her eyes is a question; on her mouth the faintest hint of a smile.
He kisses her. At first it’s chaste, the kind of intimacy a man might give his lord. Then she sighs into his mouth and presses herself closer, deepening the kiss, and it becomes something else entirely – something new, strange, something that demands he follow her lead.
He allows his hands to drift lower, pulling her against him, and hers are there, too, matching him, suddenly urgent. She may have a confidence he lacks, but her movements are filled with fumbling curiosity, no more practised than his own. It makes it easier, to know that they are learning this together, though well she knows herself, enough to guide him inside her. He thought they were close before – now they are indivisible, entangled, one body blurring into the next. It steals his breath, and hers too, to judge by her gasp, but her expression is pleased, not pained, as he begins to move, and she pulls him closer and closer and closer and—
Afterwards, as they lie there, limbs trembling from exertion, he understands what it means to know somebody carnally. Why they call itknowledge.He feels terrifyingly known, as though he has given her some understanding of him that nobody else has – allowed her to perceive him in a way that should be private. She has seen, heard, felt his utter vulnerability, had him under her power, and he’s exposed by it. It’s a gift he gave her willingly,and still it frightens him, as though he’s been stripped of some armour that was keeping the world at bay.
For a moment he feels skinless, half-shifted, naked in the forest. He’s struck by sudden terror, haunted by phantom claws tearing through his fingertips, and he jolts away from her so abruptly that he’s out of the bed and on his feet before she’s opened her mouth to ask him what’s wrong.
‘Where are you going?’ she asks, as he pulls on his tunic, his braies, anything to remind his body what shape it should be in.
‘Nowhere,’ he says. ‘Everywhere. Away. I don’t know.’
‘Bisclavret . . .’
He cannot stay. If the wolf comes, he can’t promise he’ll have the strength to stop it from hurting her. If not with his teeth then with the knowledge of him, because she can’t know, she can’t see this, not when she still looks at him and sees a man. God, she has seen more of him as a human than anyone ever has, understands better the shape of his humanity, so why should he take that from her? Why should that be taken from him? If he had a choice he would always be a man, always be here, always lie in her arms with her fingers on his skin, reminding him that he’s human.
But he isn’t. And he doesn’t have a choice. He stumbles from the room, ignoring her calling after him, and pushes his way out of the house and into the night with ragged breaths tearing at his chest. They might be sobs. They might be howls. He doesn’t want to change. He never wants to, but he wants it even less now, when he still has the memory of her softness and her kisses marking his skin like tiny brands.
The cold air pulls at his skin, trying to rip it off him. He staggers towards the forest and has hardly reached the outwood when he falls, knees hitting dirt, hands scrabbling at tangledroots. He can feel his back arching until it threatens to break, the change baring its teeth before it bites.
Not like this.
It is always like this.
