“I can feel them,” she breathes. “The ridges. Every one of them.”
Deeper. Her legs wrap around me. I watch her face as I sink into her — the parted lips, the flutter of her eyelids, the flush spreading down her throat and across her chest. She’s taking all of me and her body is adjusting around me, the tight heat of her pulsing, clenching, releasing.
I seat myself fully inside her. Stop.
The heat equalizes between us. I feel it — the moment where my temperature and hers meet somewhere in the middle and the boundary blurs. Her body is hot around me. Not her normal temperature. Hot. Matching me. The fire I started in her that first day, burning from the inside.
Her ankles cross at the small of my back. She pulls me that last fraction deeper and her breath catches and her eyes find mine.
“There,” she whispers. “Right there. I can feel your heartbeat inside me.”
I hold still. One breath. Feeling her around me. Feeling her heart beating against mine through our skin. The room is already warm. The window is already fogging.
Then I move.
Not slow. Not careful. This is not the hall. Her body knows me now, and mine knows hers and there is no careful left. The force of me pushes her up the bed, and she grabs the headboard with one hand and my shoulder with the other and holds on.
“Yes,” she says. “Like that. Don't stop.”
I don't stop. Every thrust pushes the heat higher between us. My ridges drag through her on every stroke, and I feel her clenching around them, feel her body gripping me, the wet friction and the heat building and building. The furs beneath us are damp and warm. Her skin is slick with sweat, and so is mine. Where our bodies meet the heat is almost unbearable and neither of us is pulling away.
The Jötunn pours out of me. Full sentences, the old language, the deep language. “Minän rauði vétkha.” Mine. Burning always. The vibration of the words travels through my chest into hers where our skin is pressed together, and lower, through my body into hers where we're joined. She feels every syllable. I know because her whole body tightens around me and the sound she makes is raw and open and has my name buried in it somewhere.
“Keep talking,” she says. Her voice is wrecked. “Keep — the vibration — I can feel it everywhere — keep —”
I talk. I tell her things I have no words for in Common. The Jötunn word for the warmth that stays after the fire dies. The word for the sound someone makes in their sleep when they're safe. The word for coming home. I press the words into her throat with my mouth and feel them vibrate through her pulse. I speak them against her chest and feel her heartbeat stutter. I say them into the hollow behind her ear and she digs her nails into my back hard enough to draw blood and I don't care.
“I'm close,” she gasps. “Thyran — I'm —”
“I know.” I feel it. Her body going tight around me, the rhythmic clench that means she’s on the edge. “I can feel you.”
“Don't stop. Don't change anything. Right there — right —”
The room is an oven. The furs are soaked. The window drips with condensation. The stone walls are warm to the touch.
Her hand finds my face. Makes me look at her.
“Stay with me,” she demands. Her eyes locked on mine. “Right here.”
I break.
Her name comes out of me in Jötunn. Not the Common word, not the sound she knows.Rauðminän.My fire. The one I came back for. It tears out of my throat and fills the room, and I feel the release flood through me, heat cresting, the pulse of it pouring into her. She feels it — the heat of me spending inside her — and the sensation tips her over. Her body tightens around me, her back arches, her hands grip my arms. She doesn't go quiet this time. My name. Rough and loud and real.
I ease my weight to the side. Her body pressed against mine. Her face tucked against my collarbone. Her breathing rough and slowing.
We lie there. The room is warm. Too warm. My temperature starts to bank, the furnace easing down. Her hair is damp against her neck. I reach over and pull the loose strands off her skin, tuck them behind her ear. My fingers are clumsy at that scale. I do it anyway.
She catches my hand. Holds it against her cheek. Turns her face into my palm. Her lips move against the heel of my hand. Not a kiss. Just contact. Her mouth warm and soft against my skin.
“Why did you run?”
Quiet for a long time. My heartbeat. Hers. Both slowing.
“You made me want things I don't deserve.”
“You don't get to decide that.”
“Who does?”
