“You on top of me, pushing my shift up to my hips.”Now that she’d started speaking, it was hard to stop.It was almost like a confession, really, this moment, laying a sin bare and having someone absolve her.Even if Adelais’s absolution was not prayer but hunger.“You going between my legs in the dark and telling me to be quiet.”
Adelais remained frozen, but Tate could see her swallowing.Could see the pulse pounding at the collar of her tunic.
“If this had been two hundred years ago…” Tate stopped; she couldn’t finish.Even after admitting the rest, it felt impossible to speak aloud.
But she didn’t have to.With her eerie prescience, Adelais already seemed to know.“You’d like to be carried off like a spoil?Carted off to my home, made into a concubine?”
“It’s not—it’s only—” Tate still couldn’t find the words, but panic was what was choking her now.It felt soawfulto hear, to have it phrased so bluntly, when in her head it was not the bleak truth of what had happened to her religious sisters centuries ago, but something else.A smear of urgent images and feelings, a blur of quickened breaths and wet flesh that ended with everyone replete and pleased.
But again, Adelais seemed to sense Tate’s turmoil.“Shh, abbess, don’t fret.I know you don’t really want that.What you want is to play a game.”
A game.Tate hadn’t thought of it like that.“It doesn’t feel like a game in my mind,” she said slowly.
“Some of the best games don’t,” said Adelais.“But that doesn’t change what they are.Playing, but with a beginning and an end.Playing with rules.For instance”––she came closer, her fingers sliding up Tate’s neck to cup her jaw over her wimple––“a rule that you could stop the game whenever you wanted.”
“And how would I do that?”Tate whispered.Adelais’s hand was so warm through the thin linen, so illogically warm in the cool night.
“You’ll simply saystop,” Adelais said.She said it in her Norman tongue,arestes, and then said it again in Tate’s English, as if to make it absolutely clear.“Stoppast.”
“And you would stop?Easy as that?”
Adelais nodded.“I fight fair, and I play fair.I swear both those things are true.”
Tate gave her a look.“You donotfight fair.I’m servicing you for three nights to keep you from pillaging my abbey.”
Adelais grinned.“We struck abargain.What is not fair about that?Come, abbess, what do you say?Don’t you want to see what it feels like?To have what you thought about last night?”
Tate shifted on her feet.She did want it, more than she could express, because once her brain had conjured the image of Adelais’s hand over her mouth, she hadn’t been able to think of anything else.Like wine that could not be undrunk, the idea could not be unthought.The fantasy, however new, however blurry, could not be buried, and since last night, Tate’s mind had been full of every way it could happen.Every way Adelais could do those awful, forbidden things to her.
“Maybe,” Tate said, closing her eyes.The Wolf’s hand on her jaw was warm, firm.She could feel the strength in it, the threat.She’d have to pray on her knees for years for it, but the danger inherent in that touch made her something both more and less than herself—a mixture of boldness, fear, shame, and hunger.She felt like she didn’t know herself.
And for the first time in ten years, she wanted to know herself.
“Yes,” Tate whispered.“Notmaybe.The answer is yes.”
Adelais touched her forehead to Tate’s.She was tall enough and Tate was short enough that Tate had to tilt her face all the way up, and when Adelais’s mouth brushed over hers, she could almost imagine it was the night itself kissing her with its apple-sweet lips.
“What do you want, little mouse?”Adelais murmured against Tate’s mouth.Petite suriz.“Tell me what game you would play.Tell me what it could look like out here, in the dark.”
Tate could barely breathe, the words were that dangerous sliding around on her tongue.“You could be a stranger on the road,” she managed to say as she opened her eyes.“I could be returning to the abbey after running an errand.”
Adelais nipped at Tate’s lip.“I could offer to walk you back.”
“And then you could…”
Tate didn’t finish.It was speaking sin aloud.Laughing at God’s gift of free will to want such a thing.
Adelais lifted her face from Tate’s and looked down at her.“You have to tell me the game you want to play so I can make sure we play the same one.Do I demand payment for my protection?Or do I not even bother with a little nicety like asking?”
Tate flushed.It was a cruel gift of the Wolf’s, that she could see these stains in Tate’s mind.And yet once the stains were out in the open, they were no longer stains at all, but possibilities.Games.“You wouldn’t bother,” Tate said quietly.“You’d take what you wanted.”
“Mm.I would.Do you want to run?Would that be exciting for you?”
“I think—” Tate had to order her thoughts.She couldn’t believe they were justtalkingabout this, about the things that were supposed to stay in the deepest reaches of the night.“I think I’d like to try.”
“Do you like pain?”Adelais asked the question like she was asking Tate if she wanted her wine watered or not—something that casual, that easy to do or not do.Gratitude twisted through Tate for that casualness.She sometimes suffered devotionally, like many monastics did, by striking her back with a knotted rope as she prayed, or wearing a leather cord beneath her knee, but suffering to creep closer to God was very different from…this.
“Some pain,” decided Tate after a moment.“Enough for it to feel real.Teeth, pulling my hair, wrestling.Some light bruises, maybe.”
