He fixed the wheel as soon as everyone was asleep, and then he stayed out in the barn until midnight, when she appeared in a cloak.
He stood up from where he had been waiting, just a shadow in the darkness, but she saw him and came for him.
She pressed into him, and they hadn’t done that sort of thing in a long time, but he wanted to, so he wrapped his arms around her and kissed her.
She sighed into his mouth. “I missed you,” she whispered.
He touched her face. “I missed you, too, but I don’t know if I realized how much until this moment.”
“I’m sorry to do this,” she said. “But I need your help with something. It has to be you. It can’t be anyone else.”
“Me?” This warmed him, he had to say. “There’s nothing I can do for you.”
“Oh, it has to be you,” she said.
“Look, I know you wanted us to try to run again—”
“That was foolish,” she said. “You were right. We have been on our own before. That’s not what we should do. I do have a plan, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves, I suppose. I need you for something else.”
“What?” he said.
“If I marry Celedin,” she said, “I can’t imagine he’s going to be…” She ducked down her face. “A very giving lover, you know? So, whatever it is with him, that is all I will know, and I need—”
“You’re mad,” he said, cutting her off, but his voice had gotten very deep. “Have you truly told me to meet you in the barn to make this request of me?”
“It has to be you,” she said, pressing in against him, her small elvish body warm and lithe as it seemed to brand itself into him. “I need to know what it could be like between a man and a woman, and I know I will not get the knowledge from Celedin, so I must get it from somewhere, and who else could I turn to?”
He supposed, from a certain perspective, there was a kind of logic to what she was saying, but it was too dangerous for a number of reasons. He kissed her again, anyway.
Her eager sweet mouth opened to him, her tongue dancing with his.
He groaned. “You know,” he gasped against her lips, “that I have told you we would never do that.”
“But you showed me your cock anyway,” she whispered back.
“Yes, but that was such a long time ago, and I didn’t doanything with you—”
“I want it to be you,” she said. “I don’t want it to be anyone else.”
“But it can’t be me,” he said. “Your maidenhead. If you don’t come intact to your wedding night—”
“But I don’t understand how that works!” she protested.
“Well,Icertainly don’t understand,” he said.
“But who else am I going to go to?” she said, her voice soft and insistent.
“Obviously, no one,” he said firmly. Because the thought of her in someone else’s arms was torture. Impossible to bear.
“So, I’m just to wait for Celedin, then? Subject myself to that and never know anything else?”
He groaned again. He kissed her. His hands roamed up and down her spine.
She slid her hands over his chest. “I feel like I have the right to know what it could be like. I feel like he will not give me anything but pain. I feel like he will only see to his own desires and never pay any attention to mine.”
His hand went to the curve of her backside, and he urged her pelvis against his. He had been half hard at the sight of her, truly, but this conversation had urged his arousal on. The more aroused he became, the less he could really think.
She gasped as she felt the press of him against her. Her hand went lower, all the way to his crotch, to cup him.
