He’d never kissed anyone but Aerhril before. It was the same.
It was nothing the same.
Nathre’s body was all flesh and curves. So many places to put his hands. He had not intended to come there and take her virtue, but when she guided his hand inside her skirts, he certainly didn’t object.
He found her wet little center, and he was gratified that the topography was similar enough that he knew mostly what he was doing, and he teased her until she was rippling against his fingers, breathing in his ear, “Haem take me, Haem take us both,” and that was the orc goddess of the underworld, and he liked that she spoke of the orc religion when he had his fingers on her clit.
By this time, they were lying together on the blankets and he’d unlaced his breeches so that he was sticking straight out of his clothes, and she’d put her shy fingers to him severaltimes before pulling back and giggling.
In the wake of her climax, she lay there, panting and said, “Is it because of her, because she’s marrying him?”
“No,” he said.
“Are you with me here to console yourself at your loss? To distract yourself?”
“No,” he said.
“Did she teach you how to touch a woman there?”
A hesitation. “No.”
“Have you had her, then?”
“Never,” he said. “I’ve never actually had a woman, never put my… inside a woman.”
“I would be the first, then?”
“Are you saying…?”
“Do you want me?”
He groaned. “Very much.”
She touched his face. “I want you to take everything off. I want to see you.”
“You too,” he said.
And so they did, and she put her fingers on his arms and the muscles in his stomach and she traced the patterns of the scars on his back.
He weighed her ample breasts in his hands, her skin lighter green and her nipples little dark points. He teased her and suckled her, comparing her all the time in his head to Aerhril, trying to convince himself that he liked this better, that this would be what he wanted, that he could be satisfied with this.
It wasn’t because she was an orc, he thought, because he liked her orc features very much. He found her quite attractive. And when he slipped into her wet, eager quim, she was lovely there, a slick passage that gripped him as he glided in and out of her. He wheezed against her skin, into the slope of her breasts. He told her that she felt better than he could have possibly imagined, that he never wanted to stop, that she was perfection.
But after, he was quiet as she snuggled into him.
“We could be married and live here, under Elrion,” shesaid. “There are lots of man and wife servant teams. If we wished to leave, we could likely get hired together, I think.”
He kissed her forehead. “I shouldn’t have done this to you.”
She was quiet.
“I don’t think… I was very drunk. You’re loveliness personified and any man would count himself lucky to—”
“But not you? Because you’re thinking about her?”
“I’m sorry.”
She got dressed quickly and left him. She didn’t say anything, and she certainly didn’t cry or act as if she were even disappointed, but he could tell that he’d wounded her, and he felt guiltier than he’d felt about anything in his entire life.
