I ease her down onto the ground beside the fire, on the bedroll from my pack — thank Drogath and his eternal insistence on proper preparation — and I take the last scrap of fabric hiding her from me with the same care, slow enough that she can change her mind at any point, slow enough that I can watch what each moment does to her face.
She doesn't change her mind. Her hips lift for me and I pull the last of it away and then I sit back and look at her properlyin the firelight, stretched out beside the fire, watching me with those sharp bright eyes, and I trace my hands along the length of her — starting at her shoulders, down over her ribs, the curve of her waist, her hip, her thigh — following the shape of her as though I am learning something by heart.
She makes a sound. Quiet, undone, a small whimper that she seems surprised by herself.
It nearly kills me.
She reaches up and pulls me back down to her and I go, mouth finding hers again, and I take my time there too, working down her jaw, her throat, learning every place that makes her breath change.
I want to know them all. I want to know every single variation. She tangles her fingers in my hair and I feel her chest rising and falling faster under my hands and I work my way back to her mouth and she's breathless when I get there.
I ease into her carefully. She's small — everything is comparative — and I go slow, watching her face, stopping when she needs me to stop, moving when she's ready, and I feel her stretching to accommodate me and the sound she makes is not pain, it's something else entirely, her head tipping back, lips parting.
"Ursik—"
"I've got you," I say. "I'm not going anywhere."
She exhales and her body opens for me and I sink deeper and the sound I make is involuntary and low and I bury it against her temple. She's extraordinary. I'm trying to hold onto some version of coherent thought and she's making it difficult with every small movement, every sound, her nails finding my back and anchoring there.
I move. Slow, deep, nothing aggressive about it — I'm not interested in proving anything here, not interested in anything except her, what her face does, what sounds she makes whenI find what she wants. I'm big and I know it and I keep that awareness with me, keep reading her, but she takes me like she was made for it and the thought undoes me so completely I have to pause and breathe and collect myself.
She notices. Her eyes find mine and there is absolutely nothing guarded in them for the first time since I've known her.
It breaks something in me. I didn't realize how desperate I was for it.
"Don't stop," she says.
So I don't stop.
She moves with me, finding the rhythm, and I let her set it, let her take what she needs, and she does — she takes it, demanding and unashamed, and I cannot stop watching her face. Her head tips back. The firelight moves over her throat. She calls my name and it sounds completely different than it ever has — raw, stripped of everything except want — and then she comes, arching hard against me, clenching around me, crying out in the small cave with the rain still hammering outside and the fire burning low beside us, and I watch her through every second of it.
I want to watch it again. I want to watch it until I have it memorized, every line of her undone like that, every sound of it.
When the shudders ease, I follow her down, pressing my mouth to her temple, her cheek, the corner of her jaw, and she lets me, breathing hard against my shoulder, her hands finally loose in my hair.
16
URSIK
It takes a while for the rain to stop.
I notice the silence before anything else — the absence of it, the way the cave suddenly has a different quality without the constant percussion against the stone. Aislin is asleep against my chest, her dark hair spread out over my arm, and for a long moment I don't move.
I watch the fire. It's burned down to embers, still radiating enough heat that neither of us has gone cold, and I watch the orange pulse of it and think about nothing in particular, which is unusual for me. I'm generally not a man who manages nothing in particular. I'm a man who manages seventeen things at once, loudly, in sequence.
Right now there is only this.
Aislin, who I can finally stare at and think is unfairly beautiful without guilt. Aislin, who let me in and made me feel like the luckiest man in the fucking world. Aislin, whose moans will haunt me and I couldn't stop myself from making her come over and over just so I could hear them.
Aislin, who I think has stolen a bit of my heart.
She stirs when I shift to check the entrance, blinking up at me with sleep-blurred eyes, and something clenches in my chest at the sight of her — unguarded, that edge of her dissolved completely in sleep, just Aislin looking at me from the crook of my arm with no walls up.
"Rain stopped," I say.
She listens for a moment, confirming it, then sits up and pushes her hair back from her face. I watch her look around the cave — taking stock, cataloguing, the habit she can't switch off — and I hand her her shirt from the stone beside the fire without being asked. She takes it without comment, but the corner of her mouth does something.
"How long was I asleep?" she asks.
