"My turn," I say, and reach for his fastenings.
His formal blacks come apart easily under my skilled fingers. I dress people for a living, and undressing turns out to use many of the same skills. He helps me peel the shirt from his shoulders, and I have to stop and look.
I've spent months watching this body fill doorways and dwarf chairs. None of it prepared me for lantern light on all that green skin, the scars, and the sheer scale of him.
He's enormous.
Then I unlace his trousers. They drop, and I stop breathing.
Oh.
Oh.
I knew orcs were big. Everyone knows orcs are big. I have measured this male's shoulders for a formal coat, joked with Lyra about what Aragos must be like, and thought myself very worldly.
I know now that I am not worldly.
His cock stands heavy and thick against his belly, longer than any human man I've ever seen and half again as wide. My first coherent thought is that I have no idea if I can take him.
Gods help me.
There's nothing in my experience to measure him against.
"Lissy."
"Mm?"
"You're staring."
"You're worth staring at," I say faintly. "That's not my fault."
"You said that earlier."
"It keeps being true." I make myself look up at his face, and he's watching me too. Careful. Waiting for me to decide what happens next. There is heat in his eyes, but there's a question there too. Whether I'm afraid. Whether this is the moment the human woman thinks better of lying with an orc.
My body has already answered while my head was busy taking measurements.
I'm not afraid. I'm aching. There's a pulse between my legs with its own heartbeat, my thighs are already slick, and I want him so badly my hands are unsteady.
"Lissy," he says again, lower. "We don't have to?—"
"If you finish that sentence, I will scream, and two hundred wedding guests will come running, and you will have to explain yourself to your grandfather."
The corner of his mouth lifts.
"Then come here," he says.
I take his offered hand.
He lays me down on furs that smell of cedar and explores me first, letting me get used to the idea of us together. His hands are rough from war and unbearably gentle. He finds the scar on my knee from the cobblestones and kisses it. He finds the callus on my middle finger where I hold my needles and kisses that too.
I laugh.
Then his mouth moves lower, between my legs, and I stop having thoughts.
He takes me apart that way once. Slow and relentless, his hands holding my hips still while I gasp at the canvas ceiling. I come with my fingers buried in his hair and his name muffled behind my own hand, because there is a wedding nearby and I have some dignity left.
Not much, but some.
