He works me slowly, his mouth and his hands, and I stop being able to track anything outside the radius of his attention. The hoot of an owl. The frogs down the hill. All of it falls away. There is just this: his tongue, patient and exact, learning what I respond to and returning to it.
His large fingers find me, and he takes his time there too: one first, slow and thorough, and when I’ve adjusted to that, two, a fullness that makes my hips tilt toward him without my deciding to. He is not rushing toward an outcome. He is here because this is exactly where he wants to be, and I feel that knowledge settle into me as surely as everything else he’s doing.
He makes a sound against me—low, resonant, a vibration I feel move through me from the point of contact outward, up through my stomach, into my chest. I don’t have a name for it. I file it assomething to think about later, except later is not available to me right now.
“You taste—” he starts, and doesn’t finish, because apparently words have failed him.
His fingers curl. I make a sound I’ve never made before. He does it again—listening, adjusting, the devastating focus of someone finding exactly what he’s looking for. My hands are in his hair. I am not being quiet. I have entirely stopped caring about being quiet.
He brings me there slowly, keeping me right at the edge longer than I would have chosen—long enough that I am pulling at him, long enough that the sounds I’m making have stopped being voluntary, long enough that I have forgotten every version of myself that has ever managed anything. When he finally lets me go over, it moves through me in waves, each one longer than the last, my whole body clenching around his fingers and releasing and clenching again while his mouth stays on me, working me through every second of it, not stopping until I’ve given him all of it.
His name comes out of me on the last wave. I didn’t plan that either.
I wasn’t quiet. Not even a little.
I come back to myself in pieces. His mouth is at the inside of my thigh, warm, kissing me back down. His hands are on my hips, steadying.
“Kragen,” I say. My voice doesn’t entirely belong to me.
“Yeah.” Low. Satisfied.
“Come here.”
He moves, and as he does his lips travel along the line of my hip, unhurried, and find the scar—the small vertical line on my left hip that most people either miss or carefully don’t mention. He goes still.
Not the startled kind. The deliberate kind—the full-body quiet that means something has reached him somewhere unguarded. He doesn’t ask. Doesn’t look up at me with the expression that means we should talk about this. He just kisses it, once, warm and present. That sound builds in his chest again, low, continuous, something between a word and a rumble, and I feel it through his lips against my skin. I know what it is now. Orcs purr. He is purring at my scar. Like it is simply part of me.
I go completely still.
Everyone else has navigated it. He just kissed it.
He moves on—the curve of my waist, my stomach, my mouth—and the message has been delivered without a single word: this is not a problem. This is just you.
Something in my chest simply lets go.
I pull him up to me.
“Wait.” It’s somewhere between a whisper and a command. He eases off the bed and pulls his shirt over his head. I realize, looking at him in the amber lamplight, that I have been underestimating the situation.
Of course I knew he was large. I have known this since he first ducked through my workshop door. I’ve been in rooms with him, in a car with him, pressed against him on my grandmother’s couch. His size has become so familiar that it stopped registering as remarkable. Looking at him now, in my bedroom, in the lamplight, with his shirt gone and his hands at his belt, it hits me.
He is built like a structure raised without compromise. Broad through the chest and shoulders, enough to make the room recalibrate around him. The deep green of his skin in the warm light, the muscles moving under it when he reaches to set his jeans aside. He moves through the process of undressing as he moves through everything else—without apology, without performance, just himself.
Then I see the rest of it, and I stop thinking in complete sentences.
He is—proportional. That’s the word my brain locates and then immediately flags as inadequate. He is proportional to the rest of him, which is to say he is large in a way that makes my experience feel like insufficient preparation. I look at him. My attention catches there for what is probably a beat too long.
“Hey,” he says.
I look up.
His expression isn’t quite a smile, not quite uncertainty. Somewhere in between. He is, for the first time since we walked through my front door, not entirely sure of himself. I find that this is the most attractive thing I have seen all evening, which is saying a great deal.
“Hi,” I say.
“Still okay?”
“Asking me that a lot tonight,” I say.
