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“Jealous,mi sol?”
I felt like I was swallowing something unpleasant despite not having even touched the food.
“Yes,” I finally bit out.
Ren shot me a wicked grin that was surprisingly soothing. Perhaps it was how, when he looked at me like that, he devoted to me the whole of his attention as if nothing else on the continent mattered. As if nothing else evenexisted.
“We’re going to finish eating, take a gloriously long and hot bath together, and then you’ll allow me to fucking worship you for the next few hours,sí?I want to prove to you that you have nothing to worry about, because there’s only you, Nat.”
He paused with a goblet of wine halfway to his lips, which twisted half-heartedly into an expression of feigned disgust. “Monogamy? What the fuck did I do?”
I scowled at him and he cocked his head, considering me.
“Oh yes,” he purred. “You.”
-
A hot, wet tongue stroked up the back of my neck. “You awake?”
“No,” I said. Even without opening my eyes, I could tell it was still dark, and this bed was fuckingsoft.The smell of dirt and leaf mould was absent from my nostrils for the first time in weeks, and being warm and clean and cozy was a luxury I’d almost forgotten.
Our bath earlier, to Ren’s disappointment, had proven less sexy and more utilitarian, as we scrubbed off the layers of grime we’d accumulated until the water was nearly black. Even he found it hard to initiate something when it looked like we were wallowing in pure mud by the end, and the second bath he’d made me run us was a similarly unappealing grey. It had been hard to enjoy the hot water like that, but this? I’d never take sleeping in a bed for granted again.
“I’m bored,” Ren whined, kicking the back of my thigh under the covers. “Play withmeeeee.”
Without opening my eyes, I lifted my leg slightly where I lay on my side facing away from him, inviting access.
Yet he didn’t move. My leg wavered with the strain of keeping it raised, and then eventually dropped.
“Mathias,” he said patiently. “We’re not at the ‘get on with it while I just lie here’ stage of our relationship yet, and I sincerely hope we never reach it.”
“When I fuck you,” he added in a murmur, nuzzling gently at my shoulder, “I want you present. I want you moaning out your desire and screaming my name, you hear me?”
The words, uttered with heat and promise, spurred my cock to life and my eyes open. We’d kissed and fooled around earlier, once our stomachs were full, our skin washed, and his hair clean and freshly braided – resulting in Ren murmuring many prayers of gratitude to Dios, although the god hadn’t shown the patience I’d had to exercise with a hairbrush, did He? We hadn’t had the chance to do such things in over a week other than for some casual flirtation and fleeting touches, and it seemed fitting to remedy that in the same room where I’d first given into him all those months ago. And then I remembered why we hadn’t gone any further than that, and groaned miserably into the pillow.
“I want to. But you’re still injured,Ren.”
From the pained looks he’d been making when he thought I wasn’t looking, I knew his shoulder had been twinging with increased regularity since our fall in the mercenaries’ wagon. The wound was also starting to leak pus through the bandages that I tied around the swollen skin with none of Jiron’s skill but twice the fretting, and the only thing keeping me from freaking out about what that meant was the knowledge that the Martinezes’ healer would be here at any moment to magic it all away.
“That was just a dream,” Ren whispered unconvincingly, drawing out the syllables and waggling his fingers over my temple. I stared suspiciously at them in the gloom. “I’m fine, and you’re going to let me have my way with you.”
“Nice try. When you’re healed.”
“When I’mhealed,I want inside you every hour, on the hour.” He huffed and rolled onto his back with a wince, the lack of any further attempts to convince me suggesting that mypesky stuffiness,as he described my refusal to let us fuck when the circumstances rendered it sheer stupidity to do so, was starting to take root in him. “If you’re going to resist my irresistible advances, you can do something else for me?”
I pressed my face into his bare shoulder, breathing in the scent of him. “Mmm?”
“Tell me what snow tastes like, Nat.”
“Snow?” I asked, surprised by the request. “Uh, nothing. It’s just water.”
“Oh,” Ren said, deflating with audible disappointment. “I’d thought it might be sweet. Or maybe fluffy bitterness, like flour.”
“Flour,” I repeated, snorting against his skin. As Ren shifted to look at me expectantly, his fingers trailing up my arm in lazy patterns, I explained my amusement.
“There’s many types of snow. Sleety, hard as rocks, clumpy, fine...but best of all is the crispy snow. The type that crunches underfoot and is thick enough to mould.” I snuggled closer, and he shifted his arm to play with my hair. “There was this day, years ago, where that kind of snow had just fallen and all the others were playing outside. Making shapes where they rubbed the snow away from the grass, like angels.” My hands and feet twitched involuntarily, remembering the wild movements of the childish game.
“Astrid was recovering from an illness…or something that meant she wasn’t allowed outside the castle that day. I don’t exactly remember, just that we were forced to watch the other children from the window. We were both so jealous. But instead of complaining or throwing a tantrum, she just looks me in the eye, chews on one of her blonde pigtails, and says, ‘Nathanael, I do believe princesses and princes should get to have theirownsnow.’ And we go down to the kitchen and haul these massive bags of flour back to her room, and to this day I have no idea how we weren’t caught on the way up because those things were spilling powder fuckingeverywhere.”
