4
“Are we there yet?”
“Just a bit further.”
Bianca stifled maybe the hundredth yawn of the evening. As much as a nice warm tent with blankets and soft furs to sleep in sounded, curling up on the ground clutching her cloak tight around her was starting to sound good enough.
Tanis was carrying her basket because he started insisting Bianca was walking slower with it so full. It was a good deal heavier, but nothing she couldn’t manage. She’d had plenty of lifting and carrying heavy boxes for setting up her troupe’s stage and costumes with their life on the road, but it was… nice.
“Are we going to have to say hello to people or–oop!”
she squeaked, as her face became immediately acquainted with his thigh, and the world became dark, his fur cloak covering her entirely as she clung to his leg.
There was the sound of crunching snow underfoot as someone approached, and she kept still and quiet. Wide awake now. Clearly introductions were not part of his plan.
“Son of Dhane,”
an unfamiliar voice growled, rougher than Tanis’, but with the same orcish drawl. “A bit late to be out.”
“I lost track of time, stalking the Huldira.”
“Unwise. A huldira would likely sneak up on you again in the dark.”
“I did realize that. I’ll do better tomorrow with some sleep in me.”
“Not much sleep left to get this night. There’s plans for a larger hunting party when the rest of our rangers return…”
The voice trailed off. Tanis was still holding her basket, Bianca realized. She could practically feel the attention of whoever had stopped them eyeing it with as much suspicion as Tanis had when she’d first given him one, if not more.
“I found this,”
Tanis offered after a moment. “Next to some scavenged remains.”
Too long a beat of silence went by.
“I thought, why bring it back empty?”
Tanis offered, and Bianca winced. Perhaps she hadn’t noticed it before because she had been too afraid of a stranger, but he was a terrible liar. “And… maybe we could find some use for these.”
There was a noise Bianca recognized all too well, the I’m-not-dealing-with-your-nonsense sort of groan that her troupe director was so fond of making.
“Fine. Give it to the stitchers, but I don’t want to see you wasting your time like that again.”
She only had a moment to wrap her arms and legs around his leg, as he took a careful step forward, shuffling around whoever they had encountered.
Bianca clung to his leg as best she could, but even she could tell this was not how he usually walked.
“Did you hurt yourself?”
the other orc called after them.
“Nothing the stitchers can’t fix,”
Tanis answered over his shoulder.
Through the movement of his cloak, she occasionally spied glimpses of the orc camp. It was not caravans like Bianca’s acting troupe’s, but tents with patterns woven in the waxed canvas, a number of small campfires sprawled and spread throughout the woods. Occasionally by a cluster of larger, sturdier tents there was a huge bonfire, where more orcs gathered.
His tent was stationed nearly alone as a watch on one edge of the camp. She slipped quickly from the confines of his cloak through the flaps of the tent, with hopefully no one noticing. There was a pile of animal furs on one side of the tent, stacked on top of a wooden chest to keep them off the ground. A small leather and wood box laid near the edge of the bedroll, a little pot of a blue veined plant mostly crushed to ink in it. There was a little metal crucible with its lid askew, a couple still warm coals that heated the tent some.
Bianca could only sightsee for a moment before she had to scurry out of the way, as Tanis dropped to his knees and moved inside after her.
“It was already crowded with only me, so,”
he grimaced, an apology for the cramped space. Slowly they worked around each other, until he sat on his bedroll, long legs bracketing her as she knelt in the small space.
It was hardly spacious. Even though she, a halfling, could stand fully in the tent, he could barely sit up without grazing the top.
“Were you at any point going to let me know you didn’t want the others to see me?”
“I thought more would be asleep by now,”
he sighed. “Didn’t plan on chatting.”
Meaning, he hadn’t thought about it at all until he encountered someone. “And that back there wasn’t chatting?”
“There's a rule about bringing strangers to the camp during the betrothal rituals’ season,”
Tanis muttered, and then did not elaborate. He hadn’t mentioned before he’d be breaking rules to help her. Maybe the problem was really that he didn’t want to have to explain anything at all.
Bianca cast her eyes around the tent. Still, it was warmer inside without the wind, and the bedroll was soft to sit on.
“We can return you to your camp when the patrol falls asleep. Usually around dawn.”
“What till then?”
she whispered, nowhere to look but straight into his eyes.
That might have been the first true bit of unabridged emotion to cross Tanis’ face, just a hint of panic, as he seemed to process the idea of the next few hours alone.
In a tent.
With Bianca.
Not that they hadn’t just spent several hours alone together, but there was something about the tightness of the space that seemed more immediate.
“What indeed,”
he said, glancing away from her.
Already, sitting on her knees was beginning to bother her. Bianca chewed her lower lip, shifting her weight.
“We could talk a little. Not too loud,”
she offered.
“About?”
he returned. He seemed to put all their differences and lack of similarities into that one little word.
“Fine,”
she huffed. “We don’t have to talk about anything.”
“So… we make faces at each other?”
He stuck his tongue out at her, and Bianca blinked a moment, realizing she had never seen anyone stick their tongue out so far. It occurred to her with a flush rushing up her cheeks that orcs might need to get past their tusks for one thing or another.
Suddenly the tent was over warm, and her heart was beating too fast again. “There was a notion to sleep, wasn’t there?”
Then again, as he nodded and moved to lay down, the bedroll seemed to fit Tanis and not much else. Bianca tried to find a better way to fit in the little space left to her, tucking her legs under her and curling her body against his middle. She laid her head against his outstretched arm. As good a pillow as anything, maybe.
“It is odd to be...level with you,”
he offered after a few moments.
She snorted a laugh. She thought about saying something about how it was nice not to have to crane her neck all the time.
This close, she liked the way his nose canted to the side, the jagged line of where it had probably been broken once or twice. She reached out to touch his cheek, tracing over the blue paint that was already wearing off.
Bianca didn’t know what compelled her to do it, but she brushed some of his hair out of his face, tucking it behind his ear. She pecked a kiss over his mouth and giggled at his stunned expression.
“You know, there are some things I’m curious about too.”
She watched the curiosity bloom in his expression, the interest in his eyes as she pushed herself off the ground again.
“Devious little thing,”
he murmured, a glint in his eye. She gave him her sweetest smile in response.
After all the time they’d spent together today, she was beginning to sort out the feelings he stirred up in her. Maybe it was a bit weird for a halfling to appreciate a bit of height. She wondered if it had ever happened before, that there might be a few sparks, a brief flame even, between an orc and a halfling, or some equally strange pairing. By his expression, it seemed that there had been a growing interest in him as well.
He propped himself up on his elbows to lean up and let her kiss him again.
The top of her head barely grazed the brow pole of the tent as she leaned her entire body against his, putting an arm around his neck. She sank down to her knees again, this time straddling his middle.
It started gentle and curious, soft grazes that were careful to avoid his tusks. It wasn’t overly difficult, she learned, as they curved upwards rather than out, and she could press her face to the blunt sides comfortably. Each touch of lips grew deeper, their breathing becoming shallow, more touches exchanged, exploring. His hands were on her back, stroking through her hair, grasping her ass.
That same heat she felt low in her belly was rousing her clit awake. She shifted her hips against his as they kissed, searching for some relief to the needy ache in her cunt until she felt his cock harden through his trousers beneath her.
She ground her hips against his, and before she knew it his hands were working down her winter leggings, rucking up her tunic, his large rough hands finding the softness of her inner thighs, the wetness growing between them.
She broke from their kiss for a breath, wondering how far curiosity might take her. Was it so out of bounds that she might want to bed an orc just the once, to see how it was?
“Let me taste you,”
he growled, dragging a finger through her folds.
She shivered. This was quickly becoming a lot more intimate than she'd thought it would, but she had no wish to say no to that.
She shifted up on her knees, pausing to pull off her leggings and shuffle forward until her knees were on either side of his head, her thighs in his hands.
His tongue was scorching hot against her cunt, his tusks bruising her pelvic bone as he delved his tongue deep inside her without ceremony.
“Oh, oh, you really meant that,”
she gasped, covering her mouth with her hands to contain the moan of pleasure that followed. Not that she hadn’t done this before, but there were some key differences in the sheer magnitude of the tongues she’d been licked by.
Tanis seemed truly ravenous to taste her, that every time he dragged his tongue through her folds he savored it even more, and was desperate to have it again. She found his hand on her hip, pulling up her tunic to reveal her breasts. The roughness of his callused fingertips toying with her nipples while he laved over her clit was almost too much to bear.
Normally Bianca might worry about rutting her hips too harshly against someone’s face, but with the intensity that he gripped her hips it didn’t seem to be a problem. She ground her hips against his mouth, whimpering with each movement desperate to push their tandem efforts into a more cohesive pattern, something that could finally push her over the ultimate edge.
“Wait, slow down, or I’m going to come and then smother your face,”
she whispered between hushed moans of pleasure. She was so close and she didn’t think that she’d have time to say it. He gave another couple of rough licks that nearly sent her over the edge.
“Tanis,”
she almost exclaimed, only hushing herself when Tanis put his hand over the top of the one she had over her mouth, to keep her from crying out too loudly. She whimpered against his palm with each hot stroke of his tongue over her clit.
He gripped her pelvis and lifted her just enough off of his mouth to mutter, “What am I trying to accomplish here?”
Whether it was his hot breath against her quivering, messy, dripping, over-sensitive from licking cunt, or the harshly spoken words themselves, she felt another zing of another hot pleasure flush through her body. Bianca let out a whine of need against his palm. He began licking fiercely even more so than before, growling as he tasted her. His hand pressed hard over her mouth as he unraveled her.
She felt herself leave her body, her muscles so hot, so strained from holding herself in this position, suddenly relaxing, feeling that wave after wave of releasing pleasure, until her thighs felt like jelly and she could only fall back upon her heels.
The first thing that brought her back to her body was the tender stroke of his thumb against her cheek. She was clutching his arm to her chest, his hand still against her mouth.
“Not a sound,”
he rumbled low. She pushed back on her heels, trying to sit up, and caught enough of a glimpse of his wet face, his toothy grin.
“I can’t look at you,”
she mumbled, putting her hands over her eyes. There wasn’t a lot of room to flop over except on to him, as if he were her own personal mattress.
She turned over and sprawled out on her belly against his, coming face to face with his massive erection straining at his pants. She didn’t care that her knees were still by his ears as she began to unlace the leather cords under his belt, to reveal his engorged cock. Her hand couldn’t close around it fully. Tracing her fingers against the veins, Bianca marveled at the thickness, the way the head was shaped, the way that it became almost purplish at the tip.
Her general policy was that whatever could fit in her mouth could also fit in her anywhere. Of course that more applied to finding suitably sized vegetables for when she could steal an hour alone in her caravan. She wasn’t sure she could actually fit his cock within her, or if she’d have to return the favor with some more creative methods.
She stroked up and down, coming up and giving the head a little squeeze. She felt his cock twitch at the stimulation, thick drops of his seed beading at the tip.
“I’m close,”
he breathed.
“Already?”
“The way you taste…”
Bianca gasped as she felt him lick her again from behind, raking through her cunt from clit to taint to spread ass cheeks to hole. If she hadn’t just come like an avalanche, she would have gone back to straddling his face. She couldn’t help but notice the way his cock twitched, wobbled, and dripped another swell of seed.
“Tanis, if you do that again I will get us caught,”
she hissed. Her nethers were just a touch too sensitive still.
“Don’t tempt me,”
came his wry reply, but he kept his tongue to himself.
She gave another few strokes, before his body was tensing beneath hers, and his release spilled over the top of her fist in thick, copious heavy spurts. A concerning amount, actually.
“Oh, that close,”
she whispered in surprise, mildly flustered over the amount of seed that had just glazed over her hand. “And here I thought we’d be rocking the tent.”
“We will, just give me a few minutes,”
Tanis breathed, before passing her a scrap of cloth to clean her hand off.
Bianca nodded, still jelly-boned, and re-oriented herself to lie down with her head on his shoulder. She closed her eyes for a second, and would open them again in just a moment, she promised herself, before the day’s exhaustion took her.
She might have dreamt it, but distantly she felt Tanis curl an arm around her and press a kiss to her forehead.