18. Lissy
LISSY
We slip out between the trees while everyone sings. Nobody stops us, and only Grammy sees us go. I catch her eye across the fire. She looks at me, looks at him, and turns back to the orc grandfather's mead like a woman minding her own business.
That is the greatest gift she has ever given me.
The dryads raised guest pavilions along the stream, tents made of canvas and living branches woven together. Each is lit by a single lantern. Torgan holds the flap of his aside, and I step in.
Then he lets the flap fall, and it's just us, the lantern, and the sound of water from the stream.
Neither of us pretends we came here to talk.
Then it's like a dam breaks, and he rushes toward me.
He kisses me. It's slow, like the way he kissed me in the courtyard, but nothing underneath it is careful anymore. His hands find the buttons down the back of my dress. I made the unfortunate choice of wearing one with dozens of tiny buttons. He works them loose one by one without hurrying.
Making me wait makes me impatient for him. "You could just—"
"You made this dress," he says, his lips finding my shoulder as he works another button loose. "I'm not damaging it."
"I can fix a dress, Torgan."
"I know." Another button. His mouth follows the opening fabric down my spine, and I shiver against him. "I'm not hurrying either way."
When the dress finally pools at my feet, he steps back and looks at me in the lantern light. All of me. Long enough that I fight the urge to cover myself. Nobody has ever looked at me like that. Like the dress was wrapping paper and he has just uncovered a gift.
"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.
When he rises over me, I let go of the rest.
"Are you all right?" he asks. It's what he asked in the storage room. His arms cage me, all that mass held off me like it weighs nothing, and the blunt head of him presses against my entrance. I am so wet and so empty that I could weep with wanting.
"Better than all right." I hook my leg over his hip. "Go slow. But go."
He goes slow.
He pushes into me by inches, watching my face for any hint that I'm not all right.
The stretch steals my breath. It's too much, then almost too much as I adjust to him.
Then he's right at the edge of too much and never over it, because every time my breath catches, he stills and lets my body make room.
By the time his hips finally meet mine, we're both shaking. He's seated so deep I can feel him everywhere, fuller than I have ever been, and he makes a sound against my throat that is half growl, half gasp.
"Lissy." My name comes out rough. "You feel—"
"I know." I can barely speak. "I know. Move."
He moves.
Whatever I thought I knew about this, about men, about beds, about my own body, is gone by his third stroke.
His size drags against every part of me at once.
There is no angle that isn't devastating, no thrust that doesn't reach somewhere no one else ever has.
He reads me like he reads a battlefield, adjusting, learning, and using everything he learns.
I climb faster and higher than I ever have before.
I hear myself begging him not to stop in a voice I don't recognize. My dignity is gone now.
He doesn't stop.
I come beneath him, clenching around all that impossible fullness, and it doesn't end. He works me through it and past it and up again, until I'm shaking and swearing into his shoulder. Only then does he let himself go, driving deep and spilling into me with my name in his mouth.
After, we lie tangled in the furs, my head on his chest and his heart slowing beneath my ear. My whole body still hums. I feel wrung out, satisfied, and vaguely astonished at myself.
Nothing before has ever been like this. No one has ever been like this, and it isn't the size of him. Or not only that. It's that the strongest male I've ever known spent the entire night being careful with me.
And we just did that.
"You're thinking," he says into my hair.
"I'm recovering. There's a difference."
"Mm."
"Torgan." I prop my chin on his chest so he can see that I mean it. "That was the best night of my life. In case you're lying there wondering."
He looks at me for a long moment. His hand comes up and tucks a strand of hair behind my ear.
"I wasn't wondering," he says. Then, "But say it again anyway."
I laugh, and he pulls me closer.
"That was the best night of my life."
And for once, I believe there may be happiness for me.