Chapter 8
NISSA
Breathless and emptied of energy, Nissa’s chest heaves as she hauls in air.
“Enough,” she begs, half-laughing. “That is enough, Ria.”
Ria grins down at her, that confident smile drifting into a delicious smugness that is so delightful that Nissa starts making plans about how to keep it on her face. “It’s not nearly enough, Nissa,” she whispers, kissing along the length of her neck.
“Oh, I meant only for this moment, this one, right here,” Nissa replies, playful and silly, poking one finger down into the earth emphatically. “Give me a few minutes, and you can see whether I have the strength left to…”
“Yes, love?” Ria’s words are arch, teasing as she settles on her side against Nissa, her head resting on her shoulder. “Left to…?”
Nissa can’t hold back the laugh, and it comes with a snort. “Take yet more of your attentions?” she says questioningly.
It’s Ria’s turn to snort. “I’m sorry. I just made you come your brains out beneath the stars and you’re still being coy? My ‘attentions’ indeed!”
She catches a blanket and a fur and yanks them up over the two of them.
The quiet of the night expands between them, and Nissa stares up at the stars in the cold night sky.
Ria smooths a strong, rough palm across Nissa’s stomach, and Nissa, glancing down, thinks she’s never seen so beautiful a sight as the contrast between Ria’s skin and her own.
She shivers under that touch, enjoying the possessiveness of it.
Does Ria even know how entirely I am hers? she wonders. The sensation and even the thought is so strangely unfamiliar: she is more herself, and yet given over to Ria. She glances up and swallows hard as the thought of the next morning opens a pit of dread in her stomach.
That thought is enough to send her fleeing back into sensation. She rolls towards Ria, turning the other woman onto her back.
“Actually, come to think of it,” Nissa says, echoing Ria’s arch, playful tone. “There’s something else I can do while I catch my breath…”
She wriggles down, kissing in against Ria’s neck.
The other woman gasps, her hands gripping at Nissa’s waist, and Nissa bites her earlobe none-too-gently.
Ria makes a noise somewhere between pain and pleasure, and Nissa grins in delight.
“Oh yes, I think perhaps this is a much better use of my time than just lying around…”
She slides down, getting her knees under her between Ria’s legs, then kneels up above her.
For a moment, she just looks at her, her heart feeling like it’s expanding until it’s as big as the sky above.
Her breasts are soft curves, the nipples just starting to harden in the cold.
Her strong, stocky frame is soft with relaxation, the muscles of her uninjured shoulder only working because Ria grips Nissa’s waist, sliding her hand down the curve into her hip over and over.
Nissa glances up at Ria’s face, meeting her gaze.
Nissa’s mouth falls open almost in disbelief. The cockiness, the confidence, the smugness… all are gone in this moment of being perceived. It makes Ria shy. Nissa tilts her head, wanting to chase back the thread of uncertainty in her gaze.
“Goddess above, Ria, you are so fucking beautiful,” she murmurs quietly, her voice thrumming with honesty.
Ria’s smile is small but there’s no mistaking the delight in it.
“Will you let me touch you?” Ria’s throat works and Nissa can see the vulnerability as if she’s spoken it aloud.
“Wait, let me try another question.” She draws close, kissing against Ria’s neck. “Is this alright?”
“It is,” Ria says in a husky voice, then clears her throat.
Nissa swallows. One night, and she’s being given this intimacy, more than she could ever have expected.
Is she opening a door better left closed?
But she can’t resist this vulnerable offering; her body is already moving against Ria.
She draws her tongue down the salty skin, then along the collarbone.
“This?”
“Yes,” Ria affirms softly.
Nissa smooths her hands across Ria’s upper stomach, then slides them upward. As Nissa’s hands fit to the curve of Ria’s breasts, Ria’s body shifts, almost imperceptibly but somehow so clearly towards desire.
Her mouth falls open.
“Yes,” she says, before Nissa can ask, and then she smiles, reaching up to tug Nissa down to kiss her thoroughly.
When they part, both breathless, Ria grins, that familiar, cocksure attitude behind it.
“Touch me as you will, Nissa, love. But just know this—I have been on the edge of that waterfall all night, so it’s not likely to take much. ”
Nissa gives her a speculative smile. “Well, at least not the first time,” she corrects.
Ria chuckles deep in her throat, drawing Nissa down to kiss her again, and then she folds her good arm behind her head. “Do with me as you will,” she says, melodrama in her tone.
“Oh-ho, now there’s a promise,” Nissa says with a grin, but she kisses swiftly down across the wound carved beneath Ria’s collarbone, to capture a nipple.
The sensation of it in her mouth is like nothing else; it feels like it fits too perfectly.
She tongues it briskly, experimentally, and the sound of Ria’s swift inhalation sends desire shooting through her core.
Again, even now, she can feel herself becoming slick again.
This woman.
She drags her tongue against her nipple again, and Ria sighs, her hand falling against Nissa’s head, and Nissa takes the hint, setting to it with a will.
It’s not long before Ria’s hips are moving against her thighs.
Nissa releases the nipple, turns to the other, and Ria moans in her throat as her mouth closes around it.
Nissa can barely keep back her own moan, and when she lets it out, Ria makes another sound, almost a whimper.
Every sound she makes feels like it tugs at Nissa’s core.
“You are incredible,” Nissa whispers to Ria’s torso.
The muscles shift under the skin, and Nissa kisses into the salty skin, letting her teeth score gently across it.
Ria murmurs something, and Nissa smiles against Ria’s warmth.
She lifts a hand, placing it gently against Ria’s hip.
Something ragged is under her fingers and she pulls away startled as Ria gasps, remembering the wound she’d stitched earlier that day under Illima’s falcon-precise gaze.
“I’m so sorry,” she cries, pulling up to look at Ria’s face. Maybe she shouldn’t be doing any of this. She doesn’t want to hurt Ria.
“It’s fine,” Ria says. “It didn’t hurt, just… it might.”
Nissa settles her hand back against Ria’s lower belly instead. “This alright?”
Ria glances down at her, smirking. “I mean, it’s fine, but it could go a little lower. Y’know. If you wanted.”
Nissa huffs out a breath on a laugh and deliberately picks up her fingers until only her first two fingertips touch Ria’s skin. Then she walks them down, down, into the tight-curled triangle. “Like this?”
Ria is caught between laughing and arousal. “Yes… I mean, no, I mean no don’t stop but—”
Nissa grins and raises an eyebrow. “Oh?” she says questioningly, pretending more innocence than is real. “Is this not right?”
She walks a gentle fingertip into Ria’s slit, and the other woman is caught between a groan and a laugh at the sensation.
Then Nissa bites her lip as she registers the slick heat of Ria’s sex.
She can’t keep back the ache that opens in her chest at the sensation, almost like a fear of loss, and she bends to kiss Ria’s thigh, slipping gentle fingers into that warmth.
Ria’s hand fists at her side, and she whimpers, a sound that feels like a plea to Nissa’s unpracticed ears.
“More?” Nissa asks softly.
Ria doesn’t hesitate. “Inside. I want you inside.”
The words make Nissa’s breath catch again, her heart swelling.
With gentle, exploratory fingertips, she feels through the slick warmth until she finds the entrance of Ria’s sex.
She hesitates just a split second, and then her mouth falls open as she doesn’t need to press inside at all; Ria’s sex draws her inside.
Nissa whimpers softly at the sensation of all that heat and wetness wrapped around her fingers, and Ria responds in kind.
“My mouth?” Nissa asks softly.
“Fuck,” Ria says, the word hard and ragged and somehow perfect. “Yes. Goddess. Nissa. Yes.”
Nissa kisses gently, the sensation of the damp curls under her lips like a promise.
She tries to remember what Ria had done to her, any of the half dozen times she’s pressed her mouth to Nissa’s sex.
She opens her mouth, her tongue licking, and Ria’s entire body jerks towards her, and she cries aloud. Nissa pulls back, startled. “Alright?”
“Goddess, fuck.” Ria hesitates, as if she’s finding the words. “More than alright,” she says roughly. “You are incredible.”
Nissa can’t deny the delight she feels at these words, and she smiles right against Ria’s sex. She opens her mouth again, exploring with her tongue, eyes closed, learning not only the topography but the way that Ria responds to every gentle move.
Ria’s hips shift, driving Nissa’s fingers into her sex, and Nissa takes the hint, meeting the rhythm. Nissa closes her mouth around Ria’s clit—it’s so like hers, but also different—and Ria gasps.
When Nissa’s tongue works at it, Ria cries aloud, “Just like that. Like—”
And Nissa opens her eyes in wonder as Ria gasps in sharp, crescendoing intakes of breath, then finally cries aloud, no words this time. She bows around Nissa, arching off the blanket, her sex gripping and then fluttering against Nissa’s fingers, her clit pulsing.
Nissa keeps going, heartbeat pounding, not sure when she should stop, and Ria keeps gasping and moaning, her hand finally settling against Nissa’s head.
Nissa stops moving, kisses the clit one more time in something like affectionate farewell.
“Slowly,” Ria pants out. “When you take them out, go slow.”
Nissa obeys, reluctant to leave the gentle throb she can feel inside. Ria exhales as they part, and Nissa crawls up her body.
Ria is flushed, tendrils of her hair sticking to her face, and Nissa has never seen anything more beautiful.
“You are…” Nissa shakes her head. “You are fucking incredible, Ria.”
Ria flutters love-drunk eyelashes at her. “I… I am not the incredible one.” She blinks, drawing Nissa down until she’s resting with her head against her shoulder. “I… are you sure you’ve never done that before?”
Nissa laughs. “Alright, you don’t need flattery, you know. You’ve won me.”
Ria hesitates, and Nissa bites her lip, wishing she could take the words back, not because she doesn’t mean them but because she’s not sure what significance they hold, here and now. “That was… amazing,” Ria sighs, eventually, and presses a kiss into Nissa’s forehead.
“It… it was…” Nissa smiles, drawing the blankets up over them. “I think we’ve held the light in the world, don’t you?”
Ria’s strong body is soft and warm against hers.
“I think we lit it up like a bonfire,” she whispers. “The sun has no excuses this Longest Night. We made it the easiest thing in the world, to return.”