Chapter Three
I have undressed in front of two men in my life.
The first was a fisherman from down the coast, who walked into our village one summer when I was twenty and left again before the autumn equinox.
The second was a tinker I took into my bed for three nights one bad winter.
Nights I have not regretted, and have not repeated.
Neither watched me undress with any particular weight; they watched the way men watch, with hunger and intention, and I undressed for them as a woman undresses for a man.
I am not undressing for a man tonight.
He stands very still at the oak table, his head set on the wood, both attentions on me, while I unlace the bodice of my dress with hands that shake only a little.
The laces are old; they give easily. I work the bodice loose and draw the dress off my shoulders.
The wool slides down my arms, pools at my waist, and I push it the rest of the way down my hips.
It falls to the floor.
I step out of it, fold it, and set it on the bench by the door.
My shift is next. I draw it over my head in one smooth motion, fold it too, and lay it on the dress.
I do not cover myself. He has been looking at me since I lifted my eyes from the hedge, and the looking did not change when the cloth came off. I stand in the firelight and let him see me.
The head’s eyes move down my body and back up. The body does the same, the sense of attention sweeping me from head to toe. He shudders.
It is the first uncontrolled movement I have seen him make. A ripple runs the length of his frame, and the hand resting on the table closes briefly into a fist, then opens again.
I cross the kitchen to him. When I am close enough that the front of my body almost brushes his, I stop and look up at the empty collar of his cloak.
“Touch me,” I say.
He does.
His hands rise to settle on my shoulders. His thumbs press my collarbones, his fingers curving down across my upper back, firm without being heavy, and a shiver runs through me.
He slides his hands along my upper arms, down to the elbows, across the soft inside of my forearms, and around to my hands, which he lifts and turns palm-up, tracing the lines with his thumbs as if reading me, then sets them back at my sides and lifts his own to my shoulders again.
This time he slides his hands down the front of me, over my breasts; his thumbs cross my nipples, and they stiffen under his touch. I let out a low sound.
His hands slide down my ribs, across the softness of my belly, around to the small of my back. He pulls me lightly against him, and I feel the hard shape of him through the layers of his clothes. He is a man in that, at least. Man enough for that.
He bends.
The empty collar of his cloak comes down toward the side of my throat, and I feel him there against my pulse, as if he had set the place where his mouth would be against my skin. The sensation pulls a soft cry from me. I sway.
He moves down. The kiss-that-is-not-a-kiss travels down my throat to the hollow of my collarbone, then to the curve of my breast, where he pauses, his empty collar laid to the soft skin between.
From somewhere deep in his chest, a low purr begins.
A vibration that runs into me where his body meets mine.
My nipples tighten further, and my hands come up to the back of his cloak without my deciding they should.
I have lost the thread of where I am. The kitchen, the fire in the hearth. All of it a long way off. The head on the table watches me, the body before me takes me apart by degrees, and I am beginning to understand how long he has waited for this.
He bends further, his hands sliding to my hips, and he kneels.
On one knee in my kitchen, his cloak pooled on the flagstones, his hands on the curves of my hips, the empty collar now level with my belly, he presses it to the soft skin below my navel; the purr in his chest deepens.
The not-kiss travels lower, and lower still, and when it reaches the join of my thighs, my knees nearly give.
His hands tighten to hold me up, and I make a sound that is not a word.
His hands move. One hand spreads flat to my lower belly, holding me; the other comes around the back of my thigh and lifts, gently, urging me to open my stance.
I do, widening my feet. He sets his collar lower, against the soft flesh between my legs, and the not-kiss becomes something else.
A heat, a steady insistence from the place where his mouth should be.
My own slick begins to gather, and his hand flattens harder against my belly, as if to anchor me. He holds me there a long time.
Then he rises to his full height, hands sliding up my body as he goes; his palms cup my breasts when they reach them, thumbs passing over my nipples once, twice, and then he is standing again with both hands on my shoulders, the head on the table watching us both.
He turns me gently by the shoulders, around to face the table.
He guides me to it, setting my hands flat on the oak on either side of his own head, until I am bent slightly forward at the waist, the head’s black eyes staring up at mine.
Behind me, I hear the soft creak of his clothing, and the warm, hard length of him presses against the back of my thigh.
He does not enter me. Not yet. He lets me feel him running the length of himself along the cleft of me, slow and deliberate, coating himself in what he has drawn from me. I am shaking now in a fine continuous tremor I cannot stop.
He bends. His hand slides up the line of my spine, between the shoulder blades, to the back of my neck, and uses that grip to lower me until my elbows rest on the table and my face is closer still to his.
The black eyes hold mine. Behind me, he finds the entrance to me and pushes.