24 #3
He knew which window belonged to her room. He stood below and threw pebbles at it until a light came on and she pulled aside the draperies and looked down on him with a lamp in her hand.
Nathre.
Elrion wanted to get the Chapel outfitted with those newfangled gas lamps, but he was only renting it, and he would not take on the expense unless he owned the place. So it was just candles and oil lamps inside.
Nathre came down and was shy and smiling. “What are you doing here?”
“Was thinking about you,” he said, bold now that he was drunk. He put his hand around her waist and pulled her flush up against him.
She did not resist. “What were you thinking?”
“Oh, thoughts that’d make you blush,” he said.
“You’re drunk,” she said.
“I think so,” he said. “I want to kiss you.”
She let out a little giggle. “Not here. Anyone could see.”
“Then where?”
She took him into a little stone building that had once been the outdoor kitchen, but was now just four walls and open windows. There were blankets strewn around the floor, though, and she said they’d been having picnics out there and it could be comfortable, perhaps.
He’d never kissed anyone but Aerhril before. It was the same.
It was nothing the same.
Nathre’s body was all flesh and curves. So many places to put his hands. He had not intended to come there and take her virtue, but when she guided his hand inside her skirts, he certainly didn’t object.
He found her wet little center, and he was gratified that the topography was similar enough that he knew mostly what he was doing, and he teased her until she was rippling against his fingers, breathing in his ear, “Haem take me, Haem take us both,” and that was the orc goddess of the underworld, and he liked that she spoke of the orc religion when he had his fingers on her clit.
By this time, they were lying together on the blankets and he’d unlaced his breeches so that he was sticking straight out of his clothes, and she’d put her shy fingers to him several times before pulling back and giggling.
In the wake of her climax, she lay there, panting and said, “Is it because of her, because she’s marrying him?”
“No,” he said.
“Are you with me here to console yourself at your loss? To distract yourself?”
“No,” he said.
“Did she teach you how to touch a woman there?”
A hesitation. “No.”
“Have you had her, then?”
“Never,” he said. “I’ve never actually had a woman, never put my… inside a woman.”
“I would be the first, then?”
“Are you saying…?”
“Do you want me?”
He groaned. “Very much.”
She touched his face. “I want you to take everything off. I want to see you.”
“You too,” he said.
And so they did, and she put her fingers on his arms and the muscles in his stomach and she traced the patterns of the scars on his back.
He weighed her ample breasts in his hands, her skin lighter green and her nipples little dark points.
He teased her and suckled her, comparing her all the time in his head to Aerhril, trying to convince himself that he liked this better, that this would be what he wanted, that he could be satisfied with this.
It wasn’t because she was an orc, he thought, because he liked her orc features very much.
He found her quite attractive. And when he slipped into her wet, eager quim, she was lovely there, a slick passage that gripped him as he glided in and out of her.
He wheezed against her skin, into the slope of her breasts.
He told her that she felt better than he could have possibly imagined, that he never wanted to stop, that she was perfection.
But after, he was quiet as she snuggled into him.
“We could be married and live here, under Elrion,” she said. “There are lots of man and wife servant teams. If we wished to leave, we could likely get hired together, I think.”
He kissed her forehead. “I shouldn’t have done this to you.”
She was quiet.
“I don’t think… I was very drunk. You’re loveliness personified and any man would count himself lucky to—”
“But not you? Because you’re thinking about her?”
“I’m sorry.”
She got dressed quickly and left him. She didn’t say anything, and she certainly didn’t cry or act as if she were even disappointed, but he could tell that he’d wounded her, and he felt guiltier than he’d felt about anything in his entire life.
The next day, he had a raging headache as he worked his chores at Foxglove Peak. He saw Aerhril going to and fro, her long hair streaming out, and he thought of telling her that he had not waited for her, that he had gone and taken some other woman, not her, and how she would react to that.
Now, in the light of morning, he could not even understand why he’d done it.
His head was throbbing, and that maybe made thinking hard, but truly, it was nothing like him. He was not that sort of man, not one to use a poor girl in that way. He hadn’t even pulled out. He’d spent inside her.
I could have gotten her with child, he thought.
But no, not the first time, not only once. He hoped it would not be so easy.
Except within two weeks, he was having that horrible conversation with Igbar in which Igbar informed him that he had, indeed, gotten her with child.