10. Daylight Evidence
DAYLIGHT EVIDENCE
She came back to the workshop early, and she knew why she came back early, and she did not leave when she saw the windows.
Morning had not yet climbed to full glare.
The inner water still held that silver-green hour before the reef ring turned cruel with light, and Brineshell's walkways smelled more of wet wood than market spice.
Iva crossed them with her pack on one shoulder and last night's notebook decision still sitting under her ribs like a swallowed coin.
Her name remained in the margin of the navigation panel note.
She had looked at it once before dawn, then closed the book and come here instead of taking the extra hour in bed she badly needed.
Professional reasons, she told herself once, without conviction.
The east wash wanted checking in early light.
The channel-marker correction deserved a second look.
None of that explained arriving before first bell with heat still low in her body from memory and soreness still tucked between her thighs like a private bruise.
The workshop stood open to the morning. Mavrek was already inside, bent over the central table among sample strips and half-ground pigments.
Natural light filled the room through the windows facing the community walkway.
Through the panes she could see a woman carrying baskets toward the kitchens and a boy dragging a bundle of rush reeds twice his own size.
Anyone on that walkway could see in. The windows were simply there, as they had always been.
From the far end of the boards they would make a stage of the room if anyone cared to look.
Mavrek looked up.
His gaze went to her face, then to the pack on her shoulder, then briefly to the panes and back. Not performative. Not a challenge. Recognition.
"You came early," he said.
"So are you."
"I did not sleep in the workshop for romance."
That nearly made her laugh, which would have been intolerable at this hour. She set the pack down on the side shelf because her hand needed somewhere to go. The air in the room smelled of night-work: oil, stone dust, lamp smoke gone faint in daylight, and maruk on his hands.
"Anyone can see in," she said.
"Aye."
No move toward the curtains. No stride to the door. He simply gave her the fact back.
Iva should have taken it and gone. Instead she stepped deeper into the workshop. That was the decision. Just one step past the point where caution remained plausible, then another, until she stood at the scarred worktable with daylight bright behind her.
She could have gone to the scaffold. The scaffold was safe -- the only place in Brineshell where her body answered to material instead of to the man standing three feet from her with oil on his hands. She chose the workshop instead. She chose the windows.
Mavrek's hand flattened over the sample cloth he had been folding.
"You know how open this room is," he said.
"I noticed."
"Aye."
The fear came sharp enough to taste. So did the wanting. They ran alongside one another so closely now that separating them felt like the wrong exercise for the morning.
She reached for his hand.
Oil slicked her fingertips at once, warm from his skin.
Maruk and mineral dust. The smell rose between them.
She lifted his hand without asking and looked at the amber shine in his palm as if it were a technical thing she had every right to inspect.
Then, because she had already crossed every sensible line between the door and the table, she turned his wrist and pressed her mouth to the center of it.
The breath he took was not quiet.
"Iva."
The use of her name there, in daylight, with the bright panes at her back, made something low in her body clench hard.
"Do not start telling me to reconsider," she muttered against his wrist.
"Nay." His free hand came up and settled at the back of her neck. "I was not planning to insult you."
She lifted her head. They stood close enough now that if anyone looked in from the walkway they would not need imagination. Mavrek's gaze dropped once to her mouth and came back. Her pulse jumped in her throat. He was waiting again, damn him. Always letting the material declare itself.
Iva kissed him because if she gave herself two more breaths the bright room might become enough to stop her.
No protective dark this time. His mouth took hers in clear reef light that showed everything. His hand slid to the nape of her neck and then forward over the side of her throat, leaving a warm faint slick where the oil transferred.
He pulled back just far enough to look at her. "Still yes?"
The tenderness of the question would have ruined her if she let it. She kept her voice rough instead. "If you make me say yes each time, we'll lose the whole morning."
That brief flash of teeth again. "Then come here."
As if she were not already nearly in his lap.
He lifted her onto the worktable in one clean movement and spread her knees with the calm authority of someone rearranging tools for better access.
The bright panes remained over his shoulder, white with morning.
She could see the walkway in slices around him: a plank rail, the pale post outside, movement once as someone crossed the far end and did not pause. Her breath snagged on the sight.
Mavrek followed her glance and looked at the window too. Then back at her.
"You may stop now if this is not what you came for."
Iva dragged him closer by the front of his shirt in answer. "Stop offering the reasonable path. I dislike it."
He kissed her hard enough to silence whatever answer he might have given.
This time she was less outside herself. The first night she had seemed to hover somewhere above her own body half the time, cataloguing evidence even as he made it.
Morning stripped that refuge away. The light was too clear.
The glass too present. Every sensation arrived without the softening dark allowed.
His mouth went to her throat and she felt exactly where the oil on his fingers touched her skin as he opened the collar of her blouse.
Warm thumb beneath the jaw. Callused fingertips at the hollow of her throat.
The transfer of maruk there as legible as ink.
She knew what it would smell like an hour from now on the walkway. The knowledge made her wetter.
Mavrek pushed the blouse off one shoulder, then the other, not bothering with more buttons than necessary.
His hand skimmed down her forearm to bare her wrist, turning it up.
The place she'd scrubbed two mornings ago as if friction could alter truth.
One of the places claim oil would read longest in daylight.
"Still there," he said, thumb brushing the inside of the wrist.
"Do not catalogue me before breakfast."
"Too late."
He bent and kissed the pulse there, then licked the faint salt from her skin in a stroke so intimate she actually gasped.
If anyone looked in now, they would see exactly what she was. The thought should have stopped her. Instead her thighs opened wider.
Mavrek's eyes lifted at once, sharp with hunger. "Aye."
"You are impossible."
"So they say."
He dropped to his knees between them before she could reply. No ceremony. Just one large body lowering itself in full morning light until his hands were on her calves and his face level with her lap. Her whole body went hot and cold together.
"What are you doing?"
His look could have been called patient if patience had ever burned like that. "You came early."
Then he pushed her skirts up her thighs and kissed the inside of one knee.
The first touch of his mouth there made her hands fly to the table edge. The second, higher up, made the walkway outside the window seem to rush closer. She could see the blurred shadow of someone passing beyond the glass and had to clamp her lips together against the sound trying to leave them.
Mavrek noticed everything. Of course he did. One hand slid up her thigh and held it open while his thumb stroked once over the soaked fabric between her legs.
"That heat was in you before I touched you."
"Do not speak."
"Nay."
His fingers hooked the gusset of her underclothes aside and the morning air hit her cunt cool and indecently.
He looked at her once before he bent to taste her, and the look itself nearly undid her.
Full daylight. Her thighs spread. His mouth lowering to her sex with the walkway still visible at the edge of the frame.
When his tongue touched her, all thought went ragged.
The first stroke was broad, deliberate, from the entrance of her cunt to the clit already aching for pressure.
She jerked hard enough that the table legs knocked.
He held her steady with both hands, palms hot on her thighs, oil from his fingers leaving faint slick prints high along the inside where the skin was too tender to forget anything quickly.
"Mavrek--"
He made a sound against her that vibrated straight through her and then went back to licking her with the same ruthless patience he brought to everything else.
No hurried devouring. Just steady deliberate skill until she was panting with her head thrown back and one hand over her own mouth because the bright glass stayed there, indifferent and impossible.
He looked up while his mouth was still on her and saw that hand.
Then he pulled her wrist away.
Not gently. Not cruelly either. Simply took it and held it flat against the table, his oil-slick palm closing around both her wrists while he kept licking her.
The position bared her throat, her chest under the fallen blouse, the whole line of her body to the morning light.
Shame hit so hard it blurred instantly into something hotter.
The brush of his tusk against her clit made her curse out loud.
He smiled against her.