13. The Argument on the Wall #2
He kissed like a man who had spent twelve hours holding himself in the narrow lanes work allowed and now had no interest in lane discipline.
She tasted the last bitter trace of tea on him, the salt of the day, the iron heat of his mood.
When she opened for him his tongue pushed in deep and sure and she clutched at his shoulders with hands still gritted in mineral powder.
"You were right," he said against her mouth, as if the words themselves made him rougher. "Gods curse me, woman, you were right." No one in Brineshell heard it but the sample wall and the panel on the easel. Some traitorous part of her noticed that too.
The honesty of it went through her like a knife.
Iva's laugh broke into something much more dangerous. "You sound furious."
"I was." His mouth slid to her throat, teeth just touching. "And then I looked again."
That nearly took her knees out.
Competence and desire had crossed wires so completely she could no longer tell which had lit first. He wanted her because she had stood her ground, because the patch dried clean, because she had not apologized for surpassing him. The truth of that was so naked it made her cunt throb.
She fisted his shirt and pulled him closer. "Then stop talking."
He made the low sound she had already learned meant approval and pushed one thigh between hers.
The pressure landed exactly where she was aching and she rocked down on it before dignity could intervene.
The sample wall behind her gave again — brittle paper, pinned boards, one dish clattering from a shelf and rolling under the table.
Mavrek's hand flattened over her sternum as if he needed to feel the force of her where it mattered. "Aye. There."
He knew. Of course he knew. She had been loudest after the argument, after the patch, after certainty. The connection was humiliating and exact.
"Do not look pleased," she said breathlessly.
"Why not?"
"Because I dislike being legible."
"Too late."
That got him a sharp bite at the hinge of his jaw, which in turn got her blouse opened by sheer impatient force. Buttons skittered against the floorboards. He shoved the fabric off her shoulders, tugged her chemise down enough to bare both breasts, and stared once before he put his mouth on her.
The back wall dug sample edges into her spine while his tongue roughened one nipple to aching hardness and his hand worked the other.
Twelve hours of labor were all through the room and all through them.
Dust at her nape. Sweat drying in the hollow of her back.
The faint soreness in her thighs from the scaffold.
His forearms rough with old pigment and the day's fresh grit.
Nothing polished. Nothing cleaned into romance.
The mess of it made the wanting feel truer.
When he dropped to his knees and pushed her skirts up, several sample strips tore free and slid down around them like failed blessings.
"Mavrek," she warned, because the wall behind her held twenty years of his private work and some late sane part of her recognized the danger before the rest of her did.
"Aye."
He kissed the inside of her thigh and shoved her underclothes aside.
Warning apparently filed and ignored.
His mouth on her cunt in the closed studio was different from daylight in the workshop. No windows now. No need to swallow sound. The knowledge hit her before his tongue did, and when it did hit she let the sound go instead of breaking her own teeth holding it back.
That was information.
Mavrek groaned at the noise and licked her harder.
One hand held her thigh open while the other slid behind her, fingers digging into her ass and pulling her into his mouth with a greed stripped of all his prior composure.
The sample boards at her back scraped and shifted every time she moved.
One cracked cleanly under the shoulder he had pinned there.
Iva had meant to care. She really had. Then his tongue found the exact place that made caring temporarily impossible, and the room narrowed to grit under her palms and the sound of herself being much louder than she ever allowed.
He took that too, as if her volume were another form of proof.
When she came the first time it was with her head thrown back against the wall and a shout she would have died rather than make in the workshop.
Mavrek kept licking her through it, shameless and patient and mean enough to prolong it until her knees trembled and another pinned strip slid down across his shoulder.
"Again," he said into her skin when he rose.
Sweat, dust, sex, argument. His cock strained hard against his trousers, obvious and unforgiving.
Iva got one hand between them, fumbling at the fastening because she wanted him naked and inside her immediately and perhaps also because some savage piece of her needed to return the loss of composure in kind.
He helped by rucking the cloth down just enough to free himself, thick and flushed and already wet at the crown. Bigger in the close dusk of the studio than she remembered, which should have been impossible and yet there it was, one more unfairness.
"You look offended," he said.
"I am evaluating the engineering."
He barked a laugh at that, brief and wrecked. Then he turned her, one hand between her shoulder blades, and bent her over the worktable.
The studio smelled of ground minerals and sex.
Her cheek landed in a spill of chalk dust. Somewhere near her left hand a sample board still lay wet enough to transfer blue pigment in a cold stripe across her palm.
Mavrek shoved her skirts up over her hips and gripped the back of one thigh hard enough to leave a print.
"Tell me if you need slower."
He was still that man. Even now. Even furious and hard and half out of his mind with wanting because she had been right about pigment. The care threaded through the roughness and made it worse.
"Get on with it," she said.
The answering thrust punched the breath out of her.
He took her from behind with the blunt certainty of a man who knew exactly how much he could ask and intended to ask it all.
Her body, already worked open by his mouth, still jolted at the stretch.
He was deep at once from the angle, striking somewhere inside her that made her hands claw uselessly at the chalked tabletop.
One of the sample strips smeared under her wrist with a wet squeak.
Mavrek swore and pulled almost out, then drove back in harder.
The sound she made was wholly without decorum.
Good. Let decorum drown.
He fucked her in the mess of the workday, in the grit and dust and sweat, one hand braced beside her head and the other sliding between her thighs to her clit. Each thrust jolted the table into the wall. Behind her, more of his pinned experiments tore loose.
She could feel one folded card trapped under her shoulder blade and another ground to pulp under her hip where he held her down and took her with that same impossible blend of attention and force.
"This is what you wanted?" he said, voice ragged at her ear.
She could barely think, much less lie. "After I was right?"
"Aye."
Gods.
The confession of it — hers and his both — turned the whole room molten. She pushed back against him with no finesse left at all and heard him curse low and filthy when he felt it.
"Again," he said, hand rougher on her clit. "Be loud again."
No one nearby. Closed studio. The nearest workers long gone.
The only witnesses his sample wall and the panel on the easel and whatever gods oversaw people too tired to act wisely.
Iva let the volume go. Let him hear what he had done to her when competence stopped feeling like a liability and started feeling like the thing he wanted most.