13. The Argument on the Wall #3
She came hard, cunt clamping down around him, forehead knocking the tabletop, voice breaking open on his name.
Mavrek followed almost immediately, thrusting deep and staying there while his cock jerked hot inside her.
He came with a broken sound against the back of her neck, one hand crushing hers flat into a smear of blue pigment while thick heat flooded her in pulses that made her legs shake.
Then silence, except for breath.
And the small dry sounds of damaged sample boards settling to the floor.
Mavrek withdrew slowly. Iva hissed at the emptying stretch and the warm slide of him leaving her body.
She stayed folded over the table a moment longer because standing seemed conceptually ambitious.
Chalk dust had printed across one breast where her chemise had twisted down.
Mineral grit clung to the damp inside of her thigh.
Her hair felt full of paper fibers and powdered color.
When she finally turned, she saw the wall behind them.
Several strips still hung. Several did not.
One whole row of active experiments had been smeared where her back and shoulders had driven into them.
A pale green board had split. Two nearly-dry sample cards lay face-down in a streak of mixed blue and skin oil on the floor.
Another had taken the print of her hand clean through the center.
The pale green board stopped her.
She knew that strip. She had stood before it two evenings ago and watched the gray-green shift from muddy to luminous depending on angle.
The one that had failed three times in a day.
The one he had been working hardest to hold still in its own light.
Now it lay cracked into two clean halves on the floor with a heel print across the wet face where one of them had stepped on it during the worst of things.
Mavrek looked at the damage.
Not briefly. He looked at the green board, picked up both halves, and held them edge to edge as if testing whether the break might yet be salvageable.
It was not. The crack ran through the test area.
She watched his thumb move once across the ruined surface and knew he was reading what could not be recovered.
Then he set both halves aside on the discard pile.
"They needed updating anyway," he said.
Which was true of most of the wall. Not of that strip.
The dismissal was real. So had the moment before it been.
Iva pulled her blouse together with fingers not yet steady. "I damaged your work."
"Aye."
Not denial. Not reassurance first.
He stooped, lifted one of the other fallen boards, examined the smear of skin oil and blue dust across it, and set it aside from the salvageable pile with flat practicality. "Some of it."
"The green one was not ready to be updated."
His hands stilled for half a breath on the next board. Then he continued sorting. "Nay."
She waited for the anger she had earned, or the easy forgiveness that would have been worse. Neither came. Only his hands moving through the pile, separating what survived from what did not, with the same brutal efficiency he brought to flood-damaged sections of the wall.
"That was very noble after the fact."
"Nay." He looked at the sorted stacks. "It is accounting."
There. Honesty that refused to flatter either of them. It had cost him something. He had let the cost stand, then chosen her over the boards. Neither fact canceled the other.
Iva wiped at her throat and came away with mineral shimmer on her fingers.
Paint dust striped her skirt. There was grit in her hair and between her breasts.
Her whole body felt used in the specific honest way two exhausted working bodies used each other when they had stopped pretending mess was avoidable.
Mavrek came to her then, slower now, and brushed a streak of shell-white from her jaw with the back of two knuckles.
"You are still right about the patch," he said.
It was absurd that this nearly undid her more than the sex had.
She swallowed once. "You are very bad at losing well."
"Aye." His mouth moved, almost a smile. "And worse at wanting you quietly."
The line lodged under everything else.
She gathered her pack from the chair, acutely aware of the blue smear on the strap where her hand had transferred it, of the grit falling from her hair onto her shoulders, of the wet soreness between her thighs and the glow of certainty still moving through her like a second pulse.
He had wanted her most when she was most certain.
He had said so by body if not by tidy statement.
And it had cost him something to say it at all.
At the door she glanced back once.
Mavrek stood in the studio amid fallen strips and salvaged boards, lamp light catching the two halves of the green sample where he had set them on the discard stack. Brief irritation gone. Cost acknowledged. Work already being re-sorted into what could be kept and what could not.
He looked up and caught her watching.
"Tomorrow," he said, "we finish the panel."
No romance in it. No softening.
Just the next truthful thing.
Iva opened the door and stepped out into dusk with paint dust on her clothes, mineral grit in her hair, her body sore and satisfied and lit through by the deeply inconvenient knowledge that he found her most attractive when she refused to be wrong for his comfort.
Tomorrow the repaired panel would dry in daylight with her judgment visible all over it.