68. Now Kissing
NOW: KISSING
Reed only used his hands on me because I was always too distracted by them to ever think to ask for his mouth.
Only afterward, wrung out, body weary but mind alive, I would lie next to him and remember his other offer.
And then I would close my eyes and find myself dead to the world until the early, still-dark morning when he would lightly tap my shoulder until I awoke.
The night after that first time, Keir had come to the tent and asked to speak to Reed.
Reed had been crawling into the tent, his eye on me, a smirk on his face.
While my heart was pounding and I wondering what might happen between us this time, his name had been called.
He pulled himself out of the tent and greeted Keir.
They spoke for so long, and I had walked most of that day. I fell asleep before he returned.
But every night after that, once we were both settled in our makeshift bedroll, he would kiss me on the side of my face and down to my neck, some nights harshly so, employing his teeth and an urgency that nearly frightened me in its fervor, becoming another man in the dark.
He went from a man who walked with such ease, such a lack of care to what went on around him, to such confusing passion.
If it had not been for the glare of that single eye, it would have seemed he paid no mind to anything during the day.
And then there was this claiming of me in the night, though it was a small claiming, using only his hands and the press of his long, lean body.
With just the dim glow of nearby soldiers’ campfires seeping through the tent, I could not make out enough of him to observe him in this state, but I could feel it in the pressure of his hands, the caught inhales in his throat, and the way—as I reached a place of closeness, in the heartbeats right before pleasure—he would beg me, whispering, “Please.”
And then he would pull away, sometimes licking his fingers, and recline beside me, his body still tilted towards mine. But in his manner there was a withdrawal, a finality, that he was done once I had given him what he had pushed me towards.
“Don’t you expect something in return?” I asked him after a week of artfully delivered ecstasy, all the while aware of his ever-present hardness pushing into my lower half.
I was drowsy as we lay alongside each other.
He leaned over me while I was on my back, bit my ear and then suckled it softly, his left hand roaming me from collarbone to navel, his shoulder under my chin almost pinning me to the ground.
He was languorous in his pace, but his touch was nearly harsh, pushing and stroking with such force that by the time his hand parted my legs, I had said, “Finally,” and made him laugh his low, scratchy chuckle.
“No,” he said. “I don’t want your touch, Robbie. I can’t have it.”
“Why not?”
But he didn’t answer me.
When I next had my courses, we were a week away from Skow.
He climbed into our tent and, as he was removing his jerkin and his tunic, I announced that I was in some pain and bleeding due to that.
I had almost hoped to shock him. He was so hard to get a reaction out of, I wanted to see how he would handle this.
Reed shrugged and asked if he could do anything to make me comfortable, then lay down beside me and suggested, carelessly, that he may as well rub my back.
I rolled to my stomach and let him do so.
Then, as he kneaded a spot along my spine, propping himself up on one elbow and leaning over me slightly, I asked, “Why do you never take your eye patch off?” It was an incredibly rude question, but we had developed a peculiar intimacy, and I wanted to know.
“You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to,” I hurried to add.
His hand stilled. Then he said, “It’s easier. The flesh beneath is not nice to look upon. I don’t want to upset every person I encounter.”
“Is your eye beneath it sensitive to light?”
“There is no eye.”
I cursed myself for asking.
Before I could apologize, he continued, “I lost it in a fight.”
“I should not have asked,” I apologized. “I always blurt things out.”
There was a beat and then he said, with a smile in his voice, “It’s one of my favorite things about you.”
“It is?”
“Yes. The world is full of folk who know they must dress themselves in the manners and expectations of others. Even just to buy meat from the butcher or speak to their neighbor. People spend the entirety of their days in the clothing of who others expect them to be. But you’re just .
. . naked. You’re just walking around naked, being yourself.
In my—and I admit it now—unfair assessment of you as a piss-poor criminal, I think I mistook your authenticity for a lack of guile.
But you are both genuine and clever. Though you must be terrible at cards. ”
I laughed rather more loudly than I should have as a woman who was not supposed to be sharing a tent with a man not her husband. “I am horrendous at cards. I bet you are exceptional. I never know what you’re thinking.”
Reed pushed his thumb into my spine and ran it up the length of my back. “I’ll show you my whole face if you think it won’t scare you.”
“Before I had my dinner tonight, I pulled a rotten tooth from a man’s mouth.
I have seen some things in my time,” I said carefully.
My face was turned away from him, and it was too dark for me to really see anything.
I continued, saying, “I’ve no business asking, Reed. You don’t have to show me anything.”
“I don’t like how you only say my name when you are very serious or very aroused,” he remarked, sliding his body down along mine. “Try using it in casual conversation once in a while.”
His joke fell flat between us. I felt him reach up to his face, and I imagined him sliding off that strip of leather that was wider in the middle so as to cover him from brow to cheek on that side. “Do you—do you want me to turn over and look?” I asked.
Reed made a hmm sound and then replied, “You can’t see much in the dark, and maybe it’s better that way.”
I could not understand why he wanted to show me this. I was unsure as I turned my head and said, “Are you just tired of rubbing my back?”
We lay facing each other, noses grazing, and as my eyes adjusted to the dark, I could make out the hollow where his left eye had once been.
There were no upper or lower lids, just a depression covered by a twisted stretch of skin.
The scars were smooth in the way of newer skin and yet still had a roughness to them in the way of many scars, both silken and coarse.
“And you think this might scare people?” I asked.
“It’s just easier,” he repeated. “People don’t have to think anything when they look at me.
They just see a man with an eye patch. If they see disfigurement, they have to stop and address that in their own mind.
It becomes a tangible thing then, between me and the person, a hurdle they have to clear before they can simply speak to me. ”
“You can take it off around me,” I offered. “It cannot be good for the skin. To wear that leather strap all day and night.”
Reed did not reply.
“You have such a handsome face,” I sighed. I found myself growing sheepish at my blurting out yet one more girlish thing around him.
He exhaled through his nose. “That is kind of you—”
“No.” I cut him off, but my tone was soft.
“Recall that we have just discussed that I blurt out what I think. So do not accuse me of pity now. I thought it the first time I ran into you in the street. I like all your angles. And your mouth always looks like it is about to open and say something absolutely cruel, but it will be too smart for most people to understand its cruelty.” I laughed a little.
“That’s why you are an utter bastard but only smart people can tell. ”
This close, I could see him smile a little.
“It’s a terribly kissable mouth,” I confessed.
The tip of his nose brushed against mine as he mimed shaking his head, limited by our heads lying against the quilt. “That’s against my rules, Robbie.”
“Hmm. You only say my name when you are bossing me around. Try using it in casual conversation.” Then I leaned, my chin canted up just enough to capture his mouth with mine.
My own lips caressed his upper lip. I could have parted them, could have slid my tongue inside his mouth, but I only kissed him chastely, lightly, as if to say, “It’s just a kiss. ”
“Rule breaker,” he murmured as I pulled away.
“Professional outlaw,” I corrected him.
“Do it again.” His voice had a rawness in it, something new, something akin to fear. “Just one more and then you have to stop,” he added.
I leaned in and repeated my placement of my mouth on his, again taking that rakish, expressive upper lip between my own, but this time I bit him slightly and rejoiced at the trapped groan in his throat.
This time, after my tender bite, I added my tongue to our kiss, an apology to where my teeth had been, a small flick, an invitation.
When he did not resist me, I opened wider.
I gave the inside of his mouth a sultry lick.
For a breath, his own lips sucked at my bottom lip, a quiver in them, like he wanted to do more.
Then he did and bit me back, letting his own tongue, slick and hot, run itself along mine.
It was like the lucky strike of iron on flint, that hit that truly sparks kindling. I sighed into him, my lips almost going slack, rendered defenseless and powerless by his kiss.
Then he pulled away and said, “That has to be the end of this.”
“Why?” I asked, but there was no ire in my question.
“Because,” he said, and he gathered me in his arms and pulled me close. “Because,” he continued, “I still have to rub your back.” He rolled back and positioned my upper half on top of him, his hands running along my spine.
I rested my head against his shoulder and closed my eyes.
Something in my heart had cracked, a splitting, an opening that should not have been there.
With just a few words in the dark, the exposure of his scars, the reception and reciprocation of my kisses, this strange man, this foreigner I knew so little about, a man who refused to swive me or kiss me anymore, had slipped into that crack like someone with magic would into a god tree’s door.