Aislin #2
"I don't want to rush this." My voice has dropped without my meaning it to, rough at the edges.
I let my forehead fall forward to meet hers and close my eyes for a moment, because it's easier to say it like that.
"I want you. Make no mistake about that.
I'm not—" I exhale. "I'm not pulling back because I don't want this. "
She's very still.
I open my eyes. She's watching me from an inch away, close enough that I can see the firelight move in her green eyes, and I don't look away from her when I say the rest of it.
"You've been free for a month." It comes out quiet.
Not accusing — I'm not accusing her of anything, least of all this.
I'm accusing myself of the possibility of moving too fast, of letting want make me careless with something I don't want to be careless with.
"A month is nothing. A third of how long they had you.
I know you, Aislin. I know how you think.
And I don't—" I press my thumb once, gently, against her jaw.
"I don't want you walking back to the base with regret. I'd rather have nothing than that."
Silence. The fire shifts. Rain against stone.
She looks at me for a long moment, and I watch her doing what she always does — reading, parsing, looking for the lie in it — and she doesn't find one, and something in her face does a quiet thing, a loosening.
"You know what I've spent the last several months learning?" she says.
I wait.
"What pain feels like." Her voice is flat, not performing anything.
"What it feels like at someone else's hands.
What it feels like to have no say in it.
" She holds my gaze and doesn't look away.
"I know that. I know it well. I know every variation of it.
" A beat. "I want to know what the other thing feels like.
I want—" Her jaw tightens, not with anger, with the effort of asking for something she doesn't have much practice asking for. "Pleasure. I want that. Please."
The word please from Aislin lands somewhere in my chest and stays there.
"Are you going to shut me out after?" I ask. "Run back to your cabin and build the walls back up?" I'm not angry about it — I just need to know. I need to know what I'm walking into. "Because I can take a lot, but I can't take that."
"No." She says it before I can beg her not to break me. "I'm not." And then the corner of her mouth does that thing — not quite a smile, more the threat of one. "You're stuck with me. Stuck getting up before sunrise just to appease me."
The laugh that comes out of me is short and genuine and I feel the tension in my chest break open like ice in spring. "I don't mind the early mornings."
"I know you don't," she says.
And then I kiss her.
This time it's different — not the soft beginning of the first one or the heat of the second, something else, something that knows where it's going and isn't in a hurry to get there.
I feel her settle into it, the last of the tension going out of her shoulders, her hands sliding up over my chest and around my neck, and I cup her face in both my hands and kiss her until the rain sounds distant and the fire is just warmth on my back.
She reaches between us and her hands find the clasp of her bra and she undoes it, slow, and slides the straps off her shoulders, and I pull back far enough to see her.
I don't have a single clever thing to say.
There's not a word in any language I speak for what she looks like in the firelight — it moves over her skin in gold and amber, catching the curve of her, the lean lines of her, and she holds my gaze with that defensive lift to her chin that she uses when she's waiting to be disappointed, waiting for the other shoe, and I realize she's braced for something — an appraisal that makes her feel smaller, maybe, or some dismissal she's already half-prepared for. I don't let her wait.
I take my time looking. Not appraising. Just looking at her the way she deserves to be looked at — like she is exactly what she is, which is devastating, which is the only word I've had for weeks and which proves itself now more completely than I know what to do with.
Firelight and dark hair loose around her shoulders and green eyes watching me carefully.
"You are so beautiful," I say, and it comes out quieter than I meant, stripped of any performance, just the plain truth of it. "I can't stand it."
Her chin drops a fraction. Something flickers behind her eyes.
I ease her down onto the ground beside the fire, on the bedroll from my pack — thank Drogath and his eternal insistence on proper preparation — and I take the last scrap of fabric hiding her from me with the same care, slow enough that she can change her mind at any point, slow enough that I can watch what each moment does to her face.
She doesn't change her mind. Her hips lift for me and I pull the last of it away and then I sit back and look at her properly in the firelight, stretched out beside the fire, watching me with those sharp bright eyes, and I trace my hands along the length of her — starting at her shoulders, down over her ribs, the curve of her waist, her hip, her thigh — following the shape of her as though I am learning something by heart.
She makes a sound. Quiet, undone, a small whimper that she seems surprised by herself.
It nearly kills me.
She reaches up and pulls me back down to her and I go, mouth finding hers again, and I take my time there too, working down her jaw, her throat, learning every place that makes her breath change.
I want to know them all. I want to know every single variation. She tangles her fingers in my hair and I feel her chest rising and falling faster under my hands and I work my way back to her mouth and she's breathless when I get there.
I ease into her carefully. She's small — everything is comparative — and I go slow, watching her face, stopping when she needs me to stop, moving when she's ready, and I feel her stretching to accommodate me and the sound she makes is not pain, it's something else entirely, her head tipping back, lips parting.
"Ursik—"
"I've got you," I say. "I'm not going anywhere."
She exhales and her body opens for me and I sink deeper and the sound I make is involuntary and low and I bury it against her temple.
She's extraordinary. I'm trying to hold onto some version of coherent thought and she's making it difficult with every small movement, every sound, her nails finding my back and anchoring there.
I move. Slow, deep, nothing aggressive about it — I'm not interested in proving anything here, not interested in anything except her, what her face does, what sounds she makes when I find what she wants.
I'm big and I know it and I keep that awareness with me, keep reading her, but she takes me like she was made for it and the thought undoes me so completely I have to pause and breathe and collect myself.
She notices. Her eyes find mine and there is absolutely nothing guarded in them for the first time since I've known her.
It breaks something in me. I didn't realize how desperate I was for it.
"Don't stop," she says.
So I don't stop.
She moves with me, finding the rhythm, and I let her set it, let her take what she needs, and she does — she takes it, demanding and unashamed, and I cannot stop watching her face.
Her head tips back. The firelight moves over her throat.
She calls my name and it sounds completely different than it ever has — raw, stripped of everything except want — and then she comes, arching hard against me, clenching around me, crying out in the small cave with the rain still hammering outside and the fire burning low beside us, and I watch her through every second of it.
I want to watch it again. I want to watch it until I have it memorized, every line of her undone like that, every sound of it.
When the shudders ease, I follow her down, pressing my mouth to her temple, her cheek, the corner of her jaw, and she lets me, breathing hard against my shoulder, her hands finally loose in my hair.