9 #2
“Don’t make me hate you,” she said. “I want one person in this whole keep who I don’t have to hate.”
He let out a pained noise, and he reached for her. He seized her hand. “I’d like that, too.” His voice wasn’t strong. He squeezed her fingers. “Friends, Aerhril.”
“But you just said we couldn’t.”
“Let’s try,” he said.
SHE SNEAKED OUT to see him often. Not every night, but lots of nights. It grew colder, and she would find him shivering in the barn loft, and she would slip under the blankets with him, and he would pull them over their heads and they would warm each other with the heat of their breath.
They talked.
“Celedin locked me outside on the turret yesterday, and I banged on the door and begged him to let me back in, and he just stood on the other side of the door and laughed,” she would say.
“He said it would show me that I wasn’t any better than anyone in the Silvarenna, but I think it is all an excuse, because I don’t act better than him. ”
“You’re a symbol to them, a symbol of the fact they were crushed by your superior armies,” he said to her. “That’s all it is.”
“But I am not a symbol, I’m just a girl,” she said. “And if I tell anyone, if I go to your uncle, he stops it, but then Celedin does something worse and it all simply escalates.”
“When do you go home?” he said. “The wards aren’t sent back when they come of age at thirteen?”
“No, at sixteen,” she said. “Two more years.”
“You’ll be glad to leave this place behind.”
“I’ll miss you.”
“Yes, you’ll miss watching me stack barrels by the house,” he said. “You’ll miss watching me fight with the horses when they won’t take the bit or the bridle.”
“I’ll miss watching you split wood,” she said, smiling, teasing, and thinking of the way he moved when he swung an ax over his head, the way his muscles rippled, the way his entire body was lethal grace.
He chuckled. “You’ll miss watching me get whipped.”
She went still next to him. “I do not enjoy that.” Why did he always say things like this?
“I think you do,” he said. “I think you like it because there’s someone treated worse than you in this place—”
She sat up, throwing the covers askew, stopping his words. She glared down at him.
He sucked in breath through his nose and held her gaze. “And I think you like feeling sorry for me.”
“You know,” she said, “I do not know why I come out here at all. I do not know why I am kind to you. I do not know why I—”
“But we’ve just gotten done explaining that. It’s because you like watching me chop wood.” His smile was so smug she wanted to slap it off of his face.
Her nostrils flared. “You know what I think?”
“Oh, I suppose you’re going to tell me, no matter if I want to know or not.”
“I think you think no one likes you at all,” she said.
“I think you are so used to people being cruel to you that you have decided to give them a reason to be cruel. Then you’ll feel as if you are in control of it, as you have the power to make them treat you that way.
But you don’t have that power, and I am the one person here who won’t be cruel to you and you simply want to throw me away, and—”
“Little fair elf, I don’t have to throw you away.
You’ll leave. Two years, you just said. What do you think my future is?
I’ll rot away here, in the barn next to the Peak, cutting wood for the rest of my life.
I am nothing. You can treat me like I’m something, but we both know it won’t change things. ”
“You’re not nothing,” she said. “And I don’t only like the look of you. And if you only like me because of the way I look, then—”
“I like everything about you,” he cut in, and there was something vulnerable in his voice, a timbre she rarely heard.
“Well, I like everything about you, too,” she said, and then she fled, scurrying off the loft, leaving him behind, running back for her bed and the warmth of Foxglove Peak.
TOO MANY NIGHTS like that, too many nights in the cold, huddled close, too many whispered conversations.
She knew there was nowhere for it to go, and she knew it was only courting some kind of calamity.
But he was as good as his word. He never touched her.
Well, there was touching. They were huddled together, bodies close, warm radiating between the two of them and within the cocoon of the blankets over their heads, but there was no deliberate touching.
He did not put his hands on her body. He did not explore the lines or the curves of her, and she did not touch him either, though she wondered what the swell of his muscles would feel like under her fingertips, against her palms. She wondered and imagined.
Sometimes, when she went back to her bed, she thought about touching him.
She always had to go back to her bed, of course, because she could not be caught out there with him, and it wasn’t the way it had been when they were children, where she felt it safe to wait until dawn, for there were all sorts of servants about going here and there in the early morning, and if she had waited until first light, she would be discovered for certain.
So, instead, it was always in the still of the darkness, stealing away, back up the steps of the keep, back to her bedchamber. He would always insist. “Little fair elf, it is time. If you say longer, we’ll fall asleep.”
She would slip back into her bed, which would now be cold, and she would slide her fingers between her own thighs and search for the spots that felt pleasant to her, search until she found the path to bliss.
Sometimes, she only played herself a little string of images of him in motion. She would think of him doing chores, think of him with his shirt off, think of his burly gray-green arms or his broad, broad chest, or… well, his back. His scarred back. His wounded, bleeding back—
She always tried to steer herself off that, but there was something about the way it felt when one’s finger was tracing the path to bliss, something that urged one to look at the things that one should not look at, something that made the forbidden seem sweet.
He was forbidden.
Perhaps that was the entire reason she wanted him in the first place.
But sometimes she imagined other things, imagined touching him, imagined him entirely uncovered. She had seen nude men before—mostly in paintings and sculptures, admittedly—but she knew what they looked like, anyway, male members.
She simply did not know what it was that the men were supposed to do with them.
Occasionally, when she was lying there with him, he’d shift his hips away from her as if he did not wish her to feel that part of him against her body, and she wasn’t sure, because it was only very quick moments, but she thought that perhaps it was sort of… hardened and thickened, quite stiff.
She would think about those moments, those hints of him, of the change she seemed to work in his body, and it would make her pleasure leap, make it crest and burst, and she would roll over, clenching her thighs tight around her fingers as she rode out every tremor and clench of whatever it was that was happening to her.
She knew it was calamity, but she never truly touched him, and she never so much as pressed her leg into him between his legs, though she thought about doing that, thought often about seeing if he was actually stiff, seeing if she could feel the outline of him against her thigh.
It went on that way for nearly a year and a half, though various elements did change.
For one thing, eventually, it was too cold for the steward to allow Dathor to sleep in the barn, and he ordered him into the rooms on top of the stables instead.
At one point, their driver had lived up there, but three years ago, he had married a woman from the village and now they lived together in a house only a mile away and he came to work early in the morning to see to the horses and other various sundries at the Peak.
So there was no one up there, and it was warm, and they had a bed, and…
However, there was no need for them to huddle close for warmth now, for there was a fireplace here, and he could stoke it as warm as he needed, and he insisted that they did not press into each other if they lay together.
They spent more time sitting in front of his fireplace, sitting on his bed, and less time horizontal together.
But, sometimes, she would yawn, and he would say that she must be getting back to her bed, and she would say that perhaps she could just rest her eyes here, and he would say that was a truly awful idea, and they would argue about it while arranging themselves on top of the quilt on the narrow bed there.
She would press her body into the firmness of his chest, and he would make these little groans that seemed to bubble up from the depths of him, and she would look up at him, and he would look at her, and she would wonder if he would ever kiss her, or if she should kiss him, or if she should ask him to kiss her, or…
Anyway, they did not kiss then, not then, not the first time.
The first kiss happened while she was crying over him.