21
BUT THEN IT was morning, and she was awakening alone in her room.
She dressed and she went out into the hallway and she looked into his room. The door was open. He was not in there.
She went out to check on the horses. He wasn’t there either, but someone had been. Someone had given them water and oats.
Absently, she patted her horse’s neck, who nickered her affectionately. “You need a name,” she said to the horse.
And then she went back into the lair.
She found Tafnir frying some kind of bird eggs and fish on a metal sheet over tongues of flame. He had turning implements in his claws, and he looked sort of ridiculous that way, tending to food.
He greeted her warmly. “Thy mother is in the dining room with the strange elf. Breakfast will be ready soon.”
Well, he cooked. He was a dragon who cooked.
She didn’t know what to think about anything.
In the dining room, Iahir didn’t meet her gaze when she came in, and she wondered what had happened while he slept. Something had changed, obviously.
Her mother got up to give her a hug, saying it was so nice for her to be here, and she would love it if she would stay for a time, that she had missed her so desperately.
“Well,” said Gathren, “we have to go…” They had nowhere they had to go, actually.
Iahir cleared his throat. “I have to go home, of course. But you could quite stay here, warrioress.”
Gathren did not wish to stay here, not with her mother making eyes at the dragon.
If she thought that her mother needed rescuing, then she would, if only to wait for her mother to change her mind so that they could leave this place and leave Tafnir.
But she was wavering on that point, truly.
She did not know what to think about any of it.
She sat down at the dining room table. “You don’t wish me to come along? ”
He looked up at her and then away.
“Certainly,” called Tafnir, entering the room with a platter of eggs and fish, “thy daughter mayst stay for some time, an extended visit of weeks, even. But she cannot live here.”
“I don’t want to live here,” said Gathren.
“Oh, Tafnir,” said Gathren’s mother, sighing.
“I am serious,” said Tafnir. “We dragons are called solitary for a reason. We cannot abide too many people, not for long stretches of time. I intend no offense, of course, Kadrai’s daughter.”
“It’s fine,” said Gathren. “I am definitely planning on leaving.”
She did not get a chance to speak to Iahir alone until an hour or two later, when he was in his room packing up the pipe that Tafnir had gifted him.
She hovered in the doorway, feeling nervous. “Did I do something?”
He looked up at her. “No?” He sounded confused.
“You did not wake up with me?”
“Oh,” he said, straightening. “Well, I woke just before dawn, and I thought of your mother coming down to wake you and discovering us together, and I thought you might not like that.”
She bowed her head, nodding. “That’s actually thoughtful. It is all awkward enough with her without this on top of it.”
“Of course,” he said with a smile and went back to his pipe.
“But what about your going home?” she said.
“Well, I think I have to,” he muttered. “I do not wish to, but I cannot put it off forever.”
“And me?”
“You don’t want to go there, trust me.”
“So, we part ways?”
He looked up at her. “You can come along if you like. You won’t be welcome there, though, not in the main keep where my father lives. Of course, I suppose I have a house in town where I’ve kept courtesans. Perhaps you could—”
“Oh,” she said. “We’ve spoken of this, have we not?” She wrapped her hands around her waist. “This is actually impossible with us.”
He crossed the room to her. “It wouldn’t have to be like that. You know, I wouldn’t call you a, um…”
“Strumpet?”
He ran a hand through his hair. “Obviously, I would not call you that.”
She hugged herself. “I have nowhere to go.”
He nodded. “No, I realize. I’m realizing.”
She licked her lips. “Perhaps the farm. I suppose, with my uncle gone and my mother here, it is mine. There is no one else. I could live in the barn and try to have the farmhouse rebuilt and perhaps I could…” She shook her head.
“No, I can’t run a farm on my own. And I don’t even like farming.
” She let out a breath. “But the barn. It’s something. ”
He rubbed his chin. “I need to shave.”
She touched his chin, too. “I like it. It makes you look a bit rugged.”
He gazed into her eyes. “I don’t think you should go and live in a barn.”
“You just want me to be your kept woman,” she said.
He smiled. “It won’t be like that. I don’t know long I’ll be there, but with my father…”
“What is it about your father?” she said.
He sighed.
She tilted her head to one side. “Well, as I have just said, I have nowhere else to go. I could act as if I have some pride that keeps me from being thought of as your whore, my lord, but we are…” She gestured back and forth between them.
“I shall be your whore,” he said, arching an eyebrow.
She smirked.
He reached out and took her hand. “Actually, I’m pleased you’ll come. It will be good to have company.” He squeezed her hand. “It will be quite good.”
THEY LEFT IN the afternoon, even though Gathren’s mother protested that she could stay longer. Gathren wouldn’t have minded, actually. She could have spent a few more nights in the lair, sleeping next to Iahir, both of them bare. It sounded quite nice to her, in fact.
But Iahir now seemed antsy and subdued.
She supposed it had something to do with his father, but he still would not truly engage her on that subject.
She began to speculate that this could only go one of two ways.
One would be that his father was truly horrific, some kind of unfeeling monster, and she would wonder how it was a small boy could have survived the man.
The other would be that his father just wouldn’t be that bad, in the end, and she’d wonder why Iahir had made such a fuss over it.
But it would take some time to get to Cirlahir. They had traveled two days from her farm to get into the mountains where the dragon’s lair was. They would need to travel two days back and then likely another day on top of that to get there.
The first night, they camped outside, as they had been doing.
She knew he’d made that comment about not wanting to prod into her on the ground under horse blankets, but they had more blankets now.
They’d taken all manner of things from the dragon’s lair—with Tafnir’s permission, of course.
They were well stocked in their saddle bags with anything they might need.
As they were making camp, she asked if they should have separate bedrolls, and he gave her an impish sort of grin and said he had no objection to sleeping close to her, so she made up one space for them both, with blankets beneath them and blankets above.
But she still didn’t know how to bring the subject up.
They ate—food they’d brought from the lair, since they’d run out of their rations they’d brought from her farm. And then they were kissing again. Sometime in the middle of eating and cleaning up, that simply started happening. Stolen kisses here and there, and then they were kissing in earnest.
She started to unbutton his trousers, and he didn’t stop her, so then she had him out to toy with and look at.
She tucked him into her mouth again. She wasn’t sure why.
It was an impulse. His cock looked like something she wanted to taste, wanted to feel slippery and silky against her tongue.
She had no reason to do it, but she could not stop herself, and so she did.
He pulled her off and said that he had done positively nothing for her yet, and she had to own this was true, so, she let him feel around between her legs and then—when he was hopelessly lost—she guided his fingers to the right spot, and she helped him and…
and it took her a longer time than the night before, and she started to feel a bit worried about it, a bit concerned, and it was on the tip of her tongue to tell him not to worry over it, after all, that he might as well just fuck her, because that was what this was about, and that was what they hadn’t done yet, and they needed to do that. They were building to that.
But then she had a moment where it struck her that this beautiful elf was lying half-clothed next to the fire they’d built, with his positively glorious hard cock sticking out for her to look at and stroke and suck, and that he had his fingers on her gray-green little quim, and that he was trying like anything to bring her, and something about the whole situation—his servicing her, their being equals here, the sheer strangeness of it—or maybe it was just that she really was really looking at his cock, and his cock was beautiful.
But anyway, she was climbing and cresting soon afterward, panting as she burst against his fingers, and he was kissing her and she seized his cock and guided it towards her opening.
He wheezed about the sheath, and she said, fine, was it close, and he had it in his pocket.
There was a little fumbling to put it on, but then he pressed into her there, next to the fire, and his cock felt… nice.
He worked himself into her. She was wet from her climax, very wet, and he slipped easily in and out of her, and it was nice.
He touched her tunic and bemoaned that they hadn’t uncovered her breasts.
“Next time,” she promised, because maybe that was what had been missing here, maybe that was the difference, the fact he’d been at her breasts for so long that first time.
Because it was different than last time, different in a number of ways, and maybe it was only that they were outside, and they were not entirely undressed, or that she was a bit worried because they were out in the open.
But it was also the same, truly.
That was the disappointing part.