10. Daylight Evidence #2
She wanted to kick him away and grind herself harder onto his mouth at the same time. She did neither. She came instead, sudden and helpless, thighs shaking around his shoulders while the walkway outside the glass remained bright and horribly ordinary.
When the orgasm broke, it broke all through her. Her cunt clenched around nothing. Her back arched. Her wrists jerked against his grip and would have been embarrassing if embarrassment had not already dissolved into pleasure so sharp it almost hurt.
He rose only after she'd fallen boneless against the table edge, dazed and wet and breathing like a woman who had misplaced her self-command somewhere near his mouth.
Her wrists wore amber streaks where his hands had held them.
He saw her see them.
"You can still walk away," he said, voice wrecked now, less steady than before. "Go to the scaffold with that and nothing more."
He should not have given her another choice. It made the next thing hers too plainly.
Iva slid from the table and went to him on shaking legs.
She dropped to her knees, yanked his trousers loose, and took his cock into her hand.
Daylight made honesty unavoidable. Thick, hot, already slick.
She licked him because she wanted to hear the sound he made when she did it.
His hand came to the back of her head and stayed there, not forcing. Just weight.
She took him deeper until spit and precome and the faint resin trace made a mess of her hand and chin. Then, rough-voiced, he said, "Up. Now, Iva."
She stood because her knees had already begun to soften and because she wanted, with a kind of furious honesty, to feel him inside her again before reason reassembled.
He turned her toward the table, not fully bent over it, just enough that her palms braced on the scarred wood and the bright panes filled her peripheral vision once more.
Morning beyond. Walkway rail. A woman in green carrying a bucket pausing at the far turn, too distant to read expression, then moving on.
Iva's whole body clenched around the sight.
Mavrek came up behind her and saw the same thing.
"Aye," he said, mouth at her ear, knowing exactly why she was shaking.
His oil-wet hand slid down the front of her body, over belly, between her thighs. Two fingers pushed into her at once, easy after what his mouth had done, and the little sound she made was half outrage at the open room and half pure bodily surrender.
He lined his cock up with one hand and pushed in with one hard slow thrust that drove the breath from her.
Standing took him differently. Deeper somehow, the angle turning her legs to water at once. Her forehead hit the table edge. He steadied her with a broad oil-slick hand across the back of her neck, leaving another smear there, and began to move.
No measured easing beyond what the body demanded.
She was already open, already clenching for him, already beyond the point of pretending what she wanted.
He fucked her in daylight with the bright panes at her side and his hand on her neck and his cock driving in from behind until the whole workshop seemed to narrow to wood, glass, skin, and the wet brutal sound of it.
Iva bit the inside of her cheek and failed to stay quiet anyway.
Every thrust jolted the table. Every thrust reminded her she would walk out afterward with his oil on her wrists and neck and forearms. The knowledge should have brought her back under control. Instead it sent her closer.
Mavrek bent over her, one hand flattening her wrists to the table now, the other sliding under her blouse to palm her breast. He bit lightly at the side of her neck and then sucked hard enough that she knew there would be a mark there.
"Mavrek--"
"You came back in daylight," he said against her ear. "Do not hide from it now."
She came with a cry strangled into the crook of her own elbow, cunt clamping down on him so hard he cursed and drove into her twice more before spilling.
This time he came with his teeth at her shoulder and one hand bruising her wrist against the table, cock jerking inside her while heat flooded her again in thick pulses that made her knees nearly give.
He held her upright through the aftershocks.
For a few breaths neither of them moved. Outside, somewhere on the walkway, someone laughed. A gull screamed over the inner water. The world had not even had the decency to pause.
When he finally eased out, his seed followed at once in a slow hot slide down her inner thigh. Iva shut her eyes and swore softly.
"Aye," he said, sounding half-destroyed himself.
"Do not agree with me when I am suffering."
The laugh he gave against her shoulder was brief and real. Then he reached for the clean cloth stack and handed her one without comment.
She wiped between her legs with rough practicality, then went straight to the basin.
The woman in the small wavering mirror above it looked indecently alive.
Cheeks flushed. Mouth swollen. A darkening mark low on the side of her neck.
Amber oil on both wrists and one forearm where he'd held her down. Evidence in legible locations.
She scrubbed fast. Soap cut the shine on her wrists and left the scent underneath. Water took the pigment at the collarbone but not the mouth-mark on her neck. Nothing fixed the heat between her thighs or the wet soreness that made her stand with her legs slightly apart.
When she lifted her head from the basin Mavrek was watching her in the mirror.
No apology in him. No smugness either. Just the same terrible attention.
"You should have stayed away," she said to the basin.
"Aye," he said.
"That is not helpful."
"Nay."
She almost laughed, which would have been fatal, so she snatched up her pack instead.
The walk from the workshop to the scaffold took less than four minutes. It lasted a year.
She went by the main route because choosing the longer path now would have been its own confession.
Chin up. Pace even. Collar tugged as high as the blouse allowed.
Her whole inside still felt loose and hot and sore, each step reminding her exactly what had been done to her body in full morning light while the bright panes faced the world.
The first person to read it was the same woman from two days before.
She stood at the bread-table turn with a basket of split rush under one arm.
Her eyes went first to Iva's neck this time, then down to the wrist where the scrubbing had only made the skin redder around the faint amber trace.
The nod she gave was different from the first. Not merely acknowledgment now.
Almost a formal updating of record. Then she looked away on purpose and let Iva pass.
Fetch waited on the waterway steps like an ambush arranged by a cheerful god with poor taste.
He had one boot on a lower post, a fish spear over one shoulder, and a grin so immediate she saw it from twenty paces out and considered, sincerely, pushing him into the inner water.
"Morning, restorer," he called.
"Die carefully," she said without breaking stride.
Fetch laughed outright. His gaze flicked to her neck, to the oil-scrubbed wrist, then back to her face with no effort whatsoever to pretend he had not read all of it and enjoyed doing so.
"I plan to live forever out of spite," he said. "But I appreciate the blessing."
By then Iva's whole body was one sustained internal blaze. Nausea and arousal and shame and some harder fiercer thing that might eventually become pride if she lived long enough to identify it. She kept walking. That was the only available dignity now: the keeping-walking.
The scaffold ladder rose ahead of her, ropes creaking lightly in the breeze off the water.
She put one foot on the first rung and did not look back. Every rung after that felt like stepping farther into a story Brineshell had already started telling.