18. The Anchor #2
She made a sound she would have hated in any other setting, thin and unguarded, and he shifted then, finally, one arm sliding around her back to lift her clear of the floor as if she weighed no more than a brush crate.
She wrapped herself around him on instinct, thighs gripping his hips, fingers catching in his loose hair while he turned away from the table without ever breaking her mouth.
He carried her the two steps to the kesh platform and set her down on the fur cover with a care opposite his size, then stood over her just long enough to search her face once.
The lamp behind him made a bronze line of his shoulder and throat.
The workshop sounds had gone remote. The whole room smelled of warmed oil, salt, pigment dust, him.
She reached for the hem of her shirt. Mavrek caught her wrist before she could drag it over her head.
Not to stop her.
To do it himself.
The shirt came free in one controlled pull.
Cool air crossed her skin, then warmer air from his body as he bent.
His mouth touched the slope of her shoulder with a reverence that went so close to undoing her she almost pushed him away simply to survive it.
Instead she touched the side of his face, rough under her palm, and felt the answering shift go through him all at once.
What followed did not have the frantic edge of the workshop nights before.
No danger-fed hunger. No rushed stripping at the boundary of being found.
This was slower and more merciless for it.
He took his time. At her mouth, her throat, the hollow beneath her collarbone where her pulse had nowhere to hide from him.
His hand moved over her with the specific attention of someone for whom every surface told a different truth: the line of her waist, the quick tightening low in her belly when his palm spread there, the places along her back that made her arch before he had pressed hard enough to justify it.
She unfastened his shirt with clumsy fingers and shoved it open, needing skin under her hands, the broad heat of his chest, the dark hair narrowing down his stomach, the ink-stained strength of him no longer arranged behind decent layers.
He helped when impatience made her fumble, then worked her skirt down her hips and off entirely and stopped only long enough to look at her once more.
There was nothing coy in the look. Want, yes, plain as flame. Also the same brutal steadiness he brought to scaffold work and pigment mixing, the same refusal to touch anything by halves.
Heat rose through her before his hands did.
He kissed down her sternum and kept going, mouth warm and deliberate, and when his hand finally spread her open to him the slick of her was immediate and embarrassing and honest and she hated that the room was too quiet not to hear the wet sound when his fingers stroked through. She made herself say nothing.
Her body said it for her: clenching around his first thick finger, thighs falling open, the long low exhale that had no dignity in it.
"Mavrek," she said.
He did not answer with words. He used a second finger, curled inward to find the place that obliterated thought, and then his mouth on her clit, slow and unhurried, tongue working in patient rolling strokes while she fisted the fur with both hands and bit her own wrist to keep from being loud.
Not because she feared discovery tonight.
Because the sound wanted to be larger than the room could hold.
Three days of running the arithmetic, three days of that patient terrible absence on the scaffold, all of it broke through whatever was left of her control and turned into wet heat against his tongue.
He did not stop.
When she came it was with his name dragged ragged out of her throat and her cunt clenching hard around his fingers and her back arching off the furs.
He felt every shudder and prolonged it, tongue lighter now, drawing it out until she pushed at his shoulder because another second would have stopped her heart.
He came up over her then, big enough to block the lamp entirely. The weight of him settled against her and was exactly what she had come across Brineshell in the dark for.
"Still yes," he said. Not a question this time.
She pulled him closer by the shoulders and spread her thighs around him. "Come here."
He worked himself free of his trousers with one hand, watched her face while he did it, and pushed the thick head of his cock through her wetness once before lining up. Her whole body went tight with anticipation.
"Now," she said. "Don't be patient now."
He pushed inside.
The stretch of him undid what the orgasm had almost settled.
Too much and not enough at once. She made a sound that was almost pain and entirely good, heels digging into the furs, hands clutching the broad heat of his back.
He held when she caught breath, forehead dropping to her shoulder, and the tremor in his arms told her the hold cost him something.
She felt his pulse in the place they were joined — or thought she did, the whole lower half of her body reordered around him.
"Move," she whispered.
He did.
Deliberate. Each stroke deep and measured, building rather than chasing, not the urgency of the locked workshop or the daylit recklessness of the morning but something harder to name: the rhythm of a man who has decided the outcome and is giving her every inch of it.
She clung to him and let her eyes close.
The fur bunched under her hips. Warmed stones held heat beneath the platform.
His name kept breaking out of her without permission and she let it, let him have it, because the three days she had spent not saying it had been one of the more exhausting performances of her life.
He rolled them.
Not because the pace had eased. Because he understood — from her grip, from her breath — that what she needed was to be given weight again after days of floating inside her own skull.
He took her with him so she came up over him in one smooth movement and his hands settled at her hips: steadying, allowing, not directing.
She rode him.
Openly. Without the frantic privacy of the locked workshop where she had kept one ear on the door even while coming undone.
Here there was no door to monitor. Here there was only the thick slide of him inside her and his hands warm at her hips and the shameless reality of herself using him for the exact thing she had come for.
She moved until her thighs ached and her hair stuck to the back of her neck and small wet sounds came with each roll of her hips that the room could hear without her permission.
His face below her had gone through controlled and past it entirely — jaw tight, mouth open, the specific wrecked look of a man holding himself still while being taken apart stroke by stroke.
When she came the second time it crested slowly — not the sudden shock of earlier, but a slow enormous gathering, everything in her body tightening in concert until she bore down on him and broke open.
He followed almost immediately, dragging her down against his chest, one arm locked around her so tight it bordered on bruising.
His cock jerked inside her in heavy pulses.
She felt each one — four, five, six — thick heat flooding her in slow deep releases that left her dizzy.
She lay sprawled over him and did not move.
Afterward there was no immediate collapse into speech.
They stayed where they had landed in the tangle of furs and half-open clothing, her sprawled partly over him, his hand slow at the base of her spine as both their breathing worked its way back toward reason.
The warmed stones beneath the platform held a deep steady heat.
Somewhere in the workshop a drop of oil clicked from the stirring stick into the bowl he had abandoned.
Outside, distant and irrelevant, the festival drums went on practicing the community toward its future.
His chest under her cheek rose and fell with enormous steadiness. She could feel the hard pound of him still easing from its height, the dampness cooling on his skin.
His fingers moved once through the damp hair at her nape.
"Iva."
Not a summons. A check.
She made a low sound against his skin that might have meant yes, or here, or do not ask me to become articulate yet.
He seemed to understand all three.
They lay quiet long enough for the silence to become chosen rather than stunned. Then Mavrek spoke into her hair, voice back in the register he used at the wall when discussing some necessary difficult thing.
"I should tell you what I mean to paint."
Her body went still before her thoughts did.
He felt it. Of course he did. His hand flattened at her back, warm and broad.
"Now," he said. "Not when you can't leave."