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Much Ails Me

contents (nsfw): Ser Duncan The Tall x fem!travelling companion!Reader, POV alternating, friends to lovers, mutual pining, yearning (Reader is obsessed, Dunk is enamoured and oblivious), awkward flirting (Reader), jealousy, massive scent kink, body worship, sniffing, armpit licking, rimming (Dunk receiving), handjob, virgin!Dunk, Reader is implied to have some experience.

synopsis: Much ails you, and nearly all of it is Ser Duncan the Tall. After months of failed hints, stolen cloaks and increasingly indecent yearning, a small tourney prompts even the gods to decide enough is enough—and place you both within the same four walls.

word count: 13,3K

a/n: Banner is by me, dividers by @uzmacchiato + smooching @hextoken for beta reading! I KNOW WHAT YOU GUYS THINK. ERASE THAT SCENE FROM YOUR MINDS. Dunk is canonically very clean because that is how Ser Arlan taught him. He bathed himself in nice-smelling oils for the purpose of this fic ok. Reader is right where I would die to be she wants to be. And most importantly: happy birthday to my beloved @vekharious ✿

Much ails you. There are matters of earthly grievance: hair that kindles in late sunlight into a copper crown; shoulders so broad they ought to be enough for two men instead of one; hands strong enough to haul in a rope with three bodies pulling at its other end and careful enough to mend a tear neater than you could ever dream of doing. There is the throat as well, drawing tight round every bout of abashment until the cords stand out and the hollow at its base deepens into a little gutter, tongue-ready, or perfect for the selfish wedge of your nose. Long, brown lashes that lower whenever he thinks himself watched. A mouth soft at the corners and so thoroughly made for kissing that leaving it untouched begins to feel like neglect. And the eyes—large, clear, shamelessly honest things that hide naught from the world, even if lives depended upon their secrecy.

The matters less graspable torment you worse sometimes. His courage, for one, which has so little concern for the body housing it that it borders on stupidity. Let any lost soul catch at his sleeve and ask something of him, and he will go—into flood, fire, quarrel, whatever catastrophe has learnt to call itself need. Then there is the honour he clings to, admirable and aggravating in equal measure: the very thing that makes your knees weaken whenever he bows his head and gives his word, and, you suspect, the chief obstacle standing between your nose and the aforementioned well of his neck.

There are moments, too, when he is more boy than man. His smile breaks broad and slightly misaligned across his face, ill-arranged and fitted so precisely to your heart that the poor thing trips over itself whenever it appears. His voice is warm even when his words are plain; his laughter younger than the rest of him, loose and bright and wholly unguarded. Morning roughens him into a rasp that makes the simplest good morrow sound like something you ought to hear with your cheek laid to his chest.

He treats every beast as though the gods reached the height of their craft in making it. The noon sun may hang white and pitiless overhead, yet he will halt the whole procession to see a lizard safely across the road. Dogs trust him. Birds permit him closer than they should. Even rats seem to know there is no harm in him. His kindness made room for you in much the same fashion. You have since proved useful, certainly, but he had no knowledge of that when he shifted his stores, divided his food and offered you a place beside his fire. He had managed well enough alone before you. He would manage well enough without you still. He keeps you all the same.

And then there is his smell, the least merciful trouble of the lot. By evening it rises strongest from the skin at his throat and beneath his shirt: bread left to swell near a hearth, the sweet-bitterness of ale after the body has taken its sharpness and made it flesh, salt and wheat and the greenest ghost of hops. Beneath it lies something darker and richer, like earth newly turned after rain, black and plump and so full of life that roots would grow greedy in it. It is a smell made for putting your face into. For breathing until thought gives way to some older, simpler knowledge of famine; until you wish to bite him softly, burrow closer, and leave enough of yourself behind that he might carry your scent upon him too.

All this to say: much ails you, because Ser Duncan the Tall is abundant in flesh and heart alike, and either troubles you beyond what a common woman such as yourself knows how to manage.

You're watching him from your place by the curbing fire. He’s searching, scratching at the back of his head, most likely for the cloak you’ve stolen (again) under pretence of dainty female shivers, though the truth is considerably more depraved. It smells so thoroughly of him that the only thing likely to rival it is his enormous self. You pull it over your head and cover yourself entire, so that when he inevitably demands it back, some remnant of him might stay caught in the wool of your gown.

Resigned, Duncan comes back to sit beside you with a sigh and stirs the pot where the remains of supper have gone dark at the edges. After a moment, he glances sideways and catches the hem between two fingers. “Ain’t that mine?”

You make a face.

“Wee thing," he croons. "Ye cold again?” His brow pinches with concern. “I’ll fetch ye the blanket. This smells of a three-day horse.”

He begins peeling it from you, but you clutch both sides tight to your chest.

“I like it. I mean—” You swallow. It smells of you. Do not steal the one thing from me if you won't give another. “It smells fine,” you choose to say.

Duncan frowns at the cloth, then releases it. “We can wash it on the morrow. Stream’s near enough.”

“Oh, quit it, you," you quip at him. "It smells good enough. Ser Arlan made you clean beyond any man’s reason.”

He stares at you. Then at the cloak. Then back at you, with colour steadily gathering round his ears. Why being told he is clean should shame him, Duncan plainly has no notion. Perhaps it is the way you say it, wrapped to the nose in something that has spent three days against his body.

“Aye, all right,” he mutters, turning back to the pot. “If ye hate the blanket so.”

It unnerves him sometimes, those odd little ways of yours, though he tries to pay them no mind. Looking too closely would carry him into some country he does not understand and make a greater oaf of him than he is already.

If Duncan knew no better, he might call some of your glances interested. Lustful is not a word he would ever lay on a lady. Himself, though, he is lustful enough, and scolds himself for every thought of that sort. He knows what his own face does when his eyes disobey him and settle on a cleavage deep enough to slide an entire hand into, or, worse, scraped knuckles and knees that might benefit from ointment or kissing better; ankles poking out beneath a hem; wrists he could close his fingers round, for he has never met a lady who outsized him; necks with their napes dampened by heat; hair that would find its way into his mouth if he slept beside a woman, and which he thinks he would take the feeding of gladly. Noses too, and mouths. Large mouths and small ones, with lips pink or red or brown, glossed by licking or ale or wine or grease from a homemade meal.

Your mouth most of all. Always moving round him. Always saying things he does not understand.

Your cleavage, your knees, your ankles, your neck and ears too. He has stared at all of it. Caught you staring in return. He has put the whole matter down to teasing, since believing otherwise would mean presuming upon a woman who travels under his protection. Sometimes he thinks there may be some other world in which you could desire his huge, awkward, penniless self. It happens seldom. And it is less than thought, really. Hope, mayhaps, arriving when his mind is softened by sleep or one pint too many. Then, he must shut his eyes tight and drive it out before he begins believing the absurdities it whispers.

Next day he intends to enter the lists at Acorn Hall, and he is excited about it for many reasons. Coin, first. His purse has been light for some time, and though you make no complaint, Duncan is certain you dream of a proper bath that's not in nature's basin and a supper cooked by somebody else’s hands. A good showing might buy both, with enough left for oats and another week of road.

Then there is the proving of himself. You have seen him in tourneys great and small, seen him win cleanly and come off a horse hard enough to forget his own name for half a minute. Duncan cannot decide which he prefers: the brilliance of your smile when he carries the bout, or your hand pressing a cold cloth to his brow while you tell him he was marvellous regardless. The kindness never lasts. Once you are certain he will live, you begin recalling the fall in cruel detail, laughing harder with every telling until the laugh breaks into snorts. It cuts the wings from his pride terribly. He finds the snorting dear all the same.

A tourney also gives you cause to put your hands on him. You always volunteer to buckle his armour, lace his vambrace, mend a tear in his tunic while he is still wearing it. You spend too long at his waist sometimes, tugging the rope-belt this way and that, leaning close to make certain the sword sits soundly and will not slip when he needs it. Duncan can think of no other reason for such care.

You ask strange things during these little labours too. Once, after a thorn lodged deep in your palm, he sat with your hand cradled in his and worked it free with the point of a needle. You watched his bent head for a while, then asked, “Would you handle all of me so gently?”

“I’d not hurt you,” he said.

You pouted. “That was not quite my question.”

Duncan frowned at your palm and turned it towards the light, searching for some second thorn he might have missed. The question escaped him entirely. After all, he could not see why the rest of you should require handling when the thorn sat plainly enough in one finger.

When he cranes his head, he finds you asleep by the fire, wrapped so entirely in his cloak that only the crown of your head shows beneath it. One hand has slipped free. Your fingers keep a stubborn hold on the wool, as though even in sleep you expect him to steal it back.

By morning the cloak has been returned, folded into a neat square and set beside his bedroll. You are already awake and insisting you both make haste for Acorn Hall, so Duncan postpones the washing of cloth and body alike until the arrival.

He spends most of the road in silence, fighting his own eyes. Whenever thought idles and the reins hang loose in his hand, his gaze finds the shape of your buttocks cradled by Thunder’s saddle. Then he jerks it back to the road and scolds himself until the next time it wanders.

The tourney announces itself long before Acorn Hall rises through the trees. Carts crowd the verge. Pennons snap above patched tents, bright against the dust, and every spare stretch of grass has been claimed by horses, squires, cookfires and men hammering stakes into hard earth. The greater knights have gathered nearer the lists. Duncan takes you farther out, where the lesser tents thin towards a stream, and claims a place beneath an old tree with enough shade for the horses.

You seem giddy. He puts it down to the occasion. Tourneys mean crowds, merriment and stalls full of little useless things you like to handle and admire before remembering the weight of your shared purse. While he unloads the bedrolls and begins untying the feed sacks, you come close enough that your shadow falls over his bowed head.

“I mean to make use of the stream,” you murmur. “Will you keep watch?”

Duncan turns his head. “Aye, course.”

An invitation to join you sits ready on your tongue. So does the clarification that keeping watch ought to mean staring directly at you while you stand wet and naked in the water.

His face still holds some sleep around the eyes. Handsome all the same. When his mouth opens, likely to ask why you continue hovering over him, you smile and say, “Very well.”

The arrangement soon settles into its usual dullness. Duncan sits on the bank with his back to the stream, knees drawn up and arms laid across them, shoulders forming a wall between you and the camp. You wade in behind him and watch that wall sourly.

You wonder whether pretending to drown might bring him round. Whether he would plunge in despite your nakedness, or whether honour would keep him facing the trees while you sank.

The temptation is considerable. Distracting him before the lists would be vile, however, so you wash yourself properly instead. By the time you finish, cold has set your teeth jittering. You drag a shift over your damp back, lace your skirts and pad barefoot over the grass towards him.

He hears nothing. You bend low and breathe into the warm hollow beside his neck. “Did you look?”

Duncan startles so badly one knee slips from under his arm. “N-no.”

You narrow your eyes. “Not even a little?”

He looks genuinely troubled by the question. Then he rises, brushes the dust from his knees and turns to face you with defensive shade already crawling over his throat. “No, by the Seven. I gave ye my word.”

A deep, tormented sigh leaves you. You roll your eyes and start back towards camp.

Behind you, Duncan lumbers into motion. “What is with you?”

You throw your damp hair over one shoulder without looking round. “Ah, much ails me, Ser Duncan.”

He appears to have no useful answer. Only silence follows you, and the heavy sound of his steps.

You partake in the tedious labours while he washes his clothes and bathes, both begrudgingly, for despite your eager offer Ser Duncan the Tall has declared he needs no protection while naked in a stream.

You've seen him before, naturally, though only in pieces. A bare shoulder when he changes his shirt. The lean length of one calf. Thighs so disproportionately large they seem to belong to some more excessive creature, glimpsed when he crouches to mend a boot or wades into water with his breeches rolled high. Shards of him haunt you at night, most fiercely when the moon gathers itself low in your womb and turns every thought wet-edged and hungry.

There are many things you wish of him. Sweet things, first. For him to speak softly into your ear. To call you something fond instead of girl, your given name, or the stiff m’lady he reaches for whenever his composure deserts him. For his mouth to come near enough that you might nip it and feel his teeth clack against yours when he kisses you with all the ineptitude you hope for.

The less sweet longings may be more delectable. His hips slotted between your legs. His hands making themselves full of your flesh. He would need no knowledge of force to open you. His width alone would see to that, and though Duncan likely knows naught of violent delights, you would not mind teaching him the gentler shape of the same hunger. He is kind enough to make up for greenness. Wise enough where it matters, which is chiefly in the heart.

Another want you keep hidden, sometimes even from yourself. A gluttonous one. You want to taste him where no decent maiden ought to think of putting her mouth. To learn the salt of every private fold and hollow, to come away with the marrow of him shining over your lips and fingers. You want to wear his essence so plainly that any creature looking upon you would know there is one enormous place in this world where you belong.

If only he knew. No—if only he were willing to grasp the magnitude of your longing. It rivals his height, you are certain.

By evening it is Duncan’s turn to enter his name for the lists, so naturally you go with him. You slow him so badly he is near the last knight in the queue by the time you reach the trestle table beneath the striped awning, beguiled in turn by every merchant’s low promise and every display of bright cloth, ribbons, little silver charms and polished stones with no earthly use beyond being pleasing to look upon.

He grows sourer with every halt. When you dismiss the last merchant and hurry after him, you have to trot to match the length of his stride. “I was only looking,” you tell his shoulder.

He grunts. “The hour’s late.”

At the table, a narrow man with ink on three fingers asks Duncan’s name and standing. Duncan straightens, gives him Ser Duncan the Tall, hedge knight, and names the arms he means to bear. The man writes it down, glances past him, and points the feather of his quill at you.

“And her?”

“His slave,” you grumble.

Laughter breaks out from the men waiting behind you. The clerk bends over his parchment with his shoulders shaking. Duncan goes crimson so swiftly you are certain even his scalp must be burning beneath the hair.

He says nothing until the pair of you are well clear of the lists. Then he turns back towards camp at such a pace that you must trot after him again.

“Don’t go telling folk I’ve put ye in chains,” he says.

I wish, though. In chains, or rope, or merely tangled in the sheets with you, with my mouth full of your fingers, or—“’Twas but a jest. I am exactly where I wish to be,” you tell him. Then, quieter, “Well. Almost.”

Duncan glances down at you. “Almost?”

“It's nothing.”

He stops. Breath leaves him hard through the nose. “Ye keep saying half a thing and expecting me to know the other half.”

You stare at him, convinced you have been plain enough to make yourself understood by a blind septon at midnight. There can hardly be another way of telling him short of climbing him like a tree.

That night you lie beneath a clear sky with the camp settling round you in mutters, laughter and the occasional stamp of a horse. Duncan puts his cloak deep inside his travelling sack and ties the mouth shut. You take the theft personally.

The next morning Duncan wakes with his stomach wrung small and hard beneath his ribs. He forces down one slice of bread by chewing each mouthful to paste and washing it after with water. The second sits in his hand until you take it from him and eat it yourself.

You must see the pallor in his cheeks, for you are exceptionally kind. “You are going to be great,” you tell him.

“I’ve not even mounted yet.”

“And already you look very knightly.”

“I look sick.”

“A sickly knight, then. Still great.”

He has ridden in lists before, great and small, yet the nerves come quietly every time. They begin at dawn as a little tightness in the gut and work upward through him until, by the time he sits atop Thunder, blood pounds behind his ears like a war drum.

You help him into his armour. Tie the points, buckle the plates and lace him with your head bowed over the work. Your fingers tug and test each fastening twice. When you come to the straps near his waist, you spend long enough there that Duncan begins thinking on the shape of your hands rather than the men waiting to strike him from a horse.

It steadies him some. He is grateful for that, though saying so seems likely to make the whole thing strange.

At the lists, Thunder stamps and rolls the bit beneath him. Duncan lowers his visor, raises it again and looks towards the rail. You are easy to find among the gathered folk, bright-eyed and fixed wholly upon him. He keeps the look of you as a token of luck, lowers the visor once more and spurs forward.

He rides well enough to be called back on the morrow.

The first bout is clean. On the second pass his lance catches the other knight square and sends him into the dust. The next man holds his seat longer, but Duncan breaks more wood and takes the better marks. The third nearly undoes him. A lance strikes high and hard, wrenching his shoulder back while the brow of his helm bites into the skin above his eye. For one dreadful moment the world tips sideways beneath him. He catches himself with his knees, hauls Thunder straight and finishes the pass half-blind with blood.

His earlier wins carry him through. That seems a thin comfort when he climbs down with one arm near useless and blood working along his cheek, until he sees you pushing between two squires with a wet cloth already in your hand.

By early evening you sit together beneath some lord's open pavilions, where wine and food have been laid out for the entrants. Your fingers press the folded cloth to Duncan’s temple. Every now and then you lift it to inspect the cut, frown fiercely, then put it back.

“You rode beautifully,” you tell him.

“I near fell,” he mutters.

“But you did not.”

“Near enough.”

A beat. “That third fellow struck too high.”

“He struck where he meant.”

Your mouth frowns. “Well, I dislike him for it.”

Duncan smiles. He smiles often around you, though he does not always mean to. He wishes he had done better. A finer showing might have earned enough coin to buy one of the little silver charms you handled yesterday, or the length of blue ribbon you held beneath your chin before seeing the merchant’s price.

You keep praising him. Tell him how fine he looked when the first knight fell, how everyone shouted after the second pass. Your voice softens whenever you ask whether the shoulder pains him. He likes being touched by you, though bearing it is another matter. When he forgets who he is and what is expected of him, he wonders how those fingers would feel elsewhere. At the base of his neck. Along his stomach. Lower, where a lady’s hand has no business going unless invited.

He stares at your mouth while it moves round another kind word and fails to notice the young knight taking the place beside you until three cups land on the table.

Duncan looks up. The man is near his own age, perhaps a little older, dressed in green wool too fine for camping and fastened at the throat with silver. His hair has been combed since the lists. There is a narrow gold ring on one hand and no dirt beneath any of his nails.

“Ser Duncan,” he says pleasantly. “I watched your third bout. Fine seat. Most men would have gone down after a blow like that.”

Duncan shifts under the cloth at his brow. “My thanks.”

“Ser Martyn,” the man supplies, then gives the name of some small holding upriver. He nudges one cup towards Duncan and another towards you. “For the wounded knight and his diligent healer.”

You take yours with a smile. “That is kind of you.”

The smile Ser Martyn gives back is easy and practised. “Are you his lucky charm, then?”

Your hand leaves Duncan’s temple. The cold cloth remains balanced there by itself. “Merely his companion on the road,” you say.

Merely.

Ser Martyn’s eyes glint. “Then the road has treated him generously.”

You laugh. Duncan reaches up and holds the cloth in place himself.

The third cup has made the table feel crowded. Ser Martyn leans towards you when you speak and asks where you have travelled, what you thought of Acorn Hall, whether you mean to remain for the feast after the final day. You thank him again for the wine. He tells you there is more where it came from. His father keeps a hall two days east, he mentions, with a cellar better stocked than Lord’s Whateverhisnameis and an orchard that sweetens the whole yard in spring.

Duncan drinks and listens.

Ser Martyn knows how to speak to a woman without tripping over his tongue. He owns good cloth and a name tied to a place. There would be servants in his father’s hall. Proper meals. Clean sheets. A room that stays where it is put instead of being rolled and tied to a horse every morning.

Duncan has a bedroll, three beasts and a purse that grows lighter whenever he looks inside it.

Some sour little ache has poured itself into him, close to where the morning nerves sat. It worsens each time you laugh. He tells himself this is foolishness. You are free to speak with whom you please. A decent man would be glad to see you admired by someone able to offer more than road dust and rabbit stew.

Your first cup empties. Then another appears. By the time you finish the third, glass has sparkled your eyes up and Ser Martyn has drawn closer by the width of a hand.

Duncan sets his own cup down. Wine still covers the bottom. “I think I’ll turn in.”

You look at him over the rim of yours. “Already?”

“Aye.” His gaze shifts towards Ser Martyn and away again. “Ye do as ye please, though.”

He rises before either of you can answer and leaves the cup half-full on the table.

The horses are where he left them. Sweetfoot turns her head when he approaches, calm and uncomplicated in the deepening night. Duncan finds the brush, puts one hand to her neck and begins working the dust from her coat. A brush fits his hand. Sweetfoot asks no questions.

The moment Ser Martyn joins you, it occurs that this may be another way of making yourself plain. If Duncan wants you, surely he cannot sit untouched while another man leans close and smiles into your face. Surely some crude, honest piece of him will rise. A hand closing round your wrist. An arm about your waist. Perhaps he will simply pick you up and carry you over one shoulder to camp, deaf to protest and laughter alike.

The thought pleases you enough that you laugh too brightly at something Ser Martyn says. You allow him to refill your cup, then the next. When his hand finds your elbow in the press near the table, you leave it there a heartbeat longer than necessity allows.

Duncan grows quiet. You feel his silence beside you and tend it carefully, feeding it another smile, another swallow of wine, another turn of your body towards the knight in green. He looks miserable. That should satisfy you. Instead it draws a queer ache through the middle of your triumph.

Then he leaves, with no wrist in his hand. Only tells you to do as you please and walks away with half his wine abandoned behind him. The pang of it sobers you briefly.

Ser Martyn continues speaking. You remain because leaving directly after Duncan would make the whole little game too obvious, and because it is pleasant, in its lesser way, to be admired openly. Ser Martyn has pretty eyes and well-kept hair. He is handsome. Kind too, though his kindness is smooth and social, the sort that knows where to sit and when to pour and how long a lady’s gaze should be held. It is not the kindness you want.

You want the one that moves a lizard from the road beneath a killing sun. One that gives away half a meal and calls the smaller half plenty. One that sits with its back to a naked woman because it gave its word, no matter how bitterly the woman resents it.

The wine goes on working through you. Ser Martyn’s face softens at the edges. His voice begins arriving from farther away, though he has moved nearer. Your thoughts wander to Duncan with increasing disobedience: the split at his brow, the bruise darkening beneath his clothes, and his hands, and gods, his mouth.

When Ser Martyn brushes his knuckles over your skirt, you look down and realise with sudden, drunken clarity that they are entirely the wrong knuckles. You stand too quickly. The pavilion tilts by a small, treacherous measure.

“My thanks for the wine,” you say, catching the table with one hand. “And the company. I ought to retire.”

Ser Martyn rises with you. “Allow me to walk you.”

“N-no.” The answer comes harder than his offer deserves. You soften it into a smile, or attempt one. “Our camp is close.”

“You have had rather a lot to drink.”

“I have had exactly enough.”

This is untrue. He looks as though he knows it, but bows and lets you go.

The way back proves longer than you remember. The ground keeps changing its mind beneath your feet, rising to meet one step and falling away from the next. You mutter through the whole journey, carrying on the quarrel Duncan refused to have with you.

Do as you please, you mouth in a poor imitation of his voice. “Aye, thank you kindly, Ser Duncan. Most gracious of you. Perhaps I shall marry him too, since I am doing as I please. Perhaps I shall have twelve babies with neat fingernails.”

A tent-rope catches your ankle. You stagger free and point accusingly at nothing.

“And you would wish me well, would you not? Great stupid—great honourable—” You lose the end of the insult and hiccup instead.

At camp, you find him beside Sweetfoot. His head is bowed close to her neck, one hand resting there while the other draws the brush slowly through her coat. He is tending the horse, though there is something in the shape of him that looks more like he has gone to her for comfort.

You come nearer and sniff. He stills. “I thought I’d not see you till morning,” Duncan says without looking round.

Perhaps he should not have. Perhaps you ought to have gone with Ser Martyn and shut your eyes very tightly. His hands might have become larger in the dark. His hair rougher beneath your fingers. With enough wine and enough wanting, mayhaps you could have lied yourself into Duncan’s body for an hour.

The thought leaves you feeling foul. “I’ve no interest in that one,” you say.

Duncan draws the brush down Sweetfoot’s side. “Didn’t say ye had.”

“Would you mind if I bedded him?”

The brush stops. Only briefly. “It ain’t for me to choose,” he says.

“I know.” You sway where you stand and correct yourself with an unsteady step. “I asked if you would mind.”

Duncan says nothing. That is answer enough and still not enough. You watch the back of his neck while he resumes brushing, angry with the silence and angrier with yourself for begging meaning from it.

Sweetfoot noses at his shoulder. Duncan sets the brush aside, breaks an oatcake and lets her take it from his palm. Her whiskers tickle him. His mouth softens. “There’s a good girl,” he murmurs.

The words leave a sombre quiet behind them. You sigh so heavily your whole body seems to empty. Then you sit down hard in the grass. The earth gives a small jolt beneath you, and after considering the effort required to remain upright, you let yourself fall flat onto your back.

Duncan finally turns. “What ails you, girl?”

The stars have multiplied while you were drinking. You squint at them.

“What must I do so you’d call me a good girl?”

There is a small clatter. The bridle has nearly slipped from Duncan’s hand.

You might pretend you said nothing. You might pretend he failed to hear. The wine has carried both mercies well beyond your reach, so you prop yourself on your elbows instead and look at him. He has gone red to the ears, gaze fixed fiercely on the ground between his boots. You bat your lashes. “I can learn tricks.”

For a moment he remains petrified. Then his mouth tightens. “Aye,” he says. “That’s it.” He strides over, crouches and gathers you from the grass. One arm goes beneath your knees, the other round your back, and the ground gives way with astonishing ease.

“Where are we going?” you ask, hope brightening you despite every lesson learnt thus far.

“Yer drunk. I’m puttin’ you to bed.”

You settle more comfortably against him. “I had the thought sober.”

His throat clicks beneath your cheek. Duncan says nothing else.

He puts you down upon the bedroll and kneels to remove your shoes. You offer little help. One foot keeps slipping from his hand, and when he catches it you giggle as if he has done something clever. Then, he pulls the blanket over you, tucks it under your shoulder and tries not to look at your mouth.

Within moments your eyes are closed. He sits beside the fire.

His cock is hard enough to hurt, thick and trapped beneath his breeches from carrying you against him while you spoke such things into his throat. That is trouble enough. Worse is the part of him that keeps hearing the words in your voice.

What must I do so you’d call me a good girl? I had the thought sober.

Duncan presses both palms to his face.

He has spent months putting you down as strange. Fond of teasing. Careless with words. He has taken every look and touch and queer remark and forced it into some safer shape, because the other shape asked too much of him. Now they return without permission.

You wrapped in his cloak and refusing the blanket. Your hands lingering at him. Would you handle all of me so gently? The disappointment when he kept his back to the stream. Not even a little? The muttered almost after telling him you were exactly where you wished to be.

Even your slave jest changes its face under this new light, though Duncan does not know what sort of light turns bondage into courtship.

He looks towards the bedroll. You sleep with one hand near your mouth, lashes calm against your cheeks, wholly unaware that you have overturned every sensible thought in his head.

Mayhaps you do want him. The hope arrives large enough to frighten him. It catches in his chest and groin together, making his pulse beat hard wherever blood can reach. He imagines calling you good girl with your face turned up to his. Imagines your expression changing beneath it. Imagines putting the words against your ear while his hands—

Duncan grips his knees and stops there. You are drunk. Currently snoring. Whatever truth lies in the confession, tonight it can ask nothing of him.

He feeds another stick into the fire and remains beside it until dawn, watching the flames sink low while every old certainty burns down with them.

The following morning Duncan regrets his vigil. His knees have stiffened, and his wounded shoulder protests when he rolls it. Still, his stomach keeps its peace. That is something.

You wake with your hair across your mouth and no sign upon your face that you remember making a misery of him. Duncan knows better than to trust that.

“Good morrow, m’lady,” he says, far too carefully.

You peer at him through sleep, then scoff. “Good morrow, Ser Duncan.”

Neither of you mentions horses, tricks or the names one might call a girl if properly encouraged. Duncan becomes very interested in saddles.

He rides better for having no sickness in him. Two more bouts go his way, enough to carry him near the final, where a smaller knight with a cleaner lance catches him soundly and sends him from Thunder. Duncan lands hard on the same shoulder he bruised the day before and sits in the dirt a moment, dazed and deeply undignified, while you are already pushing past the rail and calling his name.

The loss troubles him less once the purse is counted. There is enough for the road ahead. Enough for oats, supper and an inn besides. Enough, most importantly, to give you something finer than another night beneath a tree.

“We’ve enough,” he tells you, still hot from the lists and aching wherever a body may reasonably ache. “A room for you. Hot water. Supper made by someone who knows what they’re doing.”

“And you?”

Duncan blinks.

“You look as though a horse sat on you.”

“It near did.”

You laugh, bright and mean enough to make the whole fall worthwhile. “To the inn, then?”

Duncan nods. The gladness of it loosens something in him. For a little while the night before recedes beneath coin in his palm, your laughter and the promise of clean sheets. He forgets to be afraid of what you may remember. The camp comes down swiftly. Bedrolls tied, sacks loaded, tack checked twice. Soon Acorn Hall is behind you, and the nearest lodging lies ahead with a roof, a hot meal and water heated by someone else’s fire.

It proves worth every bruise. Supper comes hot and plentiful: thick stew with onions cooked soft in it, bread still tender at the middle, cheese that has not spent a week sweating inside a saddlebag. You eat with such pleasure Duncan begins to suspect he has been starving you without knowing it.

Ale follows. Only two cups each, though yours seems to empty faster whenever he looks away.

The common room is crowded with men from the lists and folk eager to tell them where they went wrong. Duncan limbers gradually in the candlelight. Warmth gets into his shoulder and takes some of the ache from it. Ale does the same for the rest of him. He leans back on the bench, one arm stretched along the wall, and listens while you recount his fall with increasing cruelty.

“You sat there blinking,” you say. “Like an ox struck between the eyes with a turnip.”

“It were a lance.”

“The expression was the same.”

“You ran towards me,” he points out.

“To see whether you were dead,” you reply with your mouth full.

“Ye looked worried.”

There's a smirk. “I was deciding what to do with the horses.”

Duncan laughs into his cup. You smile over yours fully, pleased with yourself.

The talk turns to the other riders. The knight with the green plume who lost it on the first pass and spent the rest of the day looking somehow less noble without it. The squire who ran the wrong lance to his master and had to chase after him the length of the lists. Ser Martyn comes up only once, when you note that fine wool did not help him keep his seat. Duncan finds that funnier than he ought.

He watches you eat while pretending not to. Your mouth closes round bread, works slowly, then shines again when you take a drink. Candlelight catches on the damp lower lip. It is a very pretty mouth. Duncan would much like it nearer.

Near enough to learn whether you remember. Near enough to ask what you meant. Near enough to put his own against it and make a great fool of himself in some new way.

Yet the knight he is has paid for two chambers, and soon there will be a wall between you. A sound decision. An honourable one. He resents it bitterly.

Mayhaps somewhere along the road ahead he will find courage for a different sort of danger. The foolish surge that takes him when swords are drawn and some smaller man needs defending must live in him somewhere when steel is put away. It ought not be harder to ask a woman whether she wants him than to ride at another man with a lance levelled at his chest.

It is, though. Swords make plain what is required.

At the top of the stairs your doors stand opposite one another. Duncan stops before his. You stop before yours. Neither of you reaches for the latch.

His cheeks have colour in them from ale and the heat below. Damp has curled the hair at his temples, darkened it there with salt. He looks softer after food. Less like a knight carved for carrying blows and more like the boyish part of him has risen close to the skin.

You could tell him: Come bathe with me. Come to my bed. Lean down and let me kiss that sweet mouth. Call me a good girl while you do it.

His eyes remain on yours. Waiting, perhaps. Or only being large and sincere in the manner that has ruined your life.

“Sleep well, Dunk,” you say.

“And you.”

Then he disappears behind his door.

You enter your own chamber, shut it harder than necessary and throw yourself face-first onto the bed. The mattress gives beneath you in one blessed softness. You seize the pillow and bite into it until your teeth meet feather through linen.

It has always been unbearable. Somehow tonight has made it worse.

He had watched your mouth at supper. You know he had. His eyes kept dropping there with all the furtive dignity of a dog pretending it has no interest in the meat laid before it. Still, he has gone into a separate room like he was fleeing plague. You turn your face into the pillow and groan.

Misery aside, your stomach is full of something that is neither burnt venison nor bread hard enough to injure. There is hot water waiting down the corridor, and a bed that does not contain roots, stones or one enormous knight pretending not to dream beside you.

You rise and begin sorting through your things for what you need. Clean shift. Cloth for drying. The little pot of soap bought three villages ago and guarded more fiercely than coin. Your comb is missing.

You empty the bag again, though it has not grown another pocket since the first search. Nothing. Only folded linen, stockings, a ribbon and the small collection of useless treasures Duncan has allowed you to acquire along the road.

He must have packed it with his things while loading the horses. You cross the passage and knock at his door. No answer.

The bath chambers lie in the inn's bowels. He has likely gone there directly, too sore and tired to linger. You wait another moment, then lift the latch.

His room resembles yours, only larger by virtue of having less strewn across it. His sack sits open at the foot of the bed. You kneel and search without guilt. The comb is yours. You have not invented its disappearance merely to enter his place, however much your heart behaves as though you have.

The comb lies tucked inside the fold of one of his spare shirts, caught there when he sorted your belongings from his. “There you are—”

The door creaks open behind you. You turn, and it might as well be a lance taking you square in the chest.

Duncan stands in the doorway practically naked.

A length of damp linen is knotted low round his hips, the cloth darkened where it clings. Your eyes go there first. To the slant of him. To the deep-cut lines running from either side of his belly into the wrap, narrowing your sight towards the heavy shape beneath it. Even softened by bathing, even hidden, he is large like the rest of him. The linen gives enough away to make imagination useless and appetite vicious.

Then the whole of him arrives. No more shoulder glimpsed and stolen. No more calf, wrist, thigh, brief strip of belly gone as soon as you noticed it. He stands complete beneath the candlelight, sheened with steam from crown to bare feet, and every scrap you have gathered over months proves a poor accounting.

His shoulders look excessive without cloth to excuse them. Broad enough to crowd the doorway, rounded richly at their ends, built less like anything honed for display than something made to lift, bear and shelter.

The chest itself is softer than armour ever permits you to imagine. Full. Warm-looking. Hair thickens over the centre and thins towards his nipples, both drawn tight from the cooling air. A bruise from the lists blooms under one collarbone, wine-dark at its middle and yellowing round the edge. Another stains his ribs where the lance caught him badly. They ought to spoil the sight. Instead they make your mouth ache with the urge to tend and taste. You want to put your lips to every discoloured place and see whether tenderness might be pressed into him through skin.

Below, his stomach has none of the hard, starved leanness of carved warriors. It is strong and soft together, abundant enough to invite a cheek, a palm, teeth. The muscles sit under flesh rather than announcing themselves, shifting when he breathes. Water has caught in the shallow cup of his navel. A darker line of hair begins beneath it and travels down, straight and indecent, disappearing under the linen precisely where your gaze has already disgraced itself.

His thighs show below the cloth, enormous and furred, bruised along one side where he struck the earth. They make his waist seem narrower and the towel more precarious. His knees are scraped. His shins marked by old little injuries, some pale, some newly scabbed. Then his feet—long, broad, bare against the boards, toes reddened from hot water. Even those affect you. The naked ordinary weight of them. The fact that all this impossible male beauty still ends in wet footprints.

Steam follows him faintly into the chamber. Candlelight catches it and turns the damp over his skin to gold. His hair lies darker and flattened over his brow. One drop travels the long line of his throat, settles briefly in that beloved gutter at its base, then breaks loose and goes into the vellus hairs.

Your body answers so brutally you near sway where you kneel. Your mouth dries. Lower down, everything does the opposite. It gathers between your legs with a crude, immediate pull, so fierce that for one humiliating moment you think he must be able to see it happening through your clothes. Your fingers tighten round the comb. Your heart strikes hard.

He is beautiful in a way that seems almost biased. Too much man arranged into one body. Near caricature in his largeness, had every piece of him not been put together with such unfair harmony. A body made for work and violence, yet lush enough to make violence against it feel unthinkable. Inviting enough that restraint begins to seem like a personal failing.

You have spent so long making him from scraps. Building the rest beneath shirt and mail, fitting guessed flesh between the parts chance allowed you to see. The true Duncan is larger. Softer. Wetter. Infinitely worse.

He stops with one hand still on the latch. You remain kneeling beside his open sack, comb caught in your fist, staring so openly that even his usual blindness cannot mistake it for anything else.

"M-m'lady," he stammers. Fists the linen at his waist. “Found what ye wanted?”

“Aye,” you breathe. You set the comb down on the floor, rise and take a few steps that you try to keep steady, though blood pulses in your head so loudly the wood beneath your feet feels soft. When you reach him, you push the door closed. Duncan stands still. With your head bowed, for another look might kill you, you mutter, “Have you cleaned yourself proper?”

He sucks in a wet gasp. “What’s that meant to mean?”

"All of yourself?"

"A-aye," he says.

“May I check?”

“You—” Colour rises from his chest into his face. “Yer teasin’ me again.”

You shake your head. "No," you say. “I have not been teasing you for months.”

He turns to you fully. You turn with him, and now there is nowhere for either of you to look but straight at the other.

This close, with almost all of him bare, Duncan is intimidating. Not through any threat in him. Purely scale. His chest fills your sight. The linen hangs low enough that one careless movement might finish what your imagination has begun.

His arms drop to his sides. Both hands close into fists, then open again. He catches his lower lip between his teeth.

“Ye’ve—” He swallows. “Ye’ve had ale.”

“Duncan.” You hold his gaze. “I had the thought sober.”

A sound leaves him, low in his chest, as though he is bracing beneath weight. The muscles there jump. Your gums itch with the urge to bite them.

“What…” He clears his throat. “How d’ye mean to check?”

The answer had seemed simple in every imagining. In those, you were shameless and eloquent. You told him exactly where you meant to put your hands, your mouth, your nose. You made him understand the whole gluttonous scale of you.

Now he stands over you half-naked and waiting, and you feel small enough to fit beneath one of his palms. Worse, you fear that saying it aloud will make the want sound strange even to him.

“I want to…” Your voice belongs to some blushing virgin with no relation to you. “I want to touch you.”

Duncan’s breathing changes. “And?”

You look down. “And smell you.”

His face goes blank for a heartbeat. One of his hands twitches near the linen. “What should I do?” he asks.

You lift your eyes. “You would let me?”

Duncan exhales hard through his nose. “Girl,” he says, rough and helpless, “there ain’t much I wouldn’t let ye do to me.”

Your brows pull together. So you were right: beneath all the retreating and honour and maddening silence, he wants you. He is standing here and giving you leave, and the largeness of that kindness is wounding.

You take his hand. Duncan follows when you lead him farther into the room. At the bedside you stop and reach for the linen, then look up.

His eyes widen. He understands. His fingers come over yours, shaking badly enough that the knot takes him two tries. When it loosens, the cloth slips from his hips and falls in a damp heap round his feet.

You keep your eyes on his face. “Lie down,” you tell him.

He obeys.

The bed seems built for some lesser man. Duncan takes its whole breadth, shoulders near touching either side, and when he stretches out his heels pass the frame. The mattress sinks under him and lifts in small ridges round his weight.

Only then do you let yourself look. His cock lies half-hard against his belly, thick already, flushed darker towards the head. Beautiful enough that your first instinct is to bow straight over it and put your face there. You resist. Barely. You have waited too long to frighten him now.

You climb onto the bed and settle astride his hips. Duncan groans. His pelvis lifts beneath you in one blunt twitch, then drops back into the lumpy wool. His hands rise and hover beside your thighs, lost for somewhere proper to go. You catch one wrist and bring his hand to your face.

“Beg pardon,” he mutters. “I’ve never—” The rest folds under his embarrassment.

“That makes me glad,” you say.

It is not a kind admission. The thought of him beneath another woman turns your stomach so sharply you could drown in the bile of it. Some other mouth learning him first. Some other hands leaving their knowledge where you wish to be the only one.

You soften your hold. “I won’t hurt you,” you say. “And when you want me to stop, I will. You need only tell me.”

Duncan blinks up at you. His chest expands more heavily beneath your knees. “Aye,” he says. “Though I can’t see myself wanting ye to stop, girl. Oh—”

You press your nose into the hollow of his palm and draw in one long breath.

Gods.

Your eyes close.

Lavender clings faintly from the bath, clean and floral over the skin, but it has not taken him away. Beneath it remains the bittersweet warmth you know from his cloak: body's cloying, living rot, bread, the softened trace of ale and that dark, rich earthiness that belongs to him alone.

You nose lower. The scent thins over his wrist, where skin lies close to bone, then deepens again along the seam of his forearm. Your mouth falls open without thought. You follow with your face, breathing him in from wrist to elbow while the hair there grazes your lips. Duncan’s fingers flex beside your cheek.

At the bend of his arm you stop. Cradle the elbow in both hands. The hollow there smells warmer, private in some small way, and you sniff until his whole arm trembles under your grip.

“Lift them,” you murmur.

His arms are too long to lie straight above him without striking the headboard, so Duncan bends them and crosses his wrists over his head. The posture opens him terribly. Chest spread. Ribs bare. Every soft, hidden place given over.

You lean down and bury your face beneath his arm. A sound nearly escapes you. A stupid, girlish squeal.

“Oh, Seven fu—”

Duncan bites the curse off. His cock thickens hard beneath you, pressing up between your legs. Gods, he will fill you so snugly. Perhaps too snugly. Perhaps he might damage you a little, and by his hand you think you would take it gladly.

The hair beneath his arm is softer than you expected, damp still and curling against your cheek. You press deeper into the warm cup there, where the hard edge of his breast rises towards the shoulder and the thicker muscle of his back draws down behind it. The hollow held between them fits your nose as if his body had made the place in advance.

Bathing oils have hardly reached here. This is Duncan entire. Clean sweat beginning again under heat. Malt. Yeasted sweetness of his skin and beneath it the dark thing, fertile as black soil split open by a spade. Your lips brush the hair. Your mouth waters.

Duncan writhes under you. His crossed hands tighten round one another above his head. You chuckle low against him. “If you want me to stop, you’ve got to tell me.”

“No,” he says quickly. “By the gods, don’t—”

Your tongue slips out. You lick slowly through the armpit, following the deep crease between chest and shoulder.

Duncan whimpers.

You hum. The taste and scent climb straight into your head, dense and bodily and so male it seems to strike some old starving piece of you awake.

He smells like fucking.

You could never swallow such a mass of man whole. But Gods help you, Seven Hells take you, you want all of him.

It takes effort to tear yourself away. Even then you only climb higher, following the length of him to the side of his throat. The difficulty there is keeping your teeth out of him. His pulse beats plainly beneath the skin, quick and strong and made to tempt worse creatures than you. You nip him instead. Barely. Enough to feel a jump under your mouth.

He makes a strangled sound. His arms come down from over his head, hands finding your waist and stopping there as if they require further leave. You breathe him in once more at the place below his ear, then drag yourself higher until your face rests over his.

Nose beside nose. Cheek against cheek. Your mouth hovering near his, too close for either of you to pretend this is some innocent examination.

Duncan has gone deep red. Heat shines over his brow. Sweat has begun again over his chest despite the bath, and the knowledge that you have drawn it from him sends a pleased little shiver through you.

“You smell like life itself,” you tell him, drunk on it. “I love living with you. I wish it never had to end.”

He whispers your name. Shaky and brittle, as if it has grown too delicate for the size of him.

The sound emboldens you. “Call me darling,” you say. “Call me sweetheart.” Your nose brushes his when you shift closer. “When we’re alone, call me a… good girl. So much ails me when you don’t.”

“Sweetheart,” Duncan whispers. His hands tighten round your middle. “Gods, girl. What're ye doing to me?”

You smile against his lip's corner. “Checking.”

“And?”

“I’ve barely begun.”

Duncan believes you. His cock gives such a hard throb that shame ought to follow, but somehow it does not. He is awash in something else. Naught like this has ever been done to him.

He has been looked at and touched on occasion with gratitude, rage or pity. Hands have clapped his shoulder, swatted his head, gripped his arm and tried to tell him there were good things waiting somewhere beyond the bad ones presently happening. He has one stolen kiss in his ledger, and it was not Duncan who did the pilfering. An innkeeper’s daughter caught him in the stables and stood on a stool to reach. He touched himself to the memory more than once afterwards, because the feeling of somebody’s palms against his chest and a tongue inside his mouth had outclassed a full belly and a sound night’s sleep together.

What happens now is beyond accounting. There is a girl atop him. A good girl. His favourite girl. He is naked and thick between the thighs, while you smell him and hum over what you find as though every private part of him is worth discovering. He feels cherished. The knowledge swells so painfully in his chest that he wants to kiss you only to make certain you know you are cherished too.

His head tips towards yours. He finds your mouth and gives it one small, shy peck. Your lips taste of breath and faintly of him already.

Gods, Duncan is so swollen with it. He knows where the cock ought to go for relief, at least in principle, but you remain fully dressed and look far more composed than he feels. So he only presses his pursed mouth to yours again and stays there, uncertain of what comes next.

Your hand frames his jaw. “Like this,” you tell him. A little squeeze of his cheek. “Open.”

So he opens. The same tongue that licked him where he carries the sweat of road and work slides inside his mouth. Duncan grips you so hard his fingers lose their purchase on flesh and only stretch the cloth round your waist.

The first touch of your tongue is soft. Softer than he remembers a mouth having any right to be. It glides over his with a warm, wet pressure and retreats by a fraction, then returns as if testing whether he will follow. He does, though poorly at first. The movement feels too intimate to be so small when your tongue rubs his in the dark of his own mouth, tasting where nobody else can see.

It makes him feel sweetly filthy. You have had your face buried beneath his arm and now you kiss him with that same tongue. He can taste the lavender from his bath, the ale lingering on your breath. His jaw loosens. Your mouth opens wider over his, and Duncan has the dizzy thought that he is being let inside while still lying helpless beneath you.

The feeling begins round his lips and spreads viciously. Heat runs through his jaw, into his throat, then pours down his chest so swiftly he near mistakes it for fear. His belly draws tight. Even his feet answer with their toes curling and a tingling so sharp and absurd he would laugh if your mouth were not busy stealing the breath needed for it.

He had thought kissing belonged chiefly to the face. No one warned him the whole body could be kissed through one mouth.

He is still reeling from it when you begin to slide lower. Your hands go first, travelling his shoulders and chest as though guiding the rest of you down. Nose follows. Mouth after. Each part of you seems unwilling to leave him untouched.

At his chest, you stop. Duncan looks down through heavy lids and finds you nosing through the hair there. Then your tongue comes out and circles one nipple.

The feeling is stranger than it ought to be. Small, wet, almost ticklish at first, until your mouth closes round him and teeth take a broad bite of flesh with the nipple caught at the middle. You hum terribly, pleased deep in your throat. His back rises clean off the mattress.

“Ah—gods—fuck—”

Pain turns sweet before he knows which name to give it. His hands clutch at the bedding. His cock kicks against his belly, hard enough now that the pull in his balls borders on hurt. Then you kiss the place you bit, soft and damp, soothing him with the same lips that made him arch.

He barely settles before you move lower. You drag yourself down and Duncan twitches beneath every breath. At his navel you press your face there, wedging the tip of your nose into the little hollow and breathing him in.

A broken laugh jumps out of him. “Girl, what—”

Your tongue slips into it. The words die.

You lick the hollow once, then again, slow enough to make his stomach ripple. Duncan stares down at you, dazed. Nobody has ever paid mind to that bit of him. Nobody has ever made it feel like anything. Yet your tongue works inside the small fold of flesh and makes ardour spread in his groin.

“Sweetheart,” he gasps. “Seven save me.”

You only sigh. Your breasts press between his thighs as you lower yourself farther. Even through your clothes he feels the soft weight of them nudging close to his sack, and his balls draw tighter still. He spreads his legs without thinking. Makes room. Gives you everything.

His mouth stays open. Tongue resting stupidly against his lower lip in case you decide to climb back and take it again. You seem to have no such notion.

Duncan thinks he cannot breathe any harder, but then you reach there. Oh, right there, where he is his most shameful self. Where blood gathers and betrays him. Where every decent thought has failed since you first climbed atop him.

Your face comes down over his cock with cheek pressing him flat to his belly, firm enough that the pressure wrings a gasp from him. For one wild moment he thinks you mean to milk him so, squeeze the spending out through weight alone.

He is nearly gone when you lift away. Cool air touches the place your body had warmed. Duncan makes a low, miserable sound and looks down.

You are watching him from beneath siren lids, his cock standing between your face and his stomach. “Turn over,” you tell him.

Duncan stares.

"Onto your belly."

He's bewildered first, but eager always. Turning proves less graceful than he wishes it to be. He shifts around you, near kicks your head, then catches one knee in the bedding and has to adjust his hips twice so that his cock does not get painfully crushed. His arms go bent to pillow his head and his face rests turned towards you still. So he can watch, even if only with the corner of his eye.

"Is that what folk do?" he asks, surprising himself with how small he sounds.

"I do not know," you say, "but this is what I wish to do to you."

Duncan trusts you. And so, he lets you.

You've got some gluttonous mouth on you tonight. How you've stopped yourself from swallowing his cock eludes you, but now, with him offered like that, you feel you inner cheeks dampening at the sight. He's equally gorgeous front and back. There is a long shallow road of his spine cutting him in half, and each part works tremendously hard under the skin. Across one shoulder blade lay thin pearl strokes of scars, and a rounder mark ornates his ribs. Bruises you mean to kiss later. You anoint each vertebrae with your palm, down past the narrowest part of his waist to where his back gives itself over to the heavy rise of his arse.

Fuck.

There, you must kiss him there. Smell him, taste him, make him know the force of your adoring. Two great, full halves made for gripping, biting, resting your face upon. When you touch him, the flesh shifts under your hands. You spread your fingers over each buttock, warm and thick and far more yielding than his shoulders. Then, it is as though a boulder has been placed on your back, because there is nowhere else to go but down. You place one cheek on his.

He gasps softly, like he's been braced for another sort of impact. There, you stay a moment, listening to his breathing and feeling the warmth of him seep into your face. Soon, your nose begins to guide you again. You press it to the base of his spine, and breathe. Under your chin, he splits himself like a plum.

Warmer here, and darker too. Sweeter where his body has lain against itself in the bed. You nose lower, nudging into the deep line between his buttocks until Duncan's thighs tense under you.

"Girl," he groans.

He's not that green. He's got ears and has been around men, and men sing of such things when there is drink in them. He has heard of the three-fingered Alice and all the uses she found for herself, along with a dozen cruder tales told by those who claimed knowledge they likely never possessed. It does not astonish him that pleasure may live in a cryptic place. But hearing about a finger put into some nameless man in a tavern is one thing. Lying naked while you move towards his arse is another.

You kiss one cheek. Then the other. Slow presses, each followed by the little drag of your nose on the skin downy with fuzz. He goes taut beneath your mouth. Your answering thing is to laugh quietly, put your hands round him and settle your thumbs on either side of the cleft. You part him only slightly.

It is the most intimate sight of a man. Vulnerable and tender, and Duncan specifically is pinker there, hidden and soft. The small puckered place at the centre of him tightens under your gaze as though even that part knows it is being perceived. You stroke one thumb beside it. "May I kiss you here?" you ask.

He shifts suddenly. Props himself on elbows, shoulders bunching, and cranes his head back as far as his neck permits. Hair hangs into his eyes. His face is all flushed from throat to brow.

"Do ye truly mean to?" he whispers.

"I have not checked there yet," you tell him.

He stares at you over the great length of his own body. You can see the fear in him, but no disdain. More wonder than either. The same stunned disbelief he wore when you told him there was little you did not want. His eyes drop briefly to your hands holding him open. Then, he swallows. "Aye," he husks, rough and quiet. "Check there too."

The leave sends you under. Your nose comes to the deep groove where the cleft draws tight over the little knob of bone. Skin stretches smooth there with a thin satin lustre to it. You press further in. Sound goes. Heft of his buttocks closes warm over your ears. Your cheeks are caught between them, cradled and squeezed soft by muscle and flesh, and for a blink the world beyond him extincts.

Subterranean dim swells behind your eyes so you fold them shut. Here, everything gets severed. Cloak and throat yield lesser versions; this belongs to the chamber of him that anatomy itself keeps barred, and he had to spread himself and let you trespass. A terribly alive animal. A glossy, inward tang of the inside of a person held one thin membrane away. You imagine it living beneath the pelt before the body is opened. It all reaches you deeper than gut resides, as brine warmed into musk.

He smells like a man on the brink of becoming meat.

The intimacy of it turns prurient in your blood. Your teeth ache. Your mouth floods. Your skull fills with blood that stumbles darkly through the veins at your temples.

You breathe again. The whole of you leans towards the forbidden territory. You want to split him wider. Put your mouth to the most secret place on him and stay until he carries the shape of your lips there. Make him helpless, ashamed and adored together, made to understand that no hidden part of him can escape your yearning.

So you kiss him. Open-mouthed. Moaning. Not nearly gently enough to pass for devotion, though devotion is exactly what has debased you.

“Seven fucks—oh gods,” he gasps. It is the quietest thunder ever laid on him.

Your mouth scarcely moves, yet the touch strikes through the tight ring of him and runs white along his spine. All of Duncan argues with itself. His arse closes hard round your face. The movement seems only to trap you nearer. His hips read from the mattress, forcing himself deeper into the heat he has half a mind to flee. His elbows dig down. Shoulders knot. Belly hangs taut beneath him. Between his thighs, his cock swings heavy and weeps for you, untouched, depraved, wholly begging to be noticed.

Touch me. Take me. Keep going.

Your hand answers. It slips under his stomach and closes round the root.

Duncan gasps out: "Ah—good—good girl—"

The words have grooved themselves into him already. He heard what you asked. All Duncan wishes now is to please you, though pleasure currently has him half-scalded and half-drowned.

Then, everything stills. Your lips stay against him. Your fist keeps him full and hard inside it. A clear bead of spend swells at the slit, drawing long, then making its way to slip between your fingers.

He hears you swallow and feels the movement close enough that the shape of the question touches him. "Was that for me?"

He groans into his folded arms.

"Dunk."

“Aye,” he says, and realises his eyes are wet. His thighs quiver wide around you.

Your grip tenses once. Another pearl pushes from him and slides hot over your thumb. "Say it proper," you tell him.

"My—" Breath bottles him in the throat. He tries again. "My good girl," he whispers. Louder: "Gods, my good girl. Please, sweetheart I—" Another gasp. "I beg ye—"

And so your mouth settles back to its work. At the same time, your fist begins to travel. Root to crown, slow enough that he feels each ridge of himself drag through your hand. Your thumb passes beneath the head and presses into the tender notch there. Duncan's sight jumps. The blow lands inside his skull though your hand holds him far below it, and his toes rake furrows into the sheets. He's confused between thrusting into your palm and bearing back towards your face.

Then your tongue spreads bold across his hole. His flesh seizes round it. It grips, releases, grips, each panic tightening him harder. You lick over the ring of muscle once, and circle it with the tip until his hips begin making witless little thrusts into the air.

"Fuck," he mouths into his arm. Tormented in all his sensitive spots, and glad to be. "Girl—"

But you don't listen. Only go lower. You draw down the cleft and reach the seam of his sack. One slow lick follows it, then another. The weight of him settles on your chin, full and pulled tight, while the point of your tongue gauges the delicate skin along the centre. Duncan near leaves his body.

A thin cry comes out of him. His thighs spread farther. Belly's burning, knees keep sliding, opening room for your face until the strain catches him in the pelvis. He welcomes the ache, and anything that lets you stay there.

You keep stroking. The long pull upward gathers him tight; the descent twists with your wrist turning around the length as though you mean to wring every drop out of him by patience. He slickens in your palm so much that the next pass makes a lurid sound beneath his stomach.

And then, you're climbing up again. Same route, same feral mouth. What changes is one hand seizing his arse cheek and dragging it aside. His flesh stretches, air touches the wet place you have licked, followed at once by the hotness of breath. Duncan braces.

"Oh—" he gasps. Small enough to belong to someone three times lesser than him.

Your tongue presses on his hole. It holds firm around the blunt point. You push, ease, push again. Each small pressure sends a queer fullness into him, at first sharp, then warming, then deeper than the place itself has any right to reach. There's another hum, low and pleased, as if he were delectable. The sound enters ahead of your tongue and rolls through his belly. Goes swelling inside Duncan's chest and spreads through him with the loose, splendid confusion akin to the sweetest wine. His elbows soften, and face sinks deeper into the sheets until cloth cradles his mouth and cheek. The hips remain raised, bent over just as you have asked of them, with his back kinked and arse offered squarely to you.

The muscle yields little by little, when at last your tongue slips inside.

"Oh—oh gods—"

The breach feels small and enormous together. A wet nudge coaxing through where he's tightest, then curling past it, licking the tender inside of him in short little brushes. His cock leaps in your fist. You work him through it, pulling him away from his stomach, twisting round the crown, and dragging back down.

"Fuck—girl—" Duncan grits.

His arse closes round you, trying to hold what has entered, and the clench makes you more vicious on his girth. He shakes between both grips, while you invite yourself farther and farther. He's being opened gently, and when you retreat, he pulses around the emptiness.

Had he known the world kept a girl who would do this to him, he would have boxed his own ears bloody for every mile spent doubting you. If he had known a mouth could make shame feel cherished, he would have begged you sooner. You let him keep his body through the split, too—he's being tongue-fucked in his hole, hand-fucked on his cock, spread wide like a common whore and he feels most man he's ever felt.

All of this yielding makes him sob. Everywhere has gone wet. Sweat runs from his hair down his temples. Spit shines at the corner of his mouth. His cock weeps clear all over your fingers. Behind him, you mouth keeps him slick and gaping, until it feels as though every secret place in him has begun to cry. And Duncan doesn't know he's simply coming, because this rapture is unlike any he has delivered himself by the strain of calloused fist in the dark.

It begins in his throat, of all places. A hot thickness pours down him as if some healer has tipped a cup of balm straight into his open mouth. It slips behind the breastbone, coats the ribs, fills his belly, and when it reaches the root of his cock every muscle in Duncan bears down at once. His sack pulls tight. Then it gives.

The first pulse knocks a shout from him. The next sends his seed over your fist, thick and hot, and every closing of your fingers drags another measure after it. It coats your palm, slips between your knuckles, runs down the underside of him and onto his thighs. Duncan feels every spill leave its own path. Feels himself emptied in great, blunt throbs while your tongue keeps the most tender part of him beloved.

“Sweetheart—my good girl—oh gods—” His voice breaks louder than the room can take. “Keep—please, keep—”

He has lost the strength for quieter remorse. Cries leave him rawer, farther gone. Your hand eases him through another hard pulse, then another, until the pleasure seems to exceed the body meant to contain it. By the end of it he's so completely besotted with you, some kinder world reaches through the walls and takes him whole. For several breaths Duncan belongs there instead: soft, milked empty, held steadfast by you, with every foolish doubt burnt clean out of him.

His body steams itself spent. The locked places loosen one by one. Shoulders sag. Thighs shake themselves weak. His hips drop heavily onto the mattress, and the wet he has spilled presses warm between skin and bedding. “Oh gods,” he mumbles. “Oh gods. Girl—”

He never feels your hand leave him. He scarcely understands that you have moved until your weight comes travelling up the length of his back and settles there, a small warm ballast pressing him deeper into the bed. Your chin finds the crook of his shoulder. Breath touches the sweat-damp skin beside his ear. “You’re the most beautiful thing,” you whisper.

By the Seven, he is. To have such mass felled by your doings, to be let in and trusted so openly fills you with such bliss you could kiss him bloody for it. You nose at his cheek. You're ready to rest like this, pillowed by his body, when Duncan moves. He turns slowly until you slide off him. Keeps turning so that he can face you. You cannot look into his glassy eyes for long, because he closes them and claims your mouth. It seems he means to kiss you bloody too, because his teeth work at your lower lip and tongue with eagerness that is new. He must be able to taste himself on you, surely. He acts as though this is the exciting part.

Then, he stops with his nose pressed next to yours. "What is with you, girl?" he asks.

"Very little," you tell him. "Did you like it?"

He huffs a strangled laugh. "Aye." Looks at you long and slightly unsure. "Will ye—" he starts. Swallows. "Will ye let me do the same to ye? I want to—"

"Yes." There's relief in it. Not only he let you. Not only he did not flinch from your oddity. He means to match you for hunger. "Anything you want," you say.

“Anything?” Duncan asks. “Now?”

You stare at him.

He nods, shy only in the eyes, and takes your mouth again. One hand closes round your breast through the shift, vast enough to fill itself with you. His thumb catches your nipple, fumbles past it, then returns with sudden purpose. The other grips your hip and drags you flush against the heat of him. “What has got into you?” you ask, laughing into his mouth.

“So much ails me, my good girl. So much—” He kisses the rest from your lips, then follows your jaw towards the throat. “And yer the only one that can help me.”

You know the state all too well. So you tell him simply: “Undress me.”

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