the water is black with venom @goat-limbs - Tumblr Blog

Jun 8

My Moon, My Man | part two

contents (nsfw): Ser Duncan The Tall x fem!reader, omegaverse AU (Alpha!Dunk x beta!reader). Angst and misunderstandings continue, switching POVs (indicated with dividers), Dunk tries to do good but ends up whipped, very gentle allusions to abuse in Reader's past, explicit consent, rut, touch-starved Dunk, scent kink & scenting, oral, penetrative (unsafe) sex, rough-ish sex but Dunk remains soft, power play, coming inside & knotting, smidge of breeding kink because this is the right country for it, crying after sex, aftercare, slight ownership kink, happy ending.

<- part one + extra

synopsis: After discovering the truth, Duncan is having a terrible time. But he learns that it has to get worse before it gets better.

word count: 17,4K (I'm... sorry)

a/n: Dividers by @honeyluvsw! Had to shave the banner because I think tundl machine learning saw something naked in it :v Fearing for my dear life posting this.

You wake into a changed world. He is there, grim and strange. Something in him has gone shut. From his face alone you can tell whatever’s happened, it’s terribly wrong.

In your sleep you’ve heard mutters. Him, speaking under his breath, the low foolish murmur he keeps for beasts. You’ve wondered often whether he talks to every living creature because that is simply his way, or because you will not give him words and he must spend his somewhere. You’ve heard him soft-spoken before, just never towards you. When you wake, it’s with strange hope. You reach for that softness like an idiot and it shatters as soon as you see him. Confirmation comes next as your loose chest and your bare legs.

To you, it’s written plainly. Now he knows, so he ought to deliver you to where you came from. A knight with the truth in hand. A woman on the road in borrowed shape. There is only one end to that tale and it points backwards. Home. Fathers. Bargains. Hands closing. Doors shutting. The fear of it breeds such fury you need no mirror to show you how ugly you’re turning. Good. Better fury than tears. Better to bare your teeth at him than let him see you beg.

If he had only been stern, you could have endured it. Nobody welcomes being made into a fool. If he had only been kind, you might have cried—you haven’t even noticed your foot blackening. It’s the self-righteousness in him that sends your words into slurs and your body into an upright stance. I had every right, he says and it turns him, in your frightened mind, from careful travelling companion into every man who has ever assumed authority over your body.

And you know damn well that without him you’d most likely have become eternally cold and your teeth would never rattle again. But gratitude cannot get a foothold because shame and fear are louder. He has seen. He is angry. He speaks as if he may decide what is done to you.

The second layer is the anger itself. To you, it comes from the entitlement of someone who’s never had to despair over taking up space in the world. It prompts you to spit every nasty thing your head supplies, because all else was swallowed for weeks. It’s gone now. Every time you’ve held back from telling him he’s pretty and saved it for the never, you’ve been sure the never wouldn’t come. Well, it has arrived and you have nothing left. Things you wouldn’t have assigned to him a day ago sound alien in your voice. You hate the sickly rasp in it. You hate having to fight him nearly naked. You hate that he looks at you with concern because it makes you feel small. You yell so you don’t cry, because crying would be death to your cause. You mock him, because that’s the only blade you’ve got. You haul mud at him, because you have no blade.

You see, for the first time, what this man is like stripped of sweetness, and it is all your doing. You hate too that it captivates you. As though anger shrinks him to something more touchable. Shows you there is wildness in him, something for you to tame.

Before this he had been timid. Respectful. Now, the anger helps him find the petty human edge, and you like it. It’s exciting, that spark. That one you hate as well, because falling in love means falling.

When his arms reach for you, you curl your hands into fists so you will not grab him by the neck and kiss him. When he catches your shoulders, you brace because otherwise you will grab him by the neck and kiss him. When he comes through the last of it and lays hands on you proper, you strike because otherwise you will grab him by the neck and kiss him. His strength is infuriating. It goes on and on. Shows you with humiliating clarity where you would be in a true fight with someone his size: nowhere at all but where he put you.

Then he closes around you in earnest and panic gets mixed through the want till you cannot sort one from the other. You kick because you cannot bear to be held so close and so easily, weak and known through at last. You writhe because his body makes a prison too natural to him. You hiss and spit and stamp because there is nothing to reach for and no decent pride left to you. His whole body thrums against yours.

You want free of his hands. You want to wound him. You want him.

So you kiss him, and—oh, Gods.

He changes under your mouth. The force of him stays the same; the anger goes molten. Want takes its place so fast the words fuck me rise near to the back of your teeth. He tastes of it. Smells of it. Holds you so hard the strength of him bleeds between you, and he is kissing you back before your own madness has time to cool. His mouth is hot and eager and clumsy in a way that goes through you like pity’s crueler cousin. You think, wildly, whether anyone has ever touched him with tenderness enough to teach him better. Whether he would know what to do with gentleness if it were offered. Whether he would like your fingers in his hair. Whether he would cling. Whether he would mutter against your skin. Whether he would spend in you. Whether he would want holding after.

Then, his palm spreads between your shoulder blades and your legs almost answer, wanting to climb him, but despair gets there first. You bite him because you do not know how to stop yourself without stopping him. You bite him because if he keeps kissing you like that you will forgive him everything. You bite him because you do not know how to live inside this much affection with nowhere safe to put it.

Next thing you know, you land on your arse hard enough to knock the breath up short in your chest. With each slow blink he is farther away. Walking, hunched and steadfast, toward the stream. “Dunk,” you whisper, but your throat has tightened too much for it to come out proper. Then your eyes sting. You hide them in his dirty bedroll and it almost undoes you. The smell of his sweat makes you cry harder, makes you think this is the last of him you will have. It hides your face well enough, but sharpens the knowing too: you have just ruined the one good thing that has happened to you.

Tears run out of you till your body feels dried of them. Once, between sobs, you could swear you hear a scream, but the trees swallow it whole. The fire threatens to die down, so you feed it a log too large for it and think for a moment you have killed it, till it kindles back up again. Mouth stinging and eyes swollen, you beat the dust from Dunk’s bedroll and lay it closer to yours than he would ever place it himself.

When he comes back it is dusk. You watch the sky bruise purple and wither to the grey-blue that says the sun has gone to the hells, and it makes the flame burn orange as fresh-cut fruit.

He stomps. Drags himself uphill. The shape of him stays in shadow till the fire finds him and paints him warm again. He looks worn out, tired to the bone, and like a man done in by female whims, he does not spare you so much as a glance. That is new. The anger from before you could have met blow for blow. This quieter thing, this care with which he keeps himself from looking at you at all, hurts worse. It makes you feel the damage in full. He drops to his place and turns his back on you, shut and cautious as a door barred for the night.

“Dunk,” you say. Try to—the first one comes out mute. “Dunk,” you say again, louder this time, all phlegmy rasp, and still he does not stir. “Ser Duncan.”

“Hush,” he says. “Sleep now.”

“But—”

“There’s naught to mend,” he says, while all you can see are the broken bits requiring mending exactly. “Sleep the rest of the fever off. Tomorrow we get back on the road.”

Sleep, he says. You do, brittle with it. Lie on your back and stare up into a sky pricked through with endless white points, with that faint pink glittering spill dragged across it. Beside you Duncan rasps heavily. Hums. Tosses and turns. When you glance over to see whether he is awake after all, his eyes are squeezed shut so hard the lids nearly swallow the whole length of his lashes. He looks in pain. Your palm itches to rest on his forehead and see whether your fever has passed into him through the mouths.

Dawn finds you as it always does: cold first, then angry with yourself for whatever small comfort you denied yourself the night before. You curse under your breath for not dressing back into all your layers. The air bites. Your fingers ache. Still you wake before him, as usual, and turn to look.

He is not soft in sleep this time. His face is all drawn tight with strain. The bedroll has bunched itself round him in a hard knot, and under the collar of his shirt a dark patch of sweat has spread. His hair sticks damply to his forehead. Again you want to touch him. Again you do not.

“Dunk?” you say. “Are you all right?”

He drags in a breath. “Mm. Jus’—” One hand comes up to wipe across his face. “Too warm.”

For one half-moment he sounds almost like himself, still caught on the lip of waking. Then you watch his mind catch up. It happens plain. The softness leaves. Whatever had slackened in him goes back under lock. By the time he opens his eyes proper, the distance is there again.

“Pack,” he says. “We’ll eat on the road.”

You sit up on one elbow. “Will you speak of yesterday?”

His mouth pulls into absence of expression. “Preferred it when you weren’t so set on speaking.”

It hurts. You let it hurt. Some part of you thinks it is no more than you earned.

You dress back into every piece of yourself and find the old shape sits wrong now. Shirt, binding, leather, gloves, neck-cloth. Each thing goes on like a lie you have already been caught in. You pack in silence, lash your things to the horse, and trot after him when he sets off.

He hardly stops the whole day. Once to water the horses. Once to piss. That is all. Whenever you try to speak, he picks up the pace and rides a little farther off, as though distance might do the work of deafness. You keep your jaw clenched round all the things that do not get said. You are certain there are people in this world you have hurt worse than Duncan, but none of them has taken to hating you half so briskly as him.

By evening he makes camp well away from you. Rolls his bed out at a remove that feels intentful even before you begin measuring it. He starts the fire, spits the rabbit, sets it over the flames, then walks off without a word. When he comes back he looks worn through again, some inward part of him scraped raw. He eats barely two bites, tips the wineskin high for longer than thirst calls for, burps with ugly force, and drops to his chosen place as if the ground has yanked him there. He says nothing. Before long he is snoring.

You lie awake listening to it and wondering what has wrung him out so thoroughly that half a skinsack of wine is enough to fell a man this large.

The next day repeats. He rides, you follow. The gap between you feels ceremonial. It could be disgust, could be resolve. Given the choice between the two, you would rather not name either. The whole of you has drawn so tight it feels there is nothing left to lose. At last you shout after him. He stops. You tell him the stream you’ve been following runs close again, that you need to wash some things, and surely you may stop a while. He looks at you long and cold, then nods and turns toward where the water hums.

When you are knee-deep in it, armour off, only linen left on, Duncan says, “We’ll need to find you somewhere safe.”

You look up. “What?”

“I’ve business to see to.” He does not look at you when he says it. “I’ll ride off a few days.” A beat. “After that,” he says, still working at whatever is in his hands, “we’ll speak. Of parting.”

Your hands stop moving. You look down at your foot, gone the sickly yellow of spoiled yolk. So he can no longer bear your company. You keep staring at your toes, warped in the water, praying your eyes will not worsen it. A tear forces out anyway.

Dunk’s at his wit’s end. At his strength’s end. At his body’s final gasp.

That kiss took him and shook him and wrung him through muscle and bone and other parts Dunk has no names for. When he heads for the stream his shoulders ache with the effort of pushing you off, and his cock is so hard he can barely call what he is doing walking. He gets no farther than the bank before tearing his boots off and stepping into the cold water clothed as he is. Then he lets himself drift in it, flat on his back like a corpse the current has not claimed yet, and screams at the sky. The rest of the day he spends drying in the sun, so when he comes back soaked through and sour with himself you do not ask why.

That afternoon Duncan has no notion how much more strength will be required of him to withstand your clumsy attempts at mending matters. In his head there is naught to mend. He desires no mending. Mending would mean speech, and speech would mean laying the wretched part of his nature out before you proper and waiting to see whether you flee of your own accord or finish the bloody work you started at his bottom lip.

Because that kiss has done more damage than any honest blow could. It found him where he is weakest. A mean little thing, angry and full of teeth, and still his body took it for mercy. He loathes himself for that worst of all. For the way he answered. For how quickly he turned. For being so starved of touch and so lonely in the marrow that one ugly bite of a kiss leaves him sweating through his bedroll till the ground beneath goes dark and ripe with it.

So he is scant with you after. Stern. When the spoiled blood rises in him at the first whiff of your scent, he cuts off the beginnings of your blabber by riding farther off. Just to breathe air that does not remind him what it was to have his mouth on yours and your body fighting his.

By the second day he knows there is no stopping what has already begun. Water mutes smell, so when you ask to stop by the stream he agrees to the whim of it. There he tells you he must go. For one short moment he thinks he might simply keep riding and not come back at all. Then the knight in him speaks where the rest has gone ragged. He hears himself promise the matter will be settled cleanly, cold if it must be, and in a way that leaves his honour standing.

You go strangely still with the shirt clutched in your hands. Duncan keeps his own at the water a moment longer than need calls for, wringing and rinsing and wringing again, though his eyes have gone sideways. You are looking down into the stream as if it has said something to you and you mean to hear the end of it.

His mouth asks before sense can stop it. His heart asks too. His head calls him ten kinds of fool. “What did you mean,” he says, “by ‘I’ve too much left to tell you’?”

You sniff once. It sounds as though the question has pulled you up sharp from someplace worse. “Guess you’ll never know now.”

Frown finds him at once. Rightly enough—how much more stupid can a man grow in two days’ time. “Beg pardon,” he says, bitterness making him stiff all through, “I’ll seek forgiveness forever for saving your life, m’lady.”

Your mouth pulls hard, as if he has gone and jabbed a bruise on purpose. “Do not call me that,” you say. “Not when you mean it like this.”

Duncan straightens a little in the stream, water dragging off the cloth in his hands. “What should I call you then? Boy? The name you gave me? What is your real name besides?”

You stare at him. Long enough to make him think you mean to keep that too. Then, at last, you tell him. The name sits in the air between the two of you, small and real and too pretty for the road.

“It’s pretty,” he says dimly, souring himself. He looks back down to the shirt in his hands as if the water might take the foolishness out of his mouth for him.

You move first this time. “Why are you going?”

Because I cannot trust myself around you. He scrubs harder at the cloth. “I’ve told you.”

“I didn’t take you for someone to hold an eternal grudge.”

“It is you who won’t stop reminding me of the crime committed,” he says. “You can go about fooling another bastard then.”

“Gods, just—” Your hands drop. Then pick the shirt back up. You go at it with a vicious little scrub, jaw set, breath sharp through your nose. Duncan watches, waiting for the rest of the sentence as if waiting might wring it out of you. It does not come.

So he stands. Water runs off him in sheets. He throws the rinsed cloth onto the heap on the bank and, with the meanness of a boy-man already too far gone to be proud of it, drags his foot hard through the stream and sends a fan of water at you.

You go still as if burned. Then your face changes. “Oh, you are getting on my nerves,” you grunt, and fling water back at him with both hands.

It catches him across the chest and jaw. Cold. Petty. Deserved.

He answers. So do you. In two breaths’ time the stream has become a poor ugly battlefield, all slaps of water and stumbling feet and shirts forgotten in the shallows. There is no play in it. No flirtation. Only temper. You are quicker than he is and meaner with your aim. One splash gets him square in the eyes.

“Ah—Seven hells—” he grunts. Lunges blindly where you were a blink before and finds you by luck, by sound, by scent, by the little cry you let out when his hands close at last. You buck against him with slippery fury and sharp elbows.

“That’s not fair!”

“Cease this writhing,” he grunts, blinking stream-water out of his eyes. “You’re worse than ten cats to hold.”

Your palm shoves at his face. Wet and furious and small. “I did not plan this to hurt you!” you snap. “I’d no idea if you were decent at first.”

It stops him cleaner than a kick would have. For one beat the stream keeps moving round his legs and neither of you does anything at all. A second later he hears you screaming.

“Why are you leaving me?”

Duncan looks down. You are bound tight to him. One arm round your waist. One hand at your neck. Your heart is going wild under all that wet cloth and bone, beating hard enough that he can near feel the shape of it through his own forearm. There is water on your face and more than water in your eyes.

He loosens his hand. Not enough to lose you. Enough to know the difference. “Because—”

The breath he takes to finish his sentence gets drowned in the sound of a thunder. The growl of it rolls close over the hills. Both your heads turn by the same instinct. The light has changed without either of you marking when. Everything round the stream has gone dimmer, flatter, with that waiting look the world gets just before a storm breaks proper.

Duncan swears under his breath. “We need shelter,” he says. You keep staring up at him as if the rest of the answer is still owed. “It’s near evening,” he says, more roughly. “And you’ll not spend another night in rain if I can help it.” He lets you go then, fully. The place where your body was in his arms stays hot.

“There’s no inn for miles,” you say.

“Aye.” Another peal of thunder. Nearer.

He wades for the bank and snatches up the wet heap of clothes. “Then we’ll find a roof that isn’t an inn.” There’s no need in looking back to see if you follow. He can hear you doing it. That has to be enough.

After that he rides hard and with his eyes peeled for anything the shape of shelter. The rain begins in earnest before long. First a scatter, then a sheet. It drives at his face and soaks the horses dark. Thunder keeps pacing them from one side of the sky to the other. Duncan leans low over Sweetfoot’s neck and keeps searching.

Then you go past him. Quick on that little horse of yours, shirt plastered to your back, head bent to the weather. For one miserable instant his heart drops. He thinks you have had enough of him at last and picked this very moment to flee where he cannot very well chase and hold you to account through storm and failing light.

Until he sees where you are headed. A low black shape hunched beyond a field gone to muck. Half a house beside it, walls standing where the roof has not. And farther off, a barn, dark and sound enough at first glance to keep rain off flesh and horseflesh both.

By the time he reaches you, you are already in the yard, sliding from the saddle. No word for him, only action. Duncan takes that gladly. You both get the horses into the stalls between. Thunder stamps and tosses. Chestnut keeps shuddering. Sweetfoot blows hard through her nose. Duncan rubs them down as best he can with the edge of his cloak and gets what tack he may off before the storm worsens. Your hands move quick beside his, clumsy only from cold.

When the beasts are settled, he enters the main room of the barn after you. The hay in it has gone wet with humidity and dry with heat so many times it gave its gold to light grey. You push dripping hair from your face and say, “Take the wet things off before you worsen.” And then, as if your own words oblige you equally, you begin doing the same.

Duncan goes rigid. You have got as far as dragging your breeches down over your boots when fury catches him by the back of the neck. He wheels half away from you and grits, “You stay. I ought to go.”

You laugh at him, full mad from strain. “Have you lost your wits entirely? Whatever has you so cold at heart ought to wait through this weather.”

So you know he’s rotting. The look he gives you then would flatten lesser creatures. It only makes you wetter round the mouth with irritation. “It is you who is witless,” he says, “if you mean to keep me here.”

In his turning, he catches you throwing your hands up. “Duncan!”

He has got as far as the door. Rain beats the roof in a thousand hard little fists. The wood is wet, the straw old, there’s mould in the beams and Duncan can smell all of it. Your scent pushes itself through the others and takes him and holds him. Behind, Duncan can hear your fast breathing over nature's hiss. As though you were the largest thing in here, while in fact, you are the smallest. Your boots shift on the packed earth and he knows you’ve taken a step after him.

Before you can reach him, he snaps. “What do you know of this?” His fist beats the damp-rotten planks of the door. “You know naught of it!”

Rainwater drops off the hem of your shirt and he hears it joining the pool of a puddle under your feet. There’s a pause. Cautious, you say, “I don’t. I don’t—but I see you hurting and it rubs me wrong! What is it?”

He puts one hand on the doorpost and bows his head to it a moment. It is cool. His skin is not. Heat has him by the spine, but the gut and the roots of his teeth. He’s close to retching with it. Shirt sticks between his shoulders. Every place the wet has touched him feels coarse with it. He should have gone sooner. Should have left you in some holdfast with a whole roof and a locked door and a woman old enough to cuff sense into you. “An affliction,” he says thickly.

Your waiting he can feel at his back. “What kind?”

“The sort wants me alone.”

“And what is to be done for it?”

He turns fast enough for the barn to be pulled sideways with it for a blink. You stand three paces off with your hair damp at the temples, mouth parted and hands empty and hanging uselessly at your sides. The sight steals his patience outright.

“What is to be done,” he says, “is I leave before it takes hold proper.”

“What takes hold?”

“Must you have every bit said plain?” he scoffs.

“Yes!”

It is a cursed way of yours—to be frightened and stubborn alike. Duncan wonders if this is courage or merely temper, and if it is temper, he thinks that you ought to have it dulled. He grips the heel of his hand into his eye till the vision blanches.

“I’ve the breeding curse,” he tells you, twisting, as if the words taste of something sour. “There. Have you enough?”

You stare at him, all unwitted. The rain keeps drumming. Somewhere in the farters a bird flutters and settles again. He can see you trying to fit the thing into what you know of the world. Some old wives’ tale. A fable, a whispered country warning. A shape of danger that has no name and one that you’ve ostensibly never touched.

“What does that mean?” you ask.

He drags a hand through his hair. “It means I’ve a fever in me that doesn’t break clean. It means I’ll not be fit company. It means I need to be gone from you before I do something I’d sooner cut my hand off than do!”

You let fear live on your face for a span of one breath. It bleeds off to something softer and worse. “What do you need?” you ask and it hits him so low and arduous he nearly bows with it. Nearly hates you for it.

“A mate,” he says. “Which I do not have.”

The stillness of yours makes him swallow and push on because there is hurt in him already and once a hurt starts speaking it wants to finish. “So I ought to be alone before someone like you feels compelled to take pity on me.”

Your brows pull hard together. “Pity?”

He sees the offence in you and knows he should stop there. Instead the sore place in him opens wider.

“Aye, pity. I’ve had it before.” His mouth grimaces terribly. “And disgust after. There’s always one or the other with men like me. A woman may be sorry enough to help the first of it. Then the rest comes and she learns better.”

You take a small step and move your arms. They’re rising towards him. “I’ve no pity for you—”

He answers by wrenching his neck forth. “I’d rather go fuck myself sore in a ditch,” he spits, “than stay and suffer someone who hates me forcing herself to kindness.”

Hurt clouds your face and you flinch as if he has struck you. Good, some foul little part of him thinks. Better this way.

Then you say, very fast and very raw, “I do not hate you.”

Dunk turns his back before he has to look at you again and see whether that is mercy too. “Best leave it.”

“I do not.” A step. One, then another. Straw whispers under your boots.

His eyes squeeze shut. “Do not come near me.”

Insolent as ever, you keep coming. Flippant. Brazen. Disrespectful, he’s busy thinking when your hand touches his shoulder. Light; barely there. He jerks under it as if the place has burned through cloth. He has been touched by women harder than that, bolder than that, with clearer purpose than that. None of it has crumbled him the way this does.

“Ser Duncan,” you say. “Duncan.”

It sobers him from the ire. He blinks, and finds his manners back amongst all the dust. “Beg pardon,” he mutters. “I ought to—I ought to go.”

Your fingers tighten in his shirt. Small grip. Desperate one. “Dunk.”

It near buckles his stomach, the name said like that. Without mockery and a single fever-mad scrap of possession, you say it as if it belongs somewhere softer than either of you has let it belong.

“It is not pity,” you murmur. “It is not.”

He laughs once, breaking halfway out. “You loathe me one hour and offer me your body the next. What should I call that?”

You move him round, slow enough to let him stop you if he means to, but he does not mean to. He only stands and sways where he is, hands opening and closing at his sides like a fool’s, until he’s facing you and he learns the hunch has taken him so low you’re almost level. Storm-light from the door catches your face in pieces. Wet lashes. Mouth bitten sore. A smear of dirt near the chin. You look half-wild yourself—not pretty in the way court songs would have it. Better than that. Real and roughened and staring at him with more heart in it than he knows what to do with.

“I’d kiss you too,” you tell him. “Without fists.”

All of the four eyes drop where they oughtn’t—his to your mouth, yours to his fanning lids. You know he’s looked and you know he’d want to, but save him the misery of admitting.

“Here,” you whisper. Take his hand and against your skin it’s hot as iron and twice as clumsy. You put it to your chest where your body’s beating fit to crack itself. “How’s this hatred to you?”

Your collar stretches open under his fingers. Palm large enough to span you sternum to clavicle, he lets himself just feel it a second. The thud of you under—hard and fast and alive and wanting. The cold of your skin strikes him next. He frowns down at it as if the thing were a wound.

“You’re freezing,” he says. Starts rubbing warmth into you before he knows he has chosen to. Over your breastbone, then higher, then both hands on your shoulders, thumbs working. The care unmakes him faster than lust. He bows his face close and breathes against your temple. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Embraces you whole and inhales the scent off your wet hair. Earth sits there, dark soil with potence in it. Summer rains that make the air smell fresh. Zeal that needs to be coaxed out.

He feels you making a sound and wrapping your arms round his waist. “Don’t leave me. I want to help,” you say.

His head lifts. Your face is so close it fills his sight with bits of you again. He counts the clumps of your lashes and watches the pulse in your throat. “What do you know of coupling, girl?” he asks, and the word girl snags in his mouth. “If you’re inviting me, not much, I reckon.”

“Enough to flee home and pretend to be a boy,” you say.

The answer leaves him bitter and tight in the face. He sees more in it than you meant to show, perhaps. Or exactly what you meant. Either way it puts another grief in him.

“How is this not pity, then?”

Your hand comes up slow. You touch his cheek with the backs of your fingers first, as if gentleness is a creature likely to startle. Dunk goes still under it. There is too much of him for stillness to look natural, so he bears it looking like effort instead. Great effort.

Then, you rise a little on your toes and put the smallest kiss on his mouth. It is nothing like the first one—rid of teeth and spite. A careful press, as if you are laying something brittle between you and asking him not to waste it. His throat brews a pitiful sound for him, and Duncan means to make himself start gently. What he doesn’t want is to frighten you back out of your own bravery. Your mouth is cool from the rain and from being cold clear through so he makes sure to eat the cold for you. His hands stay at your shoulders, thumbs still when you’re shivering under them. He feels the way your breath jumps when he tips his head and comes at you again with a little more conviction.

By inches, he deepens. Heat has had him mean and restless all two days, clawing through his skin for a way out, but this part comes almost sweet despite it. Awkward too. Duncan has kissed before, but he has never kissed with this much tender mind to it. The wanting is all snarled up with the need not to scare you, not to break the strange bright thing that has appeared between one heartbeat and the next.

A hand slides from his cheek into his hair and Duncan shudders so hard the soles of his feet tingle. Your fingers tighten and tug and he hears himself whimpering.

“Ah—” He breaks on it. A sound small and shameful enough to make a lesser man pull away from it. He only comes closer. “You want me, then?”

You nod. Yank him. His chest comes to eclipse you. In his sullen mind he sees your thighs split open already, your arse warmed with the force of his hips, your mouth twisted in pain and eyes wounded, so he reigns himself back to here, where none of it has happened yet. He finds the back of your neck with his palm and holds there as if he can keep your head safe in it whilst he kisses you senseless.

The noise from you turns his blood over. “Gods.” His breath saws. “Gods help me,” Duncan mutters and goes at it harder.

Carefulness begins to flee. Not out of cruelty, but relief and long hunger. He has spent too much of himself holding back from the whole of life. The taste of being let in goes into his head like a hammer to a nail, and he finds himself in a dire need to touch more of you. His hand slides down your side, and he’s surprised by the difference between seeing the shape and feeling it. His devotion keeps giving way to greed: your waist first, then higher. Then lower again because he does not know where he is permitted and is trying to know without asking and failing badly at it.

Your fingers tighten in his hair. “Duncan,” you mutter.

He stops at the width of a whisper from your lips. The air he exhales runs over your face and comes back to him. His eyes shut, when he says, “Tell me.” Hoarse. “You ought to tell me.”

It takes you a moment to gather enough breath for speech, which apparently he’s kissed foolish out of you. The knowledge of that puts an odd little pride in his chest before shame follows after and stomps it flat.

“Yes,” you say.

“Yes what?”

“Yes, touch me.”

He rests his heavy forehead to yours and laughs, deranged. “You say such things to me now,” he hums, “and expect me to keep sense.”

His hand goes to your ribs and spans them near entirely. He rubs his thumb there over the shirt as if the bones under it concern him. Then, he gets back to kissing. The corner of your mouth. Your cheek. The line beneath your ear. Each place slower and more saturated with your scent than the one before, while the rest of him has gone taut as a drawn rope. Restrain frays him, shakes through him.

He feels your palms at the laces near his throat and shudders again. “Girl,” Duncan warns.

You look at him, straight on. Rain-light and dusk and straw-dust have made your face into something soft enough to kneel for.

“Tell me if I’m wrong,” you say.

He swallows and lets his jaw work under your eye. “You’ll not be wrong,” Duncan says. “Only mayhaps sorry.”

But sorry you are not yet. The first knot pulls loose and he makes himself blind again. The second one goes easier. The cloth parts under your fingers and his throat opens to sight, then the notch below it where he’s damp with sweat. You touch there with one finger only, curious and light. He flinches as if struck.

“No one’s touched you kindly,” you say as if it’s a thought that was not supposed to be spoken at all.

His eyes open at that, feeling naked by half already. He sees a shadow walk your features and it tells him you’ve been touched kindly seldom yourself. “Some have tried,” Duncan says. That is all.

You do not press him and he doesn’t press you either. You only lay your palm flat over the hard beat in his chest, and kiss him again. He gives way with a sound that seems dragged up from much deeper than the throat. His arms close around you in earnest—one at your back, the other under your arse before he thinks better of it. He lifts you with absurd ease and sets you on an old hay-strewn ledge. It puts your face level with his. Puts the breadth of him right between your knees.

Sorry you will be, he thinks. Draws back a breath. “I ought to tell you,” he says, forcing the words through a mouth gone clumsy. “Before anything more. I’ve a—” He grimaces. Starts again. “When it takes me foul, I swell after. Too much. You understand?”

Your brows pinch. He can see you trying to make proper sense of it, and his face heats darker. “At the… root,” he mutters, furious with himself for having to say it. “Like a knot in a rope. It can hurt if you’re not ready for it. Hurt a good deal.”

You stare at him another beat, then nod once. “All right.”

Your patience is a blade drawn hot from the forge to him. He puts a hand on the wood beside your hip. The other cannot stop touching you. It has taken to your knee as if it belongs there. Broad, kneading palm, soaking the cold in you and trying to work it out. “You ought to send me off,” Duncan says, and drops to his knees between your legs. The boards shudder under the weight of him.

From there, his eyes travel over your face and now he’s certain it is worth kneeling for. He’s humbled by it and he’s asking and promising at the same time and does not know how to do either without his whole body getting involved.

“Still time,” he says.

“For what?”

“For you to think better.”

His knuckles pale where they hold your knee. Your eyes sweep him, thorough, and he realises you’re humouring him. “I have thought better,” you say then. “This is it.”

It catches him somewhere he’s sure is visible. His head bows a moment, while the want in him goes darker and fuller. Alongside it there’s care and Duncan chooses it. To not rush you or crowd you. To stay where he is till you are the one who moves first, and he hopes you can see it in him.

Then, your fingers find his cheek and he turns his face to the touch at once. A little. Involuntary enough to get hurt with your tenderness.

“Oh,” you say, thumb on his chin.

His mouth twists. “Do not make a marvel of me.”

“You are one.”

The answer lands in his throat and fails to make it farther. He kisses the inside of your knee instead, because his mouth must go somewhere. A kiss awkward and too warm, and open by half, and so earnest your legs quake some. Then another, higher. Then one on the other side, because fairness lives in him alongside the instinct to break pretty things like you.

He finds your boot with the free hand and frowns at it when it won’t come off with just a tug. “All these damned buckles,” he grumbles, then smiles all helpless when you laugh above him. It’s a sweet honest sound, a kind of laughter he hasn’t heard from you yet. So he grumbles some more.

The boots come off with less cursing than before, though not no cursing. The shirt is next, so he stands and fists the hem into fingers stiff with hope, because hope does stranger things to a man’s hands. He lifts it only after looking to your face and finding leave there. Your arms rise. The cloth goes over your head and your skin blooms with gooseflesh at once. Dunk’s eyes do not know where to settle and for once it is not embarrassment in him but too many places wanting to look at once.

“Seven be good to me,” he says, reaching for the binding. He unwinds the cloth and watches how every loosened pass lets another breath into you. By the time the last of it comes away you are both breathing harder. Duncan sets it down beside him as if it might bruise from rough handling. And then, he just looks.

He wonders, dimly, if a creature like you knows anything of shame at all because to him, it shouldn’t. Then, he notices the smallest twitch at your arms, like you’re fighting the urge to cover yourself and finally decide to live through it. He’s puzzled as to whether it is your choice entirely or if his face has changed so strangely you let him have it.

“Have you done this before?” you ask, breaking the silence.

His mouth goes crooked. “Mm.”

There’s a childish frown to your brow. Duncan would think it jealousy if his wits were gone entirely. Two urges fight in him—one to tell you each of them made him regret he’s alive, the other to say nothing at all and watch you simmer with it a little.

“With many?” you ask.

He blinks. Takes immense joy from the tightness in your face when he rules to make a show of thinking on it. “No,” he says finally.

You huff an adorable puff of air through your nose. “How many, then?”

He goes back down. Looks up to you and rubs the back of his neck. “Enough to know I ought not be on my knees talking when there’s this before me.”

That ought to satisfy you. It does not.

“Were they kind?”

The question leaves your mouth and hangs there naked with the rest of you. Duncan stills. His hand, halfway to your thigh, closes empty.

“Some,” he says after a while. “Some not.”

You look down. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“That they were not.”

It alters him whole. The shape of your words, the tone of your voice, the look on your face. Still no pity in it, but kinship so total Duncan near presses his face into your belly and begs you to let him put a baby in you so you’re his and with him for the rest of his miserable days. His hunger somehow gentles at the edges. Instead of disgracing himself like this, his hand lifts that dumb broken foot of yours and brings it to his mouth. “I am here now,” he says against your skin.

The barn goes quieter after that. You put your hand in his hair again. He exhales through his nose, lets your foot free, and opens his mouth against you in a way that seems to make your back arch before you’ve decided on it. His hands follow the movement, one spanning your waist, the other settling warm in the hinge of your thigh at the ready.

He kisses lower by inches, inept and long-suffering as he ought to be. Learns this foreign country by touch and mouth, from your navel to the hollow beside your hip. It makes him pause and look up as if he has found something improbable there.

“Do not stop,” you whisper, guiding his head where he’s most scared to go.

A hot line is drawn with his tongue. Your knees fall wider and he grunts a sound into you that makes him think lowly of himself. He tries to go slow where it matters and rough nowhere, though the wanting in him has reached such a pitch his hands tremor in the fingers. You’re wetting for him. Get warmer still. You’re warm for the first time he remembers and it’s all his doing and he makes certain every inch of him keeps asking and that is the shape he takes.

“Here?” he asks, fingers brushing but not yet parting.

“Yes.”

His head drops. Forehead rests against the inside of your thigh for one heartbeat, while he braces to go under. Then, his mouth and hands learn you at once.

The taste of you he assigns to what kindness tastes like. He knows he’s artless and lacks polish, but he uses his body’s hunger and its steadfast build. Kisses you as if cunt were mouth, because the mouth he kissed with love and here love is owed more than anything else.

The only mean thing is your hands. They’ve nails to them that pinch his shoulder and scratch his scalp when his fingers stretch you. The pain of it rests sweet in him and goes down his stomach until his cock stirs and kicks under braies. When you gasp and try to close your legs he only holds you open with a murmur so rough it barely counts as language.

“That’s it,” Duncan slurs. “Aye. Give it ’ere.”

He lifts one palm off you to find your breast, as if he cannot bear leaving any part of you untouched. His thumb passes over the nipple and your whole body jerks. Duncan groans like he has been wounded.

“Sweet girl,” he says, astonished.

Astonished he remains, when you show him what a body like yours can do. How it seeks and guides him, how you know where pleasure lives and present the route to him. Steady him with a tug to his roots and take from him. Half of your weight rests on his face, and your hips move and you take his fingers deeper, and his nose and chin are smeared with you all over. He stays where you tell him to and feels the end come on you hard with your hand turning cruel in his hair, and the knowledge he’ll be cruel to you soon enough if this is how tight you can get.

You push him off when he goes too far with wanting to be good. He slides his hand out of you and rests it idly on his thigh, denying himself another taste of you. Down there, he can see the cloth round his legs dampened in the crotch and the outline of his cock throbbing in the rhythm of your breathing.

Your palm coaxes him to look up. He wipes his mouth with the back of his wrist and is ashamed of the gesture at once. You laugh weakly, and tell him, “Come here. Come back up.”

Before he’s fully straightened, you catch his face and kiss him. Lick yourself out of him. The wood creaks. His hands do not know how to settle, so you help him by putting one on your waist, and one on your breast. He nearly stops breathing.

“Tell me,” you say, rubbing his cheeks. “What hurts. What helps.”

Duncan closes his eyes. “All of it hurts,” he says. Hides in your shoulder for a beat. “You help.”

Saying it costs him dear, but he cares not. You see him, all this broken mountain of a man, and want him all the same. And being wanted eases him greatly. Not gaped at, or treated like a curious little rabid dog to tame and play with, but wanted. He feels almost loved with you around him like that, and he’s never even touched the almost with the others.

“All of it?” you ask.

He nods once. Opens his eyes. His hand leaves your waist and presses flat to his own chest, then lower, as if the body there is some beast he means to hold in place by force of palm alone.

“It starts under the skin,” he says. “Then in the blood. Then there is no place left in me that sits easy.” His mouth twitches, ugly and ashamed. “And now I’ve gone and had my mouth on you besides. That has not helped.”

You almost smile. Almost. The strain in him seems to cure you of it. “Tell me what to do.”

“You say that as if there is some decent order to these things,” he laughs, feeling his ears burn. His gaze drops to your body and catches there, held. “I told you what comes after. The hurt of it.”

“I remember.”

“You remember the words. That is not the same.” His jaw works. “If I take you, I’ll be rougher than I mean. Even doing my best. And my best is not always clever.”

You reach for the hand he has braced against his own middle and pull it away. He comes unwillingly, like a horse checked on the bit. When his palm lands on your thigh again the heat of it makes you jump.

“I would rather have your best,” you say, “than somebody else’s clever.”

That catches him wrong-footed. Duncan lets his face open with it in a way that’s almost boyish if there were not such strain all through him. Then he bows over you sudden and heavy, unable to stay upright with that much feeling in him. “Seven hells, girl,” he says into the hollow of your neck. “Do not say things to me I’ll remember all my life.”

You put your arms round him as if there’s nothing else to do. He has his size settling over you piece by piece. Shoulders first. Then chest. Then the careful weight of his hips held off by effort. He shudders once when your hands move over his back.

“Dunk,” you hum.

“Mm.”

“Take it off.”

He stills. “My shirt?” he asks after a beat and melts when you chuckle.

“All of it, if you like.”

It turns out he can afford one more strangled, brief laugh. He pushes himself off you and gets at his laces with hands gone youthful in their artlessness. When he fumbles, you help. The shirt opens, parts from skin. Then he drags it over his head and throws it somewhere blind.

Your hands fly to his chest at once. Fingernails brush through the coarse hair on it, then move lower where his belly is soft enough to move when he breathes. You touch lightly but he feels it as if you were touching the deeper make of him. He sucks in a sharp breath. “No one’s taught you manners at all,” he mutters.

“You’ve just had your mouth between my legs.”

“Aye.” His hand closes on your wrist and keeps it where it is, spread flat over him. “And still I say it.”

You bring the palm lower. He catches it before you get far. “Easy,” he says. “Easy, or I’ll spend before I’ve got into you and die of shame.”

The coarseness of it makes heat flash through your features afresh. He sees it happen and goes dark with glee for one bare second before the guilt comes back overtop. Strange how often those two things live so close in him.

He undoes the rope-for-belt one-handed. Kicks free of the rest with less grace than speed. By the time he stands before you naked he feels as though there is no room left in the barn for anything but you and him. His cock drags hot and heavy and furious with neglect over his thigh and when your breath hitches at the sight, Duncan backs out into slightly crestfallen. “There,” he says, gaze down, fixed on a speckle of dust. “That’s what I meant.”

When he looks back up it is too late. Your eyes have gone already, taking in the thick weight of him, the flushed strain in it, the root he’s warned you of swelling. He turns his face aside as if he expects revulsion on viewing alone. Instead, you reach and his whole body flinches.

“Do you mean it?” he asks.

“I mean it.”

So he lets you put your hand around him. Careful, because you are not witless after all. He grunts through his teeth and drops his forehead to your shoulder, every inch of him going tight. “Don’t finish me yet,” he says.

“Would that be so terrible?” you ask, thumb parting him gently at the slit.

“For pride, aye,” Duncan says and smiles anyway. His hips move, helpless as a struck thing, and the drag of him through your palm makes him grunt out an ugly animal sound much like the ones he makes when he’s all alone. “Enough, girl. Enough,” he says. “I am sick with wanting you already.” He comes closer and sets a palm to your face. “You tell me stop and I stop.”

You nod.

“That easy.”

You nod again.

His thumb strokes once under your eye. “Say it with your mouth.”

“Yes,” you whisper.

A shadow of impatience goes through him at the smallness of it. “Yes what?”

“Yes, Duncan.”

He shuts his eyes briefly as if the sound of his name in your mouth is another blow to a body taking too many already. The wanting in him deepens and so does the tenderness. His hands find yours to guide you off the wooden ledge. “Turn round,” says the instinct in him. “Only if you will,” says Duncan. “Only—”

You hop off and turn before he can finish, which wraps a fist round his gut and holds, tight. Your back comes to his chest. He gathers your hair over one shoulder, exposing the nape of your neck. Stares at it some and feels the itching in his gums to clamp hard and mean on it. Then, his mouth finds it with teeth blunted. The first kiss there is almost chaste. The second less so. By the third, he’s breathing into your skin like a man trying to survive on the scent of you.

The shadow that sits on his nature whispers into his ear to bend you over and take you raw. His boyish heart beats its fist against his ribcage and tells him to keep you instead, and wins.

One arm wraps round your middle. The other hand slides over your belly, up between your breasts, then back down again because he cannot seem to settle. Every path he takes teaches him something and inflames him for having learnt it.

You go slack for him. That simple. That willing.

He tightens his hold before he remembers himself. His hips rock against the curve of your backside, helpless as a struck thing. “There you are,” he mutters, half to himself. Lifts you until your toes barely touch the tops of his feet and walks you both deeper into the barn. He sits on a hay bale with your arse pressing his cock and his arse getting scratched by dried grass.

His knees part and spread your thighs with it. You wriggle on him and Duncan can feel every part of you go alert at the head of him pressing your entrance.

“Wait,” he says, hearing the change in your breath. “Easy. Let me set you.”

He gets a palm between your legs, slicks you once more till your body softens again. Your head lolls back with a blissful sigh. “You said you’d be rougher with me,” you murmur.

“Not inside you yet,” Duncan says, lining himself up. Once that’s done, he uses both hands on your hips, broad and steady. You seem to be lost for words then. Tighten around him before he’s barely through the threshold. “That’s it,” he says. “Take what you can. I’ll mind the rest.”

The angle is cruel and he knows it, but remains solemn in it. First press uses up all the wit in his thick brain, and he’s taken over with it. With heat and pressure and the blunt tightness of your body that fights him for its dear life but its owner has enough mercy to tell it otherwise.

You clutch his forearms and whine out, “Dunk—”

Duncan freezes behind you the instant your cunt resists. “I know.” His voice sounds pulled through gravel. “I know. Little by little.”

When you swallow and nod, he tries to give you that. Little by little. The crown of him works in and your body clenches as if to throw him out again. He waits, breathing hard, bracing through it with his eyes blinking slowly.

“That’s it,” he says, cuddling his nose into the back of your neck. “Curse me if you need.”

He’s certain you almost do—can hear your lips shaping around it and choosing not to speak in the end. Instead, you drag air into yourself and he answers with one more. Then a little more, each inch won by patience. His thighs tremble and sweat with the labour of not being a bastard and a beast, fingers bite your hips and ease, bit and ease again. He wants to drive upward into you. Knows that you know it and hopes the fact that he does not you read as unbearable tenderness he carries for you.

“So much,” you whisper.

Duncan’s mouth twitches despite the state of him. “Aye. Sorry,” he says knowing how absurd the apology sounds right now, with half his cock inside you and the rest of him quaking with want. Laughter bursts out of you, bright and weak and disarmed, and loosens something in you. Your body changes round him. Takes him deeper and stranger, and Duncan swears softly into your shoulder.

“There,” he says. “There you are.”

When he is finally seated enough to stop shaking quite so badly, he stays. Breathes with you. Mouth keeps seeking your neck because it’s hard to keep all that strain in his body without somewhere to pour it. One hand leaves your hip to spread over your belly, feeling where he is inside you as if he cannot believe the truth of it any other way.

“Can you bear more?”

“Yes.”

He tests the answer with one small thrust. You make a sound he feels thrumming from your ribs to his chest.

He stops again at once. “Did I hurt you?”

“Yes,” you tell him honestly.

Duncan goes stricken.

“And keep going.”

He bites you to stop himself from groaning like a mad man. Shudders and sweats some more. For a moment he only breathes, rough and uneven, trying to gather enough sense to move without undoing both of you. Then his hands settle again on your hips and he just accepts the tremor in them as a thing that happens with you. “As you wish,” he says, voice gone hoarse as old leather.

Slow still. Slower than his body wants. The first few strokes seem timid on so large a man, but the angle makes each one count. He gets to know the places in your body that he has no names for and feels where he’s making you sore along the whole span of his cock. He’s sorry for it, and keeps going. Graceless, and you are too, and thank the gods for that, because grace would have ruined it.

He lets small words flee his mouth unattended. Once your name. Once sweet girl, because if you aren’t sweet he doesn’t know what is. His chest expands with a new kind of breathing. Fuller and calmer amongst the storm of it all. He has a mate. She knows him shortly and likes him enough to suffer through it knowing the suffering doesn’t end with just him grunting over her. In itself, it is the kindest thing that’s ever happened to him and Duncan doesn’t let his thoughts get ahead of themselves and dream bigger things than this.

It makes him band you tight with his arms across your middle. He leans over you so his chin settles into the crook of your shoulder and lets his hips roll a notch deeper. Another sound breaks from you at that, and it does for his patience what your laugh did before. He finds a truer rhythm, lets himself get lost in it if only for a second. Closes his eyes again. Your hand comes to his head and scratches the back of it. Duncan shivers like a horse under the brush and drives deeper by accident.

“Dunk—!” you yelp. And this time you do curse him. “Fuck!”

“There,” he says, half dazed with it. “That’s better.”

You tighten around him and loosen and accept him, near making him spill right then and there. Then again, when you whisper, “More.”

“Aye,” he says and obeys in the same instant. Moans as though you’ve struck him in the stomach. He works his hips hard into yours, breathing audibly, and goes back to palming your belly where his body distorts your womb. The shape he has, he gives to you. The strength he has in his legs, he gives to you. His breath spills over your skin, and that is yours too.

You start to answer him with your body. Your hips push back for more. He catches the movement at once and nearly loses himself over it.

“I’ll breed you tonight, girl, you know that?” he says. “Or try, at least, before I die while you keep doing that.”

You make a laugh of it, breathless and broken. Duncan’s next thrust lands harder for hearing it. His apology follows close behind.

“Sorry. Sweetheart, sorry.”

“You keep saying that.”

“Aye.” His teeth graze your shoulder. “And I’ll keep saying it.”

The rhythm has him fully now. Steady and increasingly rough with need. He tries to keep some gentleness in it for you. It remains there in pieces: the hand on your belly easing the force when your body tightens, the kisses at your neck, and the way he keeps listening for hurt in every sound you make and for the no that is yet to come. The rest is all appetite and strain.

He has no idea how he’s got you there, but knows you are close. Your mouth becomes unrestrained. He doubts he’s said fuck as many times as you have today. In the sensing of it, he finds the place he’s learnt with his tongue and brings his fingers to it. “That’s it,” he says. “Let it come. I want you mine, girl. Let it come.”

He thrusts. “Duncan—” Thrusts again. You near hiccup on it, go so tight around him fire spills hard and burning in his gut. He follows you suit, holding fistfuls of your flesh and jerking with it and spending hard inside you as he dreamed having. Pulse after pulse he feels the weight being taken off his sack and for each one he grunts out sounds that are neither knightly, nor fit for company.

His eyes go shut. One laboured breath goes through him from throat to heel. He braces. For the thickening. For hurting you. For his body turning further monstrous and needful inside yours. It comes with a life of its own and to Duncan it feels rightful to do so, natural and inevitable, and he hates it all the same. The primal part of his heart wants his seed locked deep in you, the other—the soft one, the valorous one—contemplates ripping himself apart just so he can spare you.

You gasp so quietly he barely hears it. “I’m sorry,” he says, as earnestly as he can, holding you still. “I know. I know. I’m sorry.”

Your body goes so rigid and taut he knows damn well the pain is difficult for you to bear. “Tell me,” he says. “Tell me if it’s too much.”

“Stay,” you whisper, though the word breaks in half. “Keep still.”

He folds over you. One arm locked around your middle. A hand trembling at your jaw as if he might somehow soothe the ache from your face alone. His head hangs so low the cheek he presses into your neck. Knot settles by degrees, each one dragging another involuntary tremor through the both of you, till at last his body seems satisfied with its own trap and the movement dwindles out of him. He hums against your throat, battling the guilt over how impossibly good it feels to be locked with you.

After a while, it comes back to him that it’s raining. The wetness of it seems to soak through the barn wood to his skin. He’s holding you so fiercely, you tap his arm once.

“Dunk?”

“Mm.”

“You may let go. I shan’t run.”

At that he gives the tiniest shake of his head, cheek still pressed to you like a tired child’s. Duncan makes no sound grand enough to call crying, only a rough broken breath and then a second, but his face stays hidden in your throat and the wet keeps coming. Every part of him is repentant with it except the part too tired to care.

You turn your head as far as you’re allowed. “Dunk. You’re crying.”

He goes rigid. “Leave me that much pride,” he mutters.

“No.”

The answer is so quick it startles him into a small breath. You turn further still and wince for it. He lifts his head, opens his arms from around you to let you. Watches the strange face on you as your palm comes to cup his jaw. Another slides into his hair. You stroke it once. Then, because there is no wit left in either of you and because tenderness has outrun shame by miles, you crane your neck up and lick the salt that is not yours from the corner of his eye.

He lets out a laugh so cracked it hurts more than the tears did. “What sort of girl are you?”

“One that doesn’t want you crying over shame if there’s no shame to be had.”

“You’ve no idea—” Duncan starts, and stops himself. He doesn’t know how to tell you that you’ve opened his chest wide. That he’d rather die next time than go through this without you now that he’s been given the sort of girl like you. “It eases,” he says instead. “The pain of it. In a bit. Only have to wait it through.”

“So we wait.”

“Aye.”

Your knees have begun to tremble with the awkwardness of the position. Duncan feels it and swears under his breath.

“Easy. Easy.” Very carefully, he shifts the both of you. The knot makes that difficult and your hiss at the first movement tears another apology from him. Still he manages it in the end, inch by stubborn inch, till you are lying on your side on the bed of straw with his chest to your back and his arm around you.

This close, with the violence spent out of the weather and his own body quieting under stages, the tenderness he has for you keeps bleeding out. He keeps touching you in little absent ways—a thumb at your wrist. Knuckles over your hip. His mouth at the nape once more, softer now.

“Did I hurt you overmuch?” he asks.

“You hurt me some.” His hand stills. Stubborn creature, you twist again, and he has to rise on one elbow to indulge you. Satisfied with obedience, you brush his split lip with your fingertip. “I bit you some.”

“Aye,” he says. “Vicious little thing.”

After another little while his breathing evens. The trembling leaves him by strips. The knot remains, though less punishing now than before, more an anchored fullness than a fresh assault. Duncan senses the same easing in you.

“What now?” you ask. Your hair is full of straw grass. Face softened and tired.

He paints a circle round the ball of your shoulder with his thumb. “Now I lie here till my body remembers how to behave.”

“And after?”

He goes quiet. Thinking. Wary all over again. “I’ll go hot again,” he says. “But you’ve quenched the worst.” Shame roughens his voice. “Enough that I can go and do my business elsewhere.”

Your mouth frowns and you give him one impatient huff. “What else do I have to take,” you ask, “so you understand I want you?”

It leaves him staring. No one’s ever put anything quite so plain into his hands before and he should have half a mind to suspect a trick in the plainness of it, but doesn’t. “You said you were sore,” he says.

“I am.”

“And still you—”

“Yes,” you say. He’s grateful that after blinking and opening his mouth uselessly, you decide to spare him the struggle and mutter, “You can put your mouth to me again. That helped.” Dunk stares some more. You roll your eyes, his insolent sweetheart. “How long?” you ask. “How long are you like this?”

Duncan drags a hand over his face. “Till the moon shrinks or gathers by the width of my little finger. Thereabouts.”

You frown. “Two-three days.”

“Aye.”

“And you would go away now for two-three days?”

His eyes search yours, still wary in spite of everything. “Are you not letting me?”

You hold his gaze. The whole barn smells of rain and spent heat and the old straw under your bodies. He has gone very still waiting for the answer.

“I forbid you,” you say, and Dunk could weep with it.

You do not know half of what you agree to or want in the instant of agreeing. When angry, he’s truly frightening. Large and trying to shrink himself into something you can’t touch and something you most likely can’t hurt. For misleading him into believing the affection is disdain you can only thank your foul mouth and short temper, you think bitterly.

But then, Gods—he shatters under one touch. One tug of his shirt. One palm on his shoulder placed there with hope, and he looks at you bracing for vileness where there isn’t one. A breeding curse, he tells you. A sickness to the blood that makes him animal and selfish. You’ve heard some and met none like him. He speaks of himself as if he were the most egregious man walking the sullen earth while all you see is a knight cut to be one and a boy you wish to cradle and kiss and save from this misery.

He kisses like he believes it’s the last kissing he’s going to be given. Up close he seems larger, made all over from the same blunt earnest substance that built him elsewhere—thick wrists, square shoulders, neck gone tight with swallowing. Pale as milk in the storm-light. His hair is coarser than you imagined. Strands of it keep working loose and hanging over his brow when he kneels and mouths at your legs. You have the stupidest wish to smooth it back.

Once, the old fear of being opened against your will rises and breaks apart because he does no taking. He keeps asking. His gaze makes you feel seen in a way that has no mockery in it. His appetite is held on a very tight rein.

There’s hurt in being split by him. Plenty. Again and again, it hurts and you let your body take it and hone it into something stranger. His effort of holding back is visible through every second of it, so you let yourself accept the too much. Tell him outright he’s hurting you and then tell him brazenly to keep going, and that look on his face then is the one you will carry to the grave. Hunger and astonishment and the wreck of gratitude. You’ve never been wanted so openly and by someone who’d stop if you told him to. You know that with certainty stronger than fear. The knowing of it lets you bear more and makes you want him more in return.

When he says he’ll breed you or die trying, you nearly come from his words alone. He follows after you like a dog and makes all those sounds you’ve wondered if he’d make if you tried hard enough. They spill from his opened throat, shameless and loud. You love him most in that instant.

Then, the knot takes hold by inches. The place where it has fixed you together burns and aches and feels impossible, and still some feverish part of you thrills at the sheer finality of it. Duncan, caught inside you with all his body’s ugly need made plain is the most gorgeous thing to you. He soothes you through it, too. The endearment catches you by surprise nearly as much as the pity in his voice for your hurt. He sounds more miserable over causing it than you feel under it. That alone makes you gather him in harder.

When he refuses to ease off you silently, the knowledge lands soft and terrible. He is not holding you there because he fears you fleeing. He is holding because he cannot yet bear the parting. Under your touch he goes still in a way you know means feeling too much rather than too little.

You steal all of it from him. The strength from his muscles, his sweat, his seed, his tears, and still he disbelieves that you want him. He wants to go alone again, and you cannot stand it so fiercely, you nearly go furious with it.

“I forbid you,” you tell him, with as much authority as you can gather while being twisted on some old barn’s floor.

His face changes in stages. First disbelief. Then a kind of startled softness. Then something darker and more dangerous, because you have just spoken to the deepest, crudest part of him in a language it understands too well.

“Girl,” he says, raw.

“Do not ‘girl’ me.” Your voice is tired, sore, stern with it all the same. “You do not get to flee into hedges and holes in the ground after making me take all this on faith.”

Duncan’s brows go up a little. “Making you?”

“You heard me.”

His hand on your middle tightens by instinct, then eases again before it can bruise. “You’ve a brave mouth all of a sudden.”

“I have had it all along. You simply would not stand still to hear it.”

That earns you the smallest, strangest ghost of a smile from him. It vanishes at once beneath the strain in his face.

“You do not know what you’re forbidding.”

“Then tell me.”

“There will be more of this.” His voice drops. “More need. Less sense. I may be more ashamed after. More sorry while it’s happening and no less set on it for that.”

You listen as if he is listing weather to you. When he has done, you say, “All right.”

Duncan actually lets out a little breath of temper. “That is no answer.”

“It is mine.”

He stares another moment. You can feel him wanting to argue, wanting to save you, wanting to be saved from the wanting altogether. The effort of all three shows in him plain.

At last you lift your hand and put it to his face. His eyes close. No resistance in him to that any longer.

“You are not leaving me in a barn to go suffer by yourself,” you say, quieter now. “I will not have it.”

“Will not have it,” he repeats, the words almost foolish in his mouth.

“No.”

He opens his eyes. Looks at you long, as if trying to find the pity there and failing.

“What if I ask proper?” he says.

“You may ask.”

“What if I beg?”

Your thumb brushes the split in his lip. Mind plots a thing despite yourself. “I would like the sound of it and still say no.”

That finally pulls a real laugh from him, though it breaks with weariness halfway through. He bows his head once, beaten in some tender, unlikely way. “Seven save me,” he murmurs. “You mean it.”

“I do.”

Duncan studies you another little while, then lowers his forehead to yours with a heaviness that feels like surrender. “Then stay I shall,” he says. “Just do not say that now, and then think better when I’ve gone and worn the skin off your patience.”

“My patience is fine.”

“It is not. I’ve seen you with a glove.”

That draws a laugh out of you, unbidden. Duncan goes still at the sound, the corner of his mouth pulling with something faint and dazed, as if laughter from you is still a thing he half believes he imagined once. His hand moves over your belly and lower in a restless, thwarted pass. He doesn’t test the luck further—just goes down onto hay and nuzzles into your hair and sighs deeply. A great deal of man to lay quiet at another’s bidding.

“There,” you say, content. “Better.”

“There,” he echoes and you could swear the bastard is grinning. “Very fearsome.”

“Mock me again and I’ll bite you harder.”

“Gods preserve me,” he says, eyes closed and head tipped back onto straw so when you turn yours you can gape at him as openly as you please. The spent strain has loosened something in his face. He looks younger for it. Younger and used through in a way that makes you want to keep him again. This is what he’s supposed to look like after, you think. Not the frightened, frazzled thing he was back when you first found him. Malleable in a way that doesn’t make him weak. Mouth soft at the corners and heat coming off him in waves, while the knot eases by slow increments.

The deep, strange pressure gives up some of its iron. His body mellows further, as if some inward grip has at last begun to unclench. When he slips free of you, the absence startles. Your body had wrapped itself round the burden of him so fully that the leaving feels wrong for one curious instant with the sensation of some important weight being stolen. A small upset sigh leaves you.

“I mislike it too,” Duncan says, making you smile into your palm.

Then, he shifts. Lifts onto all fours and you get to see him, hanging heavy between the legs and reaching as low as his mid-thigh. He’s milked all over, the skin on the base shiny and reddened from when blood has made him girthier, hairs on his navel and circling the root damp and disturbed with moisture, sticking to him wildly. He comes awkward and stiff to kneel between your hips, and leans.

You prop yourself on elbows. Your knees draw closer with the effort of it, and Duncan’s shoulders stop them from closing. He stares right at the apex of your thighs and murmurs, “Gods, but you’re pretty.”

Before you can throw any of his own abashed modesties back at him, he leaches farther down. Splays himself flat on his belly and brings his hands to you again. One palm holds you in the crease of the thigh while the fingers of the other gather what you have lost of him and press it back inside.

“Keep me, girl,” he says. “I’ll give you all I’ve got. Which is not much,” he adds, sheepish. Then he looks up at you with those round child’s eyes and says again, “Jus’ keep me.”

Your mouth goes so dry the yes doesn’t make it out. You beg him with gaze alone, and he understands at once. Climbs back up on his arms and legs and lands braced above you, rubbing his nose along yours. “Hallo,” he says, very softly.

The foolishness of it breaks something tender in you. “Hallo.”

A kiss. A proper one, free of fever-struck taking and half-mad gratitude. Just lips on lips and kind tongues. It turns out he has sweetness enough for ten men when there is nobody in him trying to outrun shame. He kisses as if he has time now. As if he means to acquaint himself with every corner of your mouth by patience alone.

“There’s my girl,” he murmurs, half to himself.

Warmth climbs into your face. “I am not your girl.”

His eyes drift shut briefly. “No?” It’s fond enough to make argument feel useless.

He presses another kiss to the corner of your mouth. Then your cheek. Then the place beneath your eye where the skin still feels tight with unshed tears.

“I’m sorry,” he says quietly. “For the fever. For the shouting. For the foolishness of me.”

“You were not the only fool.”

“Aye, but I am the larger one. It stands to reason I should answer for more of it.”

That earns him a little smile. Duncan sees it and his whole face alters round the sight.

“You frighten easy,” you murmur.

“So would you, if your body did half the ugly things mine does.”

You touch his lower lip where your teeth broke it. “I did that.”

“You did.”

“Sorry.”

His mouth turns against your fingertip. “I am not.” Then, the weight of him settles itself on you until air puffs out through your nose, and he stays. Rain ebbs overhead and you wonder how much time has passed between him snarling at you and him nuzzling his cheek between your breasts. How a person so big can feel so breakable where you have him.

You let him rest. Yourself, too. Against your thigh where he lies the beginnings of him wake again. Your fingernails scratch his head once. “Dunk.”

He lifts his head. “You are looking at me like you mean trouble.”

“I do.” You nod. “Get on your back.”

Duncan shifts with a grunt. All that largeness unspools over the straw and boards till he lies sprawled with one forearm shielding his eyes a moment. His chest rises, heavy and open. You can feel his attention on your skin even through the hand over his face.

You look at him and think: so this is what a giant felled looks like.

“Do not stare at me so,” he mutters.

“You stared enough at me.”

“I could some more.”

You smile and put a hand to his wrist to reveal him. Duncan lets you do it. That is the marvel. He lets you and looks up and gets back to touching you and every touch says mine a little, though he has not the boldness to say it again with his mouth.

Like this he’s breathtaking and it’s something you can never tell him in abundance. Too broad for grace, too weathered for prettiness. Hair wild and skin satin with dampness. The flesh of his belly loosens now he’s on his back, soft enough to look warm. His thighs spread without elegance. All of him laid plain. You yearn to take advantage of that honesty before it thinks to gather itself up again, so you swing a leg over and straddle his middle.

He sucks in a breath so hard his whole body answers it. “Girl—”

“Hush,” you tell him. Settle carefully, because despite all his size he looks for one endearing beat as if he might bolt from the force of being looked at and mounted in one movement. His hands come asking again.

“You are trouble,” he says.

“Yes.”

“And pleased with it.”

“Yes.”

He scowls. “I can stop you still,” he says, though the words have a shape of a hope he would hate you to call.

“Can you?”

Duncan considers the question with pained sincerity. “No.”

You smirk. He watches your mouth through it and grows harder under you by visible degrees. The sight gives you a mean little thrill. You shift your weight on purpose, slow enough to feel him strain.

“Careful,” he says.

“Of what?”

“Of me.”

You lean down enough that your hair falls round his face and the world narrows to the two of you under its curtain.

“I am,” you say. “Why do you think I’m going slow?”

Duncan’s eyes close for one beat. Open again with the look of a man trying hard not to beg before he has been made to. You kiss his chest first because it is there and because you have wanted to since the first day by the stream. The little sound he makes belongs to a much younger man. You keep going. One broad side of him, then the other. His hand goes into your hair in pure need, no thought to where it belongs or what it looks like. Fingers careful by force of habit and blundering from feeling.

“You can come higher than that,” he says after a while, shy.

“Can I?”

Duncan’s mouth twists. “You know you can.”

You rise just enough to look at him. “Then ask.” He stares. The rain has weakened to a far hiss. In the quiet, his breathing sounds huge. Yours too. “Ask,” you say again.

Colour lifts under his skin. His eyes sharpen with it. Pride and want pull at him from opposite sides till you almost pity him. “Do not play with me overlong,” he whispers.

“Beg me,” you say, with a stare so dead your cheeks sag with it.

One hand covers his face again. “You wicked little thing.”

“That is no begging.”

He drags the palm off and glares up at you with all the seriousness in the world. The effect is spoiled entirely by the way his chest keeps rising harder and harder under your hands. “You know what I want.”

“Say it.”

His lips part. Shut. Part again. The struggle in him is so plain it almost feels unfair. Almost. “Put your—” He stops. Starts over, glaring still. “Put yourself here.” His finger points to his mouth. “Put yourself on my face.” The words come out like stones hauled uphill.

You hold his gaze another beat just to see what it does to him. It does plenty. Then: “Good,” you say sweetly.

Duncan’s eyes go half-mad at the praise, but when you finally move his hands know what to do. They help without seeming mean to, guiding your thighs and settling your knees. When you rise over his mouth at last he turns his head once and presses a kiss to the inside of your thigh so cordial it steals the air from you before any true touch has begun.

“Dunk,” you whisper. He answers by pulling you down.

His hands leave all gentleness behind in that first moment, then find it again a second later. The hunger in him outruns manners. His mouth does not. He learns with it as he learned with touch before. A broad sweep of tongue. Gawkish eagerness. He settles in as if this, at least, is a labour he was born understanding.

You put a hand to his shoulder. The other goes into his hair. Duncan groans under you and the sound goes straight through your spine. You had not thought a man beneath you could feel so in command. Yet he does. Great body sprawled in the straw. Mouth working with grisly devotion. Hands spread wide at the backs of your thighs like he means to keep you there forever.

“Fuck,” you gasp. He gives you no speech in answer, only doubles his effort as if praise were instruction.

The pleasure comes quicker this time. Your body knows him already. Every motion of his mouth says take, take, take, and every answering tremor in you says yes. You rock against him before shame can catch up. Duncan’s hands tighten. One comes off your thigh long enough to press flat over your belly, feeling the muscles straining there. The touch is so absurdly intimate you go weak with it.

He feels the weakness. Holds you steadier. Works you harder.

When you try to drag back just to keep from spilling too soon, he follows. It is half blind and wholly determined. His hair is a wreck under your grip. Breath comes fierce and wet and loud. If he could speak, you think, he would say give it. Since his mouth is otherwise occupied, his whole body says it for him.

So you give it. Let your legs shake around his head and your palm drive his face into you so hard he chokes a little. He drinks it all as if it were owed. When the worst of it passes and you’re trembling too hard to sit straight without outright smothering him, he eases you down his body, but never off himself.

You come to rest against his chest. His mouth is wet, face looks stunned and pleased and a touch dazed with triumph. You brush his cheek with two fingers. He kisses them once. Then, you feel him under your thigh.

Still hard. Harder, if anything, for what he has just done.

You lift yourself enough to look down between your bodies. His cock lies hot against his belly, flushed darker now and lifting with the blood stumbling through it. The sight of him like that after your weight on his face turns your mouth dry. Duncan watches you watching him and goes very still.

“Do not be cruel to me,” he says.

That is exactly when cruelty would have been easiest. You know you could leave him there and he would suffer it because he thinks he deserves suffering from you if pleasure comes in the same hand. Instead you put your palm round him and feel the whole of him jolt under you.

“S-seven fu—” he strains. Your hand lifts before he can lose his wits entirely. You raise yourself and line him up with a care that is no innocence and all intent. Duncan lies under you and understands too slowly what you mean to do. Then he understands.

“Girl—”

“Hush.” You set the head at your entrance and hold there. His jaw tightens with the effort of not thrusting up.

“Now beg me,” you whisper, and feel yourself slickening with it.

He looks at you as if the asking might kill him quicker than the rut. For one heartbeat he says nothing. Pride holds. Barely. Then your hand shifts on him, only a little, and the last of its poor thinness buckles and he becomes humble all over again.

“Please,” he says. His eyes shut once, hard. Open, darker than before. “P-please,” he mouths, and this time the word drags. “Girl. Wee thing. Have mercy.”

To you it’s a blade heated white driven through the very essence of yearning. You ought perhaps to be frightened of teasing a man like him. Instead the thing that rises first is a wild, astounding fondness. He is trapped on the precipice. Spent and near another spending. Sweating. Trying to stay inert while all of his muscles pull him forth. You hold him poised there one moment longer only to feel the full violence of his want shake through him. Then you sink. It shrinks you to a single breath.

The size of him feels impossible at once. You lower by inches and still he keeps going, hot and broad and stretching you till your thighs quiver with the struggle of bearing him. Too much of him. Not enough of him. Through the pain, promise of pleasure threads and under it something opens.

“There,” Duncan gasps, throat tight with it. “Gods. There.”

You mean to go slowly. You do, for a moment. Your hands brace on his chest. His heart pounds beneath, huge and wild. Every inch you take changes his face, and the power of it goes to your head. So does the sight of him sprawled and yielding, all that heft gone obedient.

“Look at you,” you murmur.

Duncan’s eyes open at that. They are feral enough to frighten. “Do not mock me now.”

“I’m not.”

He believes you, because he has to. Because from his body’s speech it seems like he would not survive disbelief. His touch runs over you, heels of his palms and big thumbs roughened by reins and weather and all the life he has lived without gentleness enough in it and he looks too naked to live under a roof with rain pounding it and no priest to witness it.

You rise. Sink again. Learn the drag of him from above. The angle gives you a strange new mastery of it. You can feel where he catches hardest and where your body opens sweetest. He lets you have it for longer than you expected he could. He lies there and takes what you do to him with gratitude and torment painting his face.

“Again,” he says once, before shame cuts him off.

You smile a little and give him exactly that. Harder this time. “There now,” you say. “You can beg proper after all.”

“Cruel,” he says. “But it sits on you well enough.”

It warms you lower still. You keep riding him, a little mean with the delight of seeing how thoroughly he can be unmanned. The discomfort becomes something you await. A bright harsh pull that reaches right through the pleasure and makes its home there. They run together like fish in the water when they’re too fast and sparkling and you can’t tell whether it’s one or two or plenty of fish tricking your eye.

He has ache written all over his face. On Duncan it only makes him more himself. More touchable. More yours for this little span, and it makes you feel less alone in the world. The knowing that both of you have to suffer some to gain some.

Your body lifts, and he holds it by the waist. His hips begin their answering. Two stronger strokes to remind you the power under which had felt so conquered, never was. He’s only been still because he chose to.

You put a hand to his chest to steady yourself. “Easy.”

He tries; you can see it. The effort shows in the cords of his neck, the tight set of his mouth, the way his fingers spread hard enough over your hips to leave their shape. The blood in him has gone too bright. The need too deep. When you sink down on him again and linger there, wringing another helpless sound from him, the last of his chivalry gives way.

“Come here,” he says. Low. Dangerous.

You ought perhaps to listen. Instead, the insolence rises so fast you do the opposite. Lift almost clear and hold him in the wanting of the next descent.

Duncan’s whole body arches under you. “Gods damn it.” It snaps right there. He sits up with a force that makes you yelp, both arms wrapping round you tight. The barn tilts while boards sigh under sudden shift. Then, your back hits them and Duncan is over you, the vast heated storm of him blotting out the dim light.

Through a startled gasp, you stare at him. He sees it and breathes hard through his nose. A flash of shame cuts his face in half, and abashed like a boy that lives in him, he tells you, “You should not have done that.”

“Mm,” you hum. “Because you asked nice?”

“I did.”

“And?”

“And I’m done asking nice now.”

Where fear ought to appear, there is little. It runs hand in hand with a hotter thing and neither lets go. Inside you, a pulse answers all through your middle, like hot iron poured into a mould. On the back of this worry thrill rises strangely, borne up by the helplessness of his action and the fact that this great man menaces you while shaking in the arms because of what your body is doing to his. Whatever claws at him, he’s still making sure he is welcome. His forehead nearly touches yours.

“As before,” he says, voice scraping. “Tell me no and I’ll hear it.”

You put a hand to the side of his face. His skin burns under your palm.

“No,” you say, and watch him hollow out for one terrible blink before you finish. “Do not stop.”

He sucks his lip between the teeth and the split you gave him almost opens anew. Relief rattles his chest. He kisses you hard, and the next thrust comes with all his control stripped down to what is necessary to keep from harming. Gentleness of real kind, made of strength leashed as tight as it will go and still threatening to break.

He rides you into the boards with a rhythm that belongs more to his shadow self than to any choice in him. Still, you can feel how much he’s holding back. It lives in the tremor of muscles beside your head and the rough checks of his breathing and the way his strokes end on the edge of something wilder before he pulls back by force. The hand at your thigh keeps trying to open you wider. One at your jaw keeps at your face in case it gives him something your words won’t.

“Duncan—”

“Yeah,” he says. “Take it. Take it from me.”

Your legs tighten round him. The hurt has changed shape. Turned molten. Every place he touches lights. Every place he does not touch begs to be next. You cling because there is nowhere else to put what he is making of you. His hair sticks damp to your face. The vein in his neck beats under your mouth when you turn and kiss there. Being with him is the first thing that has felt right in days upon days.

“You are driving me out of my head,” he says against your skin. You would answer if you had breath enough. It feels good enough to become unintelligible from actual peak. You’re just trapped there, exist there, where your mind and heart confuse themselves and the only thing that exists clearly is the rapture of being taken.

He goes without warning beyond one broken “f-fuck,” and the sudden brutal deepening as he drives home and spends with a groan that sounds wrung from his marrow. His whole body goes through a succession of hard bright shudders and then a deeper one that leaves him near limp. Then comes the shaking. Twitching. Mouth opening at your throat, perplexed. He floods you and in the wake of his spending comes the swelling again.

It shows you where the peak has been all this time. Gets through you like a warm knife. Fullness, so astounding and grand it should unmake you, but puts you back together instead. Your belly thrums with it and it spreads warmth all over you until your fingers feel strangers to your palms. You come so hard on it, a sound you’d never make in daylight leaves you. You have no idea how torn you must look when Duncan mistakes pleasure for pain and answers with such care you could near weep yourself.

“Don’t hate me. Don’t hate me,” he says. “I’m sorry. Sweetheart, I’m sorry.”

“I don’t—” You gasp. “I never do.” Then, you weep yourself. Tears push out with violence so unbearable you have to bring a palm to your face. You hate them at once, the weakness of them and the mumble when your breath snags and starts breaking wrong.

Duncan stops moving. Then all his care changes shape. He eases down close, slides one arm under your shoulders and tugs your hand off your eyes with the other. Patience over force. When you resist, he only waits you out, breathing against your hair, till your strength gives over.

“Hey,” he murmurs. “Hey now.”

You squeeze your lids shut.

His mouth finds your cheek. Open kisses, gathering your salt just as you gathered his. He kisses one eye, then the other, then the corner of your mouth where your face has gone gnarled from trying not to sob.

“Stop,” you tell him—it only makes the weeping worse. A wail gets out of you, ugly as anything, and Duncan hushes you at once and gathers you closer.

“Hush, wee thing,” he says. “Hush now.”

You’re bawling. Everything comes together, from the past and the present and future that’s going to be miserable if lived without him, and being held through it opens the flood wider. He keeps his mouth to your face and you can feel how hard he’s trying not to lose his senses. Keeps taking the tears as if he can lessen them by sheer stubborn attendance.

“Does it hurt so much?” he asks. “Girl, tell me. Does it?”

You shake your head.

He frowns against your skin. “Then what is it?”

You drag in a breath and it breaks in the middle. Another sob takes the first words with it. At last you manage, “You spoke of parting.” His hand stills. You swallow and feel all sorts of scorn for the fresh wetness that comes with the saying of it. “B-before. By the stream.”

Duncan lifts his head enough to look at you. The storm-light is gone thin now, the barn all dark boards and damp straw and the little wash of moon seeping through the cracks. His face in it looks wrecked and bewildered.

“If you keep being sweet like this,” you say, and your voice goes ugly on the last words, “I won’t—I won’t bear it when it c-comes.”

He gapes. Gasps with surprise so bare it hurts to watch. “You said,” he begins, slow, as if stepping into deep water, “you said you’re not my girl.”

“I’m n-not.”

Duncan waits.

You drag your wrist under your nose, furious with yourself, and glare at some point over his shoulder because looking at him feels worse. “I do not want to be anyone’s girl.” His jaw works once. “I want—”

It feels larger than your mouth.

“What?” he asks.

You make yourself look at him. “I want you—” you say. “I want you to be my man, though.”

Duncan understands at once. You watch it happen. Going into him clean and taking root because possession is a tongue his body learnt before speech ever got wise enough to shame it. His eyes darken, but the face gentles around the darkness of them.

“Aye,” he says, wisest he’s ever been. “You can be my moon then.” His thumb strokes under your eye, not wiping anything, just spreading it. “My whole world. Not just a girl.”

Inside you, your heart stitches itself back together. By his hands—neat, careful work delivered with large, honest fingers. Then, your man looks at you as if you’ve hung the moon and were it in the same breath, and says, “Now you may tell me all the things you meant to.”

#self reblob #thinking about this a lot recently #as I am on a verge of my own heat errr I mean ovulation #I think bringing Alpha!Dunk to his knees would heal my soul a little