The old man isn't used to this.
Certainly, there's been a lover or two in his time, especially in his younger days, but it must have been years or more since he so much as touched another person beast without the intention to kill them. But here is the other hunter, her bared back pressed hard against his scarred chest, and there are his hands, grasping and exploring and teasing out sighs and murmurs of pleasure. He can smell blood in her blond hair, and the way it fans down her back is, strangely, even more intimate than her nudity in his lap.
One of those searching hands splays his fingers across her stomach, then down, lower, to that damp heat between her thighs. He has to remind himself of how to please a woman; his teeth catch along the shell of her ear, just before the warm breath of a growled promise for more.
Let me hear you, comes the gravel prayer. Let me hear how good this feels.
The hesitance begins to ebb, subsumed instead by the zealotry inherent in mutual pleasure. His mouth travels past her ear, down along her jaw, toward her shoulder. There is so precious little between pleasing and consuming, mutters his addled brain, as he marks the space between her neck and her collarbone with a deep, suckling kiss.
His hand between her legs works faster, thumb teasing at the bud of her, seeking out more, more, more. It's coming back to him, now; the other hand roams upward again, clasping tight against the swell of her breast, thumb and forefinger seeking out the stiffened peak of her nipple.
This is what this feels like: needing someone, the way he used to need prayers.
Sing for me, Maria, he breathes, against the column of her throat.
--gormlessthing
Maria had thought herself long past the reach of such prayers.
She had bled herself dry in penance, in discipline, in the terrible charity of the Hunt, in its endless red tide. Her body had been an instrument precise, obedient, honed to a narrow and merciless grace. It had known only purpose – the thrust and recoil of the blade, the measured breath before the shot, the hot arterial wash across her hands.
To feel it now as something wanting, something warmed and opened rather than wielded, pleased her in a way she did not care to name.
Sing for me, Maria.
The words did not command. They yearned. They trembled in the space between them like a struck bell, shivering.
Gorm was not a man of velvet courts or perfumed parlours. He was stone and iron and decades-old oaths worn blunt with use. A cleric who carried faith the way other men carried lanterns – low and practical, meant to light the ground immediately before him. She had seen him stand against horrors that unstitched reason, had watched him shoulder through with that grim, almost exasperated patience, as though the world were an ill-made thing he must constantly set right.
Gods saved souls, he had once said. He saved people. Now, he clung to her as though she were both.
Maria felt the roughness of him. Scarred skin, breath edged with gravel and the copper reek of the night’s work. Not the rarefied, brittle sanctity of the Healing Church. Not the parchment rot of Byrgenwerth. Something earthbound. Something alive. Stubbornly so.
Her blind hands found the breadth of his flanks and settled there with intent, fingers pressing into the hard knots of muscle, anchoring herself to the weight and presence of him. The simple, human solidity.
“You are a foolish man,” she murmured, her voice low and intimate, threaded through with that old aristocratic lilt she could never entirely shed. There was no cruelty in the words. “To ask such music of me.”
Still, she gave it, speaking his name as though weighing it, as if it were something newly learned, something earned.
Still, rough fingertips circled and teased and coaxed between her thighs, the sound of their ministrations slick and lewd and shameless. Still, his other hand grasped her breast, his broad thumb tracing slow, sweeping arcs as though committing the shape of her to memory. She arched, unladylike, into the contact.
With him, she felt no desire to be venerated. No pull towards martyrdom or sainthood. He sucked at her neck as though she were simply a woman. Simply Maria.
She tilted her head back to rest against him, a gesture so small it might have gone unnoticed by any other. For her, it was an unarmouring, a momentary loosening of the immaculate poise she wore like a second skin.
Outside, the night stank of blood and perforated viscera, of smoke and brine and the long rot beneath the city stones. The Hunt was at its close but it would begin again. As it always did. Blood would soak the cobblestones. Beasts would shriek beneath the moon’s pallid gaze. She would take up Rakuyo and Evelyn once more and do what she must.
For now, blood dried stiff in the loose fall of her ghostly hair, her skin still tacky where the Hunt had stained her. Eyes, grey and pale as oyster flesh, turned to watch him over the white peak of her bared shoulder.
Not lost in the moment, but holding it.
Her hand closed around his, where it rested against her breast, and she pressed it more firmly against the quickened beat beneath.
She let him hear it.
Let him feel it.
