[ lips ] in the midst of an intimate exchange, sender smooths their thumb back and forth over receiver's lips
When her thumb pressed against his lower lip, dragging a slow arc across the cleft of his mouth, the world narrowed to that soft, deliberate gesture.
It was not the first time Farkas had bared his teeth in someone’s presence, but rarely had he done so without violence behind it. Without thought, his lips now parted. His eyes, grey as forge-steel, did not leave Serana’s face. Still her thumb moved back and forth in a rhythm as old as war, as old as winter.
His lips were dry, then not. His tongue caught the pad of her thumb, the salt and the impossible coolness of her. A kiss of sorts, enamel-tipped and greedy. He drew her digit gently between his lips and sucked.
Of the old stories, before Ysgramor, before the Companions had names. Wolves who mated for life. Wolves who mourned until madness. He had never mourned, not properly. Not with tears, nor with words. Only with blades and silence. Serana, who had slept through centuries, seemed made of mourning, of things no word in Nord tongue could name.
Her thumb rested, spit-damp, just beneath his lower lip. He, beast that he was, pressed his mouth to it again. The want in him was not only for flesh – though his body burned, crying out for that – but for the kind of intimacy that did not vanish with dawn, nor rot in the ground.
“I’ve hungered before, but never like this.”