She's never seen a naked man. She focuses on ... his hair, an erbium spill, is almost as long as hers but just as soft ⸺ she remember how it felt between her fingers. And then maybe clavicle bone. The meanness of his throat when he talks. How his seeing-eye looks harder than his gemmed one.
It is not her thighs his hands find but her throat and the breath it hitches, un-silently. She white-knuckles grips the tub's edge before his wrist can claim the space between them. A coaxed second sound cannot be stifled either. Not when he tugs her off the bone and reminds her she is a body atrophying from disuse. No one prepared her properly. Of all she was told of marriage beds and the brutality of husbands, the courtly eyes that will watch and be satisfied ... no one told her she could like it ... long for it. The way it was served.
She's had her time, vacillating the day away on feelings divided. She's left apotheosizing his hands, his mouth, his hips staking her soul to the altar-wall ⸺ assailing all that she knows. Can swoon-sick not count? She's had a whole night of tossing, turning, half-sleepless to attempt to swallow it. But desire does not feather in, it chokes.
It makes her tell her first mindful lie. And she chokes on that, as well.
❛ I don't think anyone recovers from you. ❜
In any sense of the meaning but mostly, the one most devastating. Her heart knocks three times to let her know how deeply it can gush.
The natal fruits of her arrival could be his greatest gift. So many in his bloodline lick the same wounds, felled into the same patterns. He'd do best not to wish for her recovery then. And her? A reluctant agree. Of all the stories she's heard of him, she can start believing the dragon one to be the trustest. He's a quick claimer.
She shys away back into her eyelids. Feels how he's stiff-formed that knot for her. Her body responds accordingly. A throb in a pearl, deep deep inside her. Her knee knocks into his left rib. One, twice ... as if testing the bounds of her own touch.
❛ I am ... not used to being touched. I am sorry. I will not feed you fabrication again. I promise. ❜
It doesn't suit her. Her character nor her marriage.
She looks again. As much as her body wants to squirm inside out, there is a strange, conflicting peace having him here with her. She sinks a little deeper to excuse pressing into the entanglement he started.