Close to the Heavens

The shower was small and the water pressure was exactly what one expected from a suite that was trying very hard to not be what it was, but the water was hot and that was enough. She stood under it with her eyes closed and her ears flat and her hands pressed against the tile and let the remainder of the voyage, the oil, the adrenaline, the particular exhaustion of caring about something and acting on it, wash off her in pieces.

She was out in ten minutes. Efficient, as always.

She dried herself with the largest towel she could find, wrapped it around her hair, and surveyed the bed with the critical eye of someone who had slept in considerably worse places and was therefore capable of genuine appreciation. The sheets were clean. The pillow situation was adequate. She dropped the towel and slid under the linen with nothing on but the three chains at her neck, which she never took off, and pulled the sheet up to her chin.

"Come on then." She said to the ceiling.

Lev was settling himself on the floor after take his on shower.

She turned her head and looked at him with the expression she reserved for decisions she found unnecessary. "I said you could share the bed. The floor is not the bed." She shifted toward the far side, making the point clear. "I am not going to do anything, I am exhausted, and you are too large for the floor to be comfortable for either of us. Get up here."

He got up.

He sat on the edge first, which she did not comment on, and then after a moment lay down facing her, which was the only option given the width of the mattress and the width of him.

She was on her back, looking at the ceiling, and she let the silence sit for a moment before it turned into something she actually wanted to fill.

"I robbed a noble for the first time when I was fourteen." She said.

He said nothing, which meant he was listening.

"I overheard two men talking in the lower market. Bragging, really. About this medallion that a lord kept, some old family piece, gold, supposedly enchanted, allegedly worth more than the entire street I grew up on." She pulled the sheet up slightly. "They were going back and forth about how nobody could get to it. He wore it to bed. Never took it off. Had guards on every door." She tilted her head slightly on the pillow. "I thought that sounded like a challenge."

"You were fourteen." He said.

"I was small and fast and very stupid in the specific way that is sometimes useful." She said. "I had been getting in and out of places I was not supposed to be in since I was nine. The noble's roof was not even the most complicated one I had climbed." A breath. "I went in through a window on the third floor. The guard rotation was slow, they were not expecting anything, nobody ever expected anything from the roof." Her voice had taken on the particular cadence of someone reliving something she had thought about many times. "His bedroom was at the end of the hall. He was asleep. The medallion was on his chest."

"How long did it take?"

"Four minutes from the window to back on the roof." She said, with no small amount of satisfaction. "I did not run until I was clear of the building. Running draws attention. Walking like you belong somewhere is the real skill."

He made a sound that might have been approval.

"I sold it for a quarter of what it was worth because I did not know any better and I was fourteen and hungry." She said. "But I ate well for two months. And I paid a woman in the market to teach me to read." She was quiet for a moment. "Best investment I ever made."

Her voice had slowed, the words coming further apart, the pauses growing.

"The men who said it could not be done..." A longer pause. "I never told them it was me. I just..." She yawned once, controlled, and did not finish the sentence.

Her breathing evened.

She was asleep before she reached whatever the end of that thought had been, mid-sentence, her hand loose on the sheet, ears dropping sideways in the way they only did when she was entirely gone.

And he, somewhat enchanted by her ability to disconnect in the middle of a conversation, ended up following her in her dreams.

The room was very dark when she moved.

She did it without waking, or at least without any sign of waking, shifting in the deep and boneless way of someone lost several layers below the surface. One leg found his and wrapped around it. Then the other, slowly, in stages, like climbing something in a dream. Her hand moved across the sheet and found the warmth of him and spread flat against his stomach and stayed there, fingers slightly curved, her breathing still the long and even rhythm of sleep.

Then it was not.

The hand moved. Slowly at first, the way water moves when something disturbs it from a distance, and then with more intention, sliding lower, finding him, and her breathing had changed to the kind that meant she was awake and had been for longer than she was admitting.

She moved down under the sheet without a word.

What followed was unhurried. She found him under the sheet with her hands first, wrapping her fingers around the base of him with the calm confidence of someone who had already decided exactly what she wanted and was in no rush to finish it. She took a moment just holding him, feeling the weight, the warmth, before she lowered her head and let her lips brush the tip, barely a touch, a question asked without words.

Then she answered it herself.

She took him into her mouth slowly, lips pressed fir, tongue flat against the underside as she descended, feeling him respond against her and filing that information away immediately. She pulled back with the same slowness, lips dragging, a thin thread of saliva connecting her mouth to him when she lifted her head just enough to breathe before going back down. Deeper this time. She hummed once, low in her throat, more to herself than for him, the sound of someone tasting something they had decided they liked.

Her hands worked in tandem, one wrapped around the base moving in long slow strokes that followed the rhythm of her mouth, the other pressed flat against his stomach, feeling the tension building there, reading him the way she read rooms when she entered them. Looking for information. Finding it.

She varied the pressure, sometimes soft and exploratory, lips barely grazing, tongue tracing the length of him with something close to academic interest, and then suddenly firm and intentional, taking him deep enough that she had to breathe carefully through her nose, her throat relaxed, her pace unbroken. She was not performing. She was indulging, and the difference was entirely audible in the small satisfied sounds she made against him, sounds she was not conscious of making.

She used the saliva without apology, letting it build, using it to make everything smoother and slower and more deliberate, her hand gliding with ease, her mouth taking its time with the parts that made his breath change, cataloguing each response with quiet precision. When she found something that worked she returned to it, not immediately, never immediately, always circling back after making him wait just long enough to feel it.

His hand found her hair eventually. She let it rest there for a moment, and then decided she was finished with that particular chapter.

She came back up and settled over him, knees on either side, the sheet falling away entirely, and looked down at him in the dark with an expression that was open in a way she would have immediately closed off in daylight. The faint light from the window caught the three chains at her neck, the tan lines that mapped her body like a geography of everywhere the sun had found her, the small firm lines of her, everything compact except for the generous curve of her hips and the weight of her ass resting warm against his thighs.

She reached down and guided him to her entrance without ceremony and then paused there, breathing, letting the anticipation sit.

Then she lowered herself onto him. Slowly. Impossibly slowly.

Her lips parted around a long exhale through her nose, her palms pressing flat against the dense fur of his chest, feeling the heat of him radiating upward as she took him in inch by inch. She was wet enough that there was no resistance, only the stretched and burning fullness of accommodating something disproportionate, her inner walls spreading around him and gripping instinctively, pulling him deeper even as she controlled the descent. She stopped twice on the way down, not because she needed to stop but because she wanted to feel each stage of it separately, wanted to catalogue every sensation with the same precision she had applied to everything else.

When she reached the end of it she sat still.

Her thighs were trembling slightly against his sides. She could feel every pulse of him inside her, and her body answered each one with a slow clench of her walls, like a question being asked repeatedly.

He made a sound.

She filed that away too.

She began to move.

Long, rolling movements of her hips, her large ass rising and falling with a rhythm that was almost meditative, her small breasts barely moving with the pace she was keeping, the chains swaying forward and back between them. She watched his face in the dark with the same quality of attention she had given Kugane from the railing. She was memorizing him. She was aware of doing it and did not stop.

His hands found her hips and she let them, let his large fur-covered palms span nearly her entire waist, let his fingers press into the soft flesh where her hips flared, and she felt the size of him beneath her in every possible register, the breadth of his chest under her hands, the warmth of his fur against her inner thighs, the impossible fullness of him moving inside her as she rolled her hips forward and back and felt her own lubrication making everything slicker and slower and more deliberate with every pass.

She leaned down.

Her lips found his neck, the skin beneath the fur, and she pressed her mouth there and breathed him in and then bit, not hard enough to break, hard enough to mean something. He responded and she bit again in a different place and felt his hands tighten on her hips and she smiled against his neck in the dark.

He pulled her down and she let him, trading the long rolling pace for something shorter and deeper, her hips grinding rather than lifting, her small breasts pressed flat against the fur of his chest, the chains caught between them, cold links against hot skin. She could feel him hitting somewhere deep and specific that made her inner walls flutter involuntarily each time, a helpless rhythmic response she could not control and stopped trying to.

She found his mouth. The kiss was slower than everything else, unhurried in a way that contradicted the building tension in her thighs and the increasingly unsteady rhythm of her hips, lips and tongue moving together with a kind of attention that had nothing performative in it. She tasted him and he tasted her and her hips kept moving, kept grinding, kept chasing the thing that was building at the base of her spine like a wave that had been traveling a very long distance.

She bit his lower lip when it crested.

The orgasm came up through her slowly and then broke all at once, her walls clenching hard and rhythmically around him, her hips stuttering and losing the careful pace entirely, a long low sound pressed into his neck as she shook through it, her fingers curling into his fur, her whole body gripping him from the inside as the pleasure moved through her in long deep waves that seemed to start somewhere behind her navel and travel outward until her fingertips felt it.

She was still moving when she felt him follow.

The heat of him releasing inside her hit like a second wave catching the first, his hands pressing her down hard against him as he pulsed, and she held herself there, fully seated, walls still contracting, feeling every throb of it, her breath coming in slow shaking exhales against his neck.

She did not move for a long time after.

She stayed exactly where she was, draped against the large warm expanse of him, feeling his chest rise and fall beneath her, the fur soft against her cheek, the chains pressed between their bodies. Her hips made one last small involuntary movement and then went still.

Then she slid off him, turned, and pressed herself against his back with the specific determination of someone who had made a decision without ever making it consciously. Her arm went around him. Her knees tucked behind his. Her face found the space between his shoulder blades and stayed there.

She was asleep in minutes.

Neither of them said a word.

The light was pale and early when she became aware of movement.

She did not open her eyes. She registered the warmth shifting, the particular change in the air that meant someone was trying to leave a room quietly, and she lay still for a moment and listened to him finding his things, and then she spoke to the pillow.

"Are you running away and leaving me here."

The movement stopped.

"I was going to get food." He said.

She was quiet for a moment, considering this with her eyes still closed.

"Pancakes." She said. "I've always wanted to eat pancakes, and I think now I can afford to eat them.. Or you can."

She pulled the sheet over her head and said nothing else.