The Warmest Water

He carried her the way he did most things, without making a production of it, one arm under her knees and the other at her back, her head against his chest and her fingers loosely twisted in his fur. She did not protest being carried. Her legs had made their position on the matter abundantly clear.

The cave went deeper than it looked from the entrance, the stone walls narrowing and then opening again into something that felt almost deliberate, a natural chamber where the rock curved upward overhead and the sound of the sea came through somewhere she could not see, a low rhythmic presence that filled the space without overwhelming it. The pool sat at the far end, fed by something warm from below, steam rising in thin curls toward the ceiling. The light came from the cave mouth behind them and from somewhere ahead, a gap in the rock that framed a slice of open ocean, grey-green and moving.

She looked at it from his arms and said nothing for a moment.

"Put me down here Lev, please." She said finally, quietly.

He set her at the edge of the pool and she sat with her feet in the water, testing the temperature, her hands flat on the warm stone beside her. The heat came up through her calves and she let out a long slow breath that had more in it than she would have named out loud.

He lowered himself into the water beside her and then reached up and took her waist and lifted her in, setting her down in the shallows facing away from him, the water reaching her ribs, warm and steady and smelling faintly of minerals and salt. She felt his hands stay at her waist after he had set her down. She did not move away from them.

"Legs open lass'." He said, low and even, close to her ear.

She opened them. No protest.

His hands moved from her waist to her shoulders and began working slowly, thumbs pressing into the muscle on either side of her spine, moving in long strokes downward. She felt every knot he found and every one he took apart, her head dropping forward, her wet hair falling around her face. One of his claws traced the line of her shoulder blade and she shivered despite the warmth of the water.

"You are going to last." He said, working lower, his thumbs following the curve of her lower back. "Every day. That is what I want and that means I need to take care of what is mine now."

She opened her mouth and then closed it.

"I intend to ruin you daily." He continued, unhurried, his hands moving to her hips, pressing and releasing in slow circles. "That requires maintenance."

"That is the most possessive thing anyone has ever said to me framed as a health concern." She said, to the water in front of her.

He did not respond. His hands slid around to her inner thighs under the water and she stopped talking.

He worked slowly, fingers pressing into the muscle there with the same patient thoroughness he had applied to her shoulders, and she felt the tension she had not known she was still holding begin to release in stages. The warmth of the water and the warmth of his hands were nearly indistinguishable. She braced her palms on the pool floor and let him work, her breathing evening out, her thighs loosening under his hands by degrees.

Then his fingers moved inward and she inhaled sharply.

He found her still swollen, still sensitive, still faintly slick despite the water, and he touched her with the same unhurried he had brought to the massage, two fingers moving in slow circles against her that made her hips tilt backward toward him involuntarily. She was tender and he seemed to know it, keeping the pressure light at first, reading each small sound she made and adjusting, until she was gripping the pool floor and pressing back against his hand with her breath coming in measured pulls through her nose.

"Lev." His name came out as a warning that was not really a warning.

"I know." He said.

He worked her slowly through the warm water, his free arm wrapping around her from behind, his hand flat against her stomach, holding her against him while his fingers continued their patient work between her thighs. She felt herself building again despite the exhaustion, despite the tenderness, despite every reasonable argument her body could have made about doing this again so soon. Her walls clenched around his fingers when he pressed them inside her and she made a sound into the steam that bounced off the cave ceiling.

Then he was gone.

She turned her head and he was not there.

The water was still. She looked down and saw nothing and then felt his mouth find her under the surface, his tongue pressing warm against her exactly where his fingers had been, and the sound she made echoed off every wall in the cave.

He stayed down there.

She gripped the stone beside her with both hands and tried to breathe and could not do it evenly, her hips rolling toward his mouth, her thighs closing around his head under the water, the heat of the pool and the heat of his mouth indistinguishable from each other. He worked her with the unhurried patience of something that did not need to surface, tongue pressing and circling and pulling, his hands gripping her thighs from underneath and keeping them apart despite her attempts to close them, and she realized with a distant and thoroughly unhinged part of her mind that he was not coming up.

He did not come up.

She came instead, her back arching over the pool, one hand slamming flat against the stone, a sound tearing out of her that had no composure left in it anywhere, her walls clenching around his tongue as he pressed deeper and held there through every shuddering wave of it, her thighs shaking against his hands, her whole body bright and overwrought and entirely beyond her management.

He surfaced slowly, water running from his fur, and looked at her with an expression that was not quite a smirk.

She stared at him, chest heaving, hair plastered to her face. "How long were you down there."

"Long enough for you but normal for a Hrothgar" He said.

"Large cats." She said, mostly to herself. "Wonderful."

He lifted himself out of the pool in one motion and sat on the edge, his legs in the water, and looked down at her. She looked back up at him in the warm steam of the cave with the open water framed behind him and the light moving across the surface between them and felt something she was not going to name right now settle somewhere in her chest.

She moved toward him.

She rose from the water and he caught her waist before she had to ask, lifting her up and onto his lap facing him, her knees finding the stone on either side of his thighs, her hands on his shoulders. She felt him hard and ready beneath her and the contact made her walls clench again despite everything.

She looked at him directly. He looked back.

She reached between them and guided him to her entrance and held there for a moment, just the tip, feeling the ache of her own swollenness against him, the specific tender burn of being used and wanting more anyway.

Then she lowered herself, slowly, inch by inch, her forehead dropping to his shoulder at the halfway point, a long broken exhale escaping her as she felt herself stretch around him again. The ardor of it was sharper now, every nerve still raw and sensitive from before, her inner walls gripping him in involuntary pulses as she descended, the size of him filling her completely in a way that she felt from her hips to her teeth.

She bottomed out and stayed there.

Neither of them moved. The cave was very quiet except for the distant sound of the sea and the sound of both of them breathing.

"Still with me?" He asked, low.

"Barely." She said, into his neck. "Give me a second."

He gave her the second. His hands moved to her back, one between her shoulder blades and one at the base of her spine, pressing her gently against him without pushing, just holding. She felt his heartbeat against her chest. She felt him pulsing inside her, thick and insistent, and felt her own walls answering each pulse with a slow tight clench.

She began to move.

Slowly at first, rising just slightly and sinking back down, finding the depth of him on the descent each time and shuddering at it, her hips rolling in small circles at the bottom before rising again. He let her set the pace and she took her time with it, her hands sliding from his shoulders to his jaw, tilting his face toward hers, her eyes finding his in the low light of the cave.

She kept them open.

He kept his open too.

She rose and sank and rose and sank, the rhythm building by increments, the ache in her thighs and the ache inside her becoming something she was no longer interested in distinguishing from the pleasure they were wrapped around. She felt him throb inside her with each descent, felt the veins of him pressing against her walls as she moved, felt herself growing wetter despite the water, her lubrication distinct and warm against the cool wet of the pool still on her skin.

His mouth found her breast.

She gasped and her rhythm stuttered, his lips closing around her nipple, tongue pressing against the small hard point, and she felt it connect directly to every nerve still singing inside her. His hands at her hips began to guide more firmly, not taking over, not yet, just adding weight to the movement, and she let them, pressing her breast harder against his mouth in exchange.

"I cannot hold back from you." He said against her skin, between one pull of his mouth and the next. "Every time I think I have control of it you make a sound and I lose it."

"Then lose it." She breathed, rolling her hips down hard onto him and watching his expression change. "I want to feel it when you do."

She leaned back slightly, changing the angle, and felt him hit somewhere deeper that made her vision blur at the edges and her mouth fall open. She kept the pace slow because slow was what she could manage and also because slow was what made them both half insane, the long deep roll of each movement drawing everything out, neither of them rushing toward anything, both of them already there.

His other hand moved from her hip to her other breast, cupping and pressing, his claw tracing her nipple in a careful circle that was somehow more dangerous than anything rough could have been. She looked down at his hands on her small breasts and then up at his face and felt the size difference between them as she always did, acutely, his hands nearly spanning her entire ribcage, his frame dwarfing hers, and she found it exactly as compelling as she always had and was no longer pretending otherwise.

"You are going to stay." He said. Not a question.

She held his gaze and rolled her hips down. "I told you." She said. "I am not leaving."

"Good." His hands gripped her hips with sudden firmness and pulled her down harder onto him, once, and she made a sound that was mostly his name and partly nothing recognizable at all.

The pace changed after that.

Still not frantic, nothing like the cave wall, but deepere, his hands guiding her with a quiet authority that she accepted without any of the brat she usually kept between herself and things she wanted too much. She moved with him rather than against him, her forehead dropping to his, her breath mixing with his in the warm air between them, her walls clenching around him in long helpless rhythms that she stopped trying to control.

She felt him begin to lose the grip he had on himself by the way his breathing changed, by the way his hands pressed harder, by the way he pulled her down to meet each upward roll of his hips with increasing urgency.

"Lev." She cupped his face in both hands. "Look at me."

He looked at her.

"Now." She said.

He buried himself to the root and she felt him release inside her for the second time and it undid her completely, the heat of him filling her triggering her own release, her walls seizing around him in tight rolling contractions that she felt in every part of her body simultaneously, her eyes staying on his through all of it, both of them watching each other come apart in the warm light of the cave with the sea moving beyond the gap in the stone behind them.

She came down slowly.

His hands gentled. Her forehead dropped to his shoulder. Neither of them spoke for a long moment.

She lifted her head eventually and kissed him, soft and without agenda, her lips moving against his with the particular quality of something that had nothing left to prove. He kissed her back the same way.

"I meant what I said." She murmured against his mouth. "I am not going anywhere."

"I would not permit it." He said. "You'r mine now."

She smiled against his lips. "Good luck trying to stop me if I changed my mind." She kissed him again. "But I will not."

He made a sound low in his chest that she felt against her sternum and she was about to say something else entirely when voices drifted in from the cave entrance, echoing off the stone, two people arguing cheerfully about something involving fishing.

She went very still.

He went very still.

They looked at each other.

"If you laugh..." She said, in a very controlled voice. "I will drown you and report a tragic accident."

She disentangled herself from his lap with as much dignity as the situation allowed, which was not a great deal, and reached for the edge of the pool.