She had not meant to cuddle up to him, but what had started as a precaution was quickly becoming far more personal.
As she blinked awake in the dim morning light, she found herself watching Silver’s throat, the long, slow breaths nearly putting her back to sleep.
Then a glint of light off a gossamer strand, and a black and yellow striped spider dangling near his cheek, lowering itself.
She pushed up on her elbows immediately and flitted upwards. The spider started scrambling in midair as she plucked the silk a few inches up the strand, lifting it away from the bounty hunter’s face. It failed to climb back up the silk as she flew it over the diminished campfire, and she watched it curl up into a ball as she dropped it on the embers.
Silver wouldn’t know she just saved him from a poisonous bite, not that she was keeping score.
She glanced back at him, still asleep on the ground.
There was something almost sweet about the way his face looked, relaxed instead of glowering. The night before had been something else. It scorched her cheeks and flooded her belly with heat to remember riding his cock piercing.
If she was at her Fey Court, it would have been her utmost priority to find a mulberry bush and find one berry that was ripe to bursting, so that even the lightest touch stained her fingertips. She would have dabbed its color on her cheeks, her lips, the way she did whenever she had wanted to make another fey jealous with the illusion of being freshly kissed.
What do you care? He’s not going to be jealous of anything. Not for you. Silly fey.
Still, she found a puddle in one corner of the dried well bottom to watch her reflection as she combed her fingers through her hair.
Behind her, Silver groaned and woke, pushing up on an elbow. She met his eye and dropped it just as quickly.
She’d been so brazen last night, but something about the flicker of firelight had emboldened her. Now she could barely look at him without blushing. Something about the morning light made it seem presumptuous to just land atop his morning wood and ask if he’d like another round.
Nettle dared a glance at him when he separated the remaining embers of the fire with the leather toe of his boot. His eye caught hers again, and he raised his brows at her. “Ready to get going?”
A tension that had been building between her shoulders eased.
“Sure,” she said, standing and brushing herself off. She was about to take to the air when he offered out a hand. She took a step up to his palm, balancing herself with a hand on his thumb.
He brought her up to his shoulder. Nettle might have leaped out of his palm a touch faster than she should have, but she’donly been eyeing the expanse of his shoulders since first setting eyes on him.
Nettle sprawled across his shoulder, looking at the world from his height.
Or that’s what she pretended, as he set off down the winding tunnel, the carved ruins of the gauntlet becoming tall and expansive. But her attention kept returning to his tusks, wondering what it would be like to sit herself between them.
It was extremely disorienting to wonder how she would make that a reality. When would she find the time to burn incandescent under his precise and careful attention? The thought of returning home loomed, along with the knowledge that she’d never know an experience like that again.
There also wasn’t any good way to ask if he’d consider desecrating a pile of gold with her. Perhaps that wasn’t done.
“Silver, um. Was last night the sort of thing that normally happens on adventures?”
She watched the profile of his face as he raised a brow. “You mean do I make a habit of sleeping with clients?”
“No,” she said quickly, and stammered to add, “I’ve… never, I mean, not someone I knew only so briefly.”
Silver chuckled. “Sometimes all it takes is being two bodies alone in the wilds. I stopped letting people come along. Only took jobs from the board.”
“Oh. I’m… sorry.”
“Don’t be. It’s not your fault I’m easily persuaded. Something lonely in me thought: it’s been a while since anyone knew me long enough to remember my name.”
She wasn’t sure what she had expected his answer to be, and perhaps it didn’t really matter. There was always going to be an ocean of differences between him and her, and all her question had done was widen her view of the gap. She’d hoped, perhaps, for a moment, that it would have been as special and unique anevening to him as it had been to her, that she wasn’t alone in all the fluttery feelings she’d been starting to have.
It was just another thing she wasn’t suited for outside the Fey Court.
They walked in silence a long while, until the final chamber door came into view. Nettle slipped off of Silver’s shoulder, zipping through the air to it.
The door was smaller than Silver, but several times larger than herself, a circle carved into the wall. A pinprick hole in the center let out the smallest amount of light, an unfocused peek into the chamber.
