Cela nodded. She was trying not to gaze at the fuzz-dusted planes of his chest, but her gaze kept drifting downwards. In the process, she discovered something startling.
“Tyr—what is wrong with your tattoo?”
“What?” he asked, surprised, and looked at his arm.
By now Cela had both of their tattoos all but burned into her memory, every curve and twist. Now Tyr’s was different. Faded. It looked as if parts of it had been rubbed out with an eraser.
“What on earth?” Tyr said, his voice full of shock. Like her, he was intimately familiar with every twist and turn of his own tattoo. He rubbed a thumb across it as if expecting it to come off like wet paint. “Cela—let me see yours.”
Cela held out her arm and gasped. Her tattoo was doing the same thing. Parts of it were so faded she could see her bare skin, as she had not been able to in years. The uncertain moonlight made it hard to tell, but it looked as if some of it was fading before her eyes.
She took a quick step back, away from Tyr, as if denying the evidence of her eyes with her entire body. In the process, she stepped into one of the deep shadows cast by the silver moonlight. Before her eyes, her tattoo solidified and stabilized.
“Tyr ... I think it’s the moonlight.”
“What on earth,” Tyr said again, his voice soft and wondering. He held his arm up.
Cela stepped out of the shadows and did likewise, holding her arms up to the full moon that bathed the sky with its radiance.
For a moment nothing seemed to happen. And then she could watch her tattoo starting to fade, first around the edges, then wisping away to nothing wherever the moonlight hit it. In parts it vanished completely, in other places it was so faint that she could see her skin tone through it. Only the scars from her banishment mark remained clear. Tyr’s arm was the same, nearly bare in a way she had never seen it before, with only the parallel scars where he had been marked like her.
She tore her eyes away to meet Tyr’s stunned gaze. He was staring at her. He wet his lips, touching his tonguetip to them.
“Do you think we can ...” he began.
Cela took a step forward, then another, her bare feet brushing the dew-damp grass. For so long, they had worked so hard to avoid touching each other, making it second nature. Now she found the habit hard to break. Tyr seemed to be experiencing the same. Their hands hesitated, bareinches from each other. Then, as if breaking through a barrier, they clasped and entwined their fingers.
There was no shock, no pain. Nothing. Skin met skin, and it was as if they had always been like this, two people meant to meet and to touch.
It took an instant for it to sink in. And then they collided, hands all over each other. Cela flung her arms around him, but it didn’t stop there. She ran her hands up and down his muscular back, while he ran his fingers through her hair as he cupped her buttock through the nightgown with the other.
“So soft,” he gasped against her neck. “So soft ...”
He wasn’t soft at all. He was hard, all firm muscles and tension, with one particular hardness pressing against her groin as they clung to each other and explored the other’s body with their hands.
Clothes were stripped off in desperation to have as much of their skin in contact as possible. It was luxury and indulgence, it was silken chocolate and the finest wine, it was a sensory overload—a banquet after weeks of famine.
Tyr’s mouth found hers and they kissed with the frantic abandon of two people who had been imagining it ever since they had first laid eyes on each other. His lips were the sensory feast she had dreamed of, and all the while, their bodies writhed together, skin gliding across skin.
“Do you want ...?” Tyr managed, pulling back with a visible effort.
Cela didn’t care what he was asking for; she could hardly think of anything except having him on her and in her before this unexpected miracle left them as unexpectedly as it had come. “I wantyou,” she gasped, pulling him to her.
They tumbled into the grass. It was soft and cool under their bare bodies. At any other time she might have cared forthe niceties of a blanket or other creature comforts, but right now her need for him overrode all other considerations.
She needed no preparation; in some sense the past few weeks had been nothing but foreplay, every thwarted touch and heated glance heightening the intensity when they finally came together. She was soaking wet when he entered her, and was shocked to feel herself building to climax with just a few strokes.
“Tyr—” she began, but before she could collect herself enough to ask for anything (slower, faster, less, more) she came with an explosive rush, back arching and lips stuttering on incoherent words.
But that hardly slowed her down. Tyr started to pause, but Cela shook her head, clamped a hand on his bare buttocks and pulled him closer with no hesitation. He was kissing her again as he thrust steadily in and out, and she felt the strain of his effort to hold back as she built toward a second climax. This time, rather than the sudden release of the first time, it built slowly until she threw her head back and let herself fall into it.
This seemed to be all it took to bring him over as well. They shuddered together and finally, slowly, sweetly began to relax, bodies so twined together it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began.
“How is this possible?” she murmured into his shoulder.
“I don’t know.”
Tyr unwound himself enough from her bare, clinging limbs to raise his arm in the moonlight. He turned it slowly from one side to the other. Then he shook his head and wrapped his arms more tightly around her.
