"You’re supposed to be relaxing," she objected as he rose from the sofa with a slight wince, crossing to the wide windows that lined the far wall to peer down to the street. "Can’t they handle whatever it is?"
"Hard to relax when it sounds like the walls are about to come down. Rukh is alone down there." He’d already been crossing the apartment, tugging his previously discarded t-shirt over his head when his phone buzzed across the coffee table’s smooth mahogany surface. Silva listened as he exchanged tense, terse words with whoever was on the other end of the line, his voice sharp and clipped, tight fury replacing the serenity that had softened his brow only moments earlier; watched their relaxing weekend die as he flung the phone on the sofa, striding across the room and out the door without even pausing to put shoes on.
"Silva, stay upstairs." His short bark echoed up the narrow stairwell as he disappeared into the blackness, almost as if he knew she stood at the top, slipping on her flip-flops to follow him. She kicked the shoes off in frustration before slamming the door, adding to the clearly heard commotion coming from below, stomping back to the sofa and flouncing down in what even she admitted was a childish, petulant way.So much for a nice, relaxing weekend out of the business.
She would never voice her opinion aloud, lest she hurt his feelings, but Silva was convinced Tate never actuallyneededto be at the restaurant or the bar. He was exacting and regimented and his staff was cross-trained in nearly every operation — a credit to his experience and business savvy and management style, to be sure — but it left him very little to actually do, from what she could tell. Cymbeline and Thessa were both full-time, as was Rukh, and Elshona had her own staff in the kitchen . . . there was no reason he couldn’t spend more time with her, no reason these weekends together couldn’t be a more regular occurrence, an opinion she knew was shared by members of his staff.
"I’m so happy to see you again," Cymbeline had squealed several weeks earlier on a Sunday morning, just a few hours before she returned to Cambric Creek and her life of heavy expectation for another week. Silva felt like a drab mouse next to the beautiful mothwoman and had tortured herself in the very beginning, wondering what kind of relationship she and Tate had shared before her hiring, but Cym was sunny and friendly and impossible to dislike. "Things are getting serious then?"
Silva had no idea how she was meant to respond, feeling her neck heat at the question. They’d never discussed their relationship in any way and it had only been a handful of weeks at that point, and she had convinced herself that was for the best — they needed time to get to know one another, time to decide if this was anything more than an extended weekend hook-up, and she wasn’t any closer to deciphering Tate’s feelings towards her than she had been the day she’d first returned to the resort with Lurielle. She’d been saved from answering, for Cymbeline was nothing if not a chatterbox.
"You know, Thessa thinks he needs a girlfriend." The mothwoman beamed before bending to pull her tablet from its charging station behind her hostess stand, and Silva knew she’d been flushed purple. The empty bistro would be packed with bodies within the next fifteen minutes, the brunch crowd already humming on the sidewalk beyond the ornate doorway, but Clover’s hostess was undeterred. "But I disagree." Cymbeline had turned to face her fully, crowding her against the wall, with no escape. Tate occasionally grumbled about the way Cym and Thessa had a tendency to "trap him," and she’d never fully appreciated what he’d meant until that moment. "He doesn’t need a girlfriend, Silva. He needs a wife. A wife and at least three children, close enough in age that there’sneverany downtime. You can’t threaten an infant, and a toddler isn’t going to care how many color-coded checklists he makes. He’s really good with kids, did you know that? He’s been my kids’ favorite babysitter since I started here. A hobby that’s not this place, one he can only do on Sunday mornings, that too.That’swhat he needs. I’ve never in my entire life known anyone more tightly wound than that man. He needs someone to unwind him. You’d be a perfect unwinder, Silva, I’m just saying."
She’d burned with embarrassment at the time, but the mothwoman’s words had stayed with her and she’d revisited the conversation in her head numerous times since then, their fantasy binding ceremony growing more detailed with each passing week she spent in his company. The grounds of Applethorpe Manor would provide the perfect wooded backdrop for a twilight ring ceremony, in spring when the gardens would be in full bloom, their lush scent perfuming the air. She would wear flowers in her hair, and his would be plaited in a traditional old Elvish style . . . their children would have her wide eyes and his mischievous smile, her lavender skin and his glossy dark hair. It was stupid and silly and they’d never discussed where things were going. It was still early days, but it had become her favorite daydream, and she simply couldn’t help herself. But just maybe, Silva reminded herself, pushing up from the sofa to peer down at the line of bikes parked in front of the pub, her feelings weren’t so entirely one-sided after all.
The presence of the cider in his refrigerator was a little thing; a meaningless, insignificant thing . . . but it was one of many little, insignificant things she’d noticed over the last two months. When he’d learned the eucalyptus diffuser in the ladies’ room at Clover made her sneeze, it had been replaced with one in a crisp cotton scent by her next visit. She liked having a glass of water on the bedside table every night, and she made due on the weekends she visited, despite the fact that his glasses were too big for her to comfortably grip . . . and then one weekend she’d opened the cupboard in his kitchen to find a line of smaller, daintier glasses on the bottom shelf, easily within her reach, one he’d filled from a filtered water pitcher in his refrigerator, another new purchase, setting it on a cut-glass coaster that had been placed on her side of the bed. When she inevitably woke in the middle of the night, slipping out of bed to tiptoe across the room, her path would be lit with moonlight, the blackout curtains on his wide windows left open, knowing that she disliked the dark. Tate wasn’t as big and bulky as other orcs, but he still towered over her, and would do the same to every elf at her club, she was certain. He had no need for a stepstool in his kitchen, yet one had appeared — a pop of mint green, her favorite color, neatly fastened on a hook beside the sink. He kept his apartment at a near arctic temperature, and one weekend a cashmere throw had appeared on the back of the sofa, kitten-soft and wonderful to snuggle into, despite the fact that he was always warm.
A heap of little, meaningless things he did and never mentioned, never making a point to draw her attention to his actions, never mentioning them at all until they had accumulated into a whole pile of insignificant little things that made her giddy. It was early days and they’d not discussed the future of their relationship or their differing expectations . . . but it seemed to her that he’d wasted no time making a space for her and catering to her unspoken needs. Little, insignificant things that were never mentioned, that she noticed all the same — tiny adjustments to his life to make her more comfortable in it, signs that he listened when she talked and paid attention to her comfort, despite the fact that she still wasn’t sure where she fit.
Silva had lost track of the tears she’d shed during the numerous drives back to Cambric Creek — for reasons that had very little to do with Tate, yet were entirely about him and the way he treated her. It was more than just feeling desired, she had decided, more than the intoxication of his independent life — she feltseenwhen she was with him, seen in a way she’d never before experienced. It didn’t matter if she was bratty and over-privileged, or too naive and trusting and foolish; didn’t matter if she felt invisible in her life ninety percent of the time, positive that she could be replaced with an automaton and no one would notice, because she wasseenwhen she was with him. There was nothing about herself she needed to change because he saw it all and accepted her exactly as she was, and Silva was certain she would never feel this way again with anyone else. A pile of small, insignificant things, but they mattered greatly to her.
Saw her, but saw her through a wall of his own making, one she was determined to dismantle. She’d begun to dwell on the mothwoman’s words, when she wasn’t daydreaming about wedding flowers, parsing and dissecting each one, paying attention to his facial tics and subtle vocal inflections, memorizing the moments when he slipped on a mask of impassiveness and feigned disinterest, and she’d come to the conclusion that Cymbeline was wrong. Tate didn’t need to be unwound, Silva thought. He needed to berewound. Somewhere along the line, his coil of existence had twisted; twisted and kinked, and the rest of the spool had tightened around his heart. She needed to rewind him, she was certain; unspool his closely guarded emotions, untwist the flaw that kept him holding himself from her at arm’s length, and rewind their threads together.
Her reverie was broken when the air around her jolted; an almost visible ripple in the atmosphere that nearly knocked her off her feet. For the first time since he’d disappeared down the black stairwell, it occurred to her that the commotion from below was coming from withinthe bar, and that the street beyond the loft’s wide windows was empty. A frisson of panic shivered up her neck at the thought of there being real trouble downstairs, for even though he was tall and strong to her, the Pixie’s regulars dwarfed Tate, in addition to vastly outnumbering him.What if he’s in trouble?He’d not hesitated to go charging down the steps, hadn’t ascertained what sort of danger might wait beyond . . .he’s not even wearing shoes!She knelt on the sofa in panic, certain at one point that she was able to hear the sharp ring of his voice. She ought to call someone, ought to dosomething. . . but before long, she heard the sound of him dragging up the steps once more. Vaulting from the sofa, she’d made it halfway across the room before he came through the door, freezing when she saw him.
Something was wrong, very wrong. Although he didn’t appear to be injured in any way she could see, his eyes were lit with a manic and feral energy, as if he were some wild creature, panicking at finding itself trapped indoors for the first time. His wide mouth seemed slightly off-kilter, as if it were tilted on his face, and she realized, feeling her stomach flip as she approached him, that his eyes reflected the leaping flames of a fire that wasn’t actually present. "Tate? Are-are you okay?" His gaze shifted to hers, as if noticing her for the first time, and she sucked in a breath, closing the distance between them in several strides to fist the material of his shirt, a rattling panic gripping her at how far away he seemed, despite being directly in front of her. "Tate?"
". . . Silva." Her name sat in his mouth as if he were tasting it for the very first time, and her hand tightened around the black cotton, pulling him closer, the panic licking up her neck. "Do you hear that music, dove?" The only sound was the distant rumble of a motorcycle engine and a car alarm going off somewhere down the street, and the rasp of his breath, his chest rising and falling beneath her hand in short, sharp heaves.
"Tate." She repeated his name, her voice finding a bit more strength as she gripped his shoulder, giving him a small shake. She had no idea what was wrong, nor what she could do, how she could help, if there was someone she ought to call . . . rising on her toes, she pressed her lips to his jaw, feeling utterly useless. Silva gasped when his hand pressed to the small of her back, nearly lifting her off her feet so that he could bury his face into her hair and inhale deeply.
"Sweet Silva," he murmured into her hair. "You smell like the summer, dove. Summer rain."
He sounded so far away, so far from her, despite being right there, and her heart began to pound in her throat. His hand shifted and her balance slipped, the soft press of her lips turning into a drag of her teeth down the side of his neck as she floundered, the sound rumbling from his throat very nearly a growl when his hand pressed into her once again, trapping her in place. She didn’t know what was wrong and she didn’t know how to help, not truly . . . but she could distract him, she decided, distract him away from whatever sucking morass had trapped him, distract the only way she knew how. Someday she would know his heart well enough to do so without the use of her body, but today was not that day and she needed to work with what she had.
His chest heaved when she bit at the tender skin of his throat, stretching up to trap his earlobe between her teeth, slipping her hand beneath the t-shirt’s hem and scraping her nails down his chest until his mouth caught hers in a bruising kiss. She felt him inhaling her, his own sharp teeth catching her lips, needle pricks that didn’t hurt as much as she thought they should, until she gasped against him. She had tightened her hand in his hair, squeezing until she felt his skin pull, pushing off his chest until she could drop from her toes, dragging her small canines against his clavicle.
The grey joggers were a perfect canvas for the thick swell of his erection when she lowered to her knees before him, pressing her lips against the fabric, tracing the shape of him until his cock jumped. She’d wanted to do this anyway, Silva reminded herself, heat curling through her as she kissed down his shaft. The trail of her tongue left dark patches of moisture as she worked him through the cotton — down to the root where the thick length jutted from his body, tracing back up a snaking vein until he jerked again. Silva opened her mouth wide, wide enough to take the meat of him, wide enough to bite down on the girth of his shaft with her unsharp teeth. Hard enough to feel; hard enough to hurt. Excitement flared through her when he hissed, dark moisture seeping through the cotton from the puddle of precum he released, just beyond the fat outline in the fabric of his cockhead. She loved how careful he was with her, she reminded herself, stroking him through the cotton, the heat of her breath warming the wet fabric as her tongue laved over him. She loved his gentled teeth against her thighs, loved the way he held her in his arms at night and how considerate and thoughtful he’d been . . . but her heart was racing, exhilaration thumping in her chest when he groaned, his pre-come and her saliva darkening the material as she swallowed him through the cotton barrier, trying to find and work her tongue into his slit.
When she finally pulled down the waistband, his cock released with a bounce, slapping into her cheek.Wind him back to you, she reminded herself, squaring her shoulders when he gripped his shaft, tracing the head over her mouth, leaving a smear of pre-come coating her already glossed lips. His eyes were less wild already, less distant, and as she caught him in her lips, licking a slow stripe over his head, holding his eyes with her own, Silva was relieved to be able to see her reflection there.
"Do you feel better?" she asked innocently, pulling her cami up her body, letting her breasts swing free, knowing he liked to palm the curve of them and roll the dark purple buds of her nipples between his fingers until they were painfully peaked, relief only provided from the heat of his sucking mouth.
"You’re going to be the end of me, dove." His voice was still rough, still slightly ragged, but the echo of that morning’s words set her at ease, almost as much as the sight of herself reflected in his eyes did. The cozy simplicity of that morning seemed like it had happened in another lifetime, but she was close, so closeto winding him back to her from wherever it was that he’d unspooled.
When she took him in hand at last, as she’d done more than a dozen times before at that point, she realized something was wrong. Not wrong, she corrected, holding her breath as she gave him a slow pump. He was thick in her hand, her fingers not quite meeting as she stroked him, but that was normal . . . longer than anyone she’d ever been with, deep green edged in pink around the shiny dome of his head, the concave of his slit bubblegum pink, all traces of green left behind, all normal . . . It was the ripple beneath his skin that was decidedlynotwhat she was used to, forming a ridged line up the underside of his shaft, a small squeak escaping her when she realizedthiswas what she’d been feeling as she rode atop him that morning. She couldn’t explain what would cause such a change, whathappened?! — but as she remembered the drag of him within her, Silva whimpered, deciding it didn’t matter, as long as he was okay.
She held his gaze as she sucked him into her mouth, pushing his foreskin back with her lips, humming as she did so, pumping him slowly with her hand, those newly-discovered ridges rippling beneath the sheath of his foreskin. She’d been good at this once, and she’d become good at it again over the course of the last several months, for she’d learned he loved the sight of her with her lips wrapped around his cock nearly as much as she enjoyed the bump of his nose and the slide of his tongue when she sat astride his face, her thighs pressing into his long ears and her ass bouncing on his chest as she moaned. It didn’t take long for his fingers to thread through her hair and hold the back of her head as she sucked him, pumping lightly against her mouth as her hand pumped him in long strokes, sucking in a quick breath to take him as deeply as possible.
She wanted to make him explode, wanted him to shoot down her throat and fill her mouth, wanted her lips to overflow, a river of his release to run down her chest and over her breasts, felt herself dripping at the thought, wondering if he’d notice if she slipped her hand beneath the waist of her panties to find relief . . . but before she had a chance to live out the debauched image in her head, he was pulling his cock from her mouth, hissing when she deliberately let him feel the scrape of her teeth in retaliation. Silva pushed the shirt up his body once he’d pulled her to stand before him; her kicked-off panties joining the grey joggers in a heap on the floor when he scooped her up, the felt of the pool table rough at her back when she was laid atop it.
She was used to sitting on the smooth wooden edge of the table, her legs stretched wide as he licked her, a prelude to the push of his cock, her legs wrapped around his waist as she balanced at the table’s edge . . . but she’d never been placed in the center in such a way, the triangle-shaped rack of balls pushed away to make room for her. She squeaked in surprise when he pulled himself to the felt, pulling her legs open to kneel between her thighs, feeding his cock into her immediately. He normally teased her, sliding his head against her slickness and stroking her with his long fingers, but there was no time for gentleness and play right then; no time for anything other heat and desperation, and little need for more, for as he pulled back to the tip, thrusting fully in, she felt the drag of those ridges and cried out. She could already see reddened welts rising on his chest from her nails, and scraped down his arms to give him a matching set. When his thumb began to circle her clit in tight, urgent circles, her back arched, feeling the rasp of the table as pleasure coiled in her core, the drag of his cock already making her see stars.
She didn’t know what happened downstairs; didn’t know what had caused his abrupt mood change or the wild look in his eyes and she had a feeling he’d not actually tell her . . . but she was absolutely positive he’d not be able to produce a condom from their position on the table. She could tell from the relentless hammer of his hips that he was close, a good thing, as the angle of her hips coupled with the friction of his cock and roll of his thumb were doing her in. There was no way for him to pull out and disappear to the bedroom — no way she was going to let him reach behind her ear foranything!— when her body seized, clenching around him in a wave of tremors, crying out in annoyance as he pulled out, just in time for his cock to erupt.
The first long rope of his release landed across her belly, while the second pulse of his cock managed to reach the underside of her breast. She’d never had the opportunity to fully appreciate the sheer volume he came, not with his obsessive zeal for themiserablecondoms, causing her to huff in frustration once during happy hour when Lurielle had groused about having to wash the sheets constantly. She wanted to feel him emptying into her like a geyser; wanted to be filled and overflowed . . . but she would settle for being painted in stripes of white across her stomach and chest.
Silva waited for him to say something in explanation when he backed off the table — an explanation for his crazed mood, for the apparent calamity in the pub, for the magical, unexplainable,deliciouschange to his anatomy . . . but all he did was hold his back and twist, testing his mobility. Silva waited for him to wince, or exclaim in pain, her mouth dropping open when he began to laugh, his shoulders shaking.
