My mouth goes dry.
She takes a step closer. The lantern light catches the fine scales along her cheekbones, turning them into tiny points of gold. "If you were standing at a Presenting Ceremony," she says, her voice low and steady, "I would choose you."
The words land somewhere deep in my chest, in a place I didn't know was waiting for them. I swallow hard. My heart jackrabbits beneath my ribs like it's trying to break free.
I take a beat. Because this matters. This matters more than anything has mattered in a long time, and I need her to know that I'm not just riding the moment. That this isn't the cave or the storm or adrenaline talking.
"A'Vanti." My voice comes out rougher than I intend. "Do you really mean that?"
She holds my gaze, unwavering.
"Because I need you to know something." I close the distance between us, stopping just short of touching her. "I'm all in. Ihave been for a while now. I know what I want, and it's you. Not just tonight. Not just while we're stuck in a cave. You."
Her guarded, searching expression melts. She reaches up and cups my face in her hands, her palms cool and smooth on my jaw, and she kisses me.
Her mouth finds mine with certainty, with intention, and I wrap my arms around her and pull her close and kiss her back with everything I've been holding in for months.
When she draws back, her eyes are luminous. "I am sure."
Then she gives me a grin that, on any other face, I would classify as wicked. On A'Vanti, it's devastating. Her hands drop to the collar of my shirt. "Here," she murmurs, her fingers finding the top fastener. "Let me help you out of these."
She works the closures with deft, deliberate movements, peeling the sand-dusted fabric away from my shoulders. I stand very still, not trusting myself to move, watching her face as she concentrates. When the shirt falls free, she folds it with the same careful precision she brings to everything and sets it aside.
Her fingers brush the skin of my chest, light and curious, tracing the line of my collarbone. I shiver, and it has nothing to do with the cave air.
"Your turn," I say, and it comes out closer to a croak than actual speech.
A'Vanti unwinds her wrap first, the fabric sliding off her shoulders and pooling in her hands. She folds it and sets it beside my shirt. Then she turns her back to me and gathers her hair, sweeping it over one shoulder to bare the fastenings of her tunic.
I take the hint. My fingers find the closures at the back of her neck, and I work them open one by one, trying to keep my hands steady. The tunic loosens, and I ease it down over her shoulders, the fabric whispering against her scales as it falls away.
Nothing could have prepared me for the sight of her. The lantern light catches every curve and plane of her form. The fine overlapping pattern of her scales runs down her spine like hammered gold, shifting from pale amber at her shoulders to a deep, burnished gold along the small of her back. She is astonishing.
When she turns to face me, every word I've ever known leaves my head.
Her body is lean and long, built like a blade. She is narrow through the shoulders and waist, with the faintest rounding at her hips. Her breasts are small and high, the nipples a shade darker than the surrounding scales, like tiny coins of burnished copper. She is not built like a human woman. The proportions are different, the lines sharper, something almost androgynous in the shape of her frame. None of her differences matter because she is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, and my brain has completely stopped working.
We help each other with the rest of our clothes, and the quiet practicality of it steadies me.
Then A'Vanti steps back and looks at me.
Really looks at me. Her gaze travels slowly over my body with the same careful attention she gives a building she's assessing, methodical and thorough. Her gaze traces my shoulders, my chest, the plane of my stomach, then drifts lower, and stays there.
My body responds to that stare with zero subtlety. I feel myself stir and harden under the heat of her attention, and there's not a damn thing I can do about it. A desert worm joke floats through my mind, but I clamp down on it so hard my back teeth ache. There are moments in a man's life when it is not the time to be a goober, and this is one of them.
When her eyes finally travel back up to mine, there's a heat in them that wasn't there before. A gaze that is approving and unhurried and very, very deliberate.
A'Vanti takes my hand and laces her fingers through mine.
"Follow me," she says, and pulls me toward the water's edge.
The pool stretches before us, pale blue and faintly luminous, steam drifting across its surface in slow drifts. Up close, I can see the sandy bottom sloping gently downward.
A'Vanti pauses at the water's edge.
"It was in this pool," she says, "that I participated in my naming and caste-choosing ceremony."
Her gaze has gone somewhere far away.
