She kisses me.
It's soft at first, careful, the beginning of something rather than the middle, and then her hand comes up to my jaw and it stops being soft. I make a sound low in my throat and kiss her back and she tastes like cold rain and warmth underneath it and I'm aware of her hand in my hair, of the fire beside us, and then of nothing else — genuinely nothing else, no cave, no storm, nothing except her. She makes a small sound against my mouth and I feel it everywhere.
She moves, shifting, and her knee comes over my leg and then she's in my lap, weight settling against me, her hands braced against my bare chest, and I groan into the kiss and pull her closer and she sinks into me like she's been waiting to, like she's been arguing herself out of it for weeks, and the fire cracks and the rain keeps coming and I don't notice either.
She shifts in my lap and I feel it everywhere — the friction of her weight, the warmth of her skin against my chest — and I groan into her mouth, loud enough that it echoes off the cave wall, which is embarrassing, but she makes another smallsound in response and I lose track of being embarrassed about anything.
But then it hits me.
Not like a thought — more like cold water, sudden and sharp. I pull back. Not far, just enough that I can see her face, enough to put an inch of honest air between us.
She stops. Her hands are still braced against my chest, her hair falling forward around her face, and she looks at me with her brow furrowed, that familiar sharp assessment snapping back into place.
"What?" she says.
"I don't want to rush this." My voice has dropped without my meaning it to, rough at the edges. I let my forehead fall forward to meet hers and close my eyes for a moment, because it's easier to say it like that. "I want you. Make no mistake about that. I'm not—" I exhale. "I'm not pulling back because I don't want this."
She's very still.
I open my eyes. She's watching me from an inch away, close enough that I can see the firelight move in her green eyes, and I don't look away from her when I say the rest of it.
"You've been free for a month." It comes out quiet. Not accusing — I'm not accusing her of anything, least of all this. I'm accusing myself of the possibility of moving too fast, of letting want make me careless with something I don't want to be careless with. "A month is nothing. A third of how long they had you. I know you, Aislin. I know how you think. And I don't—" I press my thumb once, gently, against her jaw. "I don't want you walking back to the base with regret. I'd rather have nothing than that."
Silence. The fire shifts. Rain against stone.
She looks at me for a long moment, and I watch her doing what she always does — reading, parsing, looking for the lie init — and she doesn't find one, and something in her face does a quiet thing, a loosening.
"You know what I've spent the last several months learning?" she says.
I wait.
"What pain feels like." Her voice is flat, not performing anything. "What it feels like at someone else's hands. What it feels like to have no say in it." She holds my gaze and doesn't look away. "I know that. I know it well. I know every variation of it." A beat. "I want to know what the other thing feels like. I want—" Her jaw tightens, not with anger, with the effort of asking for something she doesn't have much practice asking for. "Pleasure. I want that. Please."
The wordpleasefrom Aislin lands somewhere in my chest and stays there.
"Are you going to shut me out after?" I ask. "Run back to your cabin and build the walls back up?" I'm not angry about it — I just need to know. I need to know what I'm walking into. "Because I can take a lot, but I can't take that."
"No." She says it before I can beg her not to breakme. "I'm not." And then the corner of her mouth does that thing — not quite a smile, more the threat of one. "You're stuck with me. Stuck getting up before sunrise just to appease me."
The laugh that comes out of me is short and genuine and I feel the tension in my chest break open like ice in spring. "I don't mind the early mornings."
"I know you don't," she says.
And then I kiss her.
This time it's different — not the soft beginning of the first one or the heat of the second, something else, something that knows where it's going and isn't in a hurry to get there. I feel her settle into it, the last of the tension going out of her shoulders, her hands sliding up over my chest and around my neck, and Icup her face in both my hands and kiss her until the rain sounds distant and the fire is just warmth on my back.
She reaches between us and her hands find the clasp of her bra and she undoes it, slow, and slides the straps off her shoulders, and I pull back far enough to see her.
I don't have a single clever thing to say.
There's not a word in any language I speak for what she looks like in the firelight — it moves over her skin in gold and amber, catching the curve of her, the lean lines of her, and she holds my gaze with that defensive lift to her chin that she uses when she's waiting to be disappointed, waiting for the other shoe, and I realize she's braced for something — an appraisal that makes her feel smaller, maybe, or some dismissal she's already half-prepared for. I don't let her wait.
I take my time looking. Not appraising. Just looking at her the way she deserves to be looked at — like she is exactly what she is, which is devastating, which is the only word I've had for weeks and which proves itself now more completely than I know what to do with. Firelight and dark hair loose around her shoulders and green eyes watching me carefully.
"You are so beautiful," I say, and it comes out quieter than I meant, stripped of any performance, just the plain truth of it. "I can't stand it."
Her chin drops a fraction. Something flickers behind her eyes.
