Page 74 of Beds and Blades

The sky through the window was the gray that exists between night ending and morning beginning.

Skip was still asleep.

I was draped over his chest, my new favorite place in the world. Dense muscle, furnace heat, the steady drum of his heart under my cheek.

I looked at the ring on his left hand. Plain steel.

Then I looked further down.

The sheet concealed nothing. His cock strained beneath it, thick and fully hard, lifting the fabric in a way that made looking away feel impossible.

By the time I dragged my eyes back to his face, I was already wet.

Skip’s body had apparently reached its own conclusion about the morning. Mine had reached the same conclusion.

Skip’s eyes opened.

“Skip,” I said.

“I was not going to my quarters that night. I was coming to find you.”

I made myself hold his gaze.

“I have thought about the claiming.”

I looked at him without the analytical buffer and without the filing system running underneath. I looked directly, the way you look at someone when you have decided to stop managing what they see.

“I want it,” I said. “I want you to claim me.”

His composure broke on a single breath. Then his gaze dropped to the ring.

“That pleases me,” he said.

“I knew,” he said. “I have known that you would accept. I was waiting for you to finish knowing.”

He looked at the ring on his left hand for a moment.

He removed it with care. Its importance was visible in the way he held it.

“I want you as mine. For life. If you will have me.”

My mind stopped, briefly, and left me with the unmediated experience of what was actually happening.

My heart slammed against my ribs. “I will have you,” I breathed. “I love you.”

He smiled.

I looked at the ring in his hand. The circumference of it, the weight of it, the heft of a ring worn by a large man for a long time. It had been built for his fingers. I looked at my own hand, and the practical mathematician in me raised a brief objection.

There was no possible way that ring was going to fit me.

He placed it on my finger. It was loose.

Then the metal moved. The band contracted against my skin, slow and deliberate. It was reshaping itself around my finger as if it had been waiting for the correct dimensions all along. The weight changed. The balance changed. The impossible circumference became exact.

I stared at it.

I had seen magic in this world. I had watched pendants glow and wounds close and dead things move that should not have moved. I had accepted, intellectually, that Mytharo operated according to principles Earth had failed to include in its curriculum. But there is a difference between accepting magic as a variable and watching a ring resize itself on your hand.