Page 55 of The Orc Warrioress and the Elf Lord

“That was last night,” she said.

“Whatever the case,” he said. “I find it hard to believe you have changed your mind so quickly.”

“Well, I have been thinking it over, and it would probably speed everything along,” she said.

“What are you talking about?”

She hunched up her shoulders on the other side of the fire, looking embarrassed and reticent to speak.

He waited.

Finally, she said, “You already must think wretched things about me, I suppose, that I am quite, quite weak-willed and ridiculous. But if I tell you this, you will likely lord it over me and make jokes at my expense and be very horrid. I suppose I want that, actually, because it will make it go so much more quickly. However, I am having trouble exposing myself to it, I find.”

“I am not that sort of man,” he said. “When have you observed me mocking others’ weaknesses, making them feel small?”

“Often,” she said. “You are always and forever teasing me.”

“Teasing is good-natured, it is not cruel,” he said.

“So, that is your excuse.”

He ate more bread. He failed to see how any of this was connected.

“All right, here it is,” she said. “I seem to have sort of fallen in love with you, my lord.”

He nearly choked again. He coughed, pounding his chest.

“I know, I know,” she said. “I am always and forever falling in love with men I should not fall in love with. I seem to be unable to stop myself. And you, of course, have sworn off the entire idea of love—”

“You do not love me,” he said, between coughs. He drank some tea.

“I do,” she said. “And, of course, you think of me like a conquest, as we were saying before, the way men think of women. You will bed me and then tire of me.”

He regarded her. He had never admitted to a woman that he was going to tire of her before. He did not think he should. He should likely have never said whatever it was that he had said to her in the first place to her. He drank more tea.

“So, the sooner that happens, the sooner I will feel betrayed by you and come to hate you instead of love you, and then the whole process will be over,” she said. “On the other hand, if I drag all this out, and I refuse to let you bed me, it will mean that you will try all the harder, and you will get more and more obsessed with it all, and it would be better if I simply gave in. That would speed things along.”

He scratched his chin. He needed to shave. Like many Valaedor elves, his whiskers were sparse and did not grow quickly, but they were growing. He really despised shaving himself, however. He preferred his manservant to do it, who was ever so much better at it than he himself was. “I suppose there’s some sense in what you’re saying,” he said. “But I don’t think… I don’t want to bed you if you’re only letting me do it so that I’ll lose interest in you.”

“Why not?”

He was not sure. “It seems… it’s not…”

“You are going to lose interest.”

“I suppose,” he said. “But admitting it from the outset, it seems to take a great deal of the fun out of it.”

“It would be a favor to me,” she said. “Because I do not wish to be in love with you.”

“You aren’t,” he said. “If you were, you wouldn’t want me to lose interest in you!”

“Obviously, I don’t want you to lose interest in me,” she snapped. “Obviously, I’ve been spending the last however many days, Haem only knows, weeks even, contemplating how to make a man like you fall in love with me, which will never happen, so…” She huffed and took a large bite of hard bread. She chewed.

He looked at her across the fire. The flames were dancing on her face, on her features, her gray-green skin. He was thinking about how she seemed so pretty and so strong at the same time, how he liked how exaggerated all her female features were, how large her breasts and hips were, how much he wanted to undo her braid and spread out her hair over her shoulders, over the tips of her ample breasts. His mouth was dry. “Not here, warrioress.”

“Not here?” she said.

“I want it someplace proper,” he said. “With a roof and a bed and blankets and the like. I’m not having you on the ground under those horse blankets we washed out this morning.”