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Two years of standing on the wrong side of a counter, and now there was no counter anywhere in this house, and both of us knew it. We went still at the same time, her back against the shut door, my arms bracketing her.

“Well,” she said, breathless. “Here’s a wall, and here’s you at it. No tea in the house to blame.”

“None.”

“Whatever shall we tell the village?”

“Nothing,” I said, and picked her up.

I carried her down the hall the same as I’d carry the best of a harvest, careful and greedy at once. I set her down at the edge of the big bed in the dark and got down on my knees on the floorboards in front of her. I’d been thinking about the fit of us for longer than I’d confess, and kneeling put my eyes level with hers.

Her breath went out of her.

“Solved it,” she whispered. “You’ve been engineering this house for a year, and you solved us weeks ago, didn’t you? Kneeling height.”

“Bed height,” I said. “Built it last spring. Hoped.”

“You hoped. You built furniture for me, you absolute⁠—”

I kissed the rest of that sentence away, and she put her hands back on my horn-bases like they lived there now. The not-purr came up out of my chest, and I felt no shame in it.

“I want to learn you,” I told her, my forehead to hers, both of us breathing rough. “Tonight. Just you. My mouth, your say-so, and nothing you don’t ask for twice. The mouth is the authority. Yours. Say what you want, Rain.”

Her scent went up like a struck match, and even so, I waited for the words, because the nose is not the authority. We’d signed that treaty in the kitchen, and I kept my part of bargains.

“Yes,” she said. “That. All of that. Now, please, before I expire.”

There was a courtship custom I hadn’t told her about. It came late in the order, and I’d never let myself hope as far as the late customs. The provider proved the harvest. What his ground grew, he laid out, and the one he’d chosen wanted for nothing at the table. My people meant it about food.

It was not entirely about food.

I laid her back on the bed I’d built with the hope she’d join me in it, and I unlaced her boots and set them down on the floor.

Then I slowly started learning my witch.

Her skirts came up over my forearms in armfuls, wool and linen and warmth, and she laughed at the ceremony I made of it until the ceremony reached the back of her knee, and her laugh broke in the middle.

Everything after that I did the same way I’d plow. Unhurried. One line at a time. No ground skipped.

I kissed the inside of her knee. The soft crease where her thigh begins. The place a hand’s breadth above that where her breath went out of her and did not come back.

My hands were big. I got one around her thigh, thumb to fingers, and opened her. She said my name in a voice I hadn’t heard from her in two years.

Then I put my mouth on her.

She came up off the quilt. Both hands went into my hair and held on tight.

A human male had a human mouth.

I didn’t.

I covered her with my ogre mouth, stroking her clit with my tongue, sliding a finger inside her.

My chest joined in.

“Goran—” Her voice had gone high and thin. “Your chest. Your—do that again. Do not stop doing that.”

I didn’t.