Page 93 of This Orc’s Got Rizz

"I read people," she says. "That's the whole of me. Eleven years at tables, fourteen months of hell, twenty-one days on a mountain, and every single person I have ever met, I had them in four minutes and they never had one true inch of me."

"I am aware."

"You read me on Day 6." Her thumbs move along my jaw. "You read me in four sentences about a joint nobody checks, and then you sat there for twenty-one nights and let me hand it over at my own speed, and you never once flinched, and Ghorlan, nobody has ever, in my life, held still for me like that."

"I would like to do that for a long time."

"Then shut up about the roof," she says, and takes my mouth.

She tastes like blackberry wine and four hundred miles of road.

I have been careful with her three times: once in a tent in a lightning hold with my hand behind her head to keep it off a root, once under a rock overhang with a camera eighty feet away and a gully between us, and both of those had weather in them or a lens on them or a clock running.

There is nothing running now.

I stand up out of the chair with her and she comes up with her legs around my waist, a hundred and forty pounds hooked on me like a coat, and I put her down on the table.

Then I stop.

"This table is red oak," I say. "Two inch top, four legs, mortised aprons, and my great-grandfather built it in a shop that had no power in it. Static load, six hundred pounds. Dynamic, considerably less, and there is a repair in the near-side apron from a thing my cousin did in a year I will describe to you later."

She has her hands in my shirt and her forehead against my sternum and she is shaking, and it takes me a second to work out that she is laughing.

"Are you," she says, "load-rating the furniture."

"I am telling you the table holds."

"That is the single most romantic sentence anyone has ever said to me and I would like it on a plaque."

"It holds," I say, and get her shirt over her head.

She is small on that table and there is a great deal of light from one bulb over the sink, and she is thinner than she was on Day 1 and stronger than she was on Day 1, and there are marks on her from twenty-one days that will be gone in a month and marks that will not. A white line at the temple. A callus across the base of every finger. Bruising gone yellow on the left hip from the mud at the final.

I put my mouth on all of it in order.

Her hands go into my hair. Her back comes up off the oak. When I take the tip of one breast into my mouth and use my tongue on it, slow, with the flat of it, she makes a sound with no shape to it at all, and when I do it again with my teeth she says a word about God and gets a fistful of my collar and pulls, and the seam at the shoulder goes, audibly, and neither of us stops for it.

I get her out of the rest of it standing between her knees.

Her thighs come open around me. She is wet enough that it is on the inside of both of them, and I put two fingers through it and she goes up onto her elbows and swears at the ceiling.

"That's a lot of hand," she says, unsteadily.

"One finger."

"That is a lie."

"Two, then." I give her the second one and her whole body arches off the table. "Slowly."

"Ghorlan..."

"You take your time," I say, "and I will take mine, and there is no crew coming up this hill in the morning."

She takes her time.

I have her by one hip to hold her on the oak and my mouth on the inside of her thigh, and I work her open with two fingers curled forward until she is loud in a house with nobody in it, and then I put my mouth where my hand is and she gets both hands into my hair and comes apart in about ninety seconds, out loud, thighs locked around my head, with her heel drumming once against the small of my back.

The table holds.