Page 96 of Moonless

She puts the belt and the knife in a dry hollow under the rock, and her foot wraps after them. Then she starts on the shirt and gets the left sleeve stuck at her elbow.

I step close and take the loose fabric.

“This arm first.”

She slides the bad arm out first, then drags the shirt off over her head, and I hold the sleeve up off the bandage.

Under it she’s wearing two scraps of my cloth and nothing else. One’s tied across her breasts and one at her hips, and she’s hemmed them with tight, crooked little stitches. The rain’s already soaking them to her skin.

Perkele.

I’m going hard, and these trousers are too wet to hide it.

She takes the shirt from me and puts it with the belt.

I make myself look at her shoulder. The pad’s wet around the edges.

“That dressing will need changing when we go in.”

“Then you can change it. After I’ve washed.”

She steps onto the flat stone with her bad shoulder turned away from the hole. She reaches for the loop and stops short.

“Show me again.”

I put the loop in her palm. The stone’s only big enough for two if I stand right up against her back, so I do, and keep my hips out of it.

“Pull down. Only a little.”

She does, and water spills over her right arm. She gasps, then laughs and pulls it farther.

“Oh, that’s better.” She lifts her face into the water, eyes shut, and that’s what I made it for. Her wet hair lies against my wrist while I steady the thong above her hand.

She looks around at me, and I forget to let go of the thong.

She lets go of the loop. The water stops, and she turns around under my arm, slow because of the shoulder.

“Rauk. Bend down.”

I bend before she’s finished saying it, and she puts her good hand on my cheek.

She kisses me, and her mouth’s cold and wet from the rain. I put my right hand on her waist with the claws turned out, so it’s the two fingers I keep bitten blunt against her skin.

She pulls back far enough to look at me and leaves her hand where it is.

“Stay here.”

“Yes.” I lower my head to kiss her again.

This time she opens her mouth under mine. I go slowly, because there’s a fang on either side of her tongue and she’s the one who’d bleed. She doesn’t go slowly at all. She licks along the inside of my lip right up to the fang, gets a fistful of the fur at my shoulder and pulls, and I bend lower so she can come down off her toes.

The rain’s beating every scent on this slope flat, mine and hers and the wolves’ below us, and it’s loud enough on the hide to cover most things. Nothing’s going to track us until it stops. I can still smell her, this close. She’s wet under that scrap at her hips, and it isn’t rain. It’s the smell I scrubbed off my fingers after the full moon.

She leans into me and finds what I’ve been keeping out of her way. My cock’s standing hard, and her belly presses along the whole length of it through the wet cloth. She laughs into my mouth and does it again, slower, on purpose.

“There you are.”

“I’ve been here the whole time. I was showing you the stopper—”