Page 51 of The Orc’s Comfort

She moves her head enough to look at me. Her eyes are glazed and her cheeks are flushed. Something deep in my chest aches with the tenderness of it.

“Rhazgar,” she says. “That was…” She stops. Starts again. “I didn't know anything could feel like that.”

I press my lips to her temple. She is loose and unguarded against me, all her usual sharpness gone soft.

I am not finished with her. Not close to it. But she has given everything she has for the moment, and I can be patient a little longer. I have gotten this far on patience alone; I can wait through one more course.

I lie back along the couch and draw her down with me, until she's settled chest to chest along the length of me instead of tangled in the cushions. She goes without resistance, her breathing slowing by degrees. Within a few minutes, she's asleep on top of me. I lie very still so I don't wake her, already thinking about what I want to feed her next.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Julia

I wake to the low hum of his chest under my cheek, my whole body draped over his, chest to chest, one of his hands resting between my shoulder blades like he's been keeping it there the whole time I slept. The specific quality of quiet tells me he hasn't moved in a while, just let me sleep on top of him like this. My whole body feels loose in a way it hasn't in months. Maybe years.

He shifts beneath me, careful, and eases himself out from under me an inch at a time, one arm still bracing my back until he's lowered me safely onto the cushions where he'd been lying. I make a small sound of protest without opening my eyes.

"I'm not leaving," he says quietly. "Just the kitchen."

I doze, half-aware of cabinet doors, the soft clink of a bowl, something being stirred. The scent reaches me before he does: dark and sweet in a way that isn't sugar exactly, something richer underneath it. I know this smell. I've smelled it in his kitchen before, on nights he decided I needed feeding along with everything else.

When he sits beside me again, I open my eyes to find him holding a small dish, something glossy and amber-dark pooled in the bottom of it.

"What is that?"

"Warm, spiced honey." He dips one finger into it and holds it up, considering.

I reach for the dish. He moves it out of my reach, easy and unbothered, the way you'd redirect a child who's already been told no once and is testing it again.

"Not with your hands."

"I can feed myself, Rhazgar."

"I know." He dips his finger again. "I'd rather you didn't, tonight."

Something about the flatness of that statement, no negotiation in it at all, goes straight through me. I let my hands fall back to my sides.

He feeds me from his finger first, slow, watching my mouth the way he watches everything, cataloguing. The honey is warm, sweet with something underneath the sweetness, cinnamon maybe, and I close my lips around his finger to chase the last of it, drawing it deeper than I need to.

His breath changes. I feel it more than hear it. There's something almost obscene about the small, wet sound I make doing it, about how much I want to do it again. Then he trails a line of it along my collarbone and follows it with his tongue, unhurried. I understand that the food was never really the point.

By the third pass, I've stopped keeping track of what's dessert and what's just him. Heat gathers low in my hips with every drag of his tongue, an ache I recognize from an hour ago, except sharper now, less patient, like my body decided the break was over before I did.

"More," I say, and I'm not talking about the honey.

He sets the dish aside and studies me for a moment, something working behind his eyes.

"I want to try something." His voice has dropped into the register he uses when he's asking permission for something large. "You keep trying to take over. Feed yourself. Direct me. I don't think you can help it, it's who you are." A pause. "I'd like to take that away from you for a little while. Just your sight. Nothing else." He holds up a strip of dark fabric. "Only if you want it."

My pulse jackrabbits into double time. "You'll tell me everything you're doing?"

"No." Amusement moves under his voice. "You want the play-by-play so you can stay ahead of it. That's not what tonight is for." A pause. "I'll ask before anything that matters. The rest, you feel when it happens."

Something in me both resists and wants it badly. "That's not fair."

"It isn't meant to be fair." His hand settles at my jaw, tilts my face up toward his. "It's meant to be mine to decide. You only have to say stop."

"Okay." I mean it more than the single word suggests. "Yes."