"Aye."
Gods.
The confession of it — hers and his both — turned the whole room molten. She pushed back against him with no finesse left at all and heard him curse low and filthy when he felt it.
"Again," he said, hand rougher on her clit. "Be loud again."
No one nearby. Closed studio. The nearest workers long gone. The only witnesses his sample wall and the panel on the easel and whatever gods oversaw people too tired to act wisely. Iva let the volume go. Let him hear what he had done to her when competence stopped feeling like a liability and started feeling like the thing he wanted most.
She came hard, cunt clamping down around him, forehead knocking the tabletop, voice breaking open on his name. Mavrek followed almost immediately, thrusting deep and staying there while his cock jerked hot inside her. He came with a brokensound against the back of her neck, one hand crushing hers flat into a smear of blue pigment while thick heat flooded her in pulses that made her legs shake.
Then silence, except for breath.
And the small dry sounds of damaged sample boards settling to the floor.
Mavrek withdrew slowly. Iva hissed at the emptying stretch and the warm slide of him leaving her body. She stayed folded over the table a moment longer because standing seemed conceptually ambitious. Chalk dust had printed across one breast where her chemise had twisted down. Mineral grit clung to the damp inside of her thigh. Her hair felt full of paper fibers and powdered color.
When she finally turned, she saw the wall behind them.
Several strips still hung. Several did not. One whole row of active experiments had been smeared where her back and shoulders had driven into them. A pale green board had split. Two nearly-dry sample cards lay face-down in a streak of mixed blue and skin oil on the floor. Another had taken the print of her hand clean through the center.
The pale green board stopped her.
She knew that strip. She had stood before it two evenings ago and watched the gray-green shift from muddy to luminous depending on angle. The one that had failed three times in a day. The one he had been working hardest to hold still in its own light. Now it lay cracked into two clean halves on the floor with a heel print across the wet face where one of them had stepped on it during the worst of things.
Mavrek looked at the damage.
Not briefly. He looked at the green board, picked up both halves, and held them edge to edge as if testing whether the break might yet be salvageable. It was not. The crack ran through the test area. She watched his thumb move once acrossthe ruined surface and knew he was reading what could not be recovered.
Then he set both halves aside on the discard pile.
"They needed updating anyway," he said.
Which was true of most of the wall. Not of that strip.
The dismissal was real. So had the moment before it been.
Iva pulled her blouse together with fingers not yet steady. "I damaged your work."
"Aye."
Not denial. Not reassurance first.
He stooped, lifted one of the other fallen boards, examined the smear of skin oil and blue dust across it, and set it aside from the salvageable pile with flat practicality. "Some of it."
"The green one was not ready to be updated."
His hands stilled for half a breath on the next board. Then he continued sorting. "Nay."
She waited for the anger she had earned, or the easy forgiveness that would have been worse. Neither came. Only his hands moving through the pile, separating what survived from what did not, with the same brutal efficiency he brought to flood-damaged sections of the wall.
"That was very noble after the fact."
"Nay." He looked at the sorted stacks. "It is accounting."
There. Honesty that refused to flatter either of them. It had cost him something. He had let the cost stand, then chosen her over the boards. Neither fact canceled the other.
Iva wiped at her throat and came away with mineral shimmer on her fingers. Paint dust striped her skirt. There was grit in her hair and between her breasts. Her whole body felt used in the specific honest way two exhausted working bodies used each other when they had stopped pretending mess was avoidable.