"Aye."
Then he seized the back of her neck and kissed her as if the oil had crossed some last invisible threshold he could no longer be expected to respect.
The maruk was on his mouth now. On hers a breath later. Bitter-salt, warm, intimate already with future. She could taste tomorrow in it and loved, ferociously, that tonight she had put it on him before he ever laid it on her skin in public daylight.
He got her out of the ruined dress in pieces. Not elegantly. She did as much damage to him in return. Shirt torn wide. Her palms on his chest, over the hard planes and the darker hair and the old pigment-stains at his wrists that no washing ever truly lifted. She wanted him naked not for prettiness but because tomorrow he would stand before a crowd clothed in tidepainter ritual, formal, controlled.
Tonight she wanted the body underneath all that office.
He bent and took one nipple into his mouth while his hand found between her legs again, two fingers driving into her with a depth that made her cry out without shame. The chest rocked under them. He sucked harder when she made a second sound, and then his thumb found her clit and the first orgasm hit like a snapped line, hard enough to throw her head back against the wall.
He watched it happen, taking nothing blindly.
She was still shaking when he pulled her off the chest and onto her feet. For one stupid second the world tipped. Then he had her upright against him, both hands under her ass, lifting her again while she wrapped herself around his waist and laughed into his shoulder at the size and absurdity of him.
"Bed," he said.
"Brilliant thought."
He laid her down on the kesh platform so fast the furs breathed under her. The ceremony brushes were still in her side vision where they lay on the linen cloth beside the bed, tomorrow waiting in the dark while tonight devoured itself around them. The oil bowl threw off warm amber light.
Mavrek stripped the last of his clothes without taking his eyes off her. His cock sprang heavy against his belly, flushed dark, already wet at the tip. She reached for him immediately, greedy now, and his whole body flinched when her hand closed around him.
"Iva."
Warning and plea in one sound.
She stroked him anyway, slow first because she wanted to feel the weight and heat of him in her palm, the thick vein under skin, the way he shuddered and tried not to thrust into her hand. She used the oil still on her fingers to slick him, spreading amber shine down the length of him. The sight of maruk oil on his cock nearly unmade her all by itself.
Mavrek made a raw sound and caught her wrist.
"If you keep that up," he said, "I will spill in your hand like a boy."
"And?"
His grin flashed, sudden and hungry and almost savage.
"And I intend to be inside you when I lose my mind."
He dragged her hand to his mouth, sucked the last of the oil from her fingers, and came over her.
He opened her thighs and knelt between them and stared once, full and open, at the slick wreck she had become under his hands. Then he bent and put his mouth on her cunt with the unhurried greed of a man who had spent five weeks holding something in check and no longer saw a reason to.
She cried out hard enough to hear it bounce faintly from the workshop front room. His tongue worked her without mercy,not careless, never that, but ruthless in its intent. Every time she twisted from the edge, he held her hips down and drove her back toward it. Every time she tried to muffle a sound, he pulled her hand aside and watched her.
"Let me hear it," he said.
She did.
Her second climax tore through her with his mouth still on her and his hands pinning her wide. He only rose when she was limp and trembling and flushed from chest to thigh.
Then he entered her in one hard thrust that made both of them curse.
This was not the slow deliberate meeting in the kesh three nights earlier. Tonight he fucked her like a man released from a sentence. Hard, deep, already lost enough that the first few thrusts drove the platform against the wall in a rhythm she could feel through her spine. She met him with the same violence.
He caught her thigh over his shoulder and changed the angle until the next thrust went so deep she saw white at the edges of the room.
"That's it," he said, voice broken open, no formality left in it. "Take it. Aye. Just so."