Ch.42
We trained past sunset.
Neither of us said why. The light shifted from gold to orange to the deep blue that came before the lampposts along the wall flickered on, and Ais kept finding another sequence to demonstrate and I kept finding another angle to practice and the excuses got thinner as the sky got darker and at some point we both stopped pretending.
The moon was up. Nearly full, bright enough to throw shadows on the stone. Ais's golden hair caught the light and turned silver at the edges. Her breath was visible now, faint clouds that vanished as fast as they formed. The temperature had dropped since sunset but neither of us had mentioned it.
She attacked.
Fast. The moonlight training had a different quality to it. Shadows shifted the timing. Her blade came from angles the dark disguised, and my body had to read the motion instead of the weapon, tracking her shoulder and hip because I couldn't see Desperate's edge in time.
She pinned me.
It happened the way it always happened. A feint I read wrong, a sweep that took my feet, my back hitting the stone, and then Ais was above me with her forearm across my chest and Desperate's point beside my ear. Standard. We'd been here a hundred times. Her weight on my chest, her face above mine, her hair falling on either side of us like a curtain that shut out the wall and the city and the moon.
She didn't let up.
A hundred times. She'd pinned me a hundred times and held it for a beat and then stepped back and reset and neither of us had acknowledged what the position was. Her face above mine. Her breath mixing with mine. Her weight on my chest and the armor between us and the closeness that was combat and wasn't combat and lived in the space where those two things overlapped.
This time she held it. One beat. Two. Three. Her forearm pressed against my chest and her gold eyes looked down at me and the moonlight was behind her and her expression was the flat mask she wore for everything except the mask was cracking at the edges. Her lips were parted. Her breathing was faster than the sparring warranted.
I reached up.
My hand found her jaw. The line of it, smooth and warm, her skin fine-grained under my calluses. My thumb settled against her cheek. My fingers curved behind her ear where the hair was soft and fine.
She went still. The same stillness from the wall two days ago when my hand had covered hers. The processing stillness. Her eyes widened and her lips parted further and she didn't pull back and she didn't push forward and she was frozen above me waiting for whatever came next.
I pulled her down.
Slow. My hand on her jaw, guiding. She let me. Her body lowered until her chest pressed against mine and her hair fell across my face and her breath was on my lips and then there was no distance left.
The kiss was soft.
Her lips against mine, dry and warm and still. She'd frozen again. Every muscle in her body locked, her forearm rigid on my chest, her fingers gripping Desperate so hard I could hear the leather of her glove creak. I held the kiss. Didn't press harder. Didn't open my mouth. Just my lips against hers, warm, steady, patient.
Three seconds of her lips pressed against mine and her body locked in place and her brain trying to process an input it had never received.
Then her lips moved.
A small motion. Barely there. Her lower lip pressing against mine and then releasing and pressing again, tentative, testing. She was figuring it out from first principles. The Sword Princess who could execute a fourteen-move parry sequence from muscle memory was working through how to kiss someone by feel, in real time.
I tilted her chin. Changed the angle. Her lips fit against mine differently and the contact deepened and I kissed her the way she needed to be kissed right now, slow and clear, each motion distinct so she could follow without words.
She made a sound.
Small. Through her nose. A "mm" that vibrated against my lips and was equal parts surprise and discovery, the sound of a girl realizing her body could do this. Could feel this. She'd spent nine years in Orario learning to fight and she'd never learned this and the gap between what she was and what she was experiencing was the widest space in the world.
We broke apart. An inch. Her breath against my lips, fast and uneven. Her gold eyes were wide and her pupils were blown and her ears were red. Full red, the color extending down the back of her neck, visible in the moonlight.
She stared at me. Her lips were wet. Her forearm on my chest had softened from a pin to a rest, her weight no longer holding me down but just there, her body against mine.
"...Again."
One word. From anyone else it would have been a request. From Ais it was the most exposed she'd ever been. Her voice was quiet and her eyes were still wide and the word cost her, the effort of asking for what she didn't have a category for.
I pulled her down.
The second kiss was different. Her mouth opened against mine and her hand released Desperate and the rapier clattered on the stone beside my head and her fingers found my shirt and gripped. Her fists bunched the fabric at my chest and she kissed me back and she still didn't know what she was doing and it didn't matter because the trying was doing all the work. Her lips moved against mine and her body pressed closer and her heartbeat came through the armor, hammering.
My hands went to her waist. The armor was there, the articulated plates of her battle dress, and my palms settled on the leather between the plates where her body was warm underneath. She was trembling. Fine, continuous, the vibration running through her frame, and the Sword Princess who fought Demi Spirits on Floor 59 was shaking because a boy was kissing her on a wall in the moonlight.
I broke the kiss and moved to her jaw. Kissed below her ear. Her breath caught. Kissed her neck, the slope where it met her shoulder, and she gasped and her hand flew from my shirt to my hair and her fingers dug in and pulled and the sound she made was a sharp inhale through her teeth that she didn't seem to know she'd produced.
Her neck was warm. Her pulse was racing under my lips, fast enough that the vein was visible when I pulled back to look. She was still above me, her weight on my chest, and her eyes were closed and her lips were parted and her ears were burning and she was breathing through her mouth in short pulls that fogged in the cold air.
I found the gap in her armor. Below the gauntlet on her left arm, where the plate ended and a strip of bare skin showed between the metal and her glove. My fingers touched the inside of her wrist. The skin there was thin and soft and her pulse jumped against my fingertips and she flinched. Her whole body jerked at the contact and her eyes opened and she looked at my hand on her wrist and then at my face.
"Bell."
Her voice was different. Lower than her usual flat register. The consonants softer. She said my name the way someone says a word they've just learned the meaning of.
I moved my thumb across the inside of her wrist. Slow. The skin was smooth and the tendons flexed under my touch. Her eyes went half-closed and her breath stuttered and her hips shifted against mine, a small unconscious movement that pressed her weight down and the heat of her came through the armor and through my pants.
She pulled back.
Her hand left my hair. She pushed up on one arm, creating space between us, and her body was rigid and her breathing was ragged and she wasn't looking at me. She was looking at the wall beside my head with an intensity that suggested the stonework had become the most important thing in Orario.
"I..." She swallowed. Her jaw was working. "Not here." Her voice cracked on the second word. She tried again. "Not yet."
I let go of her wrist. My hands went to the stone on either side of me, flat, giving her space.
"Whenever you're ready."
She looked at me. Her gold eyes were dark in the moonlight and her ears were still crimson and her hair was falling across her face and she looked wrecked. The mask was gone and what was behind it was a girl who'd felt something she didn't have a name for.
She stood. Her legs were unsteady. She shifted her weight to correct and the motion was visible her body wasn't perfectly controlled. She bent and picked up Desperate from where it had fallen and sheathed it and the mechanical familiarity of the weapon steadied her.
She took three steps toward the wall's edge.
Turned back.
"I'll be ready," she said.
Then she was gone. Down the stairs, fast, her footsteps fading into the city noise below, and the wall was empty and the moon was bright and I lay on the cold stone where she'd pinned me and my heart was going and my lips were warm and my hand was still feeling the pulse in her wrist.
I sat up. The moonlight was everywhere. Orario was quiet below. Someone was singing in a tavern three streets down, the melody drifting up in fragments.
I picked up the Hestia Knife from where it had skidded during the pin. The blade was cold. I sheathed it.
I didn't go home for a while.
She was halfway down the main street before she realized she was touching her lips.
Her fingers were against her mouth, pressing, and she didn't know when she'd put them there. She pulled her hand away and looked at it in the lamplight and her fingertips were warm.
He'd kissed her. She'd asked him to do it again. She'd said "again" and the word had come out before the part of her that controlled words could stop it. He'd kissed her neck and her body had done things she hadn't told it to do. Her hips had moved. Her hand had grabbed his hair. A sound had come out of her that she'd never produced before.
She was still trembling.
Inside her chest, very deep, in the place where the cold had lived since she'd woken from the ice, something was humming. Faint. Warm. She didn't have a word for it. She pressed her hand against her sternum and felt the humming through her palm and her eyes stung and she didn't know why her eyes were stinging because she wasn't sad and she wasn't angry and she wasn't afraid.
Her lips were still warm.
She walked faster.