A/N: If you are not currently caught up on "Death Might Be Simpler to Deal With", the following is probably not going to have any meaning (or hold any interest) for you.
The room is large, its fireplace oversized, its bed canopied. For a moment he does not see her.
Allan: I'm not as drunk as you might think I am.
Salima has removed the jewels Robin gave her, and her feet are bare beneath the hem of the borrowed dress she wears. With Marian's help she has taken down her hair and it has been brushed out, black as pitch against the color of the gown. Allan holds out his hands to try and illustrate to her that he's not pickled, but the heady sight of her before him incites an intense tremor in one of them.
Allan: No, see, now, that's not the wine...that's...
He spoke truly. It was not the wine. But he found he did not easily know how to explain to her what it was. After all, she had done what she had done this day on the demand of her King. It was not the same as though she had stepped forward in a Hall among threat of an enemy, in a foreign country, in front of all her best mates and declared of her own free will that she would have him.
Salima: It is a lot to have happen in a single day.
Allan: You can say that again.
Her eyes flicked up, almost a question about the corners of their clear greenness, flicking up to his.
Allan: [his shoulders collapsing] No, wait. This is coming out all wrong.
Salima: And how should it come out?
Allan: That...this night need be nothing more, or less than you wish it.
The lads beyond the door reached an almost dog-like howl in their pickled serenade.
Allan: [pointing to the door] Ignore that.
Salima: [slight frown] You offer to release me from the marriage?
Allan: No, I mean, that is, that would be something only the King or, like, the Pope could do, right? I only...I [speaks quickly to run it all together] offer to release you from what the lads, there, [again gestures to the door] are expecting.
Salima: But if I understand English customs, and I think that in this instance I do, unless we proceed as expected, all that King Richard spoke tonight, what I, and what you said before the gathered company-none of that matters, yes? Unless...the expected? [she glances in the opposite direction of the door, instead, to the bed]
He breathed in slowly and fully through his nose.
Allan: So we are...
Salima: [reasonably] To proceed as any Englishman and his bride might on just such an occasion.
Allan: [a spark returning to himself] Mind you, I think on just such an occasion, at just such a time of night most English gentlemen are too pissed to proceed, and most Englishwomen-rather relieved by that fact.
Salima: And so you are too...'pissed'?
Allan: Naw. I am only...nervous.
A look came over her face that was somewhere between bemused and skeptical. This man, at this juncture-nervous?
Allan: It's just I've never done this before.
Salima: [whispers] Wh?
Allan: [keeping her eye contact] With someone I truly care about.
Salima: [her lips came together in almost a smile] Then it would seem we are both similarly handicapped.
Now it is his turn to be bemusedly curious.
But she did not share all her life and experiences with him at that time, as he did not share all his life and experiences with her at that time. There would be time for such recountings and revelations later.
Marian had, at Salima's request, helped her unthread the gown's lacings before Marian had left her alone. As Allan, this unfamiliar, nervous Allan, held to his ground somewhere mid-way between the door and the bed, she undid herself. The soft fabric of the borrowed gown took naught but a moment or two to part with her skin.
Salima wished, particularly on this occasion, to be totally transparent with him. It would not do to begin things with confusion or mistaken ideas. So she stated the obvious; "My innocence has been lost long past."
In response Allan did not say that it did not matter, nor that he did not mind. He did not (as some might) bid her speak of it no more, nor forget it.
For it did matter. It was a truth, a part of her story, a piece of who she was. For him to silence her on it (even due to good intentions), even though it hurt a part of him to hear it, would have been wrong. In a way, judgmental, even. He was not about to silence her, or attempt to diminish the tragedies of her life in an effort to kiss and make them better, nor belittle or lessen them so that they became little more than straw bogeymen.
As he had vowed to the King and all earlier, he would stand by her, he would go into the future with her; living through it the only way he knew of to reclaim, to overcome the past.
It did not offend or disgust him that she lacked her maidenhead. But he would that it had been something she had given away rather than had forced from her.
Himself, he had chosen to lose his innocence. Chosen poorly, perhaps, not chosen wisely (as with many choices of a dissolute youth spent among tavernfolk and fellow grifters) but still, all the same, a choice.
Salima did not know in that moment, but she would learn in the times after, that Allan was more than sympathetic to the path of a woman who had found it necessary to compromise herself in order to make her way in the world-or to a woman who had been repeatedly forced into such situations beyond her control, beyond her ability to resist, as she had no protector, no family, no standing in her society's culture.
The door was barred (though he did not recall dropping the beam). She was before him. They were separated by some ten feet, his back to the large chamber's ornately dressed bed (this room, had, after all, been meant to house the King). She had dropped her clothes, all her coverings, so that she was to him bare as a newborn babe. Behind her burned, in a blaze, the fire in its place, making her shadowed in contrast, her many scars (distractions at such a moment) concealed in the forgiving darkness. But even so, his eyes showed him enough to know that her nude form surpassed any expectation he might have had, any fantastical dream he might, in unguarded moments, have envisioned.
The space of ten feet between them gave him the feeling, for a moment, of a supplicant, a mendicant encountering a goddess, who has only just sprung to life from her altar in order to interact with her subject.
Allan knew his mouth was slightly open, his eyes slow to blink from the sight of her. He felt his hands tingle, the right one in particular experiencing an involuntary paroxysm of its well-trained muscles, like tiny climaxes shooting down into each fingertip in impatient anticipation of touching and exploring the splendor of what his eyes beheld.
He found himself at an unfamiliar juncture. As with many of his era, he was unaccustomed to complete nudity, even when performing intimate acts. Quick rolls in the hay, or service rendered in exchange for payment, made undressing little more than a waste of one's time (and, often, coin). And so, though he was expert at throwing up a skirt or loosening a lace, he proved a bit dumbfounded when neither skirt nor lacing proved to still be in play.
"I," he licked his lips, trying to return some form of moisture to his mouth, all liquid in his body seeming to have long ago rushed to his tightening groin, "I do not know how to come to you."
In her response, her voice was familiar, patient and even. As always, she could have been speaking about anything, among any company of people, except-except there was, perhaps, a new softness to it, a calm quietness with which he was unaccustomed. "Then," she instructed him, "you must let me come to you."
He wanted to ask how, to know what she expected him to do next. Should he simply stand still? No, he would need a wall, a chair, a something to hold him up; his knees were halfway to buckled already. He looked about for the nearest unoccupied stretch of wall, and his gaze fell on the bed. 'Twould be, he thought, more than a shame to waste it, this bed outfitted, destined for the King's own use. (Now that would prove quite a story.)
He grabbed his shirt at his shoulder blades, pulling it hastily up and over his head, bringing vest and all else with it. And quickly he seated himself on the edge of the bed, trying not to look at her again, trying to concentrate only on removing his own boots, at present the idea of her kneeling to do it for him smacking too much of servitude for his liking.
Boots off, flung to the side (perhaps more comically than the moment deserved), his trousers dropped, half-way between knee and ankle when she joined him there, the space of that ten feet forgotten, the goddess dispelled from the room, and Salima, the beautiful, extraordinary, ever-surprising woman he had just shockingly consented to marry with, her naked skin warm and richly colored, stood beside him, hardly three inches from him, his hands craving the touching of her, longing for the tactile contact, the pleasure, but strangely, hesitant as never before.
His over-full thief's mind could not even hearken back to a thing he had wanted to take, to have, that he had not. Not taken, not had. Not...possessed.
She looked down to his sloughed-off trousers, her gaze signaling him to kick them the rest of the way off.
The light from the fire flicked about the room irregularly. They had taken no time to light any candles. He did not know how his paler English flesh might appear to her. Good, he hoped. Not a disappointment, he sincerely hoped.
Shite. He was going to say something stupid. He felt it coming on, something mood-shattering. It was bubbling up inside him as sure as anything he had ever known. And he would not be able to stop himself, and she would never look at him this way again, never agree, or even entertain the thought of revisiting this astonishingly monumental moment in time.
And then she did a surprising thing.
She touched him.
And it was not his arms, nor his chest (though he had been told before that was quite nice, by more than one girl), and not (though it would have been more predictable) his straining-to-the-breaking-point bits.
No, she brought her slender thumb up to his eye (which closed instinctively at her motion), and brushed it along his lashes, her knuckles resting vertically to his cheekbone. And then, as though his own feared emotion bubbled up from inside her instead, in response to her own gesture, she laughed.
"And wot's so funny about that?" he asked, defensively, before he even knew he was going to speak.
"Ask me later and I will tell you," she promised, the smile from that laugh not yet gone from her face. "Now, you must come to bed."
It was only then he noticed she had stepped into him, closer, so that her hip bumped against his, her pendulous breasts, set well out from her ribcage, tickled against the bareness of his chest.
His senses close to capacity, he sat down. He had not looked to where he had settled himself, realizing in the action that he was clumsily quite close to the headboard, which would not allow him (with her so near, her eyes so attentively on him) to gracefully lie down, his head on a pillow. In an attempt to compensate for the misjudgment, he threw a pillow aside (casually, he hoped it appeared), and chose, as though it had been his intent all along, to position his back against the headboard, sitting up at the head of the bed. He assumed she might sit beside him, might walk around to the other side of the bed to climb in.
She did neither.
One bare foot still to the cool stone floor, she brought her left leg over both of his, smoothly but commandingly mounting his position in the bed as one might a saddle. But no horse, having his back set upon by any rider has yet issued the mixed gasp of surprise, constriction, and pent-up want as did Allan-A-Dale that night.
The suddenness, the surprise of her coming over onto him without foreplay, without preamble, kept him from speaking, even from thought for a moment. They were face to face, her hands to his ears and neck on either side, her elbows bent; his nimble hands impotent no longer, busy learning every curve, every perfection and imperfection in her skin, like a blind man to Braille.
"I can face the night, find strength in your eyes/Not afraid to fall, not afraid to rise."
Her hips (those rounded delights that had spoken to his eye long before he even knew he could like their owner) called his to action, rocking them symbiotically like ships on the ocean's steady but sure rise and fall, in the timeless rhythm (if between them a somewhat more-practiced one) of any wedding night.
In this act, Salima found herself desperate to see into Allan's eyes, to look past the reflections of the fire, the reversed image of the room mirrored there, and see Allan, to see into him; unlike the others (from whom she would at this point be hiding not only herself behind her own eyes, but herself bodily, burying her face, looking away so that she might not even witness what she was part of), and to sort out from him what this moment, this coupling of their twain flesh indeed meant to him.
With the exception of Carter, no man had ever yet pledged himself in any way to her, nor made her promises, much less stood before his king-before Coeur-de-Lion himself-and vowed such a troth under no duress; an eternal fidelity, an oath unbreakable.
Though he would have (so he said, on her behalf) bypassed this proper culmination of the ceremony, she would take no chances in sealing them, thus. Body to body, mind to mind, undressed, unhidden, unfettered by anything beyond the chamber's door.
Nor would she close her eyes, but rather play witness to this event.
She saw now how she wished her life to be: one of no impediments, no actions forgotten or half-completed, no true desire of her heart unarticulated.
She held his face within her hands, not fully realizing that in doing so she spurred herself on to holding him more tightly within her thighs, that in watching him so, learning him so, she came to naturally sense, to sympathetically know how, in that moment, to best please him. To best marry their bodies as one. To travel, to carry one another, even, to the same place.
It proved to be just the beginning of her education on the matter. For she was learning...just because something once, or even, many times, had been taken from her against her will...did not mean the same thing could not also be freely given...by her choice.
She shared it with him here, unreservedly, his hands questing about on her fully welcome, her hands keeping their place at the sides of his face until his eyes told her the time had come. Moments before his vision clouded over, she re-positioned her hands, letting his face, his lips down to her breasts as he narrowed his concentration, and she dug her heels into the straw and down of the pallet mattress to increase her own leverage on his behalf.
His body responded to her skilled hips readily, his satisfaction undulating through them both.
He cough-groaned roughly, a hand going to his now-spinning forehead while he waited to re-gain his breath and balance.
She made the slightest of moves to disengage herself from him (as she had known other men to immediately wish), from their sexual embrace and the bed, and though winded, he made to prevent her breaking their bodies' continued union.
As she leaned, his hand slid from her shoulder to her upper arm.
"Oh, no," he begged her, his breath barely enough with him to form words. "Stay. Please, stay."
She made no response in words, but examined the sentiment in his eyes, which appeared true, and held her position atop him.
"Oh, stay." He again buried his head into her bosom, though less hungrily this time, more as though he thought to use it as a pillow, and tangled his arms about her, in a warm embrace.
Salima found herself, quite surprisingly, trailing her hand affectionately through the back of his hair, playing with it at the nape of his neck.
By the time she realized he had passed from his bliss into sleep, she found herself in a heretofore unexperienced situation: she was fast within his embrace, and every time she made even the slightest move to disengage herself from it, he stirred as though he would wake.
She could not bear the thought of waking him from his slumber any more than she could have borne similarly disturbing a sleeping little Henry.
And so she managed to subtly lower them both, still embracing, onto the bed. And herself, even now yet surprised at the events of the day, bewilderingly happy, and somehow married, succumbed to sleep, still wrapped within his arms.
+
The next morning, Allan wakes to the sound of a serving girl, confused to be confronted with a barred door. "My lady," she called (for surely she did not know how to address Allan), "the wedding breakfast is all set. Your guests already at table..." She waited for an answer, for the door to be unbarred. When neither presented itself, she moved along on her way.
Allan's heart was cold with dread. With the foregone assumption that last night was just that-the last night he'd ever know Salima in such a way. He had studiously avoided telling her that he loved her. He felt quite strongly that declaration need be, in this situation, kept as far away from carnal acts as possible. But though he loved her, though he had won (so Richard had said) her consent to wed, he was under no false (or so he thought) impressions about her feelings toward him.
Certainly they would get on, the two of them. He would do all in his power to make a happy, safe life for the both of them. But this woman, now, impossibly his wife, how could she bear to look at a man? How could she love or care for the heart of a man after the life she had lived-the abuse she had even so very recently (as her bruised body showed in the daylight) suffered?
He could see, though he had said nothing to her, that her body spoke to him of more than one babe conceived there. Yet she had said there were no children living, no others to ever be expected. And so, another sorrow, another loss she had had to bear.
He nearly caught himself wishing he had not so let her consent to lie with him the night before. Almost. Nearly. But then, their marriage consummated, he could only assume they would now, at her desire, live as brother and sister, his feelings toward her utterly unrequited.
It was not an encouraging belief. And because of just this belief, he scorned any movement that might disturb these last, stolen moments, her softness against him, the two of them utterly undivided as yet.
He did not know how long he lay there, happily content with, and already nostalgic for, the position he found himself in, this wife, his wife so near to him.
"There is a saying among Saracens," he heard Salima speak, though he had not felt her wake.
She was still directly beside him, resting on her side, he on his back. Their clothes still cast off. Neither had moved all night, not even to drape any bed coverings over themselves. His right arm is yet about her, his hands can feel the length of her hair as it has spread out upon the mattress.
"It says, 'the hours before dawn are stolen from Paradise.'"
Her right thigh, her knee bent, is draped across his abdomen. Everything from the day, the night, before is swirling in his head expecting clarification, further cataloging. He feels he must get out of the bed with all haste, still convinced there will be no renewal of last night's...miracle. And that if he stays in the position he is in, her skin in such proximity to his, his baser urges will tempt him to further acquaint himself with her and possibly ruin everything.
He tries to take the high road. "I, I feel like there's a lot to say." It is his try at a 'concluding the portion of our life in the bed' line.
"That is not at all what I feel," Salima answered him.
"Oh. Wait. There is a lot to be-"
"Certainly, but that's not what I feel," she repeated, bring her thigh down to bounce its underside against himself, protruding from his taut lower abdomen, no clothing, no bedclothes to hide within.
"Ah, well, a man's..." he attempted to apologize for his body betraying to her where his mind truly wished to return.
But her hand found its way to that spot as well, and Allan asked, all he could do to keep his voice from breaking. "So, this Paradise you speak of. Are we traveling there this morning? What of the breakfast we have been called to?"
"If the words you spoke to me-to your King-yesternight were true, then we will have time in abundance for talking, and for breakfasts upon breakfasts. Upon breakfasts."
Relief at her giving him permission to renew last night's dance washed over him like a warm wind.
"Then kiss me," he said, wanting her to do so, as in all their actions of the evening prior she had not once done so, their mouths (save at the public kiss confirming their joining) yet as strangers from one another.
Salima proved all but entirely unfamiliar with mouth-kissing, offering him the most chaste of pecks in response to his request.
"Now that will not do!" he played at outrage (more of himself in the moment, now that some of his angst had been lifted by her). "My best girl, such a rum lot at kissin'? I see I shall have to take you to task on the subject."
He returned to her her chaste peck, adding to it with his insistent lips, separating her unknowing ones, his tongue venturing into her mouth.
"Now that," he murmured as he pulled slightly back, "is proper kissin'." He pretended to tutor her. "We shall practice it well, 'til you have learned from it all you can." And he smoothly brought his lips to hers again.
With his left hand he found her bum, its lower lift perfection for stroking, and as he kissed her mouth and she obediently studied his actions, he smoothly brought his hand up the length of her thigh until the inside of her knee, and back down again in long, luxurious caresses.
Her fingers began playing with his ears.
"Now," he acted the stern schoolmaster, "mind on the lesson! Mind on the lesson!"
She attempted to kiss him back.
"There are many types of kisses, you will learn," he waxed on, his hand not stopping its repetitions. "Mouth kisses, ear kisses, kisses that are meant for only the lips, and kisses, like kitten's tongues, perfect for other spots..." He brought his head to her breast, the one uninjured, committing just such a kiss to it. "Perfect," he agreed.
"And there," he spoke, breaking up his speech with further kissing, "there are kisses that even have nothing at all to do with mouths," and as he had her mind fully engaged on his and her own mouth joined in study of this art, his fingers found their way to the inside of the outer hip he had been so soothingly stroking, and began to illustrate quite a different technique, there.
By the time they, as the to-be-feted guests of honor, arrived to the wedding breakfast, the food proved, not tryin' to be funny, quite cold.