For Kris Aaron, for speed-reading and loads of lovely reviews/comments!
She's definitely a little better. There's a bit of a summer breeze in her voice for the first time in days and days, and she hangs on my arm all the way home, her other hand tucked in too. And the little 'un hangs onto my other hand – can't bloody shake her off it, she's like one of the red bitch's leeches, and I get an earful from both of them, a load of girl-words rattling around my skull. But I don't mind, except to remind them occasionally that they're my eyes and to bloody well look about them, and behind us, to check for sellswords, spies, worse.
Her cooking's got better too. Lamb and damson stew. Bread that hasn't burnt. She sits very close, and strokes my knuckles a bit, and I swear I can smell her dampness. The mossiness between her legs. It's not just the lamb.
*S*S*S*S*S*S
She had to do it.
Any moment the world could change, tip upside down and shake them about. Everyone would die, at some point. She had to ask him.
Night. They had come upstairs, Sansa putting all the candles out and bringing a stub of one to his room. To their room. She had helped Sandor remove his mailshirt, he grumbling about how bloody hot he was in it. There was a sheen of sweat on his chest. Sansa put her hand flat on his stomach, and higher up, where his heart was. A long, sure thump.
All she had to do was ask.
Sandor took her arm by the wrist, hesitant, with that way of standing he often did now - head to the side slightly, listening. Very carefully, he lifted her arm up so that it stretched above her head, and turned her round so that her back was against the wall. Still holding her hand high above her, he leaned down to her, and put his mouth on her neck. Sansa's legs went to milk and cream and fruit jelly. He ran his lips up to her ear, and she tried very hard to think what to say.
'I have to ask you something,' she whispered.
Sandor put his other hand behind her neck, and pressed his whole frame right up against her, his manhood hard against the top of her hip. Fruit jelly again. He kissed her, firmly, and when she opened her mouth, brought his tongue between her teeth.
She had to concentrate. 'Sandor,' she said, around his tongue.
'Ay,' he said, not really listening.
'I have to ask you something important.'
'Alright, then,' he said, between kisses, drawing her hip high around him so that she was pinned against the wall. Gods. It was really good.
'Will you – do you want to –'
'Ay,' he breathed into her mouth, without hesitation.
Sansa froze. She drew back, touched his face. 'Really? You –'
His hand slid down her raised arm. 'Ay. Of course.'
Her heart flooded with warmth. Sandor was kissing her again, more passionately, and his hands working their way up under dress, thumbs amongst her smallclothes. She couldn't quite believe it had been that easy. She'd expected confusion, and maybe anger, and – Sandor had brought down one of the shoulders of her dress and had a hand at the waistband of his breeches.
'Do you really want to? You're not just, I don't know, you don't just have to say it because you think I –' Sandor breathed a laugh into her ear, began to shift out of his breeches. 'I don't know where we might go, or what we might do, after this, but –'
He stopped, his hips between her thighs. 'What do you mean?' he said, more slowly, less air in his voice.
Sansa felt less certain. 'I mean, I don't know what might happen, but I still want to, I just wasn't sure if you would.'
Sandor's eyes fell just to the side of her head. 'Would what?'
She swallowed. The wall felt cold against her shoulder blades. 'Want to marry me.'
He went completely still, as if listening for prey. Outside, a lone gull called, an arcing cry like little curving stabs. Her hands were resting lightly on his ribs. She could feel his heart still, pounding distantly.
Very slowly, Sandor let her leg fall and backed away a step, pulling his breeches back up. 'What in seven hells are you talking about?'
There was a keen, spreading sensation in her throat. Somehow, she'd got this terribly wrong. 'What were you talking about?' she said slowly.
He didn't answer, and suddenly she knew. He had just thought she was talking about – that. Sansa had never felt more stupid. Of course. Of course that's what he had thought. He was a man. That was all he wanted. And she was a silly, flighty girl with idiot notions.
'Oh,' she said.
*S*S*S*S*S*S
A horsefly's got in her ear. It's got in her ear, and laid eggs next to her skull, and maggots are feasting on her brain. It's the only way she could have got to thinking like that.
She'd said the perfect words and I'd said of course, thinking there's nothing in this whole dark world I'd rather do more than be inside you again, you beautiful bloody girl, and I'd got to it, hand on my breeches, and then she'd started talking some more, and I was only half-listening but she wasn't not quite making sense and something in me told me this wasn't quite right and I stopped. And then she'd said what she had really meant and my face nearly fell off in shock.
Marry me.
Half of me's rueing over her not meaning that she wanted my cock in her again, finally, and the other half's shouting 'what in the hells?' Sansa, I say. You're talking madness. I hear her fold her arms, and when she speaks I know that she's turned her head away, too.
You thought I wanted you to – she says. Of course I did, I say. It's not like we haven't - any man in their right mind would – and I hear her shift, her skin peeling off from the wall.
I'll sleep with Shireen tonight, she says, and the door gives a little, serve-you-right humph.
Of all the gods. She's been away from her way of living too long. She's starting to forget how it works.
*S*S*S*S*S*S
Every time she thought about it, her stomach curdled in embarrassment. She had basically made a half-dressed proposal to Sandor and all he'd wanted to do was get her out of her smallclothes. And she did want to do that again, she did, but now. What was the point if he didn't want to wed her? Maybe she shouldn't. Maybe she shouldn't have done any of it.
Sansa spent the morning in the kitchen, washing clothes furiously, her knuckles scrubbed red-raw, not listening to Shireen, who chittered loudly behind her about the harbour and the new boats she'd seen there.
There was a rumbling cough and Sandor was at the doorframe. 'Thought we could go for a walk.'
'Yes!' said Shireen, hopping off the bench.
'Not you,' he said, and her face fell.
Sansa walked with him, not saying a word and her arm reluctantly in his, until they came to a small public garden. There was a small fountain in the middle, a burbling of water like birdsong. Sandor sat down next to her, his movements very light and tense, as if she was a very dangerous wildcat and would spring at him at any moment. Maybe she would, she thought.
'About – last night.' He put his palms together on his lap. 'I didn't know you were going to say that.'
Sansa looked at the tendrils of ivy, lots of interlocking green and grey hearts. Or dagger-hilts. 'I know you didn't. Now.'
There was a silence. 'I didn't because the thought never came to me.'
That angered her, then. 'The thought never came to you?' All their nightly explorations had all just been no better than whoring to him, then. Gods, she was a fool.
He sighed. 'No. Of course it didn't.'
She shook her head furiously. 'You've been using me. You just wanted -'
He opened and shut his mouth. 'Hells, Sansa, you're muddling everything. Let me speak, for gods' sake.' She gripped one thumb with her other hand, and watched it swell and redden. He sighed, very slowly. 'I'm blind, Sansa.'
'I don't care,' she said, each of the words carefully released like an arrow from the tautest of bowstrings.
'If not that, then –' He turned towards her. 'You can't – there's no way we can –' he couldn't even say it. 'You need to be marrying an heir, someone with power, a lordling over in the Southron lands or something.'
'The Southron lands? When am I going back there?'
'Someone over here, then. Someone with influence, money. A Myrish prince.' Soft, dry amusement in his voice. There was no such thing.
'I don't love a Myrish prince.' She'd said it before she'd had time to think about it. He looked startled, his eyebrows raising a little, before puzzlement drew lines all over his face, lines she'd never seen before.
She stood up quickly and stalked off, before remembering that he could hardly find his way back on his own. She stomped back and practically dragged him to the house, not saying a word.
*S*S*S*S*S*S
Seven buggering – this is just getting worse. Worse, and better, all my wordly dreams and nightmares all wrapped up into one bundle. It's all I ever wanted, but hearing her say – fucking hells – these things now, when I'm as useless as a lame warhorse, a blunt sword, a helm made of pastry, it's ending me.
To have her bound to me, having to look after me, lead me around like a bloody puppy. I'd be like a leadball and chain round her ankle for the rest of her life, or for the rest of my life at least, and I'm like to die well before her, given I'm twice her age and more. And bairns – gods, the thought of that, of little black-amber wolfpups made by her and me near curls a Braavosi sword right through my guts, until I think of me never being able to see them, probably treading on them, squashing the damn things to death. She'd have to watch me even more.
I was supposed to have freed her. Not caged her up again.
Still, hearing her talk soft to Gendry over food that evening, even though I know it doesn't mean anything, makes me remember. That for all my high talk of Myrish princes, I don't want her wed to anyone else. I'd take the first man who tried to apart with my bare hands.
Gods.