Chapter 2: Making Love in a Lift

I cough and wretch as I crouch and wriggle through the tight spaces after Bristel and Ripper, my partners on our digging crew. It might be logical, but it's still sexist, to partner up all the female miners together as buddies, even with how few of us there are. Ripper, who used to sell hard moonshine in the Hob before it burned and can only dig with one good arm, and Bristel, who I know is fucking my old hunting partner Gale, are the only two women, other than me, working down in the mines. Mining has only really been seen as "man's work," and the few women who have ever been down the shafts are either divorced, widowed, separated or just unmarried. Only the most desperate women who can't provide for themselves otherwise venture down here.

I've been relegated to canary duty today. Every pair or threesome on a digging crew is required to have at least one canary in a cage and on hand. The canaries sing up until the point where it is no longer save to breathe. By that point, the canary is dead… and if you don't get out, so will you.

I still take turns with Ripper on the pickaxe, though – the poor woman does only have one arm, and it doesn't seem fair that the woman with the disability doesn't get a more bearable job like holding the stupid bird in its stupid cage.

Suddenly, I spot Thom, one of the supervisors, squirm into the cavern where my girlfriends and I are working, followed by another male body. Flashes of white skin tell me the newcomer has just come down from the lifts, but the soot won't stay away for long. He'll be coated in it within the hour.

"Everdeen!" Thom calls. "We have a new recruit. I'm putting him on your crew!"

When the new arrival lifts his cobalt eyes to mine, my heart nearly stops. I nearly scream, but that would trigger a false alarm of an imminent collapse and cause a stampede for the lifts. Peeta just gazes back at me, his handsome face grim but determined.

I pass the canary cage absently to Bristel, who seems to be undressing the handsome baker's son with her eyes, and drag Peeta down the tunnel until we are in the relatively safe shadow of one of the lifts.

"What are you doing down here?" I hiss, incensed but also…. Deeply scared for him. A Merchant like him doesn't belong down here. Doesn't need to be down here.

"Signed up for a shift with the Foreman. And…. I had to see you again."

I avert my gaze, heat rising into my cheeks and coloring them pink – a pink which thankfully cannot be seen under my curtain of soot. "You're foolish. It's dangerous in these tunnels! And what about the Bakery? Your mother…"

"Doesn't get a say on how I spend my Saturday mornings," Peeta finishes. His one hand reaches up to caress some soot off my cheek and I shiver, despite how broiling hot it is down here. I gaze at him in baffled wonder.

"Why are you doing this?" I breathe.

"To help provide for you," he answers with debilitating honesty. "And your sister. Two miners' wages is better than one, even if I'm only done here once a week. You won't starve, Katty girl – not on my watch."

I am utterly speechless, staring at him with amazement and admiration, and…

"Thom!" I call over my shoulder to Peeta's and my supervisor. "I'm taking my five minutes' break!"

I barely hear his OK before I am dragging Peeta by the hand into an empty lift. Slamming him up against the metal of the cage, I press myself against him and kiss him furiously. Run my hands over his skin. Our breathing comes in rough gasps, and I am suddenly in his arms and half-hoisted up the side of the lift and his toned body without even fully realizing how I got there. His hands are brazenly groping my ass, feeling me up, but I don't mind as we make out and our shaking fingers undo suspenders and buttons to trousers. And in the time it takes our lift to reach the surface, Peeta and I make frantic love, my paramour taking me fiercely up against the bars of the cage. We rut and hump against each other as we continue to embrace and kiss, and only the screech of metal conceals our twin groans and cries as we make each other cum.

My partner and I barely redress in time for the lifts to open and we step out into the sunlight. Taking my hand, Peeta guides me to a spot behind the outhouse where we can be alone, and for one mad moment, I think he is going to kiss and fuck me again and how I would gladly let him.

"Will you marry me?" Peeta blurts out.

I gasp and drink him in, bewildered. "What?!" We share a couple kisses, shag once and now he wants to Toast the bread with me? Is he insane?

"I…. I'll take care of you. I want to take care of you, and Prim. …. Will you marry me, Katniss Everdeen?"

I appraise him, running my fingers through his curly blonde hair. I've never wanted to belong to a man, but… but this man…. who has always given me a strange reason to hope. Who threw bread to me when we were children…

Slowly, my ravished lips uplift into a smile. "Of course," I murmur, looping my arms around his neck.

Peeta smiles, and we embrace and kiss. And then, I'm crowded up against the side of the outhouse where Peeta and I happily have sex. Fuck until we are drained and noodly.

Peeta and I hold our Toasting in my family's living room one winter's evening. The fire we stoke in the hearth to Toast our bread keeps out the chill, and also makes flames dance in my husband's blue eyes as he feeds a piece to me. Tilting my head, my smoky eyes solemn, I permit my…. my husband to kiss me, and I kiss him back to Prim and Mother's tearful applause.

That night, on the cot in our bedroom just steps down the hall from where Mother and Prim are now sharing her bed, I climb on my husband, straddling him, and we make love. I ride my husband until I cry out, consummating our marriage and pleasuring him the way a husband deserves to be pleasured by his wife.

I'm afraid of losing him. Of losing him or my own life down in the mines. I'm afraid of how a young Seam woman and her Merchant-born husband are going to make this hardscrabble life work, but as I lie strewn across him, sweaty and spent from fucking, Peeta tells me we'll be OK. We have each other.

Curled against him where he is stroking my hair, I feel Peeta kiss my temple. "What?" I snuggle against him.

"I wish I could freeze this moment, right now, and live in it forever."

"OK," I murmur.

"Then you'll allow it?" I feel him smirk.

"I'll allow it." I lift my head to look at him.

"If that's what you want."

I nod in assent. "That's what I want." And craning my neck, I kiss him, sweetly and deeply.