"Savor"
She smelled like soap and gunsmoke, and, somehow, in some corner of his mind, he'd rather expected her to taste the same. He'd expected her lips to be bitter and fragrant, both at once, the odor of flowers overlaying the odor of war.
Distressingly long stretches of time were spend wondering the truth of it. He'd listened in a few times when others speculated what it would be like to kiss her (never participated, of course; even jokes weren't seemly), but they never even mentioned what they thought she'd taste like. No, it was all talk about how they bet that she'd change under the influence of a good man, beneath a good kiss, and how she'd lose that stiffness, all in tones that made him strangely uncomfortable, strangely irritable.
But even if he were the only one, he wondered, and decided that she'd be masked and bitter.
And he was right in a few respects, but wrong in most others. She was bitter, yes, but it was a warm bitterness, not clinical; tea, not gunpowder. And there was the most curious sweetness to her, despite her abstinence from sugar, despite her no-nonsense diet.
Roy had said to her once that the flavor must have simply been her natural kindness, goodness, welling up. She'd shoved him off the bed.