Title: Not Yet by Lightning
Chapter: Thirteen
Author: Jade Sabre
Notes: Mmmm…this chapter earned me one of my favorite beta quotes EVER. It also does its part to help the fic earn that M rating up there. And not just because Bishop wallows in profanity. Just so you know.
Reviews are, of course, incredibly welcome at this point, especially as I'm still a bit tenuous on this M-rating ground.
Disclaimer: I don't own Neverwinter Nights, or any of its sequels or expansions, or any of the characters contained herein, aside from my PC, who was created on a Bioware engine and thus probably therefore partially belongs to them too.
13
He was beginning to think he had made a mistake.
At first glance, this seemed like a remarkably stupid thing to think. He had not only seduced the Knight Captain of Crossroad Keep—something no one else had ever done—but had also managed to stay in her bed. She was a pretty thing, so the complaint wasn't on that end, and while he couldn't exactly go around bragging about it, he could enjoy his own private amusement when the paladin attempted to put him in his place. His nights in the keep were warm and satisfying, and his nights on the road were still pretty much his to control.
No, he really shouldn't have had any complaints about the entire situation, aside from the part where he was trapped inside a stone keep and doing nothing but fetch-and-carries while he waited for the world to end. Yet something was nagging him about the whole thing, something whispering in his ear that he shouldn't get too comfortable because he was starting to forget about The Plan.
(Not that he was really one for plans or anything. He had some ideas, made a few preparations, occasionally followed through. It was entirely up to him what he did, no matter what anyone else was counting on.)
For one thing, she was young. He hadn't realized that, at first, when he'd watched her walk into the Sunken Flagon with her pragmatic inability to deal with the stupidity of others. Watching her for months afterwards, he'd had an idea that her stoicism made her seem older than her years, but she so rarely wavered—and even then, it was usually when she thought she was alone (and after she had checked and double-checked that fact; it was hard to hide from her)—that he thought only someone of a certain age could be so ingrained in her ways. Even Shandra, for all her whining about how tough she had to be because she grew up on a farm, relaxed every once and a while. The Captain displayed none of this whining despite her similar upbringing and yet, in some ways, was the paladin's equal in sheer reservation. So he'd figured she was around Shandra's age, if not close to his own.
But while she could be ageless and mature and aloof when dealing with others, there were some facts that were hard to hide in bed. Her body—or what he knew of it through touch, since he never really got a chance to look—felt young beneath his fingertips, and surprisingly lacking in the little wears and tears that older adventurers showed. Her inexperience—well, it was difficult to get through her defenses, and as far as he knew he might be the only man who bothered trying (and even then he wasn't sure how he had succeeded), but that didn't exactly bode well either. And her reactions—he was used to practiced, faked full-throated moans, but she gave him unpracticed half-stifled gasps that stirred his blood with their naïvété and astounded him with their honesty.
But it wasn't really her age that bothered him, aside from the dangers of infatuation. Or maybe it was—he was afraid she'd show signs of infatuation, but instead she treated him exactly the same as she had before. He was beginning to forget what he had wanted out of this in the first place—to get laid? Because that wasn't happening like it should've—and on top of it, he couldn't crack her austerity, and that frustrated him. She made absolutely no move to restrict his behavior, aside from occasionally telling him to leave the others alone. She watched him, perhaps a little more closely than before, and with a different look in her eye, but she kept just as close an eye on Jerro. She didn't exactly appear to trust him any more than she had before this had started. He wasn't making any progress in becoming her confidant—and yet he knew with an absolute certainty that she wasn't just using him as some kind of release for her own benefit, and that almost scared him.
It was that she let him do whatever he wanted—and he did, as far as he thought she knew what to do. What she really needed, he thought, was a teacher, someone to show her all the kinky ins and outs of sex. And he wasn't used to teaching, or particularly wanted to teach—he was used to women knowing exactly what they were supposed to do. And he wasn't sure she wanted to learn—he didn't know what she wanted. He had wanted her, and now he had her, and it was slowly becoming apparent that having her involved her, a separate person with needs and appetites of her own.And he didn't want her getting ideas if he started treating her differently than he had before. And—and—he couldn't talk to her, because that might give her ideas too. She didn't need to get any ideas, but he didn't know how to get any of his own without giving her some reason to think—what? And trying to answer that question wasn't even worth his time.
o-o-o
o-o-o
She'd sent him out with a patrol of Greycloak archers, a short round of the surrounding farms, so he could tell her whether or not they would be able to hit anything if something actually attacked them. It was a thankless, boring job, and no amount of Greycloak baiting was going to erase that fact. To top it all off, they'd run into a group of bandits that had been as surprised to see Greycloaks as the recruits were to see bandits, and the sergeant in charge of the patrol had accepted their surrender.
"The Knight Captain would want to see justice served," the sergeant said, admirably hiding the fact that he must've been quaking in his boots to go up against the Knight Captain's personal maniac.
He snorted and said, "You must've figured out by now that the lady doesn't exactly go for all that Tyrran tripe—"
"Still," he said, "they haven't done anything wrong that we can see. Better to take them back before they do any harm—"
"Or, we could just kill them all, and then we'd know for sure they wouldn't be able to do any harm."
The sergeant drew a breath and said, "No."
Bishop sighed and said, "Whatever."
The whole affair meant that the patrol took longer and that he had to stick around and watch the bandits be put in the dungeon. Dinner was cold by the time the patrol got to it, and then to eat it he had to endure the excited yapping of a bunch of recruits who could, maybe hit a target one time out of three, one and a half if you weren't looking to kill. This wasn't exactly thrilling news, and he was sorely tempted to skip reporting it and just spend the night outside the walls with Karnwyr for warmth.
But he was a mortal man of flesh, and the flesh was weak. So he shoved his half-eaten dinner away, unable to listen to the prattling for another second, and stalked out into the dark halls of the Keep. It was fairly easy to sneak through—the halls were wide and full of shadows for the taking—and the living quarters tended to be fairly deserted after nightfall, the occupants having already made the decision to stay in and sleep or stay out until dawn.
He opened the door without bothering to knock and immediately shrugged out of his armor. Laura sat at her desk, a light spell cast on her candle (a tricky way of avoiding counting the hours of the night one spent working), attention on the stack of paperwork before her. She didn't look up, despite the fact that he made as much noise as possible dumping his belongings on her floor (though he did relent and straighten everything up; he had enough control to ensure that his temper didn't result in his effects being spoiled). He was down to the light tunic and trousers he wore to keep the leather from chafing, and she still hadn't stopped reading.
"I sincerely hope that's interesting," he said, not bothering to hide his displeasure with the world.
"It's the report from your patrol," she said. "Can they shoot?"
"Sometimes. If you give them twenty minutes to aim and another ten to gather up the courage to shoot. And if you don't distract them in that time."
She picked up a quill from the desk and made a note. He stared at the back of her head, but she gave no sign that it disturbed her.
"Well. When you're finished," he said.
The quill paused, and then resumed its course.
Oh, she had no idea the disaster she courted. He was hardly some lapdog who would wait on her hand and foot. He stared at the back of her head, her hair pinned up in its usual twist, trying to come up with something suitable to express how much he hated being sent on patrol, how much he hated letting himself being sent on patrols, how much he—
She set down the quill and twisted in her chair to look up at him. After a moment she said, "I thought you'd be bored, sitting around here."
"At least I'd be able to decide what to do, instead of having some kid tell me how to handle bandits."
She shrugged. "There's not much else to do right now," she said. "That's all there is to it. We can't really do anything until we have another shard, according to Zhjaeve—"
"Whatever." He didn't really care. At this point he was starting to think he'd made a mistake coming here—she wasn't going to put up with what she saw as his crap anymore than she put up with anyone else's. It was clear from the way she was still fully dressed in her knight's overcoat, the way she hadn't moved the paper away from her desk, the way she was still sitting at her desk, instead of actually turning and talking to him—hell, the way she kept herself so pinned up and formal all the damn time.
She twisted back in her chair with another shrug, leaving him to stare at the back of her head again, fingers twitching under his crossed arms. Abruptly he moved forward and, without really thinking about it, pulled out one of the decorated sticks she pinned into her hair. He turned it over in his hands—white, with trios of lightning bolts painted in circles around it—ignoring her startled reaction, and then pulled out the other one.
Her hair stayed up. Hissing with annoyance, he reached down to find and pluck out what was keeping it up, but her hand caught his as she turned in her seat again and said, "What are you doing?"
"What do you think I'm doing?" he demanded, freeing his hand from her grasp and digging his fingers into her coif.
"Stop," she said, trying to pull away, but with a jerk he tugged her hair out of its careful arrangement, the pins making a ticking noise as they fell to the floor.
She was out of her chair and five feet away from him in the next second, but the damage had been done. Her hair tumbled down over her shoulder, barely falling out of its twist, hitting her just at the swell of her breast. He knew from experience that it was thick and soft, but something about seeing it down around her face, following the curve of her jaw as she instinctively gathered it into her hands, was infinitely satisfying. She looked young and almost vulnerable, and though her expression had barely flickered, her eyes were warier than they had been.
"What was that for?" she asked, shaking her head once to loosen it, already moving to put it back up.
He closed the distance between them in two steps and pried her hands away from her hair. He grasped her wrists in one hand and took a lock between his fingers, considering it, watching the play of the light over the different shades before letting it dangle in her face. It fell along her nose, only increasing her youth.
"No reason," he said, not loosening his grip on her, staring down into her face.
She sighed and said, "Then could—"
He kissed her, because he was sick of listening to her talk, but while she let herself be kissed, she made no moves to reciprocate the gesture. He pulled away and rested his forehead against hers, bringing their noses to bump against each other, turning her eyes into one dark blur in front of his. After a moment, he released her hands, which fell to her sides uncertainly, as if she couldn't decide if she wanted to push him away or not.
"Are you quite finished?" she said tiredly, at the same time he said, "Are you done?" There was a longer pause, in which neither moved. Their breath came and went in the same space; he could almost feel her pulse moving through her skin.
"Well," he said, still leaning against her, "if that's—"
"I have things I have to do," she said. "I didn't anything done today because Sand and Aldanon and Qara—"
He kissed her again, shifting to press her into the wall. She reluctantly gave under the pressure, and he immediately broke it off to say, "If that's what you did all day, you don't need to do anything else."
"But I—"
Shut up, he thought, kissing her, harder this time, running his hands into her hair, thick and tangled between his fingers. Her hands came up to rest against his chest—again as if she couldn't decide to push him away or not—and he could feel every inch of her ready to flee at the first opening.
Well. He wasn't going to offer her the opportunity. She'd stretched him to the limits today, and now it was her turn to give something; she wasn't going to get rid of him that easily. He wanted—something—and he intended to get it.
"Will you just relax?" he demanded, kissing her jaw, moving his kisses to her neck, massaging the back of her head. That was the real problem, he thought, the part of him that should have been occupied by what she was doing to him, except she wasn't doing her job. She was reserved and tense and even when she literally let her hair down she didn't want to give him a glimpse of anything—he would've been satisfied with—gods, he didn't even know anymore. He wanted this girl—he wanted her, he'd taken her, and he should have had her, but she didn't seem to want to be there for the having.
She squirmed and said, in a jerky voice, "I'm not—"
"Fuck that," he said, to whatever it was she was going to say, and also to the fact that her tunic was covering her shoulders. He pushed her overcoat down her arms—she let it drop to the ground—and reached down and tugged the hem upwards; she seemed to give in to the inevitable and lifted her arms, letting him slip it over her head. She moved to kiss him, but he ignored her. It was too late for her to distract him from what he wanted; to that end, he pulled up the undershirt she wore and tossed that on the floor as well, leaving only her breast bindings. Her shoulders hunched as she tensed again, even as she shook her head to settle her hair, not seeming to realize how incredibly sexy the motion was and how unlikely it was that he was going to be able to leave her alone after watching it.
"Relax," he said, in what he hoped was a calmer tone, pressing her back into the wall as he pressed kisses to her collarbone, feeling her fighting her natural response.
"Can we, um," she said, one arm waving in the general direction of the bed, but he ignored that too, pulling her away from the wall just long enough to slip his arms around her, pressing his hands into her shoulder blades while he went on kissing her shoulders, her collarbones, her neck.
He followed her jaw up to her ear, paused a moment, and whispered, "No."
"Um," was her almost-terrified response as he unclasped her breast bindings. He kissed her, slowly, giving her something to distract her from whatever it was that was bothering her, and she kissed him as though trying to distract him from what he was doing.
To his everlasting frustration, she had somehow contrived to have yet another piece of fabric covering her. He pulled away and stared at the strip of cloth wound around her midsection. "What the hell," he said, not bothering to hide his impatience, "is that?"
She bit her red, swollen lip and he gave into temptation and kissed it, because it was thick and pouting and warm. "Scar," she said finally.
He rolled his eyes, already tugging at the bandage. "I already know it's there. Everyone knows it's there. Hell, people on other planes know it's there by now—"
"Yes, but—"
It pulled off, and he was left staring at the rather large, jagged mark on her chest. He knew it by touch, but he'd never bothered to do anything like map her body in his mind and hadn't realized that it went from halfway down her sternum to just above her navel, its edges ragged and a strange silvery color.
"Huh," he said, reaching out and running a finger down it. She shivered. "This must've been your entire torso when you were a kid." He looked up and met her eyes. She had an almost panicked edge to her expression now, though what she was afraid of he couldn't imagine. He knew she had a big gaping scar on her chest; he'd known that almost as long as they'd been on speaking terms. He had still wanted her, he still did want her, he'd slept with her enough times to be familiar with its slick texture, and he was starting to reach a point tonight where he would have fucked her even if the scar had been across her face, instead.
"Yes," she said, eyes on his face, still tense.
"Oh fucking gods, Farthing," he said, "will you just let go?"
She was still watching his face and so her surprise when he reached out and grasped her breasts was absolute(ly gratifying). She gasped and he kissed her parted lips, running his hands up and down her scarred torso (like he cared, like he didn't have scars too). An idea was forming in his mind, a plan, and he suddenly decided he was going to follow through with it.
She made a noise of confusion as he suddenly dropped down to his knees, and then his hands had pulled her pants down from her waist and his mouth was on the inside of her thigh and his fingers were warm and wet inside her. A shudder ran through her as her arms flailed, but he let his tongue join his fingers and felt her melt, the tension bleeding out of her. She grasped his hair so tightly she was liable to pull it out, but he persisted until she came with a moaning sigh that crashed around his ears.
He pulled away and stood, licking his fingers with a kind of lazy insolence even though he himself was harder than he'd been in months. She slid down the wall, her legs trembling and shaky, her mouth parted as her breath came in little oh oh oh sounds that really weren't helping his condition. They stared at each other for a moment, and then he picked her up, tugging her pants off from where they had pooled near her feet, and unceremoniously moved and dumped her in the bed.
She lay there, her breathing still shaky and surprised, and he sat down with his back to her and waited, pushed to the very limits of his self-control and rapidly losing ground. Then he felt her hand on his arm, tugging him over, and he turned his head and she was there, kissing him, warm and sweet and salty all at once, her kisses proof that she was a good learner even if he wasn't the greatest teacher. She pulled away and he reached to pull her back, but she dropped her head into the crook of his neck and shoulder. He twisted in order to pull her flush against him, and then she lifted her head and laughed.
He stared at her, torn between shock and his insatiable need to fuck her, now, and she met his frankly bewildered gaze and laughed again, delighted and free, tossing her head and not even protesting when he cut off her laugh with a sloppy kiss. He could still feel her laughter shaking through his skin as he followed her down and her arms went around his back and she clung to him, laughing breathlessly all the way.