'Alright, Stark, I'll stop,' Jaime said, 'I'll stop when you stop. Agreed?'
After a moment's contemplation of the consequences, Arya walked rapidly across the space between them and kissed him so deeply that she drew blood, her tongue ensnaring his and possessing it greedily as she let him taste her again and again. When his fingers gripped the back of her neck, she moaned freely into his mouth and snarled at him as his lips pressed harder against hers and made her gasp for breath, her teeth grazing his chin.
Jaime's eyes were momentarily blinded by black leather and then by white linen as she brought his doublet and shirt over his head so that the fingertips of her hands could trickle icily over his chest and shoulders and back like rain; and her lips and teeth kissed and bit and gasped hungrily against his throat and chest and stomach as though she sought to draw his strength out through his skin. Her fingers made no attempt to unfasten his breeches, but stroked his cock with such want and rapidity and inexperience that he was soon harder than the trees around them and straining unbearably as she disrobed her own torso and stepped back into his arms, her skin freezing like the first time, like the godswood in Harrenhal another lifetime ago. He found her mouth again, and when he tasted his own blood there, he followed the taste along her tongue, teeth and gums; marking her lips with his, filling her mouth up with the taste of him and feeling her groan into him and buck her hips against his cock as her fingers closed over his heart and felt it hammer.
Her skin became a fire and a heartbeat as he trailed his mouth and teeth down her throat and to her breasts, her nipples swelling and growing hard between his lips as her voice cried out and her fingers tugged hard on his hair, hurting him and making him bite harder. As he straightened up and fastened his lips around her neck, which was thrown back in ecstasy as though begging the gods for more air, he slid one hand across the fragile hardness of her stomach and down into her smallclothes. She was incredibly wet, and when his fingers found her nub and began to work there, her lips and the feeling of her moans in his mouth were as sore and crimson and alive as his were in hers before she brought her lips to his throat, her favourite part of his body, and sighed with unconcealed enjoyment as her tongue slowly tasted the skin there and savoured it like wine as her hips thrust against his clumsy, left-handed fingers and felt the warmth spread from her cunt to the rest of her body.
'Harder, please, gods, harder,' she whispered, whimpering and shuddering when he complied.
She had never been this bold before, or this rough, and though it was unlike anything that they had ever done, he found that he liked it. She was holding herself as hard against him as nature would allow, she was biting down on his neck like a cat or wolf, and when he responded by simply fucking her harder with his hand, her teeth only seemed to grow sharper. The strain in his cock was insupportable, and grew even more so as her hips thrust harder and harder against him; her gasps growing deeper and her eyelids beginning to flutter, and soon he was plunging his tongue into her mouth to dampen the sound of her release as she cried and moaned and cursed, and rubbed him so hard that he followed within minutes, shivering and groaning and swearing into her mouth; his body thrashing wildly against hers.
'Gods, Stark,' he gasped, 'fuck.'
He remembered very little of what happened afterwards – only inches of it. He remembered falling to the floor at some point and seeing her beside him, watching him; the fingers of his hand moving gently from her face to her shoulders to her arms; enjoying the gooseflesh that he saw springing up there and the smile that accompanied it. He remembered her face directly above him, and her eyes, and the feeling of her body stretched out across his as she rained tiny, dizzying kisses on his lips for what felt like hours. He remembered his bare skin puckering with cold as the Kingswood grew freezing around them, and he remembered not caring a fuck about the cold because she was here again, his again. And he remembered her head on his chest and his arms locked around her back, holding her there as she murmured, with agonising softness, that she loved him.
But above all he remembered waking up the next morning to find her sleeping on the other side of the fire again, wide awake and watching him, her gaze stating quite clearly that the events of the previous night were to be forgotten and never spoken of again.
Twenty years ago, he would have found this sort of thing vastly amusing. Six months ago, he would have laughed and purred that 'some boys like a challenge.' He would have thrown himself with enthusiasm into the game of cat and mouse, and he would have enjoyed it immensely. But all of that blowing hot and cold bullshit of refusing to speak to him one moment and fucking him the next; summoning him like a bed slave but scarcely deigning to acknowledge his presence in public: that was a game that he had played for most of his life, and one that he had come to despise. He was tired of it. He was too old for it. He had grown out of it. It was Cersei's game, and he would never allow anyone to play it with him again. No one. Not even Arya.
We didn't make love last night, he thought, we fucked. You wanted to and I needed to, so we fucked, and it was bloody fantastic. But I'm never doing that with you again. Either you want me or you don't. It's very simple. And I'm not prepared to wait around for years like some cunt-obsessed fool while you make your mind up about it.
'You remind me of Cersei when you act this way,' he said flatly, staring across the fire at Arya and watching her face change. Her beautiful grey eyes were like flint and Valyrian steel, and he was suddenly seized by a dull, paralytic and consuming anger. He did not understand her. He did not understand at all. He despised the memory of Eddard Stark, and would probably spit on his tomb if circumstance ever required him to visit it. He had seen that man's face in countless waking dreams and nightmares, and when he had been a young man, the judgment in that stare had both angered and tortured him.
Hating your father doesn't stop me loving you, he thought, and it certainly doesn't make me contemplate leaving you. I don't hate you because of your name. Why can't you pay me the same fucking courtesy?
Arya was glaring at him now, and he could see that the comparison with Cersei had both angered and wounded her. Her face was contorted in wrath, her mouth was a grim slash of red, and yet she did not sit up as she stared unflinchingly at him and shot back her response:
'Don't you ever say that to me again.'
