The moment my feet were back on the ground, Ketka was mobbed—and, by extension, so was I—by well-wishers and good-natured hecklers.

It wasn’t enough to make the slightest dent in my mood. The afterglow of our dance was too strong, and I was still riding the euphoric, ecstatic high. I giggled helplessly as I dragged Ketka towards one of the little tables, the gorgeous Yarovi warrior tolerantly letting me tow her along through the crowd.

It’s possible she asked me what the hurry was, but the crowd was loud enough that I had an excuse to not hear it, and that meant I didn’t need to pull myself all the way together in a hurry.

She definitely kissed me, I remarked to myself, giggles rising again after almost fading. I’m a knower of such things, having been kissed a couple times in my time, and that was definitely being kissed.

I’d been wrapped around her shoulders, hauling myself up by one leg and the arm I’d slung around the back of her neck; she’d bent down to meet me and then held me up as I melted. No ambiguity, no wondering, and she hadn’t teased me past those first moments in the frieze. Just a scorching hot kiss as I melted into a helpless puddle in her arms, drowning in the softness of her lips.

After a kiss like that, it was practically a hate crime to expect me to be able to string a sentence together.

“I need to eat,” I said anyway, almost dissolving incoherently back into giggles at my train of thought. “Food, I mean, I need food.”

Ketka’s laughter and my giggles carried us most of the way to the table. “I should hesitate to ask—”

I interrupted Ketka by kissing her, and was interrupted in turn by the almost immediate growling of my stomach. I ignored it long enough to make it a proper kiss, borrowing some of her body heat to supplement the flush roaring through my body, and then I spun back towards the table I’d aimed us towards.

“Told you she’d—”

I lunged at Kelly, hitting her with something that might have been too high-energy to be entirely a hug. There was enough tackle in there that I heard a wheezing oof as I made contact, and then I was meeting Kelly’s broad, smug smirk with my big goofy grin.

“Hi,” I said brilliantly.

“Nice, by the way.” Kelly’s eyes flickered to look behind my shoulder, and she smirked wider even as she flushed. “Both of you. That was…”

“A good dance.” Ketka’s hand came to rest lightly on my shoulder, and something in Kelly’s smile shifted in a way I couldn’t put words to. “Miss Avara.”

“Please, call me Kelly—but I’m lingering too long!” She slipped out of my arms without me really noticing how or having a chance to be part of the motion. “Don’t tell anyone I’m here doing my job, I might get condescended to.”

“What are—”

“No talking,” Kelly cut me off with less than her usual grace. “I was never here! Eat food, I know you, you need to eat. Ketka, got one for you of course. I…”

“Yes?”

“I was gonna—it doesn’t matter. Take good care of her, okay?” Something about Kelly’s body language focused, like her state of mind was coalescing around those words. “I mean it,” she said with soft firmness. “She’s more fragile than you think.”

“And she is precious to you.”

“And she’s precious to me,” Kelly agreed without hesitation. “Sophie—”

I raised my eyes back to her face from where I’d been glancing down at the table in embarrassment. My blush only deepened, rapidly, when my stomach chose that moment to growl and cramp.

Not letting the cramp show was one thing, but the growl was mortifyingly audible.

“We eat!” Ketka beamed at me and—may her deeds sing her praises at the gates—stuffed a fried dumpling of sorts into her mouth instead of laughing.

I followed suit, closing my eyes in pleasure at the explosion of flavor in my mouth. When I opened my eyes again, I was unsurprised to see Kelly gone and Ketka looking momentarily pensive. It passed as soon as she noticed that I was looking at her, replaced with a focused expression.

“Hi,” I said vaguely, fighting the urge to duck my head and dig my toes into the ground. I did break eye contact, deliberately taking a bite of something long and crunchy—a vegetable of some sort, slathered with a vinegary sauce. I’d intended to look back up immediately, but…

… well, I was distracted. I was warm down to my toes, tingly with something that wasn’t exactly bodily even if hormones were obviously physical. Ketka’s expression was warming me to my toes, and I was feeling like I wanted to dance again with her, or break into song, or just start babbling incoherently.

I bit into another vegetable instead. I had a thousand questions for her and a thousand answers to questions she hadn’t asked, and the words were all getting in each other’s way. Nothing was surfacing out of the haze of good feeling, and I ate something that I thought would be another vegetable but which turned out to be a piece of fruit.

When I looked back up, Ketka had finished whatever had been on her plate and was relaxed, arms resting on the table and eyes on me. She reached out with deliberate slowness, capturing one of my hands with one of hers, and she tilted her head in an expression of inquiry as my brain hitched and my heart skipped a beat.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Without a direct question to answer and without any real need to say anything specific, my words weren’t unscrambling themselves. Pressing my hand into her touch seemed like it could give her the wrong message; I rotated my hand instead, facing it up and shifting it towards her so that I could squeeze the sides of her wrist. That answered half of her question, the bit that asked is this specific thing okay, for values of specific thing that were about initiating physical contact in what was a new context for us.

For the other half, all I could do was give her a smile, a goofy grin that threatened to split apart my face and do actual harm to the straining muscles. It made it hard to eat, but I kept at it, filling my stomach so that it could fuel the fire—feed the brain, I’d told what felt like a hundred girls at one point or another, feed the brain if you want to feel.

“You are possessed of a silence that is unlike you.”

Ketka’s voice startled me out of my momentary fugue, cutting through the haze and the half-remembered song whose incomplete chorus had been looping in my mind. I swallowed wrong, getting a piece of something stuck in the back of my mouth, and I only noticed after drinking deep of one of the two cups in front of me that it burned with a pleasant kick.

“Words are hard sometimes.” I knew I sounded a little mechanical, but I’d never been able to bridge the gap that thoroughly. I’d practiced the words, given the same speech to so many women, but…

Ketka did a good job of looking patient, though I could tell from the tension in her wrist that she didn’t understand and wanted to understand. Thinking about that made it harder, but I was already going on, speaking rote words on autopilot—but they were rote words from a woman flushed with joy and my hand was squeezing Ketka’s. So hopefully she’d understand.

“Picking something to say is picking between a million things, and following through with it is a billion more. So sometimes I go quiet, and I talk with my body, and that needs to be okay.”

“Yet there are moments when speech is necessary.”

“If I need you to stop doing something,” I said softly, “I will say it. Unambiguously. That’s a promise. But…” I searched for the words to express it, coming up as short as I always did, using the same partial explanation that I always did. “Words feel like I’m imposing.”

Ketka surprised me by not asking another question for a while, just tracing patterns on my right wrist while I kept eating with my left, drinking mostly the citrus-cut water and sipping carefully from the alcoholic punch. The warmth of the booze was soaking just a tiny bit into my body, making me feel a little bit looser, a little bit like my muscles were relaxing even when they were still tense, and I didn’t want to go any further than that.

It was very nice even at that low simmer, though. The punch was tasty, fruity and clear and bright with high-palate notes, and it felt so very pleasant, complementing perfectly the shivers that Ketka was sending through my entire body.

I was watching her when she spoke again, plate empty of food and mind preoccupied with the shape of her smile. “When you respond in body with such clarity as you do,” she said, “this is different from your words, to you?”

“Yeah.” I grinned at her, knowing it didn’t make sense, knowing that it didn’t need to make much sense. My breath was still shallow, my heart still racing; I’d recovered from the dance, only to be still shaken just from her hands now working their way down my wrist to my palm.

“This, this pleases you?”

She’d found some sort of pressure point, or some sort of muscle knot—I knew basically nothing about muscles, I just knew I didn’t want her to stop, and she was pausing, looking at me. “Fuck,” I whispered. “Yes.”

“Look you here, then.”

I hadn’t even noticed my gaze dropping to the table or my eyes half-closing. One of my legs—one of them, and not the other, hilariously—was shaking, and the laughter made its way past my lips as I forced my chin up and met Ketka’s eyes, feeling my heart race harder as she took my other hand and massaged the muscles in my palms.

“There are a great many things,” she murmured, “that I am minded to show you. But I must first understand your silences and your answers.”

“Yes and no is easiest.”

I was dissociating in the haze, feeling like it was someone else’s body I was inhabiting—nothing about my reactions felt quite right, like it was all too intense, too pure.

It made it easier to speak, at least.

“With yes and no,” I heard myself say, “it’s binary. I only have to worry about cadence, intonation, volume, where I’m looking, how my hands are, do my hips move, am I tensing up. It’s easier.”

“And this,” she said with a nod, meaning and this conversation, “comes easily? No, it comes… practiced.”

I nodded, grateful that she understood, grateful that she was working her way around my hands instead of just probing in one place.

“Dance again with me,” she said suddenly. “The next song is one of nothing but closeness; we will not be amiss to move slowly, and none hear another.”

“A slow dance for talking,” I said quietly, giggling. “I like that.”

I had expected her to walk hand in hand with me. Instead, she steered me through the thin crowd between us and the dancing area, her hands still holding mine but also resting on my hips.

The feeling of it was more intoxicating than the punch had been. With my arms held close across my stomach and her body close enough to mine that I could feel her warmth and her breath on my scalp, she could adjust my course by minute pressure and I could settle back into my body and focus on following her guidance.

Waggling my hands and arms against her grip was a risk that I hadn’t considered until I’d already done it. I was ready to protest that no, I didn’t want her to let go, I wanted to enjoy how it felt—but she just chuckled into the curve of my ear, sending lightning down my opposite side.

“When you speak with your body, a woman might think it so clear as to need no words.”

Ketka’s voice was approving and amused, and the clear mix of joy and hunger in it had me slowing down just to feel the strength of how she could keep me moving forwards. She nipped at my earlobe, getting a yip of reaction out of me, and before I knew it we were back in the center of the dancing.

True to her word, I couldn’t hear a single other person. Just my shaky breathing, Ketka’s soft chuckle as she turned me to face her, and a band that deserved so much more attention than I could possibly give it.

“Reach up, Sophie,” my partner for the night said, “and your fingers lace behind my neck.”

“Your grammar’s slipping.” It was a remark made without thought, and I blushed furiously when I realized what I’d said.

I did as she’d bid regardless, and she led me into the first steps of our second dance.