Having my fingers laced around Ketka’s neck wound up leaving me with almost no balance and even less control. As close as she had me, my body was bent backwards and my heels barely let me reach high enough, and it was almost too much.
The utterly intoxicating comfort I had in the way she moved us, slow and confident, was paradoxically the only thing that kept the feeling from being overwhelming. Every motion was small enough that I could keep what little stability I had, and every motion was one of two bodies moving in unison.
The heat of her core made the punch seem cool by comparison where she pressed into me—which was everywhere, it felt like—and her legs brushed against mine. My mind was haze and sparks, my body aglow, and I was putty in her hands.
She drew me in with every step, leaving me with nothing to do other than follow her lead and savor her touch; and then, cruelly, she asked me questions.
The first ones were banal, questions about food and language and mathematics. But in short order, they became… more difficult for me to answer.
“Tell me of the ways I might reach you, and of the ways you would reach me?”
“I like your voice,” I said distantly. “You have a nice voice, I like the way it rumbles.”
Ketka’s tone had made it clear exactly what kinds of reaching she meant, and that wasn’t it. It still took me a bit to keep going, to turn a seeming non-sequitur into what she wanted and needed to hear—a moment she gave me, as she’d given me so many others.
“Words of affirmation. Affectionate touch, touch that feels good.” Those two were the easy ones, if she understood them—the ones I’d said to enough people that it had become practiced. “A desire that commands instead of asks, from someone… safe, but…”
Ketka’s fingers slid under my chin as I trailed off, raising my gaze back to hers. I hadn’t even noticed my head falling—maybe as we’d danced, maybe as I’d spoken—but I definitely noticed meeting her eyes again. It intensified my blush—everything was intensifying my blush, it felt like—and made my head reflexively try to duck again.
The softness of her grip allowed me no more motion than if it were steel, and the concern on her face drove my mind to speech for fear she’d let go.
“It’s about agency,” I blurted. “I mean, it’s also that, for some reason, when I’m with a partner, every choice is overwhelming, every action is a million choices, and that’s a thing too, and I guess that’s also agency, the way even trying to decide is so impossible it sends me out of the moment. And it’s about how if I ask, I can’t trust what I get because what if they’re just being nice, and the only thing I can trust is a desire that takes and gives.”
“Instead of receiving and fulfilling,” she murmured. “And this, too, is agency?”
“I guess, but also I have a… a thing for, um.”
I didn’t know why I was stuttering. I was a grown adult, I could tell this gorgeous, tall, deep-voiced woman whose inescapable gentleness I was caught by what I wanted and needed from her.
“I like how shy I feel right now,” I offered instead, delighting in her dissatisfaction with my deflection..
“And is this the agency you spoke of, the thing?”
“That—that, um, is, it’s a little different?” The last word came out as a squeak as a roughly callused hand slipped down, eyes going wide as she squeezed my ass.
“That,” she murmured hungrily, “is a thing of beauty, that sound. But finish your thought.”
I breathed shallowly, once, twice, not even realizing until my legs took up my weight again that Ketka had been supporting me, that I’d lost my balance entirely. The words spilled out of me as I stumbled again, and this time I just hung on to her shamelessly, reveling in my weakness.
“The shyness thing, it’s about vulnerability and uncertainty and a little undercurrent of fear and doubt, and that ties into agency. But also I like being restrained, I love being helpless, there’s no underlying reason to it, I just—”
Her thumb brushed against my mouth, silencing me and pulling the air out of my lungs. My tormentor’s grin gleamed as she bent down and kissed me, thumb stroking across my cheekbone and beneath my ear, and I shuddered against her for a long, melting moment as her tongue played gently against my parted lips.
She broke the kiss, murmuring almost as if to herself. “To answer is to be drawn out… so many questions arise, and I have heard many answers.” Her eyes glinted with humor, and drew her head back to smirk at me. “Does it please you, my having heard many answers to these questions?”
I nodded, swallowing hard as her words sank in.
“Ah. Easier to answer with your body than to use words.” Her smirk became something softer and gentler, a wide smile full of delight. “Dance with me, Sophie, and let me feel your answers in your blood and breath.”
I did, and she did.
Her hands explored my back through my shirt, tracing the line of every muscle as we moved; she drew out truth after truth from me, ones I had words for and ones I knew I would struggle with.
Her touch brought with it a liquid heat that radiated through my spine to my extremities, and every time I stumbled she had already moved to support me so completely that it was as if she’d planned for it; she suggested things wonderful and terrible, great and glorious and terrible, and she read my answers in my body without needing me to say a word.
Her breath and touch betrayed her own eagerness, trembling not when I was at my weakest—then, she was an immovable rock and a pillar of strength—but when I had recovered and she could show me the delight that came alongside her desire; she coaxed me into unambiguous gestures to accompany the fallible syntax of physicality, letting me confirm and deny in the simplest of ways.
She held my head anytime I would have looked away, murmuring that I could always close my eyes if I was drowning; she asked about my senses, about smells and tastes, about sights and sounds, about what it meant for a touch to feel good, all without needing me to breathe a word.
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She touched me with a maddening intimacy, for all that her hands didn’t stray from where a friend’s might have, if they were dancing with me, for all that I wanted more so very badly; she asked me about what words of affirmation meant to me, and I managed words without thinking through them.
With the slightest brush of her thumb, she parted my lips and made way for her kiss; with the softest murmur, she praised me for each and every way I’d pleased her and delighted her, and that moment lasted forever and yet not long enough by far.
But the song, alas, had come to an end.
Ketka started guiding me back, out of the crowd and away from the next dance. The second time I tripped and almost fell within a few steps she gently coaxed my arms off of her neck, where I’d almost forgotten they were—I’d dissociated from the geography of it, too deep in how everything felt to remember where I was.
With my left arm around her waist and hers supporting me under the right shoulder, I could walk.
It was getting into evening somehow, with the sun starting to approach the horizon, and it was cooling off pretty steadily, though the table we wound up leaning on was still warm with the sun’s heat. Between the mild chill that my clothes did nothing to dispel and the way that Ketka was maintaining a bit of distance between our bodies, I was fully mentally present in mournfully short order.
“I assume,” I said eventually, studiously looking away from her smile for a bit, “that there’s something you wanted to talk about.”
“Transparent, am I?”
“Any blunter and you’d be wielding clubs,” I quipped feebly, turning my head to grin at her.
“We have left unspoken a subject that we cannot let lie.”
Her voice wasn’t exactly grave, but it was serious despite her answering smile. I let some of that gravity imbue my nod, letting the intoxicated warmth go as best I could.
It still took a bit. Gloriously, wonderfully, the altered state of consciousness that I’d been so deep in was reluctant to leave. But Ketka was right, and it was a conversation that I needed to be fully present for.
“You want to discuss,” I said eventually, looking over at the milling, peacock-gorgeous crowd, “what we’re gonna be to each other.”
“We are already friends, in the way that we of Delve become friends in our passing seasons—brightly burning, joining fiercely to share as deeply as our time will be short together.”
“Yeah.” I rubbed my eyes, feeling them—somewhat shamefully—burn with sudden tears. “I… had a lot of friends like that. They’d move on, or I would, or…” I took a deep breath, letting it out slowly.
“I have no call on your secrets,” Ketka said delicately. “Even less so than most. I will listen, if you want to share, but sometimes memories are better left in the ground.”
“In the ground,” I murmured to nobody in particular. There was a knowingness to her choice of the phrase, and the sadness in her smile made clear how deliberate it was. “Do you toast to absent companions, to fallen friends? In Yaro, I mean.”
I could tell the length of the moment in which she was on the edge of saying something pithy, though I didn’t know why. “For an honored foe, we toast the blood that soaks the sands,” she said instead. She raised a tall, narrow glass that had been filled about an inch up with a dark amber liquid, nodding at the similar vessel in front of me. “For family? To the blood of my blood that keeps wet the sands for me.”
“Let the blood of my father’s line evaporate,” I said dryly. “Is there one for found family?”
“We… rarely speak of family in such ways, Sophie.” I watched the tension ripple across her hands and slowly ease away. “But I suspect you have cause, even if we still hold it improper to say it out loud.”
“I do.” The words came out heavier than I wanted, but less heavily than they might have. “I do have such cause, to speak ill of the family that abandoned me. I—he wasn’t going to get—” I cut myself off, letting out a ragged breath and drawing it back in more steadily.
I couldn’t bear to look up to see whatever expression was on Ketka’s face. I just waited, instead, forcing my hands to be still instead of fidgeting.
It wasn’t much of a wait.
“May he live to see the shadows circle,” she murmured, pushing my glass into my left hand and taking my right hand in hers. “For the family we choose, for someone who is a brother to me as Deoro is, we lack an elegant phrase. Though…”
I caught her raising her glass out of the corner of my eye and heard her murmuring to herself. I tried to read her lips, just out of habit, but she wasn’t speaking Shemmai; Yaroba, then, which meant she… was translating?
“This,” she said eventually, looking back at me, “is a toast for fallen comrades in battle. My best attempt at a translation! A child’s work, you understand.”
I met her grin, only slightly forced, with one of my own. “I understand perfectly, Ketka, the quality that your best attempt at a translation will carry.”
“Hmph.” She visibly preened at me, then sobered a little. “This toast, then, is given in the company of fellow warriors, after others fall or in their memory. To we remaining—to those gone ahead.”
“To we remaining,” I repeated. “To those gone ahead.”
Our glasses clinked gently, and I drank. There was only a small swallow of the liquor in the glass, given how narrow it was, but it poured down my throat like a river of flame, leaving smoke and tingling in its wake.
“Oh, that’s the stuff.” The words brought first the fire and then the aftermath of it up into my sinuses, and I breathed it out and savored it.
“Araq,” she agreed reverentially. “Blessings be upon Hitz, and their wells never run dry.”
“From your lips to my absent God’s ears.”
We shared a moment’s silence, looking at each other in the afterglow of the drink. Its heat, and the relaxation it was spreading through my body, was bringing back the memories of earlier in the evening in a pretty pointed manner.
“I’d like it,” I suddenly said, words flowing with a natural ease that surprised me, “if you took me home with you, and tomorrow we were still friends. We can figure out what we are to each other beyond that after tonight, right?”
“Ah, you would like it. I see.” Ketka smirked at me, smirking wider when I didn’t take the bait and just smiled. She leaned closer, leaning her forehead on mine and letting her voice rumble quietly through my bones. “And when I take you home,” she said almost idly, “should I put you to bed, and find another to dance with?”
“No,” I responded with a forced—and shallow, oh so shallow—tartness. “Unless you want to?”
“What I want is to fuck you, Sophie.” Her eyes were suddenly boring into mine from that miniscule distance. “I want to make of you readied tinder, red and glowing and only a breath from roaring—and with a torch of words I want to then set you ablaze. I want to drink of your joys until I am glutted. Is that what you want?”
My head was bobbing in a rapid-fire nodding motion before Ketka was finished asking, and she laughed, soft and greedy, murmuring an endearment into my ear and then kissing me with the kind of greedy hunger that eclipsed any expectation.
“Go get us some dinner,” she ordered, breaking off too soon. “Tell whoever is at the table you need a pair of lovers’ baskets.”
Warm to my toes, shooting a grateful glance at the near-stranger who caught me when I inevitably stumbled in my haste, grinning ear to ear, I obeyed.