“You don’t seem entirely okay.” My arms are wrapped around Amber, my body pressed up against hers, mind still spinning with what she’d divulged earlier tonight. “Scratch that,” I say after a moment of uncharacteristic silence from her. Something is wrong, I can feel it in my bones, and I shove everything I’d been thinking of aside and look at her with my full attention on her, rather than her implications, for the first time in a while. “You seem totally not okay. Amber? You there?”

She moves, blessedly; the act of it, her pulling me in for a kiss, is a balm. It’s oddly tremulous, which I guess fits the full-body shakes she’s still having, but as I kiss her again she responds, body arching to press into mine. Her lips part for my tongue and it’s a bolt of lightning down my spine as she traps it with her teeth and sucks gently on it, then releases it.

“Stars, the things you do.” My voice is a low enough murmur I can barely hear myself, but I suspect it’s still clearly audible to her; her fingers clench around my shoulder, gently, as if in answer. “The way you look.”

I hadn’t looked at her all evening, not properly. I’d have noticed if I had; noticed that she’s wearing something vaguely like a sleeveless tunic and not much else, tight across her chest and riding halfway up her thighs. I should have taken the time to lose myself at least for a moment in the way her muscles move when she walks, if nothing else, and I push everything away but the hunger in my gaze and the fire running down my spine to my groin.

Amber’s hand shakes, barely perceptible but shaking nonetheless, as she guides my hand up to her thigh, feeling the slick wetness of her arousal almost as far down as her tunic reaches. I slip my hand into her underpants and feel the heat in me redouble; she’s blazing warm and so slick she’s practically frictionless to the touch. I pull the drawstring’s knot loose as I kiss her again and she bucks as I slide my hand up her thigh, revelling in the tangible evidence of her desire.

“Please.” The word is quiet, almost whispered. It passes out of her lips like it’s a struggle, like she can hardly speak. “My lord, please.”

It’s been no few days, and I’m still not used to the fact that I can read her intonation, her facial expressions, her body language. It’s glorious, it’s wonderful; it speeds me up as I strip off my clothes as fast as I can, and it redoubles my hunger as I pull her tunic over her head, pressing my body against her skin as it’s revealed.

Her bra follows, and I pause for a moment, up on one elbow, drinking in the sight of her. Her beauty claws at my throat and my heart, fills me with wonder and joy and a sense of unreality; she steals the breath from my lungs.

Her arms are still over her head, the tunic still tangled in her hands. There’s a passivity to her motion, or her general lack of motion, that I’m not used to, but her body language makes what she wants clear as she spreads her legs and tilts her hips, lips forming the word please as though she can’t bear to form speech.

I’m inside her in a single thrust, hands full of her breasts, mouth at her nipple. She gasps raggedly at my entry, rocking her hips into mine as she squeezes my cock, pulling an equally ragged grunt from my throat as I almost lose my senses between that and her wet, greedy heat. Her pelvic muscles clutch all the harder as I slide almost all the way out, but she’s so phenomenally soaked that it doesn’t matter; there’s not enough friction to matter, just pressure, glorious fucking pressure as I thrust back in.

Not quite to the length. I adjust, sliding out just enough to shift where our skin is bunching; I bring one hand off her breasts, grabbing the underside of her knee and raising it up to my shoulder. She brings the other one up without prompting and I slide forward and up before thrusting the rest of the way into her, hands returned to her glorious tits, rolling her engorged nipples between my thumb and middle finger. I push her knees forward just a little, and on the next thrust, my hips meet hers and every millimeter of my cock buries itself inside her.

Her back arches, shoving her breasts into my hands and her hips into mine as she orgasms. I’m saying something, I’m not even sure what; words are spilling out of me like a reservoir with a leak down low, and all I can pay attention to is how amazing she feels and the simple mechanics of maintaining the position. I shift with her on the bed as my thrusts slide her across the sheets, I somehow manage to avert what was about to be a cramp in my calf without losing tempo, and I come closer and closer to losing myself every moment that I’m fucking her.

I hold out as long as I could have hoped. It’s like hurtling off a cliff for a moment, my eyes locked with hers, a weightlessness in my body and a singing tension in every muscle, and then her orgasm wracks both of us and I lose that moment in sheer pleasure; a long moment made longer by the way she seems to milk me greedily for every drop, made longer and more delightful by the blissful smile on her face.

I don’t quite collapse on top of her, still inside her, but it’s something close. There’s a shivering and shaking, that glorious tingling spasm somehow like the wake of a boat’s passage. It’s long, long seconds of letting them course through me before I can muster enough effort to even lift my head and look at her, much less pull myself out and more or less crawl up her body to kiss her.

Her hands are still over her head, still tangled in her tunic, and she’s not kissing me back, not really, and as she comes down from the high of the orgasms there’s distress starting to leak through.

“Hey.” With some difficulty, I prop myself up a little, enough to pull her to me. She… not exactly moves with me, more lets me move her. She’s crying, my companion is crying and I have no idea what to do or say other than hold her, her head heavy on my chest, her weight uncomfortable but bearable across my hips and legs. “Amber, my Paladin, my light in the darkness. If you want to talk to me, I’m here. If you don’t want to, that’s okay, but I’m here, and I’ll help you however I can, if you tell me how. But if you just need to cry for a while, that’s okay too.” Creche talk, really, but what else am I going to do?

“Hard,” she whispers, “it’s so hard, how do you make it look so easy?”

I don’t say anything, because I have no idea what to say, no idea what she’s talking about. I stroke her hair instead, running my fingers along the woven braid that runs along the crown of her head in a spiral. The rest of her hair spills out from under it in a controlled flood, and I tease the tangles out as she sobs, and every spasm of it is like a spike through my own heart.

“Sorry,” she eventually mumbles once the tears are done flowing. The mumble is more of a burble, and it takes everything in me not to giggle as I hand her one of the towels we have by the side of the bed and she blows her nose in a long trumpet-call that runs for a solid few seconds, tunic still hanging from one wrist. “I’m sorry.”

“I don’t know of anything for you to be sorry for,” I say with as little emphasis as I can. It’s still probably too much; my emotions are a tempest of a turmoil, and it robs me of my emotive control. “But I’ll listen, if you want to tell me?”

“You make it look so easy. Being vulnerable,” she clarifies hoarsely. “I feel like I’ve shattered, like someone will stroll by and rend my pieces apart, or shove their hands in me and take me as a puppet. How do you stand it? Gods all bless, how did you ever keep your heart whole?”

“Um.” I blink, not sure how to respond. “Practice and necessity, probably,” I go with, though that might be too much honesty. “It’s not like I sat down and decided yeah, I’ll keep falling in love, yeah, I’ll keep putting myself out there, yeah, I’ll keep letting myself hope. It’s not like I met you and said to myself, yeah, I’ll take the risk, throw any ethical issues to the side.” I kiss her, tasting salt. “I can’t not. It’s not even a compulsion, it’s just how I am. Can I ask—”

“I could feel their will wrap around me.” Amber’s interruption is whisper-quiet. “Wrap inside me. It did not hollow me out only because they did not wish it to. I could feel with a word and a will they could have commanded my limbs, my mind. My words flowed as I screamed at myself to stop, but I could not; you needed to know, and I… was it that way for you, when you danced with Zidanya? When you were toyed with by Lady Sheid?”

“I…” I pause. “Amber, do you remember how I was after I came out of the soulwork trance today?” She nods, and I smirk faintly. “I don’t know if I came by it honestly or through the bullshit the Spirit put me through, but I swear I have a fetish for being vulnerable. Twisting on Lily’s finger, dancing follow for Zidanya; Amber, it’s easy for me to be vulnerable because I like it, and because I know that if someone goes too far, well. That’s what the orbs are for. I had the kill on Zidanya if she didn’t work with me at the end, you know?” Though let’s not think about Lily.

“And Sara?”

There’s a lot less distress on Amber’s face. Actually, she’s got the look of someone working through a puzzle, and in this case I think the puzzle is me, which is pretty neat. “That was a leap of faith, one taken by necessity. But it’s still, well.”

She smiles up at me, rising up on an elbow to—thank the stars—kiss me like she means it, even if her lips still taste like salt, even if the hand she wraps in my hair shakes a little. “I saw the results earlier today, my lord. You were nigh catatonic with heat.”

“And not because of anything Sara was doing. Just, y’know, to clarify.” I take a deep breath with some difficulty, let it out somewhat shakily, determined not to ask her to move her weight. “It was just… the vulnerability itself.”

“I see.” She looks up at me, and there's an oddly fey smile on her face. “No. I don't see. Can you show me, my lord?”