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How to Train your human

Nibbi's tail had not stopped thumping against the sun-baked dirt for the better part of an hour, and she was fairly certain she'd worn a groove into the earth deep enough to plant root vegetables in.

She sat cross-legged outside the appraisal hut with her claws digging little half-moons into her own knees, her emerald scales catching the late afternoon light and throwing tiny green sparks across the ground that she was (regrettably) too nervous to appreciate. Inside, beyond the heavy hide flaps that smelled of tanning oil and old leather and whatever it was that made the elder’s hut feel heavier than the rest of the village, the village elder was poking and prodding and measuring her catch. Her catch. Her first catch. Her first hunt, her first chase, her first successful net-throw (okay, her fourth net-throw, but the first three had been practice throws that just happened to miss), and she'd dragged home something big.

Not big like a ridge-boar, which any second-season huntress could snare with her eyes shut and her tail tied behind her back. Not big like one of those fat marsh birds that practically walked into traps because they were too stupid to do anything else. No. Nibbi had hauled in something that stood nearly twice her height, something that had made old Tessik drop her smoking pipe right into her own lap when Nibbi came trudging through the village gate beside the carrying pole, three other huntresses straining on the lines while she marched at the front with both hands locked on the lead rope, and the rare, scandalized curses that followed were a memory Nibbi intended to treasure for the rest of her natural life.

Every huntress needed a pet. That was simply the way of things, had been the way of things since before Nibbi's grandmother's grandmother had first sharpened a claw on ceremonial flint. You went out, you hunted, you caught something worthy, and you brought it home and trained it, and the quality of your pet said everything about the quality of you.

A huntress with a well-trained ridge-boar was respectable. One with a matched pair of marsh hawks was impressive. One with something nobody had ever seen before, something enormous and strange and utterly unlike anything currently penned in any paddock in the village…

Well. That huntress would be legendary.

(Assuming, of course, that she could actually train the thing. A detail Nibbi was choosing to worry about later.)

He had no scales. That had been the first thing she'd noticed when she'd found him stumbling through the deep ferns at the edge of the eastern ridge, all long limbs and pale, horrifyingly naked skin that looked like it would bruise if you so much as breathed on it too hard. No fur either, except for a patch of dark stuff on top of his head that flopped around when he moved. There were no claws to speak of. And no tail. That one had genuinely unsettled her, because how did a creature balance without a tail? How did it express displeasure? How did it knock things off tables? The whole arrangement seemed like a catastrophic design oversight.

But he was big. Broad across the shoulders, long in the leg, and when she'd tackled him into the fern bed (from behind, because she was a huntress and not an idiot), she'd felt the coiled strength in his limbs as he'd thrashed against the net, and something hot and electric had zipped from the base of her skull all the way down to the tip of her tail.

Strong, she'd thought, tightening the net cords with shaking claws. This one is strong.

The hide flaps of the appraisal hut rustled, and Nibbi was on her feet so fast that her tail whipped sideways and nearly took out a passing water-carrier's ankles (sorry, Dekka, very sorry, didn't see you there). The village elder emerged with the slow, deliberate gravity of someone who had been old since before the concept of age had been invented, his grey-green scales dull and papery, his eyes like two wet stones pressed deep into the folds of his face.

"Young huntress," he said, in that voice that always sounded like gravel being poured very slowly into a leather bag.

"Yes! That's me! What is it? What did I catch? Is it rare? It's rare, isn't it. I knew it was rare." Nibbi's claws were clasped together so tightly her knuckles ached.

The elder regarded her for a long, measured moment. Behind him, through the gap in the hide flaps, Nibbi caught a glimpse of her catch standing now, upright, which was a relief because she'd been mildly concerned she'd knocked him too hard with the weighted end of the net, and her breath snagged somewhere between her throat and her chest.

They'd stripped him down to a standard village loincloth. Just the basic hide wrap, the same kind they put on any unclothed creature that came through appraisal, and on him it was… barely. The cloth sat low on his hips, and Nibbi's gaze dropped (involuntarily, she would insist later, completely involuntarily) to where the tip of something was very clearly poking past the edge of the fabric, and her scales flushed a shade of green so deep it was nearly black.

Note to self, she thought with tremendous force, get a bigger loincloth. Immediately. Before someone loses an eye.

"You have caught," the elder announced, drawing her attention back with the gravitational pull of his disapproval, "a human."

Nibbi blinked. "A human."

"A young one. Male. Somewhere between fifteen and nineteen seasons, by my estimation." The elder's tail scraped slowly across the ground behind him, the way it always did when he was working up to saying something Nibbi wasn't going to like. "Not yet fully grown."

Not fully grown, and already twice her height. Nibbi's tail began thumping again, entirely of its own volition. "So he'll get bigger?"

"That is precisely the problem." The elder folded his weathered arms across his chest. "Young huntress, I would strongly advise you to reconsider this claim."

There it was. The thing she'd been bracing for since she'd first seen the looks on the other huntresses' faces when she'd come through the gate, not admiration, not envy, but that particular tight-lipped expression that meant oh, you poor stupid hatchling, you have no idea what you've gotten yourself into.

"Humans," the elder continued, ticking points off on his clawed fingers, "are difficult to tame. They are expensive to feed. They eat nearly constantly, and not sensible things like grubs and root mash, but great quantities of cooked meat and grain. They are resistant to command. They bite. They run. They are, by the general consensus of every huntress who has ever attempted to keep one, pretty useless for most practical purposes." He paused, letting each word land like a stone dropped into still water. "You would be better served to release this one and try your hunt again. A nice ridge-boar, perhaps. Something manageable for a first pet."

A ridge-boar. He wanted her to trade that. She looked past him again at the tall, strange, scaleless creature standing in the dim light of the appraisal hut, its chest rising and falling, its dark eyes darting around the space with an alertness that made her hunter's instincts sing. For a ridge-boar.

Nibbi thought about it.

She really did. For a full three seconds, she entertained the possibility of walking away, of letting them turn the human loose at the edge of the territory and pretending the whole thing had never happened, of going back out into the ferns with a fresh net and coming home with something safe and expected and boring.

No.

No, absolutely not. Not in this lifetime or any other.

"He's my claim," Nibbi said, and her voice came out steadier than she expected, low and firm in a way that surprised even her. "It is my right."

The elder's eyes narrowed. His tail stopped its slow scraping.

"I caught him. I netted him. I brought him back. He is mine." She drew herself up to her full four feet of height, which admittedly was not a lot of height to draw up to, but she made every inch count. "I will feed him. I will wash him. I will train him to be a good pet. The best pet. Better than any ridge-boar, better than any marsh hawk, better than anything anyone in this village has ever…"

"Nibbi." The elder held up one hand, and the single word cut through her rising tide of declarations like a claw through wet hide. "I hear your claim. I accept your claim."

Her tail went absolutely berserk.

"But."

(There was always a but. The elder was a creature composed almost entirely of buts.)

"Humans are not ridge-boars. They are not marsh hawks. They are clever, and they are dangerous when not trained properly. They can hurt you, young huntress, in ways you do not yet understand." His gaze held hers, and for a moment the gravel-in-leather-bag voice softened into something that almost sounded like concern. "I will be checking on your progress. Two weeks. If I do not like what I see, if that creature is not responding to your training, if it shows signs of aggression, if you cannot demonstrate control, I will release it into the wilds myself. Are we clear?"

Two weeks. Fourteen days to turn a tall, strange, scaleless, tailless, constantly eating, apparently useless creature into something the elder would consider a properly trained pet.

Nibbi's claws were trembling. Her scales were practically humming. Somewhere deep in her chest, in the space between her ribs where excitement and terror lived in the same nest, something was buzzing so hard she could feel it in her teeth.

"Crystal ," she said, grinning wide enough to show every single one of her pointed teeth.

The elder sighed, a sound like wind through dead reeds, and stepped aside.

Nibbi darted past him, through the hide flaps, and into the appraisal hut where her human stood blinking in the sudden shift of light, his hands half raised as though he couldn't decide whether to shield himself or surrender, the too small loincloth doing absolutely nothing to preserve whatever dignity he might have been clinging to. Nibbi skidded to a stop in front of him and tilted her head all the way back to look up, and up, and up into his face.

He stared down at her.

She stared up at him.

Her tail thumped once against the packed earth floor.

"Right," Nibbi said, mostly to herself, her claws flexing at her sides. "Two weeks. No problem."

~~*~~

“Ah, fuck me, this is a problem,” she cursed aloud.

The pen was empty.

Nibbi stood at the yard gate and stared at the empty enclosure and felt every single one of the last seven days drain out through the soles of her feet into the dirt.

Gone. He was gone. She'd been at the eastern ridge checking snare lines for four hours, and the human had apparently looked at the entirety of her careful, methodical, genuinely impressive first week of training and decided to simply leave. Now she was going to have to tell the elder she'd lost him. The elder was going to do that thing with his tail, the slow scraping thing, and then he was going to say something like I did warn you in that gravel-bag voice, and Nibbi was going to have to stand there and take it.

She crossed the yard in six steps and grabbed the gate.

Closed. The gate was closed.

She looked at the rope latch. Tied. The knot was exactly the knot she'd left, a double-wrap with the tail tucked under, the same knot she'd been tying since she was three seasons old, and it had never once come undone accidentally. Her claws found the cord and traced it. Intact. No fraying. No sign that anything had pulled against it from the inside.

Nibbi let go of the rope and looked at the pen, then at the gate again.

The gate was closed. The rope was tied. The knots were intact.

She stood very still in the way she stood still when a hunt was going wrong and she needed to think instead of run. The pen was empty. The gate was closed. The only way to reconcile those two facts was that whatever had gotten out had done so on purpose, with enough understanding of the latch to close it again behind itself.

That was not a ridge-boar thing to do. Ridge-boars did not close the gate behind themselves.

She shoved through the gate into the yard proper and started searching, her tail low and lashing, her nostrils working. The yard smelled of sawdust and something else, something warm and complicated that she'd been catching in odd moments all week and hadn't yet filed under any useful category. She ignored it. She was busy panicking.

The woodpile near the eastern fence had been disturbed. Not ransacked, not scattered. Disturbed. Carefully. Several pieces shifted and a long flat-sided log dragged clear of the stack and positioned on the ground with geometric precision. Wood shavings curled in pale ribbons around its base. Fresh ones, still holding their curl.

She'd found shavings like this on day two, when she'd come home to discover him crouched over the remains of his dinner making a series of sounds she could only describe as sustained whining. He'd refused the raw meat entirely, just sat there making the sounds and looking at her with those disturbingly large, human eyes. She'd eventually cooked it over the fire pit out of sheer self-defense because the whining had been giving her a headache. She still didn't know what the sounds meant. Nobody in the village spoke human. It seemed like a significant design flaw in the whole pet-keeping arrangement.

She moved past the woodpile. Near the fence post, something glinted.

Nails. Several of them, the iron ones from her repair kit that she kept in the lean-to, arranged in a small cluster on top of a flat stone. Some were bent. Not broken. Bent with deliberate angles, like someone had reshaped them with intent. She picked one up and turned it over in her claws. The bend was tight and even.

She remembered watching his hands on day three, the way those long, clawless, frankly unsettling fingers had moved with a precision that made her own claws feel clumsy by comparison. She'd handed him a piece of cord to keep him occupied while she worked, expecting him to tangle it into a useless knot the way most animals did. Instead he'd done something complicated and structural with it that she still hadn't entirely unpicked. The fingers were the strangest thing about him, she'd decided. Stranger than the lack of tail. Stranger than the skin.

She dropped the nail and kept moving.

The food store.

She looked at it for a long, silent moment.

She had left him enough provisions for two days. She had been gone four hours. The provision basket now contained enough food for a very small lizard who wasn't particularly hungry. Day four had been an education in what it meant to feed a human. You thought you'd given him enough, and then came back to find him looking at you with those eyes doing the thing she'd labeled in her head as the ‘more please’ look, and she'd had to go back to the communal larder twice and lie about what it was for both times. He ate like there were two of him in there.

She checked behind the lean-to. Not there. She checked the shadow under the eave near the fire pit. Not there. She checked the narrow gap between the fence and the old storage crate she used to hide in as a hatchling. Too small for him by an embarrassing margin. Obviously not there.

She put her hands on her hips and turned in a slow circle.

"Come," she said to the yard, on the off chance.

Nothing.

That was new, she thought, slightly wounded. She'd spent the better part of days five and six on come. That had involved a lot of her pointing at a spot near her feet and him making various sounds at her that ranged from confused-whining to irritated-whining to what she'd eventually, triumphantly, identified as compliance-whining. He had sat when she said sit. He had stayed when she said stay. And by the end of it, when she said come, he came.

And now he was gone, and the elder could take his ridge-boar and his marsh hawks and…

A sound from above.

Not from the yard. From above the yard. From specifically above her head, where the roof of the main hut jutted out over the eastern wall.

Nibbi looked up.

The human was on the roof.

He was sitting astride the peak of the hut, and in his hands was a crude mallet she had never seen before, carved, she realized, from one of the pieces of the woodpile. He was methodically driving a bent nail through a flat plank and into the roofing frame. Around him, arranged with that same unsettling geometric precision, were four more planks of varying sizes, all clearly shaped from the logs she'd seen near the eastern fence, all fitted against each other in a pattern that was

She stared.

The eastern section of the roof had been leaking since she inherited the house. She'd been meaning to fix it for seasons, which was how long she'd been telling herself she would get to it tomorrow. It was a two-person job at minimum, usually three, involving scaffolding and a lot of creative swearing.

He had fixed it. Or was fixing it. The new planks covered the worst of the gap, and she could see from here that they were fitted together with the kind of tight overlap that didn't happen by accident. He must have started while she was gone. He must have spent hours up there.

Hours. Alone. On the roof. With tools he'd made himself from wood he'd selected himself. And he hadn't run. He helped.

Nibbi retreated very quietly behind the water barrel at the corner of the yard and watched.

He didn't notice her, or if he did he gave no sign of it, just kept working with that steady, unhurried focus, fitting each plank, driving each nail, running those strange fingers along the joins to test them. There was a patience to it that she hadn't seen in him before. Most of the time he moved with a sort of coiled restlessness, like something that wanted to be somewhere else. This was different. This was a creature doing something it liked.

Builder type, she thought. He was a builder type.

She'd heard of those. Animals with strong territory instincts, animals that nested, that maintained, that put their energy into the space they lived in rather than the space beyond it. Old Pressi down the north lane had a tunnel-digger that had expanded its pen three times over in the first month she'd owned it. Same principle, probably. The human had identified the structural weakness in his territory and was addressing it.

This was actually very good enrichment behavior.

Nibbi stayed behind the water barrel for another hour and watched him finish. He set the last plank, drove the last nail, ran his palm along the completed section in a long testing sweep. Then he sat back on his heels at the roof peak and looked out over the yard with an expression she couldn't name, and the late afternoon light came down at a long angle and turned his scaleless skin almost golden, and Nibbi decided she'd been crouching behind a water barrel long enough.

She stepped out. She looked up at him.

"Come," she said.

He looked down at her. His chest moved. He made a sound—not whining, something shorter—and then, with a care that suggested he was very aware of how far up he was, he began working his way down the side of the house, using the fence post as a brace, dropping the last several feet with a thud that she felt in the ground through her feet.

He straightened up. He looked at her.

She looked at him.

Her tail moved once, slowly, in what she would have called a reluctant acknowledgment if anyone had asked, which she was going to make sure nobody did.

First voluntary return, something in the back of her head noted, in the tone of a hunter cataloguing a significant observation. He came back.

She filed that away and immediately became aware of something else, which was that the human, after several hours of physical exertion in the afternoon sun, smelled.

She'd noticed it before, the smell, in fragments, something warm and salt-sharp underneath the general animal scent of him, something her nostrils kept catching on and then couldn't let go of, like a splinter in soft hide. Up close, after the exertion, it was

It was a lot.

She took a step back. Not because it was bad, exactly. She couldn't decide if it was bad. Her brain wanted to file it under unpleasant and kept declining to complete the paperwork. It was sharp and warm and strange, and it sat in the back of her throat in a way that made her jaw tight, and she kept thinking about it even as she was actively trying to stop thinking about it, which was annoying.

He needed washing. That was the practical answer. Pets needed washing, especially after exertion, and she'd been meaning to do this since day one and hadn't gotten around to it. The communal hot springs were twenty minutes down the south path. The elder's notes on pet care, which she'd borrowed from the village records and read very thoroughly while pretending she hadn't, were extremely clear on the importance of regular bathing for animals that didn't groom themselves.

He'd also earned a reward. The roof was a genuine contribution. She could admit that.

Nibbi clicked her tongue at him and pointed down the south path.

"Come," she said.

He came.

The communal hot spring sat in a shallow basin of worn stone at the bottom of the south path, ringed by a half wall of stacked river rock that came up to about Nibbi's chest and served the dual purpose of keeping the heat in and keeping nosy neighbors out. Steam rose off the surface in slow, curling threads that caught the last of the dusk light and turned it pink and amber, and the air smelled of mineral salt and wet stone and the faintest trace of the herbal soap cakes someone had left in the carved dish near the entrance.

Empty. Nibbi had timed it perfectly. Dusk was the gap between the afternoon bathers and the evening bathers, that narrow window when most of the village was eating or arguing about eating or recovering from arguments about eating, and the springs sat quiet and steaming and unoccupied. She did not want an audience for this. Not because there was anything unusual about washing a pet. Every huntress washed her animals, it was basic husbandry. But the human was new and strange and she hadn't yet figured out how to make any part of handling him look effortless, and she refused to give anyone the satisfaction of watching her fumble.

She set the brush and the soap cake on the flat stone beside the pool and stripped.

There was no ceremony to it. She unclasped the hunting vest, shrugged out of her chest wrap, stepped out of her hip cloth, and piled the lot on the dry bench near the wall with the same brisk efficiency she'd use shucking corn. You didn't put on a show for your pet. You just got undressed, because you were about to get wet, and clothes and water didn't mix, and that was the entire thought process, beginning to end.

Her scales caught the steam and went slick almost immediately, the emerald darkening to something richer in the humidity, and she rolled her shoulders and felt the warmth start to loosen muscles she hadn't realized were tight. Good. Fine. This was going to be quick and practical and entirely unremarkable.

She turned to the human.

He was standing where she'd told him to stand, near the entrance gap in the half-wall, and he was doing the thing where his eyes went very wide and very still and fixed on a single point in space, which in this case appeared to be approximately six inches to the left of her head. His jaw was set. His hands hung at his sides, and the fingers were doing that subtle curling thing she'd noticed on day four, the one that meant he was processing something he didn't know what to do with.

Nibbi pointed at the loincloth. Then she pointed at the water.

"Off," she said. "In."

Two words. Simple. She'd been working on simple.

He didn't move for a moment. Then his hands went to the tie at his hip, and he pulled the knot loose, and the loincloth dropped.

Right. Yes. She’d seen him without it before, briefly at the appraisal hut, and once on day three when he’s gotten tangled in a creep-vine and she’d had to cut it free with her belt knife while he stood very still and breathed in a way that had made her own breathing do something complicated. But those had been glances. Functional.

He was standing in the full amber light of dusk, completely bare, and Nibbi’s gaze made a quick professional sweep from top to bottom. Head. Shoulders. Chest, broad and pale, a scattering of dark hair she still found deeply weird. Stomach, flat and built for labor. Hips.

And then her gaze arrived at the place between them and stopped.

She had grown up around kobold males. They were compact and practical in that department, neatly sheathed, proportional, efficient. Good design.

This was not that.

It hung heavy between his thighs, undeniably large, nearly the length of her forearm, and the comparison formed in her mind before she could stop it. The tip was covered in a soft fold of skin that gathered like an inside-out sheath, unfamiliar and strangely delicate.

Human hood, she thought, because she needed to call it something or she was never going to stop looking at it.

She was staring. Steam beaded along her scales and slid down her shoulders and she had not blinked once. Her mouth was slightly open in a way that was neither dignified nor professional.

Biological differences, she told herself firmly. You are noting biological differences. For the training log. This is research.

The research was getting warmer. The air was getting warmer. Something behind her ribs was getting warmer and she did not like it.

She pulled her gaze away with a physical effort that felt like unsticking her feet from mud, turned sharply toward the pool, and stepped into the water.

The heat hit her like a wall, perfect and almost too hot, the kind that made every scale on her body sing and her muscles loosen into something liquid. The water rose to her waist and she sank to her shoulders, letting the mineral warmth do its work while very deliberately not looking back at the human standing naked at the pool’s edge.

“In,” she said again, pointing beside her without turning her head.

She heard him move. Bare feet on wet stone, careful and deliberate, then the water shifted as he stepped in. A large displacement. He was a large creature. The level rose around her chest and the wave pressed warm against her scales. He hissed through his teeth when the heat found him, a sharp intake she felt more than heard, and then he settled beside her. The pool that had felt spacious moments ago was suddenly not spacious at all.

The spring was designed for kobolds. Three, maybe four at a comfortable distance, with room to stretch tails and scrub without bumping elbows. One kobold and one human, a human occupying roughly the space of three and a half kobolds, meant comfortable distance no longer existed.

His knee was against her hip. Not pressing, just touching, the pale skin of it smooth and startlingly warm even through the hot water, and she could feel the shift of muscle underneath when he adjusted his position. She moved her tail to give him room and it brushed across his thigh under the water and she felt him flinch, just slightly, a tightening in the leg that pressed harder against her hip for one second before he pulled back.

Fine. This was fine. She was going to wash him, wash herself, and get out. Fifteen minutes. Twenty at the outside. Practical and efficient.

She grabbed the brush and the soap cake and turned toward him, and he was right there, closer than she'd calculated, because the pool was smaller than she'd calculated, and his face was right there, angled down at her, water beading on his chest and his jaw and the dark hair plastered flat to his forehead, and his eyes were

His eyes were doing something she hadn't catalogued yet. Something dark and intent that made her think of the way prey animals looked right before they decided to stop running. Not frightened. Not resigned. Something else.

She lathered the brush, working the soap into a thick foam.

“Wash,” she said, clearly and slowly, the way she always did when introducing a new command.

Then she started on his nearest arm.

It was like scrubbing a boulder. A warm, breathing, slightly trembling boulder with skin so smooth under the brush that she kept catching herself slowing down to feel the texture of it. No scales. No ridges. No hard edges anywhere, just this endless expanse of soft, yielding surface that gave under pressure and then sprang back, and her free hand was bracing against his shoulder while she worked, and under her palm she could feel the steady thud of his heartbeat carried through muscle and bone and hot water into her claws.

It was fast. Faster than she'd expected. Faster than hers.

She scrubbed his other arm, his shoulders, worked the brush across the broad plane of his back while he sat forward, and she tried not to think about the way the muscles there shifted and rolled under the bristles like something alive, something responsive, and she absolutely did not think about the sound he made—low, in the back of his throat, barely audible over the water—when she hit a spot between his shoulder blades that apparently needed hitting.

She was working her way down his side, brush in one hand, her other hand following behind to rinse, when he moved.

Not away. Not a flinch. He turned, slowly, and his hand came up—those fingers, those long strange dexterous fingers—and he took the brush from her grip. Not forcefully. Gently, in fact, with a care that made her claws tighten on nothing, and before she could decide whether this was an act of defiance that needed correcting, he dipped the brush in the water and brought it to her shoulder.

"Hey…"

The bristles touched her scales, and the word died somewhere between her tongue and the steam.

He started at her shoulder and moved down. Slow, methodical strokes that followed the grain of her scales instead of cutting against them, and the fact that he'd figured out the grain—that he'd been watching closely enough to understand that scales had a direction, that they lay flat one way and caught the other—sent something bright and startling through her chest that she immediately refused to examine.

The pressure was perfect. Not too hard, not too soft, just enough to get under the edges of each scale where grit and dead skin accumulated, and the brush moved down her arm and across her collarbone and along the ridge of her shoulder blade, and Nibbi's eyes drifted half-shut without her permission.

He's grooming me, she thought distantly. My pet is grooming me. This is— this is actually in the training manual. Reciprocal bonding behavior. Section four. This is good. This means he's bonding.

The brush traveled down the curve of her spine, each stroke precise and unhurried, and the bristles found the shallow groove between her dorsal ridge scales where no amount of solo scrubbing ever quite reached, and Nibbi's jaw went slack.

His fingers followed the brush. That was the thing she couldn't get past—the bristles would sweep a line down her back, and then those fingers would come after, pressing along the same path, testing the scales he'd just cleaned as if checking his own work, and the pads of his fingertips were so impossibly soft against the hard edges of her that the contrast made her scales prickle and lift in tiny involuntary waves that she prayed he couldn't see.

The brush moved lower, tracing the flare of her hip where her scales transitioned from the deep emerald of her back to the slightly paler green of her flank, and his free hand settled at her waist to steady the stroke—just resting there, warm and broad, his thumb fitting neatly into the dip above her hip bone—and the heat of his palm through the water was a different kind of heat than the spring, a focused, living heat that seemed to sink through her scales and into the muscle beneath.

Reciprocal bonding, she reminded herself. Section four. Subsection... something. There were subsections. She was fairly certain there were subsections…

The brush swept across the curve of her ass, and his fingers followed, and this time they didn't just check, they lingered. His palm spread flat against the swell of her, broad enough that his fingers curled partway around the muscle, and the pressure was firm and exploratory in a way that was definitely not in any training manual she had ever read. He squeezed, gently, almost experimentally, like he was learning the shape of her, and Nibbi's tail snapped rigid behind her and then curled, tight and involuntary, around the nearest thing it could find, which happened to be his calf.

She should correct this. She should absolutely correct this. This was not standard grooming behavior.

His hand slid up from her hip.

The brush slipped from his grip and sank somewhere into the hot water. Both of his hands were on her now, one still cupping the curve of her rear with that same steady, testing pressure, the other tracking up along her ribs with a slowness that made every scale it passed over tighten and sing. His fingers found the swell of her chest, and Nibbi's breath caught hard enough to make a sound, a small wet click in her throat that the steam swallowed.

Nibbi had never had a reason to pay attention to her chest before. It was simply part of her, something that existed without demanding thought, as unremarkable as her elbows or the back of her heel. A functional component of anatomy, nothing more.

The human apparently disagreed.

His hand settled over her through the water, exploratory rather than clumsy, and those long, unsettlingly careful fingers traced the curve of her as though confirming a shape he already suspected. When his thumb brushed the raised center, the knowledge abruptly stopped helping.

Something tightened sharply behind her ribs, a bright unfamiliar pull that spread outward before she could name it, before she could decide whether it was irritation or warning or injury. His thumb moved again and the sensation doubled, then tripled, racing down pathways she had not known existed, turning her thoughts thin and scattered.

The training manuals contained instructions for grooming and discipline and feeding schedules. Behavioral charts. Reward protocols. None of them contained a section for this.

She searched her memory anyway, mind scrambling for anything useful, until it caught on a particular set of scrolls she had been too embarrassed to check out from the knowledge hut, the ones with the red wax seal and the titles written in tight formal script that pretended they were not about what they were about.

Was this mating behavior. Did he see her as his mate.

The thought barely formed before it slipped. Something in her chest broke loose and a sound escaped her mouth that was not a word, not dignified, low and raw and pulled from somewhere beneath her ribs. It vibrated through her and into the water and probably through his hands and into his bones, loud enough that a bird startled from the scrub brush twenty feet away.

Nibbi’s eyes flew open.

(They had been closed. When had they closed. She had not authorized them to close.)

She spun around in the water so fast the displacement wave sloshed over the stone rim of the pool, and she grabbed the brush out for the floor and shoved it against his chest hard enough to push him back a full two inches.

His hips rolled forward again. His hand came down, that huge broad hand, and closed over hers, pressing her grip tighter around him, and the sound he made was low and guttural and nothing like any of the whining categories she'd established. Nibbi felt something hot and liquid bloom in the pit of her stomach that had absolutely nothing to do with the spring water.

She yanked her hands free and spun, a sharp half rotation meant to put her back to him and her hands on the stone rim so she could push herself up and out and away from whatever this was becoming.

Her foot slipped.

The stone floor, worn slick by years of mineral water, offered her claws nothing at all. Her leg went sideways, balance vanished with it, and she pitched backward with a yelp that was neither dignified nor commanding nor anything a huntress should ever make in front of her pet.

He reached to catch her. His hands found her shoulders as his weight shifted forward, but his own footing failed on the same slick stone. Instead of stopping her fall he followed it, and they went down together in a splash that sent water sheeting over the rim and slapping against the stacked stone wall, the world briefly nothing but churning heat, tangled limbs, and the hard press of his body against her back.

Her brain, traitor that it was, stopped offering solutions and started offering observations. It produced two of them immediately, as if that helped.

First: he was behind her. Directly behind her, his chest pressed against her back, and the size difference that she'd been abstractly aware of for a week was suddenly, viscerally, inescapably concrete, his torso curved over her like a wall, his breath hot against the crest of her head, and she was completely enclosed in the cage of his body.

Second: he was hard. Fully hard now, rigid and thick, and it was pressed against the small of her back, wedged in the groove where her spine met the base of her tail, and the heat of it burned through the water like a brand.

He shifted behind her. Not pulling away, just adjusting, settling, and the movement dragged the length of him down along the cleft of her rear in a slow, heavy slide that found the gap between her thighs and pressed there, and Nibbi’s claws dug into nothing and her mouth opened and no sound came out, because her body recognized the shape of him before her mind could decide what to do about it.

He moved again. A slow, deliberate roll of his hips, testing, learning, the shaft of him sliding forward between the backs of her thighs, firm and rhythmic. On the return stroke the ridged underside dragged lower, catching against the thinner inner scales where her legs met, and the friction turned her thoughts into steam.

“St…” she started. “mmmph. I said you need to…”

The words came out broken. Fractured. Each one interrupted by the roll of his hips, which had found a rhythm now, slow and long, and the command voice she’d worked so hard on was dissolving in real time, authority going soft in her throat while her body stayed wide awake to every stroke.

“wait, no, I’m telling you to…”

His arms came around her.

Both of them, wrapping from behind, and the sheer span of him engulfed her, one arm crossing low over her stomach as his hand slid down to rest against the flat plane of her belly, fingers spread wide enough that his pinky grazed the crease of her thigh and his thumb sat just below her navel. The other arm went higher, crossing her chest, his palm finding the swell of her breast and covering it entirely, those clever fingers curling around the shape of her with a possessiveness that made her vision blur, as if her body was trying to decide whether to fight or melt.

His body pressed flush against her back. Every inch of him, chest, stomach, hips, thighs, sealed against her scales with no gap, no space, no room to pretend there was distance between them. She could feel his heartbeat through his chest, hammering into her shoulder blades, and his breath was ragged against the top of her head, and his hips had not stopped, that slow grind that pushed the shaft of him between her thighs and then pulled back, and each stroke was traveling further forward now, the head of him sliding past the gap of her thighs and brushing.

Brushing.

His lower hand moved. Accident or intention, she couldn’t tell, and her brain had stopped caring about the distinction, because his fingers slid from her belly down into the space between her thighs, and his middle finger slipped lower and pressed into the small nub at the crest of her slit, exact enough to steal the breath from her chest.

“Stop.”

The word came out clear. Loud, even. It carried all the authority of a command and all the conviction of someone who wasn’t entirely sure they meant it.

For one heartbeat, he didn’t.

Not defiance. Momentum. The motion already in his muscles carried through, his fingertip dragging once, helplessly, across the swollen nub before stopping, the brief friction sharp and bright enough to make her knees threaten to give.

Then he went still.

Not slowly. Not by accident. She felt the effort of it, the tension climbing through his arm, his hand locking tight against her like he was physically holding himself in place. The contact stayed. The movement stopped. Held there by nothing but will.

Nibbi’s entire body seized.

Every muscle, every scale, every half formed thought locked at once, and the sound that ripped out of her was sharp and high and belonged to someone she didn’t recognize. It bounced off the stone walls and came back wrong. Her tail whipped sideways and wound tight around his thigh, her spine arching into his chest, and the hand on her breast squeezed, firm and deliberate, his thumb halted mid roll just like everything else.

The sensation hung there anyway, a ghost of pressure spreading outward from the place he had stopped, a slow widening bloom that turned shock into ache in the space of a single breath.

He stayed. Hot. Solid. Waiting.

Not pushing, not testing, not stealing another inch. Just holding perfectly still, infuriatingly obedient, and that stillness made her aware of every single point of contact with vicious clarity. His breath against the top of her head. His chest against her back. The broad weight of his hand on her breast. The unmoving fingertip resting at the crest of her slit like a promise that refused to finish the sentence.

Good, her brain offered automatically. Obedience. Control. This is what you wanted.

Her body responded with immediate, humiliating mutiny.

The place where his finger rested throbbed with a hollow, pulsing want that spread through her thighs and belly like a drumbeat with nothing to hit. Her tail stayed locked around him, muscles shaking. Her hips jerked once, a small betrayed twitch that chased the friction he had taken away, and she had to clamp her legs hard to keep herself from pressing back and making the command a lie.

She had told him to stop.

She did not want him to stop.

The contradiction hit hard enough to make her furious, and there was nowhere useful to aim it. Not at him, because he had listened. Not at the manual, because the manual had never warned her that obedience could feel like this. Only at herself, at the traitorous, scale flushing, tail curling mess of a body that went greedier the instant he obeyed, like it had gotten one taste and decided it would throw a tantrum until it got the rest.

He had learned the command. First try.

That should have felt like victory. Instead it pinned her in place, held her right on the edge, and made her choose between control and surrender with every shaking breath.

And the worst part, the absolutely unacceptable part, was that she wanted more. Not as a thought she could argue with. As a need sitting in her chest like a live coal, smoking quietly and refusing to go out.

Do something, her body demanded.

Nibbi swallowed. Stared at the steam curling off the water. Tried to scrape together something commanding, something controlled, something safe she could live with later. What came out was smaller. Rougher. Honest in a way that made her scales flush dark.

“Don’t stop,” she said, and it sounded less like permission than surrender, like the first hairline crack in a dam she had spent her whole life insisting was stone.

The word barely left her mouth before his body answered, not with a sudden change of mood, but with something he had been holding back finally slipping its leash. The arm across her stomach tightened, not to pin her, but to brace her, to keep her from sliding away as his hips pressed forward again with a slow, deliberate weight that drove him between her thighs and sealed her back against his chest until there was no room left to pretend this was still a mistake in motion.

Nibbi’s hands shot to the stone rim of the pool.

Her claws bit into wet rock and held because she needed the anchor, needed anything solid while the pressure spread her legs apart from the inside and dragged hot friction along the softer scales there, not painful, just unavoidable, like being forced to feel every nerve she owned at once. She looked down through the churn of water and steam, and there it was between her legs, flushed dark and thick and obscene, thrusting out past the clamp of her thighs with every forward roll.

He pulled back slowly. The retreat itself was its own cruelty, heat sliding away and leaving every touched place ringing, and on the backstroke the ridged underside caught against the seam of her, not inside, just against, a heavy grinding press that rolled straight over the swollen nub at the front of her slit.

Her whole body jerked.

A sound tore out of her, sharp and helpless, and she locked her elbows as if that could keep the sensation from going straight through her bones. He pressed forward again, deeper between her thighs, then drew back, then forward, and the movement found a cadence that did not feel invented so much as remembered, as if he had been practicing restraint for days and the moment she loosened it he simply returned to what his body had been begging to do.

She could not stop watching the way he slid between her legs, the slickness building where he dragged against her, the crown of him nestling into the channel between her folds and splitting her open around him without crossing the final line. Each stroke was too much and not enough, the thick heat of him mashing against her folds, the underside ridge grinding over that sensitive point again and again until the pressure in her belly started to stack, tight and hot, like coals being layered.

He stayed controlled, even like this.

Not gentle. Controlled. As if the only thing keeping him from taking more was the fact that she had not asked for it, and the realization made her tremble with a vicious, bewildered satisfaction she did not have time to unpack.

Her hips moved.

Not a decision, not a plan, just her body chasing the friction as it started to vanish on the backstroke, pushing back to keep him there, to keep the pressure pinned where she needed it. The shift crushed him tighter against her folds and turned the grind into something blunt and relentless, and the sound she made dropped lower, rougher, the kind of noise she had only ever heard from animals that had stopped pretending they were civilized.

He answered her movement immediately.

Not by choosing a new pace, but by giving her exactly what she had just demanded with her body, driving forward with a heavier roll that rocked her against the rim and made the water surge around her waist. His breath hitched at the top of her head, a sharp pull that trembled through his chest into her spine, and his hand slid from her belly down to the junction of her thighs, fingers spreading to add pressure from above, not entering, just pinning his own heat tighter against her so every thrust ground the full width of him across her with nowhere for her to escape it.

Nibbi’s vision swam. Her thighs started to shake. Her tail went rigid, then tightened around him again like a living clamp. The stone under her claws groaned as she scored it deeper, and the building wave inside her rose higher, higher, threatening to crest without ever giving her the relief she suddenly understood she was chasing.

And that was the moment it turned.

Not from pleasure into panic, but from pleasure into hunger, from being overwhelmed into being deprived, because she could feel the edge of something coming and the grind would not let it land.

More. she needed more.

Nibbi pulled forward, off him, away from the press of his chest and the hold of his arms, and the loss of contact hit like a cold gulp of air. Her folds clenched around nothing. Her body spasmed with pure refusal, chasing what had just been taken away. Behind her he made a sound, confused and strained, as if he had been bracing to follow and had stopped himself at the last possible instant.

She bent down.

Hands on the stone ledge. Chest low, nearly brushing the water. Her back arched. Her hips lifted high, and her tail, her long, sinuous, expressive tail that had betrayed her every emotion since the day she was hatched, rose and curled deliberately to the side, clearing the path beneath it with unmistakable clarity.

She looked back at him over her shoulder, water streaming down her emerald scales.

“Fuck me.”

This time the words were not ragged. Not pried out. Not accidental. She shaped them slowly, distinctly, watching his face as she did it, as if she were teaching him a command. As if this was a lesson.

His whole body went taut.

Understanding moved through him like a spark catching dry grass. The breath he dragged in was sharp enough to tremble, and when his hands found her hips there was no hesitation left in them, only certainty.

The tip of him found her. Pressed against the opening no one had ever touched, that she had barely touched herself, and the pressure was…

(Oh fuck yes, if this was what sex was like no wonder she had so many siblings) .

She stopped thinking.

There was a moment, one bright crystalline moment, where she existed entirely in the space between before and after, balanced on the edge of something she could not undo, and she could have pulled away. Could have come to her senses. Could have remembered that she was a huntress and he was a pet and this was not in any training manual ever written in the history of her village.

She pushed back onto him.

The stretch was everything. The whole world narrowed to a single point of white hot pressure that bloomed outward through her hips and stomach and the roots of her spine. She heard herself cry out, a raw keening sound the stone walls caught and held. Her claws gouged the ledge and her tail whipped and coiled and she did not stop. Could not stop. Did not want to stop. She took him inch by inch, feeling herself open around the impossible girth of him, feeling the resistance and the give and the deep aching fullness pressing against places inside her she had never known existed. When her hips finally met his, when the full length of him was seated inside her and she could feel him in her throat, or thought she could, she held perfectly still and breathed and felt tears prick her eyes that had nothing to do with pain.

She felt complete. That was the unforgivable thought. She felt complete, like a door she had never known was closed had finally opend, and the click of it was the pulse of him inside her, steady and deep and patient.

Then he moved.

Slow at first. A careful withdrawal that dragged sensation along every nerve she possessed, then a return that filled her so completely she forgot her own name. Again. Again. Building. His hands tightened on her hips, not guiding but anchoring, and she pushed back to meet each thrust. The sound of them was water and breath and the slap of his hips against the curve of her rear, and she was making sounds she had never made, sounds half growl and half plea, and her tail wrapped around his forearm and squeezed.

The rhythm shattered. His hips lost whatever leash he had been keeping them on and slammed forward hard enough to rock her into the stone ledge. The impact scattered bright sparks across her vision like flint behind her eyes. She felt him thicken inside her, felt the shaft swell impossibly wider, felt his pulse jump from steady to desperate, and her body knew what was happening before her brain caught up. He was close. Right there.

“Good boy,” she managed, the words ragged and half wrecked. “Come. Come for me.”

She ground back into him, took every inch he had to give, and her walls clenched around him in a grip savage and instinctive and completely beyond her control. She felt the exact instant he broke, the shudder that started in his thighs and tore through his whole body like a crack through ice, and then the heat.

Thick. Pulsing. Flooding her in heavy spurts she felt deep in her core, each one hotter than the last, filling her in a way so far beyond anything she had imagined that her mind simply blanked, went white and empty and still. All that existed was the sensation of him spilling inside her, the rhythmic throb of his release against her innermost walls, the warmth spreading through her belly like swallowed sunlight. Her body clenched around him again, milking, drawing, greedy for every drop in a way that should have horrified her and instead felt like the most natural thing she had ever done.

She came again. Softer this time, rolling, a deep internal pulse radiating outward from where they were joined and leaving her shaking, her arms barely holding her up, her tail limp and trembling around his wrist. She could feel his seed settling inside her, heavy and warm, and some ancient part of her brain purred with satisfaction while the rest slowly, reluctantly, began to reassemble itself from the scattered wreckage of the last several minutes.

She had just…

With her pet…

Her first time, her virginity…

CRACK.

Thunder split the sky like a god snapping a bone.

The sound hit the spring basin like a physical force, bouncing off the stone walls and slamming into Nibbi’s chest, and every single scale on her body clamped flat in a full body flinch that was pure prey response, zero dignity. Above the half wall, the sky had gone from dusk amber to bruise purple without her noticing, because she had been busy, because she had been busy doing something she was never going to think about again starting immediately, and the first fat drops of rain hit the water’s surface like thrown pebbles.

Spring storms on the Lightning Flats were not weather. They were a verdict. There was not a season on record where somebody had not been zapped near the springs, and while a kobold could sometimes limp away smoking and furious, a human with naked skin and no scales to shed heat would get cooked like a fish on a hot stone.

Nibbi lurched forward off him with a gracelessness that would haunt her for years, felt the sudden, devastating emptiness of his withdrawal, felt the warm trickle sliding down her inner thigh, absolutely did not think about it, and spun in the churning water.

“Out,” she hissed. “Out out out out out.”

She grabbed his wrist with both hands and hauled. He was already moving, already rising, water cascading off him in sheets as he stood to his full height, and she dragged him toward the shallow end with a strength that was ninety percent adrenaline and ten percent the kind of panic that could move mountains. She snatched her clothes from the bench, did not put them on, just crushed them to her chest in a wet bundle, then shoved his loincloth at him and pointed toward the path with a shaking claw that indicated three directions at once.

“Move. Move.”

He moved. Long strides that ate the path in half the steps it took her, and she scrambled after him with her tail streaming behind her and rain hitting her bare scales in cold sharp bursts that were the absolute opposite of the spring water. It also served as a very efficient reminder that she was naked, running through her own village at dusk with her equally naked pet, and there was seed running down her leg, and this was the worst day of her life and also possibly the best and she was never going to think about it again.

Another crack of thunder, closer, loud enough to rattle the teeth in her skull. A light flickered on in a hut to her left and Nibbi grabbed his hand and yanked him sideways into the narrow alley between the tanning shed and old Dekka’s storage lean to, pressing them both flat to the wall as footsteps squelched past in the mud.

Her heart was hammering so hard she could feel it in her tongue, and his body was warm against her back, do not think about that, with his breath stirring the scales on top of her head, hot and huge and radiating heat like a banked fire, and she needed him to stop being warm and stop being close and stop existing in her immediate vicinity for approximately the next ten years.

(If she died tonight the elders were absolutely carving COULDN’T EVEN PUT PANTS ON into her grave marker.)

The footsteps faded and the light went out, and Nibbi peeled herself off the wall, grabbed his wrist again, and ran.

Not carefully. Not quietly. Not with any of the huntress trained, ghost footed stealth she had spent three seasons perfecting.

They ran the way frightened animals ran, flat out, all instinct and no dignity, bare feet slapping through puddles that had formed with suspicious speed in every possible location between the tanning shed and her hut, because the rain had committed fully now, sheeting down in cold curtains that turned the village paths into a slick obstacle course of mud and misery.

They blew past Dekka’s gate at full speed.

Dekka was standing in her doorway with a lantern.

There was a moment, one terrible, perfectly lit moment, where the old kobold looked up, and Nibbi looked at Dekka, and Dekka looked at Nibbi, and then Dekka’s gaze traveled upward to the very tall, very naked, very pale human pounding through the mud behind her, and then Dekka’s gaze traveled downward, tracking the thin pale streaks running down the inside of Nibbi’s thighs that the rain had not quite managed to wash away yet, and the expression that crossed Dekka’s weathered face was something Nibbi did not have the emotional budget to process.

Nibbi looked forward and ran harder.

“JUST DOING TRAINING EXERCISES,” she shouted into the rain, not slowing, not looking back, her tail streaming behind her like a banner of pure humiliation. “VERY STANDARD. VERY NORMAL. GOOD NIGHT DEKKA.”

Dekka said nothing. Dekka did not need to say anything. Dekka’s silence was louder than anything Nibbi could have shouted.

They hit the communal square at a dead sprint. It was mostly empty, the rain had driven sensible kobolds indoors, but mostly was doing a lot of work in that sentence because Pressi from the north lane was crossing the far end with a covered basket, and young Tiv and his littermate were huddled under the eave of the grain store, and all three of them looked up at exactly the wrong moment.

Tiv’s littermate dropped her cup. Pressi stopped walking.

Nibbi tucked her chin, pumped her arms, and stared at a point approximately twelve feet ahead of her on the ground and absolutely nowhere else, while the human matched her stride for stride, which was impressive given that each of his strides covered roughly twice the ground hers did. She could hear the wet slap of his enormous feet on the stones behind her and also the faint rhythmic dripping sound that was not rain, and she could not think about that, so she ran faster.

The path to her hut curved left past the elder’s compound, because of course it did, because the universe had decided that tonight was the night for consequences, and the lantern in the elder’s window was lit, and the shadow moving behind the oiled hide covering was definitely shaped like a very old kobold who had extremely good hearing and a well documented habit of looking out his window when he heard unusual sounds in the rain.

Nibbi veered right, hard. The detour added forty feet and took her directly past the pen where old Mossa kept her prize ridge boar, and the ridge boar startled at their approach and let out a squealing alarm call that was absolutely not proportional to the situation and was going to be heard by everyone within three huts in every direction.

“SORRY,” Nibbi hissed at the ridge boar, which did not accept her apology and continued screaming.

She grabbed the human’s wrist and wrenched him around the corner of her hut, and there was the door, there was the blessed, beautiful, solid door with its familiar carved wood latch, and she hit it at a run with her shoulder and it swung inward and they tumbled through into the dark warmth inside and she kicked it shut behind them.

Silence, relative silence, the rain on the thatch above them and their own breathing, her breathing ragged and desperate and his ragged and considerably larger, and the dark.

She stood with her back against the door and her hand still on the latch and her eyes closed, rain dripping off her scales into a puddle around her feet while she thought about the look on Dekka’s face, and the look on Pressi’s face, and the ridge boar, and she stayed very still and waited for either death or composure, whichever arrived first.

The human’s breathing slowed beside her. She could feel the heat of him in the dark, three feet away, dripping onto her floor.

She should light the fire. She should get dry and get dressed and get her training log and write down something clinical and professional about today’s developments, something that made it sound like everything had gone according to a plan she had definitely had from the beginning.

She should.

“Me hungry.”

Nibbi’s eyes flew open.

The dark was utterly unhelpful. She turned toward the voice, the voice, because that was a voice, those were words coming out of her pet’s mouth, and found him standing near the fire pit, a large pale shape in the shadows. His eyes caught the thin line of light seeping under the door.

He was watching her.

“Me hungry.”

The words just sat there in the air, completely unaware of what they had just accomplished.

Nibbi blinked, then blinked again, because she had clearly imagined it.

“Me hungry.”

She had not imagined it.

Her mouth opened, closed, opened again. Her hand came up and pointed at him, then at the floor, then waved vaguely at reality itself.

“You…” She stopped. Tried again. “You can talk now.”

He stood there. Patient. Dripping.

“You can talk,” she said again, slower, as though repetition might force it to make sense. “You have language. You, after everything, after all of that…” She gestured wildly with both hands at the last hour, refusing to name any of it. “The first thing. The very first thing you decide to say. With your brand new words. Is that you’re hungry.”

A pause.

“Hungry,” he confirmed, nodding like she had finally caught up.

Nibbi’s head fell back and she stared at the ceiling. The ceiling had nothing useful to offer.

“Of course you are.”

Her shoulders sagged. What remained of her huntress dignity retreated to its last defensible position, pure indignation.

“You break out of your pen. You terrorize a ridge boar. You…” Her hand waved again, pointedly not describing anything. “You do that. And then you figure out how to speak, and you use it to ask for dinner.”

His face brightened at the word.

“Dinner.”

Nibbi pressed both palms to her face and dragged them slowly down.

“Fuck me,” she muttered.

The human cocked his head, eyes catching the dim light as he tested the words. “Fuck… me?”

His voice was deeper than she had anticipated, a low rumble in his chest. Between them, his cock stirred, thickening again with alarming speed, and before Nibbi could correct him or explain or throw herself bodily through the window, he moved.

She managed a single squeak before his hands were under her, lifting her like she weighed nothing at all, her tail lashing out for balance as he carried her across the room with steps confident even in the dark. Water dripped from both of them, spattering the floor as he moved deeper into her hut.

“Wait, that’s not what I…” she started, but her claws were already sinking into his shoulders, her body betraying her again as warmth spread between her thighs.

The door swung shut behind them with a solid thunk, and the quiet that followed lasted exactly one breath.