"I want to feel him too. Why should he get all the... the doing?"
Kaelira bent, and put her mouth on him.
"'The doing,'" Sera repeated reverently, committing it to memory forever.
"Shut up..." Kaelira murmured against his skin, tongue out.
There was nothing tentative about what came next, only inexperience burning itself away in real time. She kissed his chest, dragged her lips along his collarbone, licked the salt of the day's work off his skin and hummed at the taste, low and satisfied, the note she usually saved for good steel.
She found the pale old seams scattered across the sculpted plates of him and gave each the same grave attention he'd given hers. Her palms read the ridges of his stomach, the swell of his arms, the shift of muscle when he breathed, and her own breathing grew audibly less steady the further she mapped, and she kept going anyway, red to the ear-tips, entirely undeterred.
