Page 36 of Orc'd & Loaded
My spine arches. The stone wall scrapes between my shoulder blades, rough and frigid, and I press backward into the cold because the contrast amplifies the warmth of his mouth by a factor I cannot calculate in my current state.
He pulls back. Looks up at me from below. Gold eyes luminous in the icebox glow.
"Tell me to stop and I stop."
"Boris."
"That's not an answer."
I take his face in both hands. My fingers barely cover his cheekbones. The scale of him against me is absurd, anatomically comical, the kind of proportion that would make my pastry students abandon their conversion charts.
"If you stop," I say, "I will review-bomb your tavern on every platform that exists."
His grin splits his face. White teeth, prominent canines, tusks catching blue light. He surges upward and flips us. My back hits the canvas sacks piled against the crate wall. Burlap and cold stone underneath. Three hundred pounds of superheated orc above. The produce crate behind my head rattles. Something leafy brushes my hair. It doesn't matter if it's the high-end mache. It doesn’t matter if it's the high-end anything.
His mouth traces my collarbone. My fingers claw into his shoulders. The muscle there resists my grip like kneading underproofed dough. Dense. Unyielding. I dig in harder and he makes a sound against my skin that vibrates through my entire skeleton.
The icebox pulses violet. The temperature in the cellar drops another degree. My breath comes in visible clouds that dissolve against the warmth of his neck. His hands slide beneath my camisole and the contact is seismic. Rough, calloused palmsagainst bare skin. My hips buck involuntarily and his forehead drops to my shoulder and the exhale he releases scorches through the thin cotton.
"You smell like yuzu," he says against my clavicle.
"Occupational hazard."
"And thyme."
"I was blanching stems at four a.m."
"And underneath all of it." He inhales. Long. Slow. "Smoke. From my spice."
My breath catches.
He lifts his head. Searches my face. The confession hanging between us, unspoken but obvious: I've been cooking with his gift. Integrating it into my menu. Letting his fire into my precision.
"The mushroom veloute," I admit. "A quarter teaspoon."
His pupils dilate.
"It needed heat," I whisper. "Just a little. Just enough to..."
He kisses the word off my lips.
The crate behind my head tips. A cascade of bouncing mushrooms breaks free, launching into the dark cellar, ricocheting off stone walls in every direction like fleshy rubber balls.
The mushrooms bounce themselves out.One by one, they ricochet off the far wall, ping against the icebox, and roll into dark corners where they finally exhaust whatever enchantment makes them so desperately committed to escape. The last one bonks off Boris's shoulder blade mid-kiss and careens into a wine rack. Glass rattles. We don’t flinch.
Eventually, we slow.
The frantic, desperate, button-destroying urgency softens into something longer. Deeper. His mouth moves against minewith the patience of a braise. Low heat. Sustained. The kind of cooking that transforms tough, stubborn things into tenderness if you just give it enough time.
The cold wins eventually. It always does, in a stone cellar, against bare skin. My teeth chatter once, sharp, and Boris pulls back immediately. His hand cups my jaw. Thumb tracing the bone where the buttercream started all of this.
"You're freezing."
"I'm fine."
"Your lips are blue."
"They are not."
