Page 17 of Accidentally Vital

I undressed her slowly. I had spent two weeks learning the power of slow. I wanted to memorize her, the unglamorous, capable strength of her. I eased the binding from the strapped shoulder. I wanted to see all the soft human places that had no fur to hide behind.

She watched me with her chin up, daring me to find her ordinary. I set my mouth to the pulse at her throat and let her feel my purr shift and drop, deepening into the register that has no translation, the one that means treasure, treasure, treasure. I felt her breath stutter. No one had ever touched this woman as though she were precious.

"That sound," she breathed. "It changed."

"It tells the truth," I said against her skin. "It cannot lie. Right now it is saying you are the most precious life in this world, and I cannot make it stop. I would not, even if I could."

I dragged my jaw and my breath along her shoulder and her collarbone, marking her with my scent and claiming her as mine. She arched into it, making a low sound of her own that undid the last of my control. Every sense I owned had gone overfull. I could smell exactly what my mouth did to her, could hear her pulse climb, could feel the heat of her against me.

I gathered her up and laid her down on my bed, covering her with the warmth of my body. I wanted, against all sense, to keep her.

But she would not simply be taken care of. I should have known she would not. It was not in her. When I would have given and given, she pressed a flat hand to my chest and pushed, gently, until I understood she wanted me beneath her. The warrior in me balked for half a heartbeat, the old creed shrieking that a male of my blood does not lie back, does not yield the high ground, does not let himself be tended like something breakable. And then I looked up at her face, fierce and tender above me, and I let the creed die where it lay.

She took her time with me. She traced the fur-patterns on my skin that no lover had ever once bothered to learn, and asked me what each touch did. She read my purr, learning which drag of her nails dropped it deeper and which kiss broke it into that helpless stutter. No one had ever tended me like this, not in my whole life.

She held me and learned my body as though I were the precious one. I understood at last, with her mouth at my throat and her body a benediction on my chest, exactly what it was to surrender. It is no small surrender, to be cared for. It is the bravest one there is.

She pulled me down by the purr in my throat. I, who had been raised to take, to hold, to stand between and never yield, let a small soft woman from a world I had never heard of take me apart with her mouth and her hands. I surrendered every piece of myself to her. I found in the surrender a strength I had no name for.

I was so much larger than her. I had spent my life being told my size and my strength were weapons, the whole of my worth. That night every careful, controlled, trembling moment of holding her was the opposite. It was devotion made of restraint. I kept my claws sheathed. My weight stayed on my arms. I read her by scent and sound and the language of her body.

I gave her what she reached for. When she finally pulled me into her, both of us shaking, my purr broke into a sound I had never made in my life. She pressed her hand to it and laughed and wept at once. I came apart in her arms, finally allowed to set my strength down and be home instead.

There is a rite my people have at the height of making love. The claiming bite, at the join of neck and shoulder, the bond that cannot be undone, the vow written in the body that says You are mine, and I am yours, for as long as we both draw breath.

I wanted it the way I have never wanted anything. My mouth was at her shoulder and my whole being strained toward it. I held it back, held it back with everything the past two weeks had taught me about wanting and waiting and not taking what is not freely, fully, foreverly yours to take.

She felt it. She felt all of it.

"What are you holding back," she gasped. "I can feel you holding something back. Don't — you don't have to—"

"I cannot give you the bite," I said, wrecked, my forehead against her shoulder where my teeth ached to mark her. "Not this. Among my people it is forever, Tabitha, it does not come undone, and I will not write forever on your body when the houses are going to tear us apart. I will not claim what I am not allowed to keep. Everything else — everything else I have is yours. But not that. Not a vow I cannot honor."

And the not-taking — the careful, aching restraint of it — was what finally undid her. She came apart with my name breaking out of her and her hand fisted in my hair. The sound of it, the scent of it, dragged me over the edge behind her. For one blinding moment there was only the two of us and the truth our bodies could not lie about.

For a while neither of us moved. I stayed braced over her, holding my own weight as I had taught myself, my purr gone soft and broken. She looked up at me wet-eyed. "I felt it, when you held the bite back. I felt how much it cost you."

"Good," I said, though my voice barely worked. "I want you to feel it. I want you to know it was real, even when I would not take it. That is the only vow I am permitted to make you, Tabitha. Everything I gave you tonight was true. What I kept back, I kept back because I love you too well to mark you and then leave you marked and alone."

I had not meant to say it. But it was out of me before I could stop it, bared in the dark, and her breath snagged.

She did not say it back; I understood that she could not. To say it would be to confront how much her leaving was going to cost us both.

I gathered her against my chest where the purr still rolled, low and content now. I smoothed the damp hair back from her face while she traced lazy circles over my heart.

"You're still purring," she said, half asleep.

"I am aware."

"It's adorable. The terror of the border clans, purring like a kettle."

"If you tell my court," I said, "I will deny it with my last breath."

She laughed.

I felt it move through both of us. I pulled her closer and let myself have the comfort of being held.

We lay tangled while the braziers burned down. I helplessly marked how the scent of the room had changed, how hers and mine had become one. It was the smell my people have only a single word for, the smell of us, of a den with two safe creatures in it. I did not tell her what it meant. I breathed it instead.