Page 44 of This Orc’s Got Rizz

"Say the thing about the poles again."

"Junie."

"Because I am going to be extremely honest with you," I say, and my heart is going like a bird in a lampshade and I am filthy to the eyebrows and I have not been dry in nine days and I have eleven pounds less of me than I came up here with. "For nine days I have had a lens on me every waking second. I have been performed at, prompted, scored, edited and voted on by four million strangers, and there is a woman four hundred miles from here who wants me to stand next to you and be furniture."

"Yes."

"And for the next twelve hours nobody on this earth is looking at either of us." My hands are shaking on the tent floor. "So I'm going to do a thing that has nothing to do with the show, and if I've got it wrong, tell me now, because I have got a lot riding on how good I am at reading people and this would be a hell of a night to be off."

Ghorlan reaches up with one hand and puts it around the back of my neck.

His hand goes around the back of my neck. His fingers reach my hairline on one side and my jaw on the other, and his palm covers everything between, and he does not pull.

"You have it right," he says.

Then he pulls.

His mouth is hot. That is the first thing, in nine days of a body that has been at eleven degrees below where it wants to be, and his mouth opens under mine and it is like putting my hands into a fire. His tusks are there at the corners, blunt and warm and absolutely present, and I have to learn the angle in about four seconds, and I learn it, and then his other hand comes up under my jacket and around my ribs and the whole span of it goes from my spine to my navel.

Something in my throat comes out that I have no cover story for.

"Off," I say, and I am hauling at wet layers, and he is doing the same, and the two of us fight nine days of soaked wool in a space with eighty-four inches of length and fifty-one inches of width, and it takes an absurdly long time, and at one point my elbow strikes the fabric and both of us freeze like people defusing something.

"Away from the arches," he says.

"Away from the arches."

Then the layers are gone and there is nothing between us and he is enormous.

He is enormous everywhere, and I have had nine days to price the arms and the shoulders and the thighs, and none of that prepares me for the fact of him under my hands, gray green skin gone hot, old work marks on the forearms, a belly that is harder than the deck he built, and lower, against my thigh, a cock that has me doing arithmetic I have no business doing.

"That is a load," I say.

He makes a sound that starts as a laugh and turns into something else when I get my hand around him.

I cannot close my hand around him. My fingers do not meet. I stroke him from root to head, twice, slow, and the whole enormous length of him goes rigid under me and his hand comes off my ribs and grips the tent floor, and the nylon creaks.

"The floor is a hundred and fifty denier," I say.

"Do not."

"Rated for how much, exactly?"

"Junie."

His hand comes back off the floor and goes between my legs, and everything in my head goes out at once.

He is careful, at first, because he is careful about everything, one broad fingertip parting me and finding how wet I am and going still with the discovery of it. Then two fingers, slow, and the stretch of it takes my breath away in a room where there is not much breath going spare, and he works me open with a patience that is frankly obscene in a man who is shaking.

I get my hips down onto his hand and ride it and there is no space in the tent to do that properly either and I do it anyway.

"Now," I say.

"There is not room to do that properly, Junie, the arch is right there at my"

"Down the long axis, Ghorlan."

I go up onto my knees and get him lined up and start down onto him, and I have to stop twice, and the stopping is not delicate. He is too much. He is too much and then, gradually, with my hands braced on his shoulders and his hands on my hipbones taking most of my weight, he is not, and I sink the last of the way down until I am sitting on his hips with the whole of him in me, and the sound I make comes out of somewhere under my ribs.