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Solona stirred from thought when she heard someone enter the room. She had been staring at the map for so long that the roads turned into swimming rivers of ink and the world shifted beneath her eyes. Although being disturbed this late into the night was unexpected – and not entirely welcome – she was grateful for the distraction. Her eyes grazed fire as she turned them towards the door; but where she expected a servant, or perhaps one of her companions come to pick her ear, she instead found Teagan leaning in the gap of the doorway, hair loose about his shoulders.
“Forgive my intrusion,” he began, voice hushed. His tiredness was obvious in the gouging shadows under his eyes, but it was clear to Solona that he had not slept. “Sleep evades me.”
She smiled before she could stop herself. Despite herself, perhaps. She nodded; an acceptance of company. Teagan closed the door softly and went to peer down at the map. The looming march to Denerim made her anxious – she had never travelled so far at her own discretion, nor for a task so important. Teagan sensed it and, leaning against the desk across from her, began to pass his thumb up the winding spine of the Drakon River. “The farmers forecast fair weather these next few weeks,” he murmured. “It should make quick travel, though robbers are getting desperate, especially towards the cities.”
Solona listened to him talk. He had a soft, permitting voice. She liked it very much. A thin braid hung against his cheek, red in the torchlight, and the smell of him rose between them: a neutral wash of lye soap and laundered cotton and that scent all men seemed to have. Her eyes, heavy now, followed the course of his fingers along the West Road. Her own hand lay over the dark swathes of the Brecilian Forest, and when his fingers reached it, they pressed up along the outer ridge of her palm. A shift of his pinkie against hers, a question subdued enough to be passed off as an accident.
Solona’s throat swelled shut. An accident would be sensible. She should be sleeping, resting in preparation for their departure in the morning. They would be leaving early, and would be travelling for many hours, and –
Her eyes dragged upwards. It was oddly difficult, like swimming through oil. Teagan was watching her very closely. Her finger stirred against his, the pad of it edging over his knuckle. Yes, it said.
And then his other hand rose between them, large and warm and ridged with calluses as a map all its own, and he was sliding it up the bared length of her neck, her jaw, her cheek. The breath shuddered from her. Her entire body reached for that touch. Her spirit ached for it. Teagan’s fingers curled around the nape of her neck, snagging in her hair. Heat flushed down the whole length of her body.
“My lady –,” Teagan began, but did not finish. She kissed him. He stiffened for a moment, all the contrary reasons flashing at once through his mind. He ignored them, and his shoulders sloped across the desk towards her, his lips pressing open beneath her teeth. She took his tongue eagerly, and found it lean and driving, bereft of the gentle hesitancy of boyhood.
No. Teagan was not a boy. He was very much a man – Solona was hardly a girl, but Teagan was still older, and it thrilled her. He was certain and weathered and still somehow gentle despite it all, and when his thumb pressed her jaw up so he could kiss her more deeply, she allowed it with an unexpected, ferocious enthusiasm.
She needed it. Maker, she did. He was a blade to a cord wound too tight; she needed the cut. Desperately. Her hands in the front of his robe, urging him closer. Free lifting from the desk to join the other, holding her face as he overwhelmed her mouth with his tongue. She moaned; it was the barest whisper of a thing, lost around the press of him inside her, but it was there, and they both heard it. They felt its tremble between their gasping mouths.
When Teagan pulled back from her his eyes were terribly dark. His mouth was kiss-bruised and slick, and the look he gave her was a question. Solona raised a hand to his face and stroked the tips of her fingers down the high ridge of his cheekbone, over the whiskers of his beard, his parted lips. Pants of breath washed over her knuckles.
The map was safer on the floor. Teagan stalked around the desk with a fury she had not yet seen on him, not even during the defence of the village – like a wave he surged between her legs, lifting her bodily onto the desk and pressing his hands up her thighs. She wore only her shift. Her cunt was bare and aching between her legs, and she felt the way his kisses stuttered when he grabbed at her hips and felt the searing wet press of it against his thigh.
“Teagan,” she whispered. It was the only thing she said. The only thing she needed to say. Teagan’s cock was already half-hard in his pants, pressing out obscenely against her belly, and he moaned when her fingers dropped from his neck to work open the cord of his waistband. They dropped easily. Solona stared, eyes bright as fire, and he shivered, cock twitching at the attention. Her teeth worried her lip as she closed her hand around it, finger by finger.
“Maker above,” Teagan rasped as she stroked him. Just once, from head to base – but it was enough. In no time he was hard enough to cut glass, precome slick against Solona’s open palm. “You’re –,” But Solona gripped his wrist and guided his hand between her legs, and he found her slick begging cunt, and all ability to speak was obliterated.
She clutched at him. Arms a noose; Teagan pressed his face into her neck and opened his mouth to the drum of her pulse there. Her heels pressed against the back of his knees, pleading him closer, and he went. His cock glossing against the heat of her. A press; one miss, slipping up against the swollen ache of her clitoris, and she shuddered violently, body clenching down on awful nothingness. She speared her hand in his hair, gripped it close to the scalp, and raised his face so she could kiss him.
He swallowed her moan as her body swallowed him. It was a parched, keen sound, vibrating with a need that woke fire deep in his body. He pressed his palms to her breasts, concealed only the thin linen of her shift, her nipples peaking between his fingers. She pushed herself into his grip, gasping into his mouth, and he ground his cock further inside her. Slick, tight, hot, wet – her body gripped him greedily, and the girth of him gave a delicious sting. Solona felt drunk on it. She could remain in this sensation forever, pressed beneath the powerful weight of Teagan’s body, the grasp of his hands, the wet heat of his mouth. Maker, his cock. It filled her exquisitely.
His eyes were the dark of a churning ocean. His cheeks were stained with two high points of colour. She kissed them. Kissed his neck, lapped at the sweat. He fucked himself into her as deep as he could, his hips twisting desperately, one hand dropping in search of her clitoris. He found it clumsily; his fingers were broad and perhaps not as familiar with such a task as this as he would like – but Solona shivered, her muscles slithering under her skin, and finesse suddenly didn’t seem to matter. Her mouth was open, and her breastbone jumped with staggering breath, but she made no sound at all; it was astonishing. Challenging. Their sweat soaked through their clothes, sticking them together. She felt the ridges of his body, honed by years of combat service, the coarse scratch of hair across his chest and belly. Had she more time, she would lay him back and appreciate it; she would work him with her mouth, her hands, and fully surrender herself to the freedom he gave her. But time was not plentiful, and like starving dogs they would fight for whatever scraps they could get.
Teagan grunted urgently against her hair. His thrusts began to grow erratic. He was close. Solona considered letting him finish inside her; a thrilled shiver lanced up through her belly, but her sense was not so fully abandoned. Despite the Warden’s supposed sterility, it was not a risk that could be taken, much as she might have wished to.
He finished, instead, against her belly. A spill of sticky white ropes, pearlescent in the flickering torchlight, smeared in the cradle of her pelvis. Teagan panted and groaned, the world drowned out by the rising buzz in his ears; the sight of her beneath him, sweat-slicked and flushed with pleasure, was maddening. Had he been any younger he might have fucked her again. He recalled, briefly, the sight of her in the Chantry: tall and severe and silent. Nothing like this. Here, she was open and feral and red. Yet still she remained silent – her grit teeth, thrown back head, trembling hands, but not a single sound. Her thighs glistened and Teagan, bewitched, fell to his knees so he might put his head between them.
Solona heaved. Bit into the flesh of her arm to keep herself from keening at the sensation of Teagan’s tongue inside her, lapping at the swollen flesh of her cunt, her clitoris. His brow glistened with sweat, hair all melting copper between her fingers as she rutted frantically against his face, the whiskers of his beard soaked with her cyprine. His moans vibrated and she was coming, violently, her body shaking open. He did not lift his mouth. His eyes opened, and the fury of the ocean was so bright she could not look away, and he watched her flake apart in ecstasy. Head thrown back; tendons risen against her throat; each muscle straining, taut, bent back against the cutting edge of a knife.
(No sound.)
Cut. Cut, and Solona collapsed against the desk, chest heaving as she tried to breathe. Teagan kissed her thighs, licked his way up the length of her body, mouthed at her breasts, her sternum, her pounding throat. Her mouth. She could taste herself on him.
“You are enchanting,” he rasped against her lips. “Would that I could keep you here.”
Solona chuckled lowly. She stroked her thumb over his lips. The wood of the desk was warm against her back, slick with sweat, and the cooling spend on her skin grew tight. Teagan lay his weight against her, and for a long minute kissed her as if he truly would deign to keep her there, Blight be damned.
Eventually – reluctantly – Teagan rose from her. He pulled the damp cotton of his shirt away from his body. As he made to redress himself, Solona appreciated the power of his form; his muscled arms, the neat turn of his waist, the honed curves of his legs. She caught the glint of russet hair peaking above his collar and smiled.
She slid from the desk and sought to right herself, too, tucking her hair back into its braid and retrieving the map from where it had fallen. The air deceived them, but by the time anyone would notice they would be long gone from Redcliffe. Teagan went to her and, for a moment, merely stood and looked. The twist of his mouth was… sad.
He kissed her gently. “The boy adores you,” he said, stroking her jaw with his thumb. “Be kind to him. It is all I ask.”
Solona’s expression shuttered. Whatever warm, vulnerable part she had opened to him vanished, and the creeping expanse of her spirit once more furled in on itself. Teagan felt it, and bristled; he knew he had overstepped, but showed no remorse for it. She knew. She needed to know that others knew, too.
It matters to him, Solona realised. It eased her, if only a little.
Teagan pulled from her. She hated when he did. The world was cold again, and he bowed once, politely, before turning to depart. Solona watched him go without a single shift of movement.
Even after returning to her room, Solona did not sleep. She lay awake in the cool dark and stared at the nothingness until her eyes burned and burned and burned.