Work Text:
The girl's name is Sings-Softly.
Katie learns it against her will.
Sings-Softly is Dead Horses warrior, tall for a tribeswoman, with the kind of easy, long-limbed grace that comes from growing up on clean water. Her hair is dark copper, sun-streaked and worn in the warrior's braid that marks her as one of the hunting party's best. She carries a war club with the same unconscious comfort Katie carries her sidearm, and she smiles at Joshua Graham like he hung the goddamn moon.
She notices her on a Tuesday.
It's a nothing day. One of those clear, dry mornings when cottonwood leaves flash their pale bellies in the wind. Katie is at the river filling canteens when she hears Joshua's voice carry from the camp above. He's talking to the warriors about the northern trails, something about the route the White Legs used before the breaking, and how the game has started returning to the high passes now that the threat has thinned.
Katie looks up and sees Sings-Softly.
The girl stands at the edge of the group, war club resting against her thigh, chin lifted. She's watching Joshua with an expression Katie recognises because she wore it herself, once. Before the river and the ring and the vows. It's the look of a woman cataloguing a man she finds extraordinary. Not handsome, not anymore. Joshua is many things, but whatever handsome features he had burned away in the Grand Canyon with the rest of his skin.
But he’s still compelling. He still draws attention with his authority, with his voice, on the way his bandaged hands move when he illustrates a trail junction.
Oh, Katie thinks, flat and simple. Oh, I see.
She screws the canteen shut. The metal threads bite.
It keeps happening.
Not in any dramatic way. It’s not a brazen flirtation. Sings-Softly is simply... present. At every communal fire, at every morning briefing, at every weapons drill where Joshua demonstrates the grip and the stance and the controlled exhale before the shot.
She asks questions. Good ones, too. The kind that show she's actually listening rather than performing attentiveness. She brings him things: a brace of gecko she's skinned and salted, a bundle of juniper branches for his evening fire, a piece of flint she found near the Narrows that she thinks might take a good edge but wants his opinion.
Small offerings. The currency of a culture Katie is still learning. Do they mean something significant? She doesn't know, and the not knowing is agonisingly frustrating.
Joshua accepts each one with the same respectful courtesy he extends to all the Dead Horses. A nod. A word of thanks in their tongue. He sets the juniper aside, eats the gecko, examines the flint and returns it with a comment about its quality. Nothing more. Nothing less.
But Sings-Softly glows anyway. The attention itself is enough. Katie can see it in the way the girl's shoulders settle when Joshua speaks to her, the small flush that runs up her throat when his eyes – those devastating blue eyes – land on her for even a second.
Katie stands at the mouth of Angel Cave and watches this small drama play out across the fire, and something moves in her gut that she doesn't immediately recognise.
It takes her three days to name it.
Jealousy.
The word sits sore her mouth, like a ulcer on the tip of her tongue. She turns it over while she cleans her rifle, while she mends a tear in her vault suit's knee, while she lies awake listening to Joshua breathe beside her in the dark.
Jealousy.
She's never felt it before. Not with Burke, that was some terrifying transaction. Not with Boone, she'd known from the start that Carla occupied his heart.
But this...
This is different.
This is hers.
Joshua is hers. By ring and by river water. She chose the Burned Man. She chose the Legate's shadow and the hands that shake when they touch her because the nerve damage makes tenderness burn. She earned this. She earned him, earned some peace with him.
And yet...
Sings-Softly is young. Nineteen maybe. She’s unmarked by anything worse than a hunting scar on her forearm. She moves without the heaviness Katie carries. No vault, no wasteland, no bullet in the skull, no dead father, no man in a checkered suit. She is light where Katie is heavy, whole where Katie is stitched together
And she looks at Joshua like she could worship him.
Katie knows rationally that this is nothing. Joshua is not interested. He barely registers the girl's attention beyond what is expected as an leader of the New Canaanites and former war chief. He comes home to her every night, reads his Bible by lamplight, touches her hair with the backs of his fingers when he thinks she's sleeping.
She knows this.
It doesn't help.
The worst of it comes on a humid evening when the canyon holds its breath before a storm.
Katie returns from checking the eastern perimeter – a task she's taken on herself. The exercise burns off the restless, ugly thing coiling in her gut. Makes her feel less like a jealous school girl.
She finds Sings-Softly in Angel Cave.
In their cave.
In their home.
The girl is standing near her workbench, holding out a folded piece of tanned hide to Joshua, who sits at his customary post with his Bible open. She's talking quickly in the Dead Horses' patois, gesturing at the hide, at Joshua, at herself. Katie catches the shape of it without understanding every word.
A gift.
Something she made.
For him.
Katie feels sick as she watches Joshua takes the hide and unfold. It's a pistol wrap, beautifully worked, the leather tooled with the black stitched patterns the Dead Horses favour.
He examines it with genuine appreciation, turning it in the lamplight.
"This is fine craft," he says, in English now, for Sings-Softly's benefit. She's been learning, Katie knows, partly because Joshua conducts his sermons in English and partly because...well, partly because of him.
"Your stitching honours the animal it came from. Thank you."
Sings-Softly beams, the praise lighting up her beautiful features.
Katie stands in the cave mouth, pack in hand, and watches her husband accept a handmade gift from a lovely young woman who is standing in Katie's home. Next to Katie's bedroll. In the lamplight that is supposed to belong to Katie's evenings.
The jealousy bites hard, and fast.
"Good evening," Katie says.
The word comes out tighter than she intends. Its just enough that Joshua looks up and reads something in her face. She sees the tiny calibration behind his eyes, the assessment.
Sings-Softly turns with a start, straightening like a recruit caught lounging.
"Courier," she says, dipping her head with the respectful deference the Dead Horses extend to Joshua's wife. "I was bringing a gift for Joshua."
Joshua.
Something in her coils with hostility.
Not ‘your husband’. Not even the formal tribal address they gave him in their own language. Just his name, easy in the girl's mouth.
"I can see that," Katie replies cooly. She sets the canteen down on the bench, unhooks her holster, hangs it on the peg driven into the stone wall.
It’s ordinary motions. Entirely domestic. The sure and certain motions of a woman who lives here permanently. "That's kind of you."
She does not say: this is my home. She does not say: he is my husband.
She does not need to. Joshua is already folding the pistol wrap and setting it aside with the same care he gives all offerings from the tribe – nothing more and nothing less, and rising to greet her.
"Katie." His voice warms the way it always does when he says her name after a separation, even a short one. He crosses to her and touches her arm – the only public affection he ever permits himself. "You were gone longer than expected."
"Trail was washed out near the eastern ridge. Had to loop around." Katie glances at Sings-Softly. The girl is hovering now, caught between the desire to stay and the recognition that she's become peripheral. "Storm's coming."
"Yes," Joshua agrees. "The Dead Horses are securing the lower camp. Sings-Softly, you should return before the rain begins."
It's a dismissal delivered kindly but unmistakably.
Sings-Softly nods, murmurs something in her own language and slips out of the cave with a last glance at Joshua that he doesn't see because he's already turned back to his wife.
But Katie sees it.
She sees it oh so clearly.
And desperately wishes she hadn’t.
"She fancies you," Katie says later, when the storm has broken and the rain drums hard against the canyon walls. The cave is sealed to everything but the two of them and the lamplight.
Joshua is rebandaging his forearms and doesn't look up. "Who?"
Katie finishes stripping her vault suit to her waist before answering. "Sings-Softly."
The linen pauses, mid-wrap. Then continues, the same pace. "She is devout," Joshua says, selecting the word carefully. "She takes her faith seriously. She sees in me the faith of New Canaan, and finds instruction there."
Katie scoffs. I don’t remember looking my old Vault chaplain like that."
"Like what, wife?"
"Like she'd take the moon out of the sky for you, if you asked."
Now Joshus looks at her. The gaze is patient but touched with the faintest edge of reproach. "You think I would encourage a young woman's misplaced affections?"
"No." And she means it. "I think you don't even notice."
"Then what troubles you?"
Katie pulls the elastic from her hair, tugs the faded satin ribbon free, shakes the black weight of it loose over her shoulders. The motion buys her a second to find the honest answer instead of the easy one. "I don't know," she admits. "I've never been jealous before. I don't know what to do with it."
Joshua finishes the wrap, tucks the end with a thumbnail, and turns his full attention to her. In the low light his eyes look darker, the shadows deepening the hollows around his sockets. "You are jealous," he repeats, sounding genuinely surprised.
Heat boils up her neck uncomfortably. "Don't make a whole thing of it."
"I am not ‘making a thing of it’" He's quiet for a moment, then: "Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm. For love is strong as death, jealousy fierce as the grave."
Song of Solomon, the verse he quoted the first time he took her smelling of river water. "Even the wise king understood. Jealousy is the wound of devotion."
"Don’t think you can get around me by just quoting scripture in that sexy, husky voice of yours Joshua,” she huffs. "Not tonight. I'm too pissed off for that."
Joshua exhales, not quite a laugh, but close enough to count. "Come here."
"I'm already here."
"Closer."
She crosses the small distance between the bench and the bedrolls where he sits. He reaches up and takes her hand – the bandaged fingers closing carefully around hers, the ring on her finger pressing cold between their palms. "There is no woman who could tempt me from you."
His thumb traces the band of her ring. "You are my lawful wife. My covenant. My only earthly desire."
The words smooth over her like a balm, and she hates how much she needed them. "I know," she says. "I know that. I'm just being stupid."
"Then let me ease your burden, wife." He tugs gently at her hand. "Come to bed."
But something in Katie - something that has nothing to do with reassurance and everything to do with the hot, dark, possessive thing still coiling in her gut. She does not want comfort tonight. She doesn't want to be soothed or quoted at or held until the feeling passes.
Katie retracts her hand gently.
She wants to claim.
It starts with the ribbon. She winds it between her fingers. Joshua watches from the bedroll, head tilted, reading her the way he reads terrain.
"Katie?"
She doesn't answer immediately. She kneels beside him, hands finding finds the buckle of his ballistic vest. She works it open: buckle, strap, buckle, strap. The vest comes loose and she pushes it off his shoulders.
Joshua's breath changes, the exhale controlled as if he’d just taken a difficult shot. "If this is about the girl –"
"This isn't about the girl." Katie's fingers find the hem of his tucked shirt from his jeans and tugs it out. "This is about you and me."
Then she pushes him back, firmly enough that he registers the deliberate reversal of how this usually goes between them.
Joshua resists for a half-second. It’s instinct, the deep-body reflex of a man who spent decades being the one who sets the terms.
Then he allows it. His back meets the bedroll, and she follows, straddling his waist, her weight settling across his hips.
His hands come up; to her waist, her ribs, the places he always reaches for.
But Katie catches his wrists. The linen is slightly damp from the fresh juniper balm, warm from his body. She pins them, gently but unmistakably, above his head.
Joshua goes still. The shadow of the Legate, stirred not with violence but with the predatory interest of a man unaccustomed to being beneath anyone.
"Katie." Her name comes out a low scrape of gravel, a warning that makes something in her belly tighten.
"Tonight," she says, and she’s proud of herself for not letting it tremble. "You're going to lie there. You're going to do what I tell you. And if you're good –" She leans down, her mouth close to the linen at his jaw, her breath warm through the weave. “You might get what you want."
A sound moves through him, a vibration she feels more than hears. His wrists flex once under her grip – testing, always testing – then and then settle.
"The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights." His hips shift beneath her, the denim rough against the inside of her thighs.
"That's right." Katie winds the satin ribbon around his wrists. She ties it off with the knot she uses on supply bundles, the kind that holds under tension but releases with a single pull.
Joshua looks at his bound wrists, then at her. Something flexes in his jaw behind the wrapping. The blue of his eyes has gone darker, the pupils wide in the low light. She can feel what the binding does to him – the press of him beneath her, the way his breathing his coming short and shallow.
"You are testing me, wife,” he says, the words clipped, scraped clean of scripture for once.
"I thought that was the role of all good wives." Her hands go to her own shirt. She pulls it over her head in one motion, the cool cave air raising the flesh along her arms, her belly. She doesn't rush. She lets him look, lets him watch as she unfastens her bra.
Joshua’s gaze tracks downward. She can feel it his attention on her throat, her collarbone, the shape of her breasts bare in the lamplight. His bound hands twitch. A muscle in his neck tightens.
"Katie." Rougher now. He’s getting impatient. "Let me –"
"No."
Katie bends and kisses him through the bandaging, finding the divot of his mouth, the hot patch where his breath warms the fabric. She traces it with her tongue and feels his whole body tighten beneath her like a wire being stretched out.
Joshua groans. The sound is muffled by the bandaging across his face. She reaches up and loosens the wrapping at his mouth. Just enough, the way he does himself, peeling back the layers until his lips are free. At least what’s left of them. They are ruined, asymmetrical with a scar pulling at his lower lip that she's come to find utterly devastating.
She kisses him properly. Slow, wet, her tongue finding his, tasting the herbs he chews for the pain, the faint copper of his damaged gums. His mouth works against hers with a hunger that belies the restraint of the rest of him; teeth catching, tongue pushing, the frustrated sound he makes when she pulls back vibrating between them.
"Please." The word breaks from him like something hard forced through a crack. Joshua Graham does not beg. The Malpais Legate does not beg. The penitent man of God does not beg.
"Please what?"
His chest heaves. The bound wrists strain against the satin. "Let me touch you."
"Not yet." Katie sits up, her weight settling fully on his hips. She can feel him through the denim – the physical evidence of his want pressing insistent against the seam of her vault suit. She moves her hips once slowly, grinding with a pressure that drags exactly where they both need it and gives neither of them enough.
His hips buck up against her. “Wife.”
“Shhh.” Katie finds the buckle of his belt. The metal is warm from his body heat. She works it free, the leather snaking through belt loops, then drops it over the side of the bedroll. The zipper follows, the metal teeth parting under her fingers with a sound that seems far too loud in the cave's quiet.
She unwraps the linen the way he's taught her: careful, no pressure on the thinnest places, seams where they won't chafe. The scarred skin of his lower belly glimpses into view the taut, discoloured patches, the uneven pink and white where the pitch clung. She knows this landscape, knows which places to avoid and which can bear her weight. His cock rises free of the loosened fabric, hard, flushed dark where the scarring hasn't leached the colour. She watches his face as the air finds him, the way he twitches in response.
His eyes are fixed on her, wild, angry, desperately aroused. The Legate is there. She can see it in the set of his jaw, the way his bound arms flex with the suppressed urge to seize, to flip, to take back the authority she's stripped from him.
But the penitent holds, holds, holds. Because she asked, because she is his wife.
"Look at me," Katie says, and he does, as though he could do nothing else.
She stands and strips out the rest of her vault suit, her underwear, her boots – discarding all her clothing until she is naked before him. Then she straddles over him, shuffling her knees up the bedroll, past his ribs, past his chest where the ballistic vest usually sits, until she's hovering above his face.
Joshua's breath comes fast against her thighs. She can feel it – warm, wet, stirring the fine hair on her skin. His ruined mouth is open, the scarred lips parted.
"Katie –“
"Do you want this?"
He shifts beneath her, shoulders coming off the bedroll to get closer to her. "Yes, wife."
She lowers herself onto his mouth.
The first contact is electric. His lips – rough in places, smooth in others – find her sex with the same focused intent he brings to everything. His tongue drags flat through her labia without hesitation, and Katie makes a sound she doesn't recognise. “Yes, please. Right there Joshua,” she breathes, her hips moving with the flex of his jaw.
Beneath her, Joshua moans. The sound vibrates against her cunt, travels up through her spine, branches into her ribs. His bound hands jerk against the ribbon, the satin pulling taut. She knows what he wants. She knows he wants to grab her hips, to set the pace, to control the angle the way he always does.
But she doesn’t let him. She keeps her thighs clamped at the sides of his head, keeps the rhythm hers.
Then he finds her clit, his tongue needling the swollen notch with an accuracy that she should be used to by now and isn't. Katie grinds down with a long, desperate moan. She can't help it. His damaged lips create a friction that is unlike any other mouth she's known The sensation crests with each pass, building a heat low in her belly. Her free hand finds the top of his head – the wrapped crown – and she anchors herself to him
"There," she gasps, when his tongue finds the exact spot, the exact pressure. "Don't stop."
Joshua doesn't stop. His mouth seals over her, the suction fierce enough to make her spine curve, and his tongue works with a precision that borders on cruelty. It is the Legate's discipline turned to this, every lesson in patience and endurance applied to the project of her pleasure. She can hear the wet, slurping sounds of his mouth against her, can feel the vibration of the noises he makes, can see his bound arms straining, every muscle in his chest and shoulders drawn tight as wire.
The orgasm builds quickly. She feels it in her thighs first – the trembling, the involuntary clench. Then in the pit of her stomach, then everywhere, a surge that whites out the cave and the storm and the lamp and leaves only the point of contact: his mouth, her sex, the searing wire of pleasure strung between them.
When it breaks, she cries out - her thighs clamping hard, riding jaw through the aftershocks until the sensitivity turns to a burn.
She lifts herself free on trembling legs and she drops beside him, gasping. Her hand finds the knot at his wrists and pulls. The ribbon slides free, satin whispering against linen.
Joshua's hands come free and reach for her – her waist, her hips – like man reclaiming ground.
Katie catches them, both wrists. She presses them flat against his chest, his own hands pinned over his heartbeat, and leans her weight on them.
"No."
He goes still beneath her. She can feel the reflex working in him. The Legate's muscle memory that says I take, I hold, I control and the countervailing force that holds it. The penitent who has trained himself to yield. The two of them war behind his eyes. She watches it happen the way she'd watch weather cross the canyon.
"You don't get to take over," she says. "Not tonight."
His jaw works beneath the wrapping. A tendon pulls in his neck. "Katie – I."
"I want your mouth again." She says it flatly, the same tone she uses when she's calling a shot in the field. "Lower."
Something shifts in his face. The resistance folds, the way a river folds around a rock. He holds her gaze for a count of three, and then he nods once
Katie releases his wrists then stretches beside him on her back, the bedroll cool against her overheated skin, and waits.
He turns toward her, scanning her face for the next instruction the way he watches his scouts for signals. His mouth finds her collarbone, and she stops him with a hand on his jaw.
"I said lower."
The breath he lets out presses warm onto her skin. “Yes, wife.”
Joshua moves down. Past her breasts — though his mouth drags across one pointed nipple in passing, the scarred lip catching. She lets him have that much because the roughness of it sparks along a nerve that runs directly between her legs. He down further her ribs, past the notch of her waist and lower to still.
When he reaches her hip, she stops him again with a press of her hand against his crown first.
"Tell me something first."
Joshua looks up. The blue of his eyes have swallowed to a thin rim. His mouth is level with the crease of her thigh, close enough that she can feel each exhale as a hot patch against skin. He's hard – she can see it from the way he moves against the bedroll, seeking relief. The sight of his want held in check by her sends something dark and satisfied through her gut.
"Tell me what you thought about," Katie says. "Before. When I was just the Courier sleeping in your cave and you couldn't touch me. What did you think about when you looked at me?"
Joshua rumbles and presses against the inside of her thigh, resting the way a penitent rests his forehead against a pew. "That is not – I am not a -“
"I'm not asking what you are. I'm asking what you thought." She tightens her grip. "Confess. I need to know."
His shoulders tense. Confession is what a man of God does when the sin is too heavy to carry alone, and she is offering herself as the vessel for it.
But they both know that what she's actually doing is making him say the unspeakable things out loud while she holds his head between her thighs.
"Your hands." His voice comes out dark and rough that makes her skin goosepimple. "When you cleaned your pistol at the workbench. You have – you stripped that weapon the same way every time, and I would watch your hands and think about them wrapped around me."
He lets out a breath, forced through the wrapping. "I wanted to put your hand inside my jeans and close your fingers around me. Let feel you learn the shape of me the way you learned that pistol. By touch and repetition."
The words hit Katie low in the belly. A pulse of wet heat, sudden and visceral, that has nothing to do with what his mouth was doing a minute ago. She feels herself clench around nothing – an involuntary contraction, her body responding to the image before her mind has finished processing it. Joshua Graham, at his own workbench, guiding her hand down. The formality of his language making it worse, making it so much filthier.
"Where else?"
A pause.
She feels him swallow against her thigh. "Your mouth." His eyes close. The lashes – dark, long, somehow untouched by the fire – press against the scarred skin beneath. "I thought about your mouth constantly. The way you'd bite your lip when you were concentrating on a shot. I would imagine pushing my thumb past your lips and feeling your tongue against it. And then... not my thumb. I imagined you on your knees in front of me. Taking me into your mouth. Looking up at me while you did it. I imagined the sound you'd make."
The honesty of it sends another throb through her. She can feel herself getting wetter, the slick heat between her thighs building with each confession he forces out. The image of Joshua Graham imagining her mouth on him while she sat oblivious at his workbench. The guilt he must have carried, the prayers he must have said after. It makes her want to grind against something.
She doesn't. She holds and makes him keep going.
"What else?”
His pelvis moves. "The vault suit. You came to the morning fire with the zipper pulled low because you'd been restless in the night and half undressed in your sleep. I could see the curve of you. The skin between your breasts."
His mouth moves against her thigh, the words pressed into her flesh. "I wanted to take that zipper and pull it the rest of the way down. I wanted to peel it off your shoulders and put my mouth on your breasts and hear what sound you made when I used my teeth. I wanted to lay you down by that fire in front of God and put my hand between your legs and find out if you were warm there. If you were wet. If you'd say my name."
Katie's breath catches. She feels the confession land in her body, a contraction low in her pelvis. Her thighs press together involuntarily around his head. She's soaked. She can feel it, the slickness on the insides of her thighs.
And she knows he can feel it too – his mouth is an inch from the evidence of what his words are doing to her.
"Did it pass?"
"No."
"Good. Keep going."
His breath shudders. She can feel the rigid tension in his shoulder when he adjusts against ber
"You drunk a Sunset Sarsaparilla bottle one evening at the fire. Follows-Chalk was telling a story." His mouth is close to her sex now. She can feel the words forming against her skin. "I was caught by the way your throat moved when you swallowed. I wanted to cross that fire and take the bottle from your hand and replace it with my mouth. I wanted to feel your throat work against my tongue. I wanted to push you back onto the ground in front of the whole camp and get between your legs and taste you until you screamed."
A sound escapes Katie, a low hum of a moan. Her hips jerk toward his mouth of their own accord, a helpless seeking, her body chasing the images he's painting with that filthy, dark voice. She's aching. She can feel the ache of her own arousal the swollen flesh between her thighs slick enough that she's certain he can see it, smell it, feel the heat of it against his face from an inch away.
"I remember. You left the fire abruptly." she manages, her voice unsteady. “I thought you were angry at us for being too loud.”
Joshua chuckles, and she nearly comes from the sound alone. "I went to the river and knelt in the water until I could not feel my legs. It did not help. I could still taste the idea of you in my mouth. I could still imagine what you would feel like on my tongue. I had never done that, never put my mouth on a woman. But I wanted to do it to you so very badly that I could not form a coherent prayer."
Katie squirms restlessly. The image of Joshua Graham kneeling in the river, hard and shaking, trying to pray away the imagined taste of her. It sends a current of need through her.
She presses her hips upward to guide his mouth the last inch. "Show me," Katie says. "Show me what you wanted to do."
He doesn't hesitate. His mouth finds her again tongue pushing through her folds, broad and flat and slow. She is already swollen from the first orgasm, every nerve sensitive. The contact makes her hips jerk hard enough that she has to brace her heel against the bedroll.
"Hands stay down," she manages, when his fingers twitch at his sides.
He obeys, working her with his mouth alone. Lips, tongue, the faint graze of teeth that he's learned she likes when she's close. "More." She bucks, pressing the scarred lips harder against her. "Tell me more. What else did the righteous Joshua Graham want to do to the girl in his cave?"
He groans. The vibration travels through her clit, up her spine. His tongue circles, pressing flat, smooth circles again. "You took your hair down one night to wash it in the river," he says into her, the words muffled, half-lost between her thighs. "And I saw...the water on your neck...Your shoulders bare. Your back." He licks into her slowly, a long stroke that makes her gasp. "I stood in the cave mouth and I wanted to push inside you from behind and hold your hair in my fist and feel your body open around me."
Katie hisses through her teeth, the sound a direct product of his voice and his tongue. The arousal is almost unbearable now – a pulsing ache that his mouth is stoking but not satisfying. She can feel herself clenching rhythmically around nothing, her body begging for something his tongue can't give.
“You wanted me then," she breathes “When you barely knew me."
“Yes. I wanted you so very badly.” His mouth then seals over her clit, those scarred lips creating an uneven pattern of texture rough, then smooth, then the impossible softness of the inner surface of his lip where the burning didn't reach.
It’s all too much
Katie comes again with her teeth in her own forearm to muffle the howl. Her body jerks off the bedroll and she feels his hands break discipline. They fly to her thighs, spread her wider as the wetness swells against his mouth. She doesn't correct him because she can't speak and can barely breathe. His fingers pressing into the flesh of her hips is the only thing keeping her anchored to the physical world.
When the aftershocks thin, she opens her eyes. He's kneeling between her thighs, his mouth wet, the exposed lower half of his face slick with her, the ruined lips swollen from use. His hands are still on her hips.
She can feel herself clenching, slick and empty,. “On your back.”
Joshua obeys without question – still a good soldier at heart. His cock is rigid, the head dark, a bead of moisture catching lamplight at the slit. He hasn't touched himself. Hasn't asked to. The disciplined denial is written in every taut line of his body.
Katie straddles him, her hand immediately finding him with a stroke. her thumb drags across the head on each upstroke, spreading the slick moisture she finds there. The groan that leaves him is pulled from deep in his diaphragm, a vibration she feels in her wrist as she positions his cock against her entrance.
Joshua hums in approval. “Yes wife. Take what you need,” he says, eyes turning hazy. "I am yours."
"Say it again."
"I am yours, Katie."
She takes him in a single motion, her hand bracing on his chest as he slides into her. Her thighs spread to accommodate the depth of him. She can the stretch and fullness of him reaching the places that are still raw from the first orgasm and finding new nerves to light.
She sets the pace. It’s slow at first – a grinding, rolling motion that keeps him deep. Her hips work in circles rather than strokes, the angle seating the base of his cock against her clit with each rotation, a pressure she can control by leaning forward or back. She finds the exact angle and stays there, building the friction, using him.
His hands grip at the flesh of her thighs. She lets them, this time. The Legate is there. She can see him in in the locked jaw, the white-knuckle grip, the refusal to break and beg.
But so is the penitent, enduring, enduring, enduring, because her asking is as close to God's voice on earth in that moment
Katie rides him harder, dark hair falling back over her shoulder. She lifts her hips until only the head of him remains inside her, the stretch of the rim making them both gasp, and drives down. The sound is obscene — wet, heavy, a sound that belongs to bodies and to nothing else.
She does it again. And again. Each stroke building a pressure in her that is less like an orgasm approaching and more like a wall giving way, a structural failure, the moment before collapse.
"One more confession," she says, and her voice is unsteady, her breathing fractured. "Tell me – tell me what you prayed for. The ones you never say out loud."
His grip on her thighs tightens. His hips push up to meet her as his eyes find hers, the blue annihilated by the black of his pupils.
"I prayed –" Joshua drives up into her and she whines his name. She’s close again, so very close. Pleasures burns in her belly, her stomach muscles spasming with each stroke of his cock. "I prayed that God would let me keep you. I prayed, selfishly, sinfully for Him to put you in my bed and let you be mine. Mine, and mine alone."
The third orgasm tears through her on the back of his words. It the way a charge goes, all at once and from the centre outward. She falls forward against his chest, her hands grasping at his shirt. Her body clamps around him in pulses she can't control and can't stop, each contraction wringing a sound from him that is less and less human.
"Come for me Joshua," she gasps against his throat, hips grinding down. “Please."
Joshua seizes her hips with both hands, the grip almost violent. It is the shadow of the Legate in him, the instinct to take and conquer. His hips drive up, three strokes, four, the rhythm graceless, the control gone.
The he comes with a sound she's never heard from him. A single, wrecked syllable that might be profanity. It would have made her giggle had she not been too busy moaning his name as he pulses inside her. There’s a sudden hot swell of his release. His whole body locks and then empties in a shudder that travels from his hips through his chest and out through his ruined mouth.
Katie stays on him for a moment, feeling herself squeeze around his cock. His hands loosen on her hips, slow and careful like the way she’d open a fist she’d held tight for too long.
The hands then slide to her damp lower back, and hold her there against him while the aftershocks move through them both in diminishing waves.
The cave is quiet.
Rain outside. Their breathing.
Eventually she lifts off him and collapses beside him on the bedroll with a satisfied sigh.
Joshua doesn't move for a long time. Lies on his back, one arm flung over his eyes, his mouth exposed and swollen and wet. The bandaging at his waist is a tangle of damp cloth that he'll have to redo entirely. "And you think I would want another?Foolish little wife," Joshua mutters.
Katie rolls her head sideways to look at him, ignoring his comment. Her jealousy seems so silly now, after discovering the depth of his want for her. "You swore."
He lifts from his eyes. "I may have."
"One syllable. Not very pious at all." She watches his jaw work beneath the loosened linen. "I'm going to remember that for the rest of my life."
"I will add it to my multitude of sins." His voice is deeper, husky in a way that makes her thighs twitch together even now.
"Come here," she says, and he does.
Joshua settles closer her, one arm draped heavy across her ribs. His face is unwrapped from the nose down, the scarred of his jaw and mouth visible in the dying light. For a moment he looks...not peaceful exactly. Joshua doesn't do peaceful. He looks settled and calm, like a river after a rush of snowmelt.
The storm eases outside, the rain thinning to a hiss, then a drip. The lamp gutters nearby, the oil nearly spent.
"You know," Katie says, voice rough, eyes on the cave ceiling. "You could just tell the girl you're not interested. Clearly. In small words. Maybe with a visual aid."
His thumb traces slow circles against the ring on her finger. "I wear a ring," Joshua says mildly. “I have been transparent of my devotion to you and the Lord.”
"Yeah but some New Canaanite men have multiple wives. She probably thinks you’re one of them. Have you told her otherwise?”
A pause.
"Ah."
She turns her head to look at him. "Ah?"
“Ah. I have not.”
“Then there’s the problem. She might be labouring under the impression that there’s space in our bedroll. Which there isn’t.”
"No, there’s not." He exhales slowly. "I will speak with her properly," he concedes. "Make my stance clear."
"Good."
Joshua pulls her closer. His mouth presses against her temple. the scarred lip drags lightly on her skin, the tender place where her hairline begins. "For I am persuaded," he murmurs. "That neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God."
"That verse is about God's love," Katie says. "Not marital love."
"Tonight," Joshua says, "I find them indistinguishable."
Katie's hand finds the ribbon, crumpled on the bedroll between them, and winds it loosely around her ring finger, silk layered over silver.
She'll tie her hair up with it tomorrow while smells like both of them.
In front of Sings-Softly.