Legacy - Lois McMaster Bujold [62]
He nodded. She drew his shirt off that long, strappy-muscled torso, folding it up atop his clean and mended riding trousers for morning. Later in the night. Whatever that grim predawn hour was.
She went on, “Well, I can’t. I’ve taken your word that our cords work the same as everyone else’s, but I can’t feel it for myself.”
“Others can tell. And tell you.”
“Yeah, well, except I can’t be all the time asking, twenty times a day. Cattagus for one doesn’t take to being pestered. And besides, he’ll have his own worries about Mari.”
“True,” he conceded, eyeing her.
She slipped out of her own shirt, his hand helping not so much for need, as to trail over her skin in passing. The light touch made her shiver. “I want to know in my own heart. Isn’t there anything at all you can do to, to make me feel you? The way all the others can?”
He said after a moment, “Not the way the others can, no. You’re no Lakewalker.”
Nor ever would be, but his wording caught her attention. “Some other way?”
“Let me…think about that for a little, Spark. It would take some unusual groundwork.”
Stripped for sleep, he was altogether unaroused. If he felt half as distracted as she did right now, that was no surprise. She felt obscurely that she ought to send him off having been thoroughly made love to, but for the first time ever, such intimacy felt forced and unhappy. That was no good either.
“You’re all tense. How if you lie down and I give you a back rub? Might help you sleep.”
“Spark, you don’t have to—”
“And a real good foot rub,” she added prudently.
He rolled over into their bedroll with a muffled noise indicating abject surrender, and she smiled a little. She started at his neck. His muscles there were plenty hard and tense, though this seemed poor compensation for the limpness elsewhere. The corded unease gave itself up but slowly as her hands pressed, slid, caressed. Unhurriedly, she worked her way from tousled top to gnarly toe, not making love, just loving.
Perhaps the lack of expectation paid off; in any case, when he at length rolled over again a more alert interest had clearly returned to him. There might yet be sleep for him tonight, if the long way around. She slid down against him to capture his mouth in a deep kiss; his own hand snaked around her shoulder and began tracing lazily over her. She tried to soak up every sensation, hold them like painted patterns on her skin, but racing time washed them constantly beyond her reach.
He arched above her like a clouded night sky, lowering, entering her; if not easily, far more easily than their first urgent fumbles on their wedding night. Exercise, indeed she thought, and smiled in memory. She felt a pang of regret that tonight was bound to be futile for trying to catch a child, both too late for this month and too soon for her healing. In these hurried, frightening circumstances, she might have been tempted to take a chance on the healing. Still…surely it would be ill omened to conceive their first child out of fear and despair. Dag’ll come back. He must come back.
He slipped his left arm behind her back, clutched her, and heaved them both over. She adjusted herself with a wriggle and sat up, looking down at him curiously. His face held a different abstraction, and she feared for a moment that they would again lose their intimate impetus to the creeping chill of tomorrow’s worries.
No, evidently not. But he watched her though half-lidded eyes as his left arm began a peculiar circuit, briefly touching the cord bound on her left wrist, then her forehead, heart, belly, groin, and wrist again.
“What are you doing?”
“Not sure. Something by feel. A little left-handed groundwork, maybe.”
What he’d called his left-handed groundwork hadn’t appeared in their lovemaking since he’d recovered the use of his right hand. She had missed his eerie caresses, though she supposed it wasn’t to her credit that they’d made her feel so downright smug for marrying a black sorcerer instead of a mere farmer. But that seemed not to be what he