“Take it off,” I said, and then remembering my long-gone governess’s etiquette lessons, added, “Please.”
Sevas’s fingers scrabbled at the laces, but he did not find much purchase. He exhaled through his nose, lips puckering with a little scowl, and at last I rolled over onto my belly, propping myself up on my elbows. Sevas’s breath caught a bit at my boldness and I felt so glad to hear it, glad that for once I was the one who had flustered him.
I looked over my shoulder, through the loose strands of my irreparably mussed hair, and saw the shape of his hardness through his tights. That thrilled me even further, so much that I didn’t even mind the way he tore my corset laces like a savage animal, peeling off my sleeves and taking down my skirts, nor even the way the wooden floor chilled my breasts and made my nipples knot with cold.
He kissed his way across my shoulders, down the length of my back, over my bottom, and sucked at the sweet place between my thighs. I whimpered and then he turned me over, sliding between my legs. As he held himself there above me, he said, “Marlinchen . . .”
“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t stop, or you’ll be a liar, a cheat—”
He laughed. “Who says so?”
“I do.”
Transformations were a fickle, dangerous magic, and every spell came with a high and terrible cost. Once you turned into one thing, you could no longer be what you once were. A cat turned into a cat-vase lost its whiskers and darting pink tongue. A carriage turned into a gourd lost its wheels and glass windows. And once you became a woman, you gave up all the trappings of girlhood, all its precious bounties.
I knew once I was through with this I could no longer hope to be rescued from a tower or kissed awake from my cursed slumber. Princes didn’t come for women; they only came for girls with intact and immaculate maidenheads, opening them up like flowers waiting to be plucked. I was excising myself from half the stories in Papa’s codex, and perhaps it ought to have terrified me. But I only felt a pull of want in the bottom of my belly, and between my legs I was almost embarrassingly slick.
Sevas stripped off his tights and then he was kneeling there above me, naked. I drank in the sight of him like it was sweetest kvass: the gold paint still smudged on his cheeks and throat, the tattoos scrawled over his shoulders and the back of his hand, the rippling muscles of his chest, the straining hardness standing taut against his stomach.
He kissed me again with a tender desperation, stroking two fingers inside me. I quivered and bit down on his lip, hard enough to taste the salt of blood. Sevas drew his mouth down my throat and over my breasts, gently circling my nipple with his tongue. His touch was so soft, so sweet, that I could almost forget Dr. Bakay’s knife had ever been there at all.
Finally he entered me, and a fiery braid of pain and pleasure laced from my broken maidenhead up my spine. It hurt, and then it didn’t, and then it hurt again, and sometimes it felt so good that I wished he would never stop. When the ache returned I couldn’t help it; I sobbed quietly, muffling the sound against his shoulder.
Sevas paused at once, blinking at me in alarm, and said, “I told you I can’t bear to make a woman weep.”
I felt sorry that I had upset him, and I didn’t want him to stop. Sevas brought up a hand to cup my cheek, thumb brushing over my lips, and once it was there I felt the urge to taste him, so I took two of his fingers into my mouth.
He let out a long trembling breath and started to move again, slowly at first and then lengthening his thrusts until I could feel how hard his heart was beating through our adjacent chests. With each bolt of pain I bit down on his fingers, hands fisted against his back.
“Do you know what I would do to everyone who ever called you plain-faced?” Sevas panted, lips brushing the shell of my ear. “I would kill them.”
I laughed, and it did something strange to the place where our bodies were connected, jostling us both. I took his fingers out of my mouth. “With your wooden sword?”
“I think you’re making fun of me.”
It was not long before he finished with a groan, spilling himself inside me. Sevas collapsed like a card house, breathing hard into my hair, against my throat. I shut my eyes and felt the seconds drag past as he went soft within me, and when at last he pulled out I opened my eyes and turned my head to look at our reflections.
There was my naked body and my soft, heavy breasts, cut into jagged pieces by the cracked mirror. There were Sevas’s eyes, damp and blue and shining, and chest rising and falling hugely, like something very large was trying to press out from under his skin. The fingers that had been in my mouth were pricked with small wounds, in the shape of my sharp little incisors, just like the gash on my knuckle.