“I am continually amazed that you have managed so long,” he said quietly. “I shudder when I think what these last eighteen months have been like for you.”
“I chose to be here. Everything is easier when one chooses it.”
We walked to the shore and removed our shoes and I rolled my sleeves. The general shucked off his shirt, tossing it over his boots. Clearly he had decided to wash as well. I crouched beside the water and wetted my cloth, suddenly warm and a little breathless. I proceeded carefully, washing beneath the billows of my shirt while the general splashed away, unimpeded. He was muscled and long and lightly furred on his chest, with not an ounce of extra around his middle. I peeked at him as he finished and turned back toward his discarded clothing, shaking himself as he went.
“I will be just a minute more,” I murmured.
“And I will wait.”
“Will you step away?” I asked. I needed to wash my nether regions, and doing something so undignified, even beneath my clothes, was more than I could endure with him watching.
I heard him move up the bank, swatting at a mosquito and shaking out his shirt. It had been a wet spring and a hot summer, and the water drew the bugs. I loosened the ties on my breeches and managed to wash below my waist without dropping them. It was not a bath, but it would suffice. When I was finished and my cloth was rung out, I turned to see if he still waited. He was there, silhouetted and still, but he turned as he heard me pick my way up the bank.
My clothes were damp and sticking to my flesh, and my hair had come loose around my face. My shirt was so wet it was sheer in spots, and I covered my chest with one hand while my shoes swung from the other. I dropped them in the grass and shoved my feet into them, not bothering with the buckles, but when I straightened, his back was rigid and he was turned away. I plucked at my shirt, pulling it from my skin. I’d lost the tie for my hair.
“You must not let anyone see you,” he murmured, his voice strained.
I did not need to ask why.
He followed me into the tent and tied the flap closed with shaking hands.
And then he reached for me.
The ferocity of his embrace lifted me off the ground, thigh to thigh, belly to belly, chest to chest, and my shoes fell from my feet, landing with muted thumps.
His mouth against mine was immediately familiar and strange. I knew the shape of his lips and the sound of his voice, the rasp of his breath and the smell of his skin. I’d studied his features in detail many times, but kissing was another matter entirely, and we came together the way we’d come together before, frenzied and frantic.
“Dear God, Samson. What am I going to do with you? What the hell am I going to do?” It was a whispered wail against my lips, and he dropped his mouth to my throat, as if he needed breath or fought for control, but I could not bear to share his attention with that part of me, and I grasped his face and brought his lips back to mine.
“I do not know how to do this,” I said, and I tightened my grip so that he would teach me. “But I want to learn.”
I felt his jaw clench beneath my palms, a battle to slow down, to savor.
“You want to learn?”
“Yes. I want you to show me.”
He groaned softly, and I reveled at the sound.
“Do what pleases you,” he whispered.
“I do not know what pleases me,” I said, but he shook his head, rejecting my words, and the caress of his mouth, so soft and light, pleased me greatly.
“Yes, you do,” he countered.
His heat pleased me. His texture. His very presence pleased me, and I touched my tongue to his cupid’s bow to see if that pleased me too. And then he was tasting me the way I tasted him, his lips seeking and supping, and I forgot to tally the wonders and matched him parry for parry.
I am convinced nothing is so intimate as a kiss, not even the joining of flesh or the taking of vows. When mouths commune, there is little that can be hidden, and I had no desire to hide anything any longer. Not from him.
His hands flexed and fisted in my shirt, and his fingers danced beneath it, stroking the smooth skin of my back. He palmed the curve of my hips and the swell of my buttocks and ran his thumbs across the peaks of my unbound breasts, but when I thought perhaps we would sink to our knees and surrender to the ever-intensifying drumming of our flesh, the general dragged his lips from my mouth, wrapped his hands around my wrists, and ground his rough cheek against mine.
“Deborah, please. Please, help me. I cannot do this. I will not do this.”
I nodded immediately and stepped back, aching but obedient, and not at all certain what he could not do. We stood in the sticky darkness, breathing and battling, and when he let go of my wrists, we parted, retiring to our pallets. But when we had settled, our eyes fixed on nothing and our ears keenly attuned to each other, I spoke, my voice pitched lower than the murmur of the camp.