I step closer to him, toeing the abyss. I could slit his throat; there’s no blade or mantle to stop me. Maybe they’d throw a feast in my honor if I came back to Keszi with a Woodsman’s head.
My hand curls around the hilt of my knife. “Would you let me destroy you, then?”
“It would be just as well,” Gáspár says miserably. “I should be struck dead, for wanting you the way I do.”
His words brush something inside of me, like flint touching tinder. That unnamable heat, coiling and strange, hardens into a feeling I can name: want. All my lewd imaginings come roaring up at me, those guilty moments of wondering how he would look pinned between my thighs. Gáspár’s gaze doesn’t lift from me, his black eye burning with perverse agony.
I let go of the knife and clasp my hands on either side of his face, knuckles white. And then I bring my lips to his.
Even still, I half expect him to lurch away from me. I feel the moment of his shock, the shiver of hesitation, and then he answers my kiss with such ferocity that I’m the one shaken. I taste the juice in his mouth, again sweet and sharp at once, and when a drop runs down his chin I catch it, smirking when he quivers under the sweep of my tongue.
Gáspár raises his hands from his side and circles them around my waist, pulling me flush against him. My body remembers the shape of his, from so many nights curled together on the ice, and it responds with fevered instinct, pushing him until he stumbles back against the trunk of the closest willow tree.
I break the kiss only to catch my breath, hands still clutching at his face. He looks particularly beautiful like this: newly kissed, his lips swollen and his cheeks flushed, Régország’s true-born prince profaned under my touch. I let my fingers skate across his cheekbone, hesitantly, until my thumb brushes the leather patch that covers his missing left eye.
“I want to see,” I whisper.
“No,” he says, face hardening. But he doesn’t jerk back or push away my hand.
Light as a moth’s wing, I lift the patch from his eye and slide it back over his head. A web of scar tissue spreads over the skin below his empty eye socket. But there’s no horror, aside from the stomach-drop moment of searching for something and finding it isn’t there. It’s nothing like seeing the ravaged skin of his wrist, or the way I used to feel, sick and uneasy, when I wondered what lurked beneath the patch. Gáspár loosens his grip on my waist, lifting his arm so he can cover the hole with the heel of his hand. It’s quick as a reflex, like the action has been ground into him.
I move his arm away. Then I kiss him, right on the place where his eye should be.
“Stop it,” he says, body tensing around mine.
“You’ll have to find some other way to occupy my mouth then,” I say, smiling as lasciviously as I can, and still tasting red juice between my teeth. My vision has funneled to just his face and body, the forest shuddering away in my periphery.
Gáspár slides his hands around my neck, under my hair, careful not to brush over my weeping bite. He presses his mouth to mine again, our teeth knocking together as my lips part, and his tongue slipping between them.
I grasp the back of his head, and his mouth lifts from mine for a moment, to trail across my jawline, his stubble prickling my chin. I make a small, clipped noise of protest as his lips trace the faded scar on my throat, so gently it’s almost like an apology. Briefly I remember him pulling Peti off me, his voice cold and furious, the swing of his ax, and then that shudders away too. I can only feel his lips on my throat, and my stammered protest turns to a moan.
His certainty shocks and thrills me, especially as he parts my thighs with his knee. I run my hand along the hem of his dolman, fingers tracing over the coiled lines of the scar on his abdomen. Under my hands his muscles flex, hips rolling, and then he tenses again, like he’s embarrassed of his own eagerness. When I shift I feel him more urgently against me, and I’m overcome with wanting more.
It’s nothing like my awkward fumbling with village boys that left my knees raw and my lips bruised. All his desire is knitted through with tenderness, and for a moment I wonder if he did manage to have much practice, before his father cut out his eye and put the Woodsman cloak on his back.
“Am I the first woman you’ve touched, pious Woodsman?” I ask, more curious than mocking, my fingers working against the waistband of his trousers.
He doesn’t reply, but his face darkens, and then he kisses me again, both our mouths sweet with red juice. All this time I’d wondered if his holy order had stripped from him the lusts and passions of manhood, and now I can feel the proof of his desire stiff between my thighs. I draw his hand up over my breasts and he groans, so visceral and unbidden that it makes my own desire throb in response, guiding his hand under my tunic, over my bare, prickling skin.