Chapter 5: The First Night

"Now?" Yuhang said, an hour later.

Wanqing lifted her head from his shoulder.

The lamp had burned down to a thumb of light, and the bed smelled of lotus oil and clean sweat.

She was no longer dizzy.

She was only warm, and very awake, and lying against a man whose heart had not slowed since the needles came out.

"Now," she said.

"You said you'd tell me what you want."

"I want you to take off your shirt."

He had no shirt on to take off.

He glanced at his bare chest, then at her, and one eyebrow climbed.

"That was already done," he said. "By you. With a needle."

"Then I want to look."

She sat up, and the quilt slid to her waist.

He watched her, and she let him.

The lamplight sat gold along his shoulders, and the long muscles of his arms.

There was a pale mark over his ribs where a marsh-fiend's claw had missed his heart by a finger.

She laid her palm flat on it.

"I should tell you something first," she said. "I have never done this."

His hand stopped on her wrist.

"Never?"

"My master kept me in the Gray Reed Valley with a stove and forty kinds of mushroom.

"There wasn't anyone to do it with." She shrugged. "I'm not nervous. I only want you to know."

Something crossed his face.

It was not pity.

It looked more like a man being handed a very large, very fragile gift and trying not to drop it.

"Wanqing."

"Mm."

"Nothing in the contract says this."

"I know. I read it twice." She leaned down until her hair brushed his chin. "I want it anyway."

He kissed her.

It was not the careful kiss from the night of the second thorn.

His hand came up into her hair and closed, and he pulled her down against him.

The sound he made against her mouth sent heat running all the way down her back.

She kissed him back with a hunger that startled her.

His mouth moved to her jaw, her throat, the soft place under her ear.

Her fingers dug into his shoulders.

"You're good at this," she whispered.

"I've had a lot of time to think about it," he said into her neck. "Three years of lying awake."

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