Headless Over Heels ch 2.41 - Tactical Shrubbery (Patreon)

Alice slipped into her darkened room, past the ornate archway and the hollow sentinel suits of armor toward her canopy bed. Seth followed, pulled lightly by her hand. Her sweaty hand; that was new. Annalise’s other hands did not sweat.

“Do you know what might be, um. Hot?” Alice curled onto the black silk bedspread. The leather of her tunic squeaked. “You could undress me. If you want.”

He covered well for the laugh that nearly brought out of him. “I very much do, yeah.”

She held her hands out. “Then c’mere.”

He climbed halfway onto the bed. “And you’re sure?” he murmured, over the threadbare mountain range of her drawn-together knees.

“I’ll be even surer if you kiss me,” she murmured back.

He rested a palm on her knee and kissed her again. That same parlor-room reluctance greeted him, the lips drifting only far enough to show the minuscule gleam of the tip of her tongue.

But when he moved microscopically forward, and deepened the kiss so their lips were pressing firm, she didn’t withdraw as she had. He hummed gently, with a questioning upturn gilding the end. “Mmm?”

“Mmm,” she affirmed.

It had been a long time since he’d taken such a leading role in a kiss. He was out of practice, and the examples he’d been given of late, Annalise’s unhesitant amorous conquests, might cause poor Alice here to faint.

He coaxed. She yielded further. Her touch was so tenderly uncertain that even with the thick familiarity of Annalise’s digits her caress on his back was like a stranger’s. His grip on her knee gently began to part her legs.

She fumbled with the top button on his jet uniform. “Mmhmm,” he hummed. His forefinger slid down the fabric taut over her stomach and landed on the chrome buckle of her belt. “Mmhmm?”

Her spine flexed. The corner of her mouth turned up. She was starting to have fun. “Mmhmmmm.”

Seth grew bolder. He brought more of his weight onto the bed, settling between the big warrior-queen thighs of the blushing holy woman he was bedding. He strayed his tongue deeper into the warm bliss between Alice’s plump, delicate lips. She was getting bolder, too, tracing his tongue with hers, curling to let him taste the cherry-balm corners of her mouth. It wasn’t an unsure whimper that greeted the clink of her belt coming undone, but a featherlight sigh and a shifting gyration beneath his fingers.

He undid the top button of her fly. And the next, and she tilted her hips forward to help him tug her breeches from around her big beautiful ass, and these were Annalise’s hips, to be sure, broad and bold and fitting in his squeezing hands like the bridle of a fearless Pladuriya warhorse, eager and proud, and there were those gorgeous silver stretch marks, beckoning him forward to kiss them—

Alice yelped and squirmed away from him. He froze like a gorgon victim.

“Sorry! Sorry. I—you tickled.” She let out a shaky laugh. “I’m okay.”

“You sure?” he asked, from the no-man’s-land he’d retreated to beyond her calves. “Do you need meadowsweet? You can borrow it.”

“No, no. I mean yes, I’m sure. I’m wonderfully sure. It’s just… your stubble tickled me. I’m good.”

“You’re very good,” he said, rubbing the words together to try and kindle the moment back up. His thumb circled the pouch of softness below her bellybutton. It hooked into the lacy line of her panties and pulled slowly, delicately down.

She whimpered from behind tightly shut lips. She was shaking like a leaf. He looked up the graceful expanse of her torso to her stricken face. She stared back like she was waiting for him to yank an arrowhead out of her leg.

“Okay, hold on.” Seth slid off Alice and propped himself on an elbow. “I’m sorry, Alice. I gotta stop.”

“What?” Alice’s wide anxious eyes blinked nearsightedly at him. “Why?”

“Cause you seem terrified,” he said.

“No. Not—not of you, Seth. You’re doing such a lovely job. I j—I don’t think—” She caged her frightened face into her fingers. “I’m—she w—I never—um.”

“Never…?”

“Niama, she was…” Alice bit her lip and blushed even harder into her hands. “She was sheltered.”

Understanding winched Seth’s brows higher. “Ooh. Okay.”

“So she never—did it.”

He exhaled rueful humor through his nostrils. “Alice. I don’t mean to toss you under the trolley here, but I really wish I had known she was a virgin earlier.”

“I didn’t think it would matter,” she whined. “I thought it would be a—a sexy surprise.” She said the word sexy with such mortification she nearly mouthed it, like it was the most dire curse ever written. “I didn’t—I’m so sorry, Seth, I’m not—I’m really really sorry. I don’t think I’m—I—I mean, I don’t think she’s—”

“You’re not ready,” he said, gently. He guided her knees shut. “It’s not a problem.”

“I’m so sorry.” Alice dragged a pillow over her face. “I mean I’m just mortified.”

“It’s absolutely okay,” he said. “Really. We can just be here together for a bit, or we could get back to making out, or I could, I dunno… climb out the window or something.”

“No,” she blurted. “By Saint Lamaia, no.”

“I was joking.”

“I know,” she said. “I know, but I—I’ll be right back.”

She leapt up from the bed like she’d been bitten by it, and hurried to the bathroom door, and yanked, and its crystal handle came off in her hands. “Shit,” she gasped—no hesitation there at least—and pulled the door by the hole her unfamiliar strength had made, and disappeared into the bathroom.

Seth flopped onto his back and stared at the wavy design along the edges of the canopy bed.

Annalise al Ydris slouched out of the bathroom, shoulders slumped, and fell facefirst onto the foot of the bed. A deep breath and then a long raspberry into the sheets.

His toe nudged her. “Hey, lady.”

She reached up from her sprawl and took the ball of his foot. “We’ll get there.”

“I mean—I don’t have to—”

“Oh, no. You’re not getting away that easy.” Annalise raised her chin. Her fresh lipgloss had left a shiny mark on the bedsheets. “You cop on, Seth il Gutierre, cause you’re the wee bastard who broke my dry streak and now you have a bleeding job to do. My actual first time was the definition of minus craic, and my first romance was frolicking in front of an oncoming fuckin’ train thinking that its headlights were moonlight. This right here is my do-over. You’re popping Alice’s cherry, and you’re gonna be bleeding lovey-dovey handy-holdy eye-looky lobbing-the-gob-in-missionary-positiony romantic about it. You understand?”

“Okay,” he said. “Okay, but Alice has to be the one to bring that on. Cause I felt like a monster.”

“Ah, g’way, boy.” Annalise crawled closer. “I happen to know you like monsters.”

“You’re not a—” he started, and then Annalise rolled the rest of the way onto him and kissed him for thirty blissful, languid seconds, and then rolled off again.

“Fucking knackered, I am.” She sighed. “Sorry, love. I’ll make it up come morning, yeah?”

“Nothing to make up for.”

“You’re being all reasonable now, sure.” She chuckled sleepily. “Get my hands on you in the morning, I’ll make you forget your lovely little manners. Gonna…” She yawned and gathered him into her arms. Sleep was already pressing heavy across her voice. “Gonna… ah, hell. Y’know. Sex and such.”

He cozied into the concave curve her waist made with her hip. “Very eloquent, Madam Verdugo.”

“Feck off, Lynnokien,” she mumbled, and in the next breath she was asleep.

“I’m a fucking rabbit.” Riccana blew gustily into the handkerchief and tossed it onto the bedstand. It landed perilously close to the steaming beet soup Seth had brought her. “I fucked everything up and turned into a rabbit. What kind of Darkness is that?”

“Oh, pet.” Annalise sat on the edge of Tiago’s old bed, rubbing its new occupant’s leg. “It’ll be all right. When I found my Darkness out I was inconsolable, and now I can’t imagine life without it.”

Riccana raked her hands into her hair and before anyone could warn her she felt what was sprouting through her springy locks. “My fucking ears,” she sobbed. “What the fuck!”

Seth made vaguely sympathetic noises with everyone else and watched the soup. Riccy’s weeping fit was letting the soup go cold. If she wasn’t going to eat that soup someone ought to. Seth had worked hard on it this morning. Picked the dill himself from Annalise’s herb garden. Did Riccy not like the soup?

“They’re already shorter than they were,” Tiago said. For five minutes of tempestuous sobbing his hand had been lingering back and forth at Riccana’s back like a bee dithering between flowers. “I think—maybe they’ll go back to normal.”

Riccana buried her face in her hands and sobbed. Something about this fit—the shoulders hunched, maybe, or the way she was crying so hard that she was having trouble taking a full breath, snapped Seth out of his soupy pondering. Why was he so hyperfixated on the soup, he chided himself, but he knew why.

He fancied himself a talented chef and Riccana wasn’t eating. He fancied himself a talented lover, and Alice had shrunk away from him like he’d been molten to the touch. Nobody was to blame for the miasma that clung to him this morning, and it was surely nothing in comparison to poor Riccana’s misfortune. But cling it did.

Or maybe it was what he and Annalise were off to do after they left this bedside that put a stone in his throat.

“I think they’re cute,” Ofelia declared.

Tiago frowned. “Ofelia. Come on.”

Riccana peered from between her fingers. “You do?”

“Thoroughly adorable, in fact,” Ofelia said. “Tiago thinks so, too.”

“Ofelia.”

Riccana’s tearstained eyes slid to Tiago, who had gone rigid in a seeming effort to blend in with his mother’s ornamental suits of armor. “…He does?”

“That’s what he told me,” Seth said.

“Fucking stop,” Tiago hissed, in the same exact tone he used with his sister and his mother, and Seth already felt better.

“I want a mirror.” Riccana held a hand out. “Can anyone give me a mirror, please?”

“There are some deeply disappointing Darknesses out there,” Tiago said, as he cast about his old room for a glass. “I mean, I have to find a bird to be a bird, and my body’s out there squawking and flapping his arms.”

Riccana gave that mental image a tearful laugh that closed Tiago’s fists in silent triumph.

“To change on a dime into a rabbit?” Ofelia nudged Seth. “I bet our thief here’s jealous.”

“Hugely,” Seth said. In the main, he was trying to make Riccana feel better—his Darkness suited him well, by his estimation—but it wasn’t wholly a lie. Not when he considered the dizzying possibilities for infiltration and evasion and curling up in Annalise al Ydris’s lap while she pet his ears.

Riccana accepted a pearl-handled hand mirror from Tiago and looked mournfully into its circle.

“They’re fuzzy,” she said. “I guess that’s better than the alternative. I wouldn’t want them to just be pink. Gray. Whatever.”

“They look good,” Tiago said.

Riccana glanced from the mirror. “Cute, even?”

Tiago pinched the bridge of his nose. “Please do not pay attention to this estate’s unpaid jester brigade.”

“Okay,” Riccana said. “Do you want to take me somewhere else today?”

If Tiago’s hand hadn’t been positioned in front of them, his night-black eyes might have popped out of their head. “You, like… me? And you?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Me and you.”

“Uh,” he said.

“On a date,” she added.

“Oh,” he said. “Uh.”

“You’ve been a good host to me this whole time,” Riccana said. “And patient and kind, and you even got in a duel for me, for saints’ sake. And for Seth, I guess. And the whole time I’ve been sulking and crying and being tiresome. I owe you.”

“No you don’t,” Tiago said. “We uprooted your life. Anyone would—”

Riccana raised her chin. “Well, then you owe me. And I want to try some of this chaya that everyone keeps offering me. So you’d better take me somewhere they serve it.”

Tiago had fought a duel on a hill without a trace of fear on his face. This new challenge clearly terrified him. “Uh,” he said. “I, uh, I’m not sure—”

“I know the perfect spot,” Ofelia interrupted. “I’ll write the address down for you.”

Annalise beamed. “Just stay in the meadow bergs, right? Not too far into the Legion districts. There might be a cheeky little warrant out for Riccy.”

“They won’t try anything.” Tea was beyond him, but the thought of defending the object of his affection with violence brought Tiago’s confidence right back. “I’ll make sure.”

“And if they do I’ll turn into a rabbit again,” Riccana said. “And hide in your pocket or something.”

“You, um,” Tiago said. “My pockets aren’t that big.”

Riccana folded her arms. “Are you calling my rabbit’s ass fat?”

“I am going to follow them in a tactical shrubbery and stare at them all day,” Ofelia whispered, as Tiago um’d and flailed like a fish on a baited hook for his clearly tickled ward.

Annalise held up a warning finger. “You leave ‘em be, Feeli.”

“This misadventure merits scientific rigor,” Ofelia said. “But fine. I’ll use a powerful telescope or something instead.”

“Aye, well, you scurrying around looking for one’ll let Sunshine be Sunshine.”

“What about the two of you?” Ofelia asked. “You’ve got your riding boots on, Mother. And Seth’s got his little sash.”

“It’s not little,” Seth said. “It’s one size.”

“It looks sharp as a tack on you, Sethy, ignore my little terror.” Annalise kissed his temple. “And if you must know, girleen, Seth and I have a meeting to attend at the Bastion.”

Seth swallowed beneath his Legion-black stand collar. The stone lodged in his throat didn’t go anywhere.

Annalise’s hand, warm and substantial, landed like a bolstering buttress on the small of his back. Pride all over her grinning face. “Today’s the day Seth il Gutierre meets the Sorcerer General.”