by Joanna Bell
"Mmm," I replied, opening my lips to take his tongue, and to curl my own up into his mouth. "Yeah. I'm tired. We should just go to sleep."
"As it is, wife," he replied, pulling away from me suddenly and collapsing back onto our bed. "Yes, I feel tired, too. Good-night."
Three lit torches illuminated the interior of the cottage. It was enough light to see, from the bulge in Magnus' leathers, that he was in no way interested in sleeping. Still, he did a good job of pretending. He did such a good job that I was forced to crawl on top of him and begin unlacing the ties that held his leathers up. He opened his eyes, then, and looked up at me.
"Take off your tunic. I want to see you."
And so I took off my tunic – slowly, without breaking our intense eye contact. I reached down and took the hem of it in my hands, and then pulled it up over my hips, my belly, my breasts, and finally my head, and tossed it onto the floor. Magnus didn't reach for me right away. He just looked. He drew his eyes like fingers over my torch-lit curves– slow and methodical and torturous.
"Magnus," I whispered, when I could bear the lack of his touch no longer.
"What is it, girl? I thought you were tired? Why do you look at me now as if you need something. What is it you need?"
It was something he specifically liked – me asking him to touch me, to kiss me – to fuck me. He would stop our lovemaking often, to make me beg for him to continue. I loved it as much as he did – perhaps more, because there had never been anything that made me so hot as his raw desire.
"Go on," he urged, reaching up and taking the tip of one of my nipples – just one – between two fingers and rolling it gently, so I could feel the aching, heavy need between my legs growing more intense. "Tell me. Do you not wish to sleep any longer?"
"Magnus –"
He sat up, then, and pulled me against his chest. "What, Heather? Is it more mead you wish for? Shall I ask the Angles to –"
"Magnus!"
He grasped my buttocks in his hands, squeezing, pulling me hard down against him, and nuzzled his head into my breasts. His leathers were half-on, half-off, and all it took from me was a little twist of my hips to feel him there, wet and thick between my bare thighs. A twitch of hunger ran through my sex to feel him so close, and an emptiness that only one thing could fill.
When Magnus reached down between us to take himself in his hands, I was already inhaling, anticipating the sweet sensation of him pushing himself into me. But he didn't do it. He nudged the head between my lips, and ran it up and down, exhaling hard as he passed over my aching opening, but refusing to put it where he knew I needed it.
And then, just when I thought I might go mad from it, he suddenly flipped me over onto my back and put his hands on my thighs, opening me wide.
Outside, the Angles' songs were dying down, but there were still some stragglers hanging on. I didn't care. I didn't care who was out there, or who was going to hear me. When Magnus bent to kiss my mouth, and then moved further down to flick his tongue around each of my nipples, I thought once again that I was going to get what I wanted. But instead of moving back up, he went further, kissing down my belly and then my thighs until they quivered underneath him.
I cried out when his tongue found my clit, and began to circle it slowly, repeatedly, exactly as he knew I liked. But still, I wanted him inside me. Even as he drew me closer and closer to bliss, I ached to be filled.
"Magnus," I begged, as he didn't slow the little movements of his tongue. "Magnus, please. Please."
But he refused. He refused even to use his fingers. When my eyes were starting to flutter shut and I was beginning to lose control, I pushed my fingers down between my legs, intending to push them into myself, but he took my hand away and lowered his whole mouth onto my clit, sucking gently, still working his tongue.
I didn't come all at once. Magnus slowed it down, using his tongue like the expert he was, building my orgasm slowly, brick by brick like a wall of fire, until my whole body arched up off the bed and I screamed his name as white hot bliss bloomed like a firework between my legs.
My husband only stopped when I was completely finished, and I lay panting and temporarily mindless underneath him. And then he rested his cheek on my thigh and looked up at me, his eyes clouded by then almost to the point of unseeing.
When he sat up on his knees, I saw that he was so hard it lay almost against his belly, and that the tip was shiny with pre-cum.
"You don't have to be gentle," I told him, reaching up and stroking his cheek. "Magnus, you don't have to be –"
"Stop," he breathed, before breaking into a grin."Girl, stop. It's been a half moon. Your words alone will finish me."
His desire for me was an ever-replenishing well, an endless source of joy. To leave him sated gave me a satisfaction I had never known before, one so deep it felt as if it lurked in my very bones – but it never lasted too long. A night spent naked in each other's arms, twisting ourselves into endless configurations of lust, would if anything leave him even hungrier the next day, or the next night, after our work had been done. I had known the shallow, reflexive sexuality of men before. I had even enjoyed it, in the same shallow, reflexive way. But it was Magnus who showed me that there was a whole world of heady delight to explore, a detailed taxonomy of longing – different sighs, fleeting expressions that would pass across his eyes, the specific tightness of his grip on this or that part of my body – that would, if noted down on paper, fill enough pages to write a library's worth of books. We did not have to leave Haesting – we did not even have to leave our bed – to explore this new geography.
And the height of it all for me was always the moment, the silky, fraught seconds, before he came. On the night of our wedding, I wanted to enjoy him as he had just enjoyed me. I wanted to bathe in my husband's pleasure, to draw it out as he had mine. And so when I saw how close he was, and that if he was to enter me at that moment it would all be over very quickly, I agreed to give him some time to cool down.
"You've had a lot of mead," I commented, staring up into his eyes, dark as they were then with desire. "How is it you're so eager with that much mead in your belly?"
"It's been a half-moon," he replied, reaching up to run a hand over one of my breasts, dragging the thumb back and forth over my nipple. "You could pour a whole cask of mead down my throat and I would still be as a boy of ten and six who has just seen his pretty neighbor bathing naked in the sea."
I laughed. "You sound like you're speaking from experience. Were you that boy? Were you spying on your neighbor when you were a teenager?"
As we chatted, Magnus stayed knelt between my legs, and his cock stayed against my thigh, not seeming to lose any of its fervor. "When I was a boy, our longhouse was set back from the others – there was an unfortunate lack of opportunity for spying on pretty girls."
He moved his hand to my other breast, slowly and deliberately, aware that any haste would result in a too-quick conclusion.
"You know this is my favorite thing," I said, reaching down to run my hands over his powerful thighs – as thick and strong as tree-trunks, the cords of muscle visible underneath the skin when he tensed them.
"What's your favorite thing? Giving yourself to me? I already know it, girl. I –"
"No," I replied quietly. "I mean – yes. But I mean this specifically. When you're close, when I can see that you're close, when I can hear the way your breath changes. I can see it in you even now, look how tense you are! I think it's my favorite thing in the whole world when you're like this, Magnus."
He blew his breath forcefully out of his mouth and shook his head. "Gods, girl. Gods, wife. How am I supposed to last if you speak to me as you do? If you look at me as you do right now?"
"I don't think I want you to wait any longer," I replied, pulling my knees up, opening my legs underneath him.
"Heather –"
His tone was a warning. I ignored it.
"I want it," I whispered, biting my lip and smiling up at him, pushin
g my body eagerly up off the bed. "Now, Magnus. I don't want you to wait. I don't care if it doesn't last. I just want – OHH."
A heavy sigh pushed the rest of my words out of the way as he suddenly filled me with his entire, rigid length.
"Gods," he breathed, holding himself inside me for a few seconds before pulling out and sinking back in. "Gods, you're so soft, girl. Oh, Gods – Heather –"
"Don't hold back," I urged, caressing his cheek, sensing that he was trying to do so. "I want you to come, Magnus. I want you to come inside me. I want to go to sleep with it all over my thighs, all over my –"
He thrust into me hard, and groaned – quietly at first, but rising to almost a shout as he came – emptying himself deep inside, his whole body stiff.
And I took it. I pulled him down close to me, pressing his face into my neck, tilting my hips up over and over the way he liked me to do.
"Voss," he panted when I felt his body begin to relax, even as his hips still twitched with aftershocks. "Voss, Heather. Gods, I can't move. I don't think I can ever move again."
I kissed his ear, and his neck, and then lifted his head up so I could look him in the eyes.
"I love you," I told him. "I don't just love you when you come like that – or when you make me come like that – I love you all the time, Magnus. I love you like – like I don't even have words to describe."
He smiled one of his adorably dopey, post-sex smiles, and bent to kiss my mouth. "As it is, girl, have I driven the loneliness from your heart? Have I made it so you barely remember what it was to feel such a thing?"
My husband was being serious. I hadn't been expecting it, as he was often quick to an almost drunken state after I'd pleased him – but on our wedding night, I saw at once that what he asked had been on his mind for some time.
"What do you think?" I whispered, kissing him again. "Do I seem lonely to you at all? Do you sense any –"
"Aye, girl, you do not. But I want to hear it."
I kissed his cheek, and then his other cheek, and then his mouth again. "No," I replied. "No I am not lonely anymore, love. Because of you. I'm not lonely because of you. And now that I'm your wife, I'm going to spend the rest of my life showing you how I love you for it – how I love you for everything that you are."
"As it is," he said, rolling onto his back and pulling me in close next to him. "I would be lost without you."
And so the Northman from the 9th century and the girl from Los Angeles, USA, were married. I hadn't expected much to change after the ceremony – we'd been living together already for almost a year, first in the little hut on the Haesting estate and then in the cottage just outside the walls. But things did change. Not the actual tasks, not the ways we spent our days. But the feeling between us as we went about these tasks, and as we lived each day. The question of the future was no longer a question but a settled fact. My future was with Magnus, and his was with me. And it had a location now, too. It wasn't going to be somewhere else – somewhere south or north or hundreds of years in the future. It was going to be where we were.
I was surprised, a little, by just how much contentment it brought me. I'd grown up with a mother who lamented her marriage, and her only child, as things that kept her from the life of travel and adventure she dreamed of. And who knows, perhaps my mother truly was destined for a life of travel and adventure before I got in the way? But as I gained a distance of months and then years from her unhappy presence, I became more circumspect about blaming myself for my mom's dissatisfactions.
"It sounds as if she is one of those people who are never happy," Magnus said one night as we ate a stew of sneeps and oysters by candlelight and chatted about my past.
I looked up, surprised at first, and then less so.
"You must have known such a person?" He continued. "My mother's brother was that way. If the sun shone, it was too hot and he complained. If the clouds drew in it was too chilly, and he complained. Weather is a surface thing, but it went deeper with him, too. His wife, who gave him children and a warm hearth, was a source only of annoyance. When she cooked him dinner he complained that the vegetables were hard, rather than being happy that he had a wife to cook him dinner – as not all men have. The way you speak of your mother reminds me of him. It's funny, I always disliked him – my uncle. But now, speaking of this to you, all I feel is pity. Perhaps it is the right way to feel about your mother?"
"You're right," I told him. "At least I think you're right – my mother never really talked to me about how she felt about anything. Not serious things, anyway. But she was definitely one of those people who was never happy – who could always find the one wrong thing in a person or a situation and focus only on that."
"You grow further from her," Magnus said, nodding at the loaf of fresh bread so I would pass it to him. "I see it in you, girl. You hold yourself differently now, to when I first met you. You walk with your shoulders back. Sometimes when I see you I think to myself that I wish she, too, could see you. That she could see you how I see you."
I sometimes caught myself wondering, in the early years of my marriage, if the Northman understood what an earthquake his love was to me. We would sit at our table in the evenings, and talk as we did that night, and I would catch myself looking down at my arms, examining my fingers to see if there was a glow emanating from my skin. He loved me. He did not have to tell me he loved me – although he did, and often – because everything he did showed me it was true. He knew me. He knew me like no one else in my life had ever known me – even my own parents.
"What is it?" He asked that evening, when we spoke of my mother and he saw some of the wonder in my heart flit across my face. "Have you not thought of your mother this way b–"
"It's not that," I replied. "It's – it's you. You notice the way I walk? You notice the way I hold my shoulders – and that it's different now, to when we first met?"
"Aye," he replied, narrowing his eyes the way he always did when I said something he thought incredibly dense. "Do you not know that I notice you more than I notice anything else in this world? Do you not know how you hold my attention? This is love, girl – and you know I love you."
"I do know that," I told him. "I just – I know you love me. I do."
"But you remember, still, how it was to grow into yourself with a mother who didn't see you as I see you. You must forget, girl."
"I am forgetting."
He looked up. "I know."
Chapter Sixteen
Magnus
She was happy. And because she was happy, I was happy. And because I was happy, she was happy. It was one of those circumstances like an eddy at the side of a river, feeding itself with the river's flow even as it fed back into the river. The Gods had seen fit to give me the contentment of my life – she had seen fit to give me the contentment of my life, and a new fervor took over after we were wed, to see that she was taken care of as she had not been before she came to me.
We were staying in Haesting, and Lord Eldred gave me permission to expand our plot of land, and to make it permanent. The summer after we were wed was long, and the harvest as bountiful as any the Angles could remember. When I began to build a new dwelling, with foundations of stone, my friends from the estate helped to carry the stones and mix the slurry of mud, sand and horsehair that was to hold them together. They helped me fell the large trees that were to make up the frame, and to weave the straw over the roof. And each day we progressed, I felt more and more sure of my ability to take care of Heather, to keep her warm and fed.
Soon we had a small flock of sheep – shaggy beasts with watchful yellow eyes – and another pig to fatten with scraps. Brona taught Heather how to make ale, and how to grind grain into flour with the grinding stones, and which plants and herbs to mix with the bedding-straw to keep the mites away.
The success of the little small-holding I built with my wife gave some of the other Angles itchy feet, whereupon Lord Eldred allowed a few of the more responsible men and their families to do
as I had done – to build their homes outside the walls. Eventually a larger stone wall was built, around the new dwellings – and ever farther afield – to keep the wolves from the livestock. And so Haesting grew in those early years when we were lucky to have fair weather and favorable conditions for our crops and animals – not to mention a lull in the raids my own people were known to perpetrate up and down the coast of the Kingdom.
As the estate prospered, so did its fighting men. Lord Eldred often called on me to speak with him of the way the warriors were trained in the North, and then to apply what he had learned to his own people. The Angles had not kept their swordsmen well-trained, preferring instead – at least before I arrived – to count more on luck than skill, and to hope that the estate's position, placed back in the woods and not right on the coast, would help keep them protected. There seemed to be a general belief that should a sustained attacked ever be mounted, and their own warriors bested, that the King would send men to help them. Even after the raid by my own father and brother, some of them chose not to see that there would not be time to call for the King's men when their enemies were at the gates.
Lord Eldred soon saw the folly in this, after the raid. And it was me he tasked, as he had four daughters and no sons, with helping to organize a force of men – less than ten at first but soon encompassing most of the forty or so who were young and strong enough. No longer were these men to spend all of their days helping with the domestic and agricultural tasks, only taking their swords to hand when a threat appeared. Under my instruction they were to train – not just at the sword but some with the bow, some with simple spears – at combat every second day in the morning.
It was not long before Lord Eldred and I could stand watching the men at their training and nod to each other, confident that if another contingent of Northmen, or Mercians, or anyone else appeared out of the woods to demand surrender, Haesting could make a serious go of defending itself.