around in your lip. Don’t leave it in one place too long.’ He watched the expression on her face slowly change, and felt an answering grin spread over his own. ‘Pretty good, huh?’
She gave a low laugh. ‘Fast, too.’
‘Starts fast, ends fast. I never really saw any harm to it, as long as a man had finished before he came on watch.’
He watched her awkwardly move the plug in her lip. ‘My father said that men used it when they should have been sleeping instead. Then they come on watch all used up. And if they were still on it when they were working, they’d be too confident, and take unneeded risks.’ Her voice trailed off. ‘“Risk-takers endanger everyone”, he always said.’
‘Yes. I remember,’ Brashen agreed gravely. ‘I never used cindin aboard the Vivacia, Althea. I respected your father too much.’
For a moment silence held, then she sighed. ‘Let’s do this,’ she suggested.
‘Right,’ he agreed. He took up the needle and thread again. She followed it with her eyes. Maybe he’d made her too alert. ‘There’s no room in here to work,’ he complained. ‘Here. Lie down on the bunk and turn your head. Good.’ He crouched down on the floor beside the bunk. This was better, he could almost see what he was doing. He dabbed away the sluggishly welling blood and picked out a few stray hairs. ‘Now hold the gash shut. No, your fingers are in the way. Here. Like this.’ He arranged her hands, and it was no accident that one of her wrists was mostly over her eyes. ‘I’ll try to be quick.’
‘Be careful instead,’ she warned him. ‘And don’t stitch it too tight. Just pull the edges together as evenly as you can, but not so they hump up.’
‘I’ll try. I’ve never done this before, you know. But I’ve watched it done more than once.’
She moved the plug of cindin in her lip, and he remembered to shift his own. He winced as it touched a sore from earlier in the evening. He saw her jaws clench and he began. He tried not to think of the pain he inflicted, only of doing a good job. He finally got the needle to pierce her scalp. He had to hold the skin firmly to her skull as he brought the tip of the curved needle up on the other side of the cut. Drawing the thread through was the worst. It made a tiny ripping noise as it slipped through, very unnerving to him. She set her teeth and shuddered to each stitch, but did not cry out.
When it was finally done, he tied the last knot and then snipped away the extra thread.
‘There,’ he told her, and tossed the needle aside. ‘Let go, now. Let me see how I did.’
She dropped her hands to the bed. Sweat misted her face. He studied the gash critically. His work was not wonderful, but it was holding the flesh closed. He nodded his satisfaction to her.
‘Thanks.’ She spoke softly.
‘Thank you.’ He finally said the words. ‘I owe you. But for you, I’d be in the hold of the Jolly Gal by now.’ He bent his head and kissed her cheek. Then her arm came up around his neck and she turned her mouth to the kiss. He lost his balance and caught himself awkwardly with one hand on the edge of the bunk, but did not break the kiss. She tasted of the cindin they were sharing. Her hand grasped the back of his neck gently and that touch was as stimulating as the kiss. It had been so long since anyone had touched him with gentleness.
She finally broke the kiss, moving her mouth aside from his. He leaned back from her. ‘Well,’ he said awkwardly. He took a breath. ‘Let’s get a bandage on your head.’
She nodded at him slowly.
He took up a strip of cloth and leaned over her again. ‘It’s the cindin, you know,’ he said abruptly.
She moved it in her lip. ‘Probably. And I don’t care if it is.’ Narrow as the bunk was, she still managed to edge over in it. Invitingly. She set her hand to his side and heat seemed to radiate out from it. A shiver stood his hair up in gooseflesh. The hand urged him forward.
He made a low sound in his throat and tried one last time. ‘This isn’t a good idea. It’s not safe.’
‘Nothing is,’ she told him, almost sadly.
His fingers were awkward on the laces of her shirt, and even after she shrugged out of it, there was a wrapping about her chest. He unwound it to free her small breasts and kiss them. Thin, she was so thin, and she tasted of the salt water, oakum and even the oil that was their cargo. But she was warm and willing and female, and he crammed himself into the too-narrow, too-short bunk to be with her. It was likely the cindin that made her dark eyes bottomless, he tried to tell himself. Startling it was that such a sharp-tongued girl would have a mouth so soft and pliant. Even when she set her teeth to the flesh of his shoulder to still her wordless cries, the pain was sweet. ‘Althea,’ he said softly into her hair, between the second and third times. ‘Althea Vestrit.’ He named not just the girl but the whole realm of sensation she had wakened in him.
Brash. Brashen Trell. Some small part of her could not believe she was doing this with Brashen Trell. Not this. Some small, sarcastic observer watched incredulously as she indulged her every impulse with his body. He was the worst possible choice for this. Then, too late to worry about it, she told herself, and pulled him even deeper inside her. She strained against him. It made no sense, but she could not find the part of her that cared about such things. Always, other than that first time, she’d had the sense to keep this sort of thing impersonal. Now not only was she giving in to herself and him with an abandonment that shocked her, but she was doing this with someone she had known for years. And not just once, no. He had scarcely collapsed upon her the first time before she was urging him to begin again. She was like a starving woman suddenly confronted with a banquet. The heat in her was strong, and she wondered if that were the cindin. But just as great was the sudden need she was admitting for this close human contact, the touching and sharing and holding. At one point she felt tears sting her eyes and a sob shake her. She stifled it against his shoulder, almost afraid of the strength of the loneliness and fears that this coupling seemed to be erasing. For so long she had been strong; she could not bear to display her weakness like this to anyone, let alone to someone who actually knew who she was. So she clutched him fiercely and let him believe it was part of her passion.
She did not want to think. Not now. Now she just wanted to take what she could get, for herself. She ran her hands over the hard muscles of his arms and back. In the centre of his chest was a thick patch of curly hair. Elsewhere on his chest and belly there was black stubble, the hair chafed away by the coarse fabric of his clothes and the ship’s constant motion. Over and over again he kissed her, as if he could not get enough of it. His mouth tasted of cindin, and when he kissed her breasts, she felt the hot sting of the drug on her nipples. She slipped her hand down between their bodies, felt the hard slickness of him as he slid in and out of her. A moment later she clapped her hand over his mouth to muffle his cry as he thrust into her and then held them both teetering on the edge of for ever.
For a time she thought of nothing. Then from somewhere else, she abruptly came back to the narrow sweaty bunk and his crushing weight upon her and her hair caught under his splayed hand. Her feet were cold, she realized. And she had a cramp in the small of her back. She heaved under him. ‘Let me up,’ she said quietly, and when he did not move at first, ‘Brashen, you’re squashing me. Get off!’
He shifted and she managed to sit up. He edged over on the bunk so that she was sitting in the curl of his prone body. He looked up at her, not quite smiling. He lifted a hand, and with a finger traced a circle around one of her breasts. She shivered. With a tenderness that horrified her, he drew the sole blanket up to drape
