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The moment itself doesn't matter. It's the sort of shit you say when you're out drinking with your friends and you want to scandalize everyone at the table, scare the shit out of them—no one takes it seriously when Nine-Fingers runs her mouth. It's the sort of shit that gets said when the whole fucking night's already fucking insane, half the Guildhall packed with relieved Harpers, Zhent blood on everyone's hands. When Rilsa says, laughing, that there's sure to be more than a few of their men fucking Harpers tonight, and Nine-Fingers grins lasciviously and asks, “How about it, Jaheira?” the table explodes with raucous laughter, because no one's taking it seriously. It's that kind of a topsy-turvy, celebratory, wonderful night.
Except the way Jaheira responds—
Nobody else is looking, but it's Nine-Fingers's job to always be looking. Jaheira's lashes flutter, her lips part, and for a sliver of a terrifying second, she does look like she's actually fucking thinking about it. She's a professional, of course, so she schools her expression, thins her mouth, and takes this long, slow sip of her wine, like the question isn't even worth answering.
But suddenly Astele's thrumming with something new and terrifying, because Jaheira didn't say no. She didn't. She knows Jaheira very well by now—she knows that this is a woman who chooses every word with vicious precision, who closes off every avenue she doesn't want people going down. And she didn't close this off. She didn't say no.
People get drunker. Jaheira isn't drinking. Astele can see why. She'd stay sharp, too, in the belly of the beast. Harpers are dancing on tables; Astele's girls are singing and laughing. It's a good night. Astele could let her guard down a bit herself, if she wants, after a victory like that.
She could. But what she wants to do instead is blend softly into the crowd, eyes on Jaheira, letting Jaheira think she's off somewhere else. Jaheira pretends to drink for a few more minutes before slipping quietly away towards the exit, clearly intending to disappear gracefully into the night as the party drags on.
Astele follows. That hum within her is intensifying as Jaheira turns in the half-light, looking at her with an expression that is not in any way surprised. Of course she's not surprised. Nine-Fingers Keene never lets the High Harper slip away without one last little quip.
And of course Astele could say something exorbitantly clever, but what she's thinking is: Jaheira didn't say shit. I don't see why I have to.
She knows every inch of her Guildhall, in and out. The hallway that they are now standing in has two doors—one leading out into the sewers, where no one of consequence will be this time of night, and one a good distance behind them, heavy enough that it takes even one of her strongest girls a good, loud handful of seconds to push it open. If they're interrupted, it'll either be by someone who doesn't matter enough to know them or someone who won't be able to surprise them. She has time. She has at least one second.
Jaheira is watching her with that sharp, amused expression dissipating into something else. Curiosity, almost. She always likes it when Astele surprises her. That feels important. Feels like it could help in a moment like now.
Astele leans forward, cupping the High Harper's face in her hands, and breathes, “How about it, Jaheira?”
Jaheira blushes—wine-red and too lovely to be believed. She doesn't seem to realize she's doing it. When she speaks again, her tone is clipped, overly sharp, but Astele does know her well enough to know that this means she's terrified of someone noticing how nervous she is.
“What are you doing?” she asks.
“Better to have swung and missed than—ah, fuck, I don't fucking care,” says Nine-Fingers, giving up on being clever, and kisses Jaheira soundly.
She’s not sure what she’s expecting. It’s not like she’s thought this one through. More like—sometimes she’s moving through alleys and weaving past the City Watch and she realizes there’s a path she hasn’t gone down before, and the choice to move is made without her even thinking about it, because when you know the city like the back of your hand, a new way forward is something that has to be mapped and known in turn. Can’t be the Guildmaster if you don’t understand every last little thing. That’s what this is.
Mostly. Probably. Jaheira is so much softer up close than Nine-Fingers had been expecting. The woman’s got blade-sharp eyes and a viper’s tongue; it would have stood to reason that she’d kiss like that, too. Hard. Biting. Demanding. But she’s not doing that. She trembles like a young lady kissed by a ruthless brigand and submits with a kind of exhausted relief, not exactly kissing Astele back, but very much not pushing Astele away. Her hands flutter up, fingers brushing against Astele’s elbows like she’s not sure how much she’s allowed to do here, before falling awkwardly back down to her sides.
It's not exactly the searing passion that Astele was expecting. She’s not exactly sure why she was expecting searing passion. She pulls back and sees with a jolt that for the very first time, Jaheira’s face is completely open to her.
Shock. Vulnerability. Not a hint of that characteristic wry combativeness. Jaheira’s still blushing, too, which lends a kind of youthfulness to her that seems utterly at odds with her lovely, lined face. She turns her face towards Astele’s hand for a moment, her gray hair brushing against Astele’s fingers, before turning her eyes shyly back to Astele’s.
She doesn’t say anything. Does that mean it’s on Astele to say something? Fuck.
Jaheira leans forward and kisses Astele again and some terrified knot in Astele’s chest that she hadn’t even realized was there loosens in an instant. She grabs Jaheira and kisses her firmly, harder, sliding her tongue into the other woman’s mouth, which elicits a shocked, wanting noise from Jaheira and her arms wrapping firmly round Astele’s neck, and at that point exactly Astele stops thinking.
Fucking terrifying, that. The Underduke doesn’t ever turn her brain off. She keeps feeling that buzzing of thought trying to break through, but Jaheira’s tongue is in her mouth, her hands tightly gripping Astele’s shoulders like she’s convinced it’s Astele who’s about to run away, which—why the fuck would Astele run away, Harper? She commits to her decisions. Always has, always does. It’s one of the things Jaheira likes about her.
Jaheira likes a lot of things about her. Suddenly Astele’s thinking about that. Years of not-quite friendship, grudging respect, recontextualized into something dizzying and delicious as Jaheira fervently and eagerly returns her kisses. She lets her hands slide down to Jaheira’s shoulders, pressing her into the wall, breaking the kiss to scrape her teeth against Jaheira’s neck.
The sound Jaheira makes, no longer muffled by Astele’s mouth, is loud enough that it snaps the Guildmaster back to attention. Nine-Fingers pulls back, trying to steady her breathing, and sees that there’s a spark of mortified terror in Jaheira’s eyes, like she thinks Astele’s changed her mind. Like that’s even fucking possible.
It’s like something’s rattled open in Astele’s chest. She’s too fucking old for fairy tales, for this feeling that a kiss can change a nation, but a kiss between the High Harper and the Underduke—
“We can’t do this here,” she says.
Jaheira’s blush intensifies and she smiles in a way that Astele physically cannot fucking look at. That is not a smile that the High Harper should be smiling at anyone. How old is the woman? Shouldn’t she know that by now? She kisses Jaheira again, too hard, trying to bring back that sharp bite, but Jaheira just arches into her mouth and cuddles in like one of those starving street cats. Clearly this isn’t fucking working.
“I mean it,” she breathes between kisses. “It’s not—anyone could, could walk through, I—”
Jaheira turns her face away from Astele’s and presses a single soft kiss to the spot just under her jaw.
That thing that’s opening inside Astele rattles and shakes. Her hands move up to cradle Jaheira close. She keeps thinking, over and over, someone has to tell her that I’m close enough to rip her throat out. Someone has to tell her. What if I hadn’t kissed her? What if it had been someone else? If she gets like this when someone kisses her, she’s at a tactical disadvantage. She has to know. She has to know.
She kisses Jaheira again.
Jaheira hums. It’s a dangerously sweet sound. There’s no tension to her shoulders, and her hands on Astele’s face are very gentle. This is not what Astele was expecting at all.
“My office,” she says. They have guaranteed privacy there. She takes two steps forward before realizing that the woman is still tucked into her side, jumps away, sees Jaheira standing there as if in a daze, realizes subsequently that Jaheira isn’t fucking going anywhere without outside assistance. She grabs Jaheira by the hand.
By the wrist. The wrist. She has to correct it and she’s glad Jaheira isn’t paying enough attention to notice. She drags Jaheira back into the busy party, letting all of whatever the fuck she’s feeling harden her face into an angry mask that might look like she’s got business with Jaheira that needs settling. She has no fucking idea what Jaheira’s face is doing. Best she can do is control her own.
As soon as that office door is shut, she surges at Jaheira, pressing the other woman up against the desk until Jaheira has to wriggle back into sitting on the edge. Her legs part and Astele steps between, gripping Jaheira’s waist, pinning her there so she doesn’t change her mind.
“You want this?” she asks. She needs to hear it.
Jaheira colors again and nods so quickly and eagerly that Astele is almost embarrassed for her.
“You’ve gone all quiet,” she says, which isn’t all of what she wants to say, but it’s a starting point.
Jaheira’s soft openness slips into something a little more familiar. Still not quite what Nine-Fingers is used to, but closer to it. She bites her lip, eyes fluttering down and away, looks back up at Astele, opens her mouth like she wants to say something but doesn’t know how.
“What?” says Nine-Fingers. “This when you tell me you’ve loved me all along?”
She’s expecting a jab at that soft underbelly to draw blood. Half hoping for it, though she can’t place why. But Jaheira just smiles at her in that way that always fucking grates at Astele, that warm, self-satisfied certainty, and kisses her again like what she said was—oh, Astele doesn’t know shit about what lovers say to people. She does know that being this fucking caustic to someone with eyes that soft doesn’t usually get you kissed like that.
Jaheira’s hands are steadier—or is it just that Astele’s are shaking, suddenly? She wants to be the one sitting on the desk. She tugs impatiently until Jaheira reverses their positions, and then it’s Jaheira kissing her, which is a whole fucking other thing, apparently. Jaheira’s kisses, when she’s not the one being kissed, have the sharp precision of an expert swordswoman. She knows exactly where she wants the strike to land. She’s holding Astele up.
Jaheira breaks the kiss.
“Yes,” she says. It’s the first thing she’s said since Astele’s mouth closed over hers. “Yes, I want this. To be clear.”
“Really,” says Astele, which makes Jaheira actually laugh. They share a kiss again, somehow, without either of them thinking about it, which is—she doesn’t want to think about what it is. “Couldn’t have fucking guessed.”
Jaheira tucks a strand of Astele’s hair behind her ear. Something with teeth opens up in Astele’s chest and she has to try not to jerk herself away from the touch. She’s not sure whether it’s more unsettling to be touched like that or to stay still for it.
“How much of me do you want?” she asks.
Astele stares. She feels color rising to her own cheeks and furiously resents it, which probably makes the blush worse. “So you’re just willing to—what, give yourself over?”
Jaheira’s smile takes on that playful tilt it does when she’s about to explain whatever lanceboard strategy bullshit she used to fuck up one of Nine-Fingers’s operations. She says, “We are at a mutual disadvantage, Astele. Neither of us will look good if this gets out. You would not have placed yourself in this position without an intense desire to—”
“Oh, fuck the fucking fuck off,” says Nine-Fingers, relief hitting her like a train, and hauls Jaheira in for the kiss of her life.
Jaheira laughs against her mouth. Horrible old crone. Astele wriggles her hands between their bodies to unlace Jaheira’s armor with graceless impatience. She doesn’t think she’s ever seen Jaheira without her lovely green leathers, and getting to take them off, being allowed—there are a lot of things tonight that she’s not letting herself think about, and she decides in the middle of that sentence that this is one of them. She focuses instead on the softness of Jaheira’s bare skin, freckled and spotted with age, thin little lightning-bolt stretch marks at her breasts and hips, and—
“Ducks?” says Astele.
Jaheira glares. This does nothing. Astele runs her thumb along the meticulously embroidered ducks that decorate Jaheira’s corset. “These are fucking hilarious,” she says. “Who did this for you? Looks like some pretty fucking impressive—”
“I can have you killed, you know,” Jaheira threatens.
“I can have you killed. You’re not the only one in this room with a small army at your beck and call.” Astele kisses Jaheira’s collarbone, the swell of her breasts, enjoying the small shudder that this elicits. “Ducks,” she says again, gleefully.
Jaheira’s hands move to unlace Astele’s own armor, somewhat vindictively, clearly hoping to find something just as mortifying as little ducks underneath. Well, joke’s on her—Astele’s undergarments don’t have a single embroidered animal on them. Gods, this is the kind of thing Astele almost wishes she hadn’t learned, because she knows exactly how much coin this sort of information would go for round the Guildhall if it was in any way verifiable, and she can already hear the cadence of her ladies’ delighted laughter.
Except she can’t tell them. She can’t tell anyone she’s doing this. She doesn’t make a habit of advertising her little off-the-books dalliances anyway, but this one feels…
It’s a lot she’s putting at risk. That’s all. Helps that Jaheira’s got just as much on the line. Makes it a tactically sound decision—Jaheira won’t fuck her over in this, because Jaheira can’t afford to, and Astele won’t fuck Jaheira over because—well—
Jaheira’s hands are on her bare skin, pushing her back against the desk. She straddles Astele’s hips, clambering on top of her in a way that holds none of the graceful warrior Astele’s seen in battle. There’s unvarnished urgency to her, like she needs to be on top right this fucking second or she’ll die. Astele sits up on her elbows and kisses her again and it all starts evening out into soft, fluttery warmth.
Jaheira laughs breathlessly against her mouth and whispers, “Stop that.” She pushes Astele back down on top of all the papers strewn across her desk. Astele’s cheek is on a letter about trade negotiations. Unfinished. She hadn’t decided how to end the last sentence in a way that walked that lovely fine line between threatening and mocking. That sort of thing’s important in her line of work.
Jaheira’s hands still. It catches Astele’s attention. When she looks up, she sees that the other woman is hovering over her with uncharacteristic uncertainty. She doesn’t say anything, but her hands don’t seem like they’re going to be moving any time soon.
They don’t have time for this. Astele grabs Jaheira’s hand and places it decisively on her inner thigh, then says, “A little to the left of that and you’ll be fine.”
“Oh, fuck you,” snaps Jaheira, “I am not so old as to forget a woman’s body that completely.”
This is such a fucking stupid thing to say that Astele actually does start laughing at her again. (Maybe some of it is relief, too. It’s good to know there isn’t anyone capable of kissing the High Harper’s edges down into something soft. But that’s—it—it doesn’t matter.)
“Do you want this?” Jaheira asks abruptly.
Astele’s answer is immediate. “Why wouldn’t I?”
She means it in the sense that she kissed her, but it comes out in a way she doesn’t like, because it brings some of that bashful warmth back to Jaheira and Astele resents it immensely. Lucky thing, then, that Jaheira focuses instead on the apex of Astele’s thighs, pressing her fingers against the fabric with light, experimental touches.
Astele’s breath hitches. She doesn’t want to be much louder than that. She’s worked so hard to maintain control. She’s the one who kissed Jaheira. Jaheira’s touching her because Astele said it was all right—gave her permission—
Jaheira says, in a soft, low, jungle cat purr, “Beautiful.”
There’s no safe feeling in Astele at that moment. She grips for purchase underneath her and all that she finds is crumpled paper. Coded communications. Requests for assistance. Briefings on the comings and goings of the city. She can almost know the contents of every letter by touch.
Touch…
Jaheira’s hand parts her legs. Slides up, to rest above where Astele wants her, cool fingers on the warm, flat plane of Astele’s stomach. She’s doing that shit she does in combat: they both know what her next move is going to be, but she’s pretending to think about it just to get a rise out of Astele, conniving old crone that she is. She tilts her head and smiles.
“Ask me,” she breathes.
“Oh, fuck you,” Astele forces out. “I’ve asked you enough already. We wouldn’t even be here if not for me.”
“You yourself have accused me of benevolent overindulgence.” Jaheira’s thumb strokes Astele’s bare stomach—a complicated shape that feels a bit like some sort of warding glyph. Very Jaheira. Every little fidget has a purpose. “Consider it a favor to me, then, if it makes the request easier. I would like,” her fingers dip lower, closer, “to be of service.”
Astele’s about to say something clever and sharp when something—happens. She doesn’t know how to describe it. She’s looking at Jaheira’s face, the face she knows so fucking well, but for a moment, she blinks, and she finds herself thinking about what that face looked like the moment after they kissed for the first time. Shy and warm and open. She’s not someone who minds kicking a face like that around, obviously, at least not when the situation demands it, but—well, the situation doesn’t actually demand it today. So.
I’ll let her win the battle, she decides, because I’ve won the war. She got her kiss, and she’s got the High Harper straddling her, asking her to ask for what she wants. Mark of a good leader. Something like that.
“Fuck me,” she says. Orders, really. She doesn’t ask for shit.
Jaheira lets out a laughing breath, her eyes sparkling like the order’s something funny, not something to be afraid of. Nine-Fingers can count on one hand—the hand without its pinky, even—how many people can do that without getting themselves killed.
Her hand slides between Astele’s thighs.
There it is. Deft fingers. Jaheira is so fucking precise about everything that she chooses to do. Her fingers press into the seam of Astele’s clinging trousers, and the layer dividing touch from skin only serves to impart upon Astele that Jaheira wants to touch her too much to think about what’s between them. She’s already moving to squirm gracelessly out of the rest of her clothing when Jaheira steadies her—pins her in place, really—with a raised eyebrow and a deeply amused smile.
“Patience,” she says. “We will get there.”
“Oh, fuck you.”
“We will get there too, if you like.” Jaheira’s fingers curl forward. Her other hand braces Astele against the desk. Her eyes are drinking in Astele’s bared breasts, but, of course, because she’s Jaheira, what she says is, “You told me that it wasn’t deep enough to scar.”
“What?”
Jaheira’s fingers move away from Astele’s cunt—god fucking damn it, Astele thinks—and trace the long, harsh line across her heart. “Worrying over nothing,” she says. “I believe those were the words that you used at the time.”
Impatiently, Astele drags Jaheira’s hand back down. “Getting slow in your old age?” she persists.
Jaheira whispers, “You have asked me enough already.” Her fingers hook under the waist of Astele’s trousers, pushing them quickly down, before tracing with particularly malicious leisure towards their intended destination.
Astele waits. She’s still thinking about that soft, open look on Jaheira’s face. The Harpers are all about balance, aren’t they? Maybe that’s why Astele’s lying still, half shaking with anticipation, letting Jaheira set the pace. She saw something that no one was supposed to see. Jaheira gets something that, by rights, Astele shouldn’t be giving to anyone.
A sliver of control. A kiss. Something else, maybe. These things tend to come in threes.
Jaheira’s fingers slide against the wet seam of Astele’s cunt. She’s dragging it out. Intimate. No, dreadful. No, both, somehow. Astele wants to reach up and drag her in, but she can see that the way she’s holding still has Jaheira a little off balance, and there’s something satisfying about that. Taste of your own medicine, Harper. I can be patient too.
“How do you like it?”
It occurs to Astele that Jaheira is the first person to ever ask her this question. That is such a fucking dangerous thought that she answers without thinking, desperate not to leave room to think: “By all the gods, woman, just fuck me!”
Jaheira colors, but it’s different this time. Her eyes sparkle with laughter and she leans down to kiss Astele properly, her hand moving between their bodies so that she can curl her fingers into Astele’s cunt. Her touch is firm, assertive, wonderfully solid, fingers flexing into Astele with her pulse like she’s got some sort of druidic sense for it. Matching the rhythm of a heartbeat.
Astele feels properly fucking caught, but that’s fine—Jaheira’s just as caught as her, so that evens the playing field. Her own hand moves up to grip Jaheira’s thigh, and she feels Jaheira’s hand falter with surprise—what, was the old fool expecting to get away with another round of unpaid community service?
There’s some sharp satisfaction in refusing Harper altruism. Astele gets as good as she gives. Always has. She doesn’t waste any time—just tugs impatiently at the laces of Jaheira’s trousers, enjoying the way she can feel the fingers inside her starting to lose their precision.
“Oh, come on,” she purrs, pressing her hand between Jaheira’s legs. Jaheira’s fingers tighten and she makes a strangled noise. “Where’s that famous High Harper focus? Can’t get as far as you have in this city without knowing how to multitask.”
Jaheira doesn’t respond. There are twin spots of color on her cheeks. Her hand has stilled entirely, as has she: all of her focus on Astele, and how Astele is touching her.
Astele says, irritated for a reason she can’t quite define, “You can’t have possibly expected me to just take.”
“You are a thief,” says Jaheira, but it’s not dripping with moralistic condescension.
“Yeah, and you’re giving this to me. Thieves don’t take fucking handouts.”
Jaheira arches a brow. “Should I take my hand out?”
Astele laughs, her fingers curling into Jaheira as she does. The ripple works its way through her and into Jaheira, whose head falls forward to rest against hers, their bodies pressed together on the wrecked mess of politics scrawled across Astele’s desk, and then it’s just—movement. Silence, but a nice kind, because they’re both paying attention. Reminds her of how it feels with Jaheira at her back, enemies around or up ahead, knowing that this is a silence that demands them to soak in their surroundings.
Every detail, every sensation, is of vital importance. This is like that. Jaheira likes a firm touch—Astele is learning this—because when she slows towards a caress, Jaheira presses into her and grinds down on her hand with indignant insistence until Astele’s picked up the pace again. Jaheira’s own stroking caresses within her are slow, careful, which isn’t something that Astele has experienced before, but it’s also attentively precise in a way that’s so Jaheira, so it’s not as though Astele can ask her to stop.
Jaheira comes quickly on Astele’s fingers—her walls tightening, fluttering, the movement of her hips doing half the work anyway. Her desperation has an after-the-battle urgency that Astele is incredibly familiar with—a desire to be sated quickly after so much pent-up waiting and wanting—but there’s something about the way it takes Jaheira more than just a few moments to collect herself that makes Astele suddenly determined to make it happen again.
She holds Jaheira in place, stroking that warm wetness, trying at first to mimic the careful, gentle motion of Jaheira’s own fingers before realizing that she really does have to pin the other woman in place. Jaheira, impatient to continue her own attentions towards Astele, keeps trying to squirm away, determined not to be distracted.
Astele hooks a leg round Jaheira’s and reverses their position. Now it’s Jaheira amidst the letters, and she really does look unbearably pretty there. One of the letters even has her name on it. High Harper Jaheira spotted near the Guildhall. Potential espionage concerns.
“Astele—”
“Oh, I like that. Say my name like that again.”
“Astele,” Jaheira repeats, obviously trying for her usual patronizing irritation, but she’s all flushed from her orgasm and it’s clear she hasn’t quite gotten herself sorted just yet. Astele realizes with a surge of sharp delight that she’s found a foolproof way to unsettle Jaheira. “I was not—I am not done with—”
“I kissed you. I’m going to do it more.” Astele bites lightly but firmly at Jaheira’s neck, determined to leave a mark—that’s the sort of thing a druid likes, isn’t it? Scratches and bites? Claiming marks? She likes the thought of that. Jaheira in the Guildhall on Harper business with a love bite too high up on her neck to hide, both of them knowing Astele put it there.
“Stop that,” says Jaheira. She arches her neck into Astele’s mouth until Astele bites harder. Bites more. She’s leaving a long trail of bruises down Jaheira’s stomach—marking the path to her final destination. “You—don’t have to—I still haven’t—”
Oh, this is even better than giving as good as she gets, because now Jaheira feels like she has to give more later. Advantageous, that’s what this is. Astele parts Jaheira’s legs, pushing the other woman farther up the table. The letters drag and rip as Astele buries her face between Jaheira’s thighs.
Jaheira cries out. It’s so loud that Astele’s damned glad there’s a party going on, else they’d have been caught for sure—and it says something deliciously dangerous that the thought sends a pulse of desire through her. Gods help her, it’d send the city toppling down, but Astele loves how it feels after she’s tidied up another impossible mess.
She could fix it. She feels, in this moment, like she can do anything. Jaheira’s fingers are tight in her hair, refusing to allow her even a moment of inattentiveness, but she’s not demanding, she’s pleading. A rambling mixture of Elvish and Common, but Astele hears the common thread: please, please, Astele, please, gods, Astele, Astele—
The thought that the Underduke is supposed to have in that moment is I can make the High Harper beg for it. The thought that the Underduke finds herself with is this: she’s so fucking cute. Thankfully, Astele is otherwise occupied, and is able to distract herself with other things—the sharp, almost sour taste to Jaheira, for one thing, and how wet and soft her cunt is from Astele bringing her off the first time, how her belly trembles with the effort of not surrendering, again, to that wave of pleasure. How very much she’s losing that battle.
Jaheira cries out again. Harpsong, Astele thinks, and grins to herself. A series of fluttering pulses around Astele’s tongue tells her that the grin’s reaped some excellent rewards.
“Oh,” Jaheira’s gasping, her hands loosening their grip on Astele’s hair. “Oh—that—” Something in Elven, spoken very emphatically. Astele would bet good money on it being deeply fucking complimentary. “Please,” she says. “Again.”
It’s the please that does it. The High Harper’s begging for it—taking advantage of that is the right thing to do. Politically speaking. Astele draws back and sees that Jaheira is flushed, her gaze unfocused, her shoulders relaxed. Her guard down.
She presses a kiss to Jaheira’s hip. Stupid thing to do, but no one’s paying attention. “Again?” she asks.
“Again,” Jaheira breathlessly confirms.
The longer this goes, the longer the High Harper’s going to have to spend paying her back. Astele digs her teeth into Jaheira’s hip until the red mark’s certain to bruise—then moves back down, exactly as Jaheira wants. She’s never been more certain that this is going to pay off in the long run.
Of course, she hadn’t actually thought through the fact that five orgasms in a row does tend to take a toll on a body. She’s just brought Jaheira off a sixth time, waiting for the High Harper’s breathing to even out into calm, when she realizes that the High Harper’s breathing has evened out well past calm. Moving up Jaheira’s body reveals that the other woman’s eyes are fluttering shut.
“What?” says Astele, surprised by the laugh to her voice. “Did I finally figure out how to kill you?”
Jaheira smiles weakly and rolls onto her side. “Just…a minute,” she says.
“Just don’t go falling asleep on my desk,” Astele warns her, exactly as Jaheira’s eyes shut all the way. Fuck’s sake. “Harper? Jaheira. Do not fucking do this.”
It is getting late, she realizes. Early? One of those. And Jaheira’s in no condition to head home on her own. She’s never slept in front of Astele before. Her face is so much softer when she’s not focused on holding it still.
Astele lies down on her side and stares at Jaheira. She’s still not half certain what’s just happened, or why. She wants to blame it on the alcohol, but neither of them ever drink hard enough to lose their edge unless they’ve just stopped the end of the world, and a win against a single Zhent outpost is hardly that.
She did it because she didn’t know she could. She did it because she would have done it well before now, had she known she could. She did it because Jaheira never drinks at these parties either. Jaheira never lets her guard down.
Jaheira’s guard is down now. It would be very easy to kill her. How has no one learned this weak spot before tonight?
Irresponsible, Astele thinks, to leave her here alone, with her soft eyes and her gentle hands. Unwise. Her own cloak is in a heap by the floor, so she gets carefully up off the desk, picks it up, drapes it over Jaheira, who mumbles something and draws the cloak closer. She considers leaving outright, but—
She shimmies back into her trousers, pulls her blouse over her head, and lies back down on the mess of papers. Jaheira shivers a bit in her sleep, and for some reason or another, because she’s not paying attention, it’s easy enough for Astele to bundle her close.
Might as well even the scales. Give Jaheira something to make fun of her for in the morning. It’ll make things easier tomorrow, somehow. Probably.
Jaheira’s cheek rests on Astele’s shoulder. Her fingers curl around the collar of Astele’s blouse. Half-asleep, she murmurs vaguely, “…we’ll have seven Harpers on the roof and four stationed…”
Astele hides her grin in Jaheira’s hair.