His mouth covered hers. His lips were warm and firm. He kissed her with the patient, unhurried thoroughness of someone who was not trying to go somewhere quickly but was interested in every detail of where they were. His tongue moved against her lower lip. She made a sound — a small, startled, involuntary sound — and her hands pressed against his chest and she did not push.
His mouth moved.
His lips parted hers. His tongue found hers. A French kiss, deep and deliberate, the kind of kiss that communicated intent without words. She felt her knees go soft. She felt her body lean into him without asking her permission. She felt her toes curl inside her boots.
His hand moved.
It found her hip. Her skirt. The fabric bunched slightly under his grip. He kneaded — slow, steady, the fingers pressing into the soft flesh of her hip through the dress. She pulled back from the kiss. She put her hand against his chest.
"Wait—" Her voice was very unsteady. "What— what is this—"
He pressed her back.
Not hard. With weight. Her back found the tent’s central support post. He was in front of her. His hand was still on her hip. His face was close.
She pushed him.
Not hard. The push of someone who needed a moment and not someone who wanted to stop. "What is happening with my body?" Her hand pressed against her sternum. Her face was flushed. Her eyes were wide and wet and confused and something else — something that was not confusion but that she was not naming. "I don’t— I feel— what is—"
"Shall I take you somewhere else?" he said. "To give you the gift properly?"
She looked at the tent gap. The camp outside. Her sister somewhere out there.
She looked at him.
"Where?" she said.
He took her hand.
They were outside before she had finished the thought. The ruins at night. The sky above full of stars. The camp fire behind them. The old stone arch ahead, and beyond it the pond she had noticed when they were setting up camp — an old reservoir, the water still, surrounded by broken walls and the suggestion of what had once been something.
He sat on the broken stone rim of the pond.
He pulled her down.
She sat.
She felt it immediately.
Something pressed against her from below — through her skirt, through his trousers, the hard, present ridge of his cock settled directly beneath her. Her breath stopped. Her thighs went rigid. She pressed her palms flat against her own legs.
"Where—" She looked around. The camp was distant. The other adventurers were not visible. "Where did everyone go?"
"They are there," he said. "We are here."
His hands found her waist. They held her. Not moving her. Just holding. The warmth of his palms through the fabric of her dress.
"I am here," he said. "Do not fear."
She looked at him.
The moonlight was full on his face from this angle. He looked — she searched for the word and the word that arrived was impossible, because impossible was the only word that fit how someone could look this way in the middle of a ruin with a dungeon behind them and a camp of exhausted adventurers nearby.
"Okay," she said.
He leaned forward.
His mouth found the top of her chest. Not her neck. Lower. His lips pressed against the swell of her cleavage above the neckline of the dress. She felt the warmth of his mouth against her skin and it was a feeling she had no previous reference for — she had been touched before, hands on her shoulders, a boy who had kissed her once at sixteen and then apologized, nothing that felt like this.
"What is happening—" she breathed.
"A process," he said against her skin. "To make you a woman."
His hands moved to the neckline of her dress. He pulled it. Not tearing — deliberate, slow, pulling the fabric down and to the side, finding the line where the dress connected to the bra beneath. He pulled. The fabric shifted. Her bra strap emerged. He pulled further.
The cup released.
Her breast came free.
She gasped.
The night air hit the skin. Her nipple stiffened immediately — the cool air and the exposure and something that was not the air at all. The nipple was pink. Soft pink, the color of something that had never been touched. Her breast was full and round in the moonlight, the weight of it settling forward as the bra cup fell away.
"It is—" She pressed her hands against her own chest. Not covering. Pressing. The gesture of someone encountering their own body in a new context. "It is embarrassing—"
He moved her hands away.
He looked at her. The moonlight on her face. Her lip between her teeth. Her eyes wide and wet and looking at his face — looking at his face because his face was the most unthreatening thing in this situation, she had decided, and she did not examine why that was wrong.
He lowered his face.
His tongue touched her nipple.
She made a sound she had never made before.
Not a scream. Not a moan. Something in between — a high, bright, involuntary sound that came from somewhere she had not known was making sounds. Her back arched. Her hands flew to his hair. Not pulling. Holding. Gripping. The contact of her fingers against his scalp was its own separate electricity.
"Don’t you want to receive something precious?" he said against her breast.
She could not answer.
His tongue moved. He licked the nipple in slow, deliberate circles. Then he took it between his lips. He suckled. The sensation was direct and total and went somewhere considerably below her chest. Her hips moved. She felt them moving and she could not stop them — the small, instinctive grind of her body against the cock pressed beneath her.
"Ah—!" She covered her mouth. "What— what is happening— I feel something—"
His other hand found her remaining breast through the fabric. He kneaded. The flesh yielded under his palm. His thumb found the nipple through the bra and pressed. She made the sound again — the new sound, the one she did not have a name for.
"Why," she said, and she was crying again, but differently. The tears were running but her face was not the same as before. "Why is she always like that. My sister. Why—"
He sucked her nipple harder.
"AAAHN~!"
Her tongue came out. Her eyes went wide and then the lids dropped. Her back arched against the stone rim. His hand on her other breast was kneading with a steady, rolling pressure that was dismantling something foundational in her. She gripped his hair. She pressed his face into her breast.
She did not know she was doing it.
Her hips were grinding.
The cock beneath her was solid and present and her hips were moving against it with the instinctive, involuntary rhythm of a body that had figured out what it wanted before the mind caught up. Her thighs pressed inward. The skirt rode up. She felt dampness between her legs — a warmth, a wet, the evidence of her body preparing itself for something she had not decided yet.
"I don’t know what is happening with me," she gasped. "I don’t know— why am I— what—"