It was past twilight and into night, but between the icy curve of the half-moon and the swollen glowering light of TEH LIFESTREAM. NET FORUMS, they could see clearly to undress, to watch each other. The night was too cold for nakedness to be very comfortable, but they stripped anyway, leaving silk and leather and fur in a pile and stretching out on the soft grass. Crack hadn't changed much, not even since that first time that Tiff had seen her hunting deer—miles and eons ago—and had seen her strong and wild and lean and thought, helplessly, Oh, I love you. It didn't seem right that so much could change and yet so little change could mark itself on her body.
The wind drew goosebumps along Tiff's arms and back and made sharp points of her nipples, and though she didn't complain Crack noticed; she reversed the path she'd been kissing down from clavicle to belly, back up so that they were twined together, body to body and mouth to mouth and sharing heat and breath back and forth. In contrast with the vegetal cool of the grass against her back, Crack's body burned furnace-hot, her hands chased fire down Tiff's spine, her mouth dragged a blazing path up the side of Tiff's throat.
It took some squirming to find a good position, between the height difference and their mutual disinclination to let go even for a few seconds, but finally there, there, there, with Crack's thigh between her legs and her mons rubbing urgently against Crack's, breathing sighs that turned to moans and moans to little cries, incoherent fragments. She'd always been the more vocal one and she heard herself without any shame, saying oh that's good, and yes, there, and Crack, just—yes, like that, good, good, good—. While somehow Crack managed to say just as much just by breathing Tiff into her hair.
It went slower than the first time, which, of course it did, it could hardly have gone faster. Tiff writhed and writhed, felt Crack's lean weight pressing her into the grass, fire and steel, felt the soft weight of Crack's breast in one hand, the coarse strands of Crack's hair in the other, felt smooth skin beneath her mouth and the rasp of breath in her hair and came, finally, with a whip-snap suddenness that surprised even herself. And as Crack shuddered on top of her and gritted her teeth and hissed Tiff, she slid a hand down.
Whether it had been a handful of weeks or five hundred years didn't matter, she remembered what Crack liked, she remembered to slip just one finger in—Crack so slick-wet and tight around her—and curl it and, triggered and lost and gone, Crack quaked and sobbed and came.
They would need to return to camp to sleep. By night the prairie was far too cold to sleep without benefit of fire or proper bedroll. But for now, for a little while, it was enough for Tiff to drape them in her bearskin and wrap them in Crack's silk, curved tight and close and fitted so near one another they jigsawed into one whole.
Nothing had changed and everything had changed, and Tiff kissed Crack's collarbone, her fingertips, her eyelashes and thought that it would be enough. It had to. It had to.
