She opened her eyes and looked back over her shoulder. “Oh, please…”

“My lady.” I propped myself on my left elbow and made quick flicks but not very deep. I couldn’t penetrate far, the angle was wrong. Just the head of my cock rubbed slickly in and out of her. I felt her cunt yield and stretch, hot and wet.

“Keep going,” she ordered quietly. “Harder. Fuck me harder.” She began to whisper filth. I was shocked to hear her murmur, calling up wisps and bodies in twos and threesomes that populated the dark room with ethereal fucking. She was not delicate; she kept straining to see my chest. She raised a knee, backed into me trying to impale herself deeper. Her thighs were becoming very wet. I wiped a hand over her outline, pausing in the softer reprieve between ribs and hips. I wriggled my left arm under her waist to angle her higher, all the while hoping that my best performance was good enough.

“You’ll do,” she said with wonder. “You’ll do…you’ll do, you’ll do, you’ll do. Don’t scratch.”

She firmly pushed my hand between her bodice lacings and flattened it against a small breast, encouraging me to rub it in circles. No other girl I’ve slept with has ever done that. Her brown nipple was hard against my palm. Her locks coiled on the pillow. A braid hung down from my hair and brushed her neck.

I pumped and struggled. I changed my stroke, long and slow. I could see my cock going in and out of her. Amazed, I thought: It’s actually happening. This is really happening to me. Her small rounded buttocks pushed me back every time she rolled against me. I bent my arm that was underneath her and easily lifted her body up. I rubbed my stomach on her black glossy wings and felt the tips of her flight feathers bristle into my crotch.

I brushed my hand down to her front and wiry pubic hairs. I found her left hand already working away there; her fingertips traced wet circles. She took shallow breaths through parted lips. She pushed my hand away. Low, under the skin of her back, her wing joints moved as if she wanted to flex them.

“Open them around me.”

She spread, either side of my waist. Her black wings shuddered with every thrust I gave her, and brushed my skin. I almost came helplessly into her. I paused, held myself still.

“Look at me,” she said.

I was right on the edge. Another thrust and I’d come. I paused to gain control; Tern moaned her displeasure. She shook her body on my cock.

“I can’t,” I gasped. “I have to wait.”

She looked into my eyes and came. Her body thrashed and whiplashed. Her uppermost wing fluttered. She breathed deeply and cried out, “Now harder!” She almost slid off me but I gripped her hips and laid into her, thrusting as hard as I could. I leaned over, twisting her top half down, breasts to the sheet, my chest pushing above her back. My hips slapped against her bottom. I forgot her status. I pumped as hard and selfishly as with a whore. I felt the flutter in my groin. Her cunt pulsed, squeezed like a fist and drew my come out of me in quick hot spurts. I thrust slower and stopped, panting.

I couldn’t tell if she was giggling or crying. She pulled my arms around to hug her. Relief filled me; I had done well. “Stay here tonight, Jant ‘long-nails,’” she said warmly. “My legs are tingling.”

We cuddled close and listened to the river. I wondered how many other men she had slept with before me and I hated them. The stiff sheets crackled under the white brocade coverlet; a draft stirred lace hangings on the heavy four-poster bed. After a while Tern murmured, “Mmm…I want chocolate…” Then she fell asleep.

I held her for months and years and decades. I took her like poison through the skin. I knew her salt taste like sea bruises, stretched nets of sinews in her neck and waves of ribs. I loved her body as she twisted like a hooked fish, kicked like prey. I was dog to her: I laid my open mouth over her throat.

I thought of the many times when I have been asleep or drugged and gradually wakened to find her touching me, my cock already hard under her hand. I wanted Tern. It took a trial as harsh as a sea voyage for me to feel the first pangs of loneliness and realize how much I need her. I was wrong to neglect her. I must apologize. I’ll win her back.

After midnight, people were gathering at the fencing school in Eske. I landed on the tiled roof, well concealed by a chimney stack, looking down at the wet streets. Below the dripping thatch of the last houses in the town, I could see dark coats underneath bobbing umbrellas. Men carried lanterns hung from hooks on their shields. Some drunken kids on tired nags clattered past on the Hamulus Road from the direction of Hacilith, slowing and relaxing as they traveled the opposite way from the city’s magnetic pull. I perched on the roof, out of sight and watched through the rain.

A cold front was coming in. The clouds scudded across to merge in one mass in the eastern half of the sky. Lightning flickered in the fingers of the bare forest. The rain fell with more intensity and the pitch of its noise increased. I really didn’t think it could rain any harder. The constant hiss of the wind in the trees was indistinguishable from the rain hissing on the roof. Drops pattered on the sagging willow leaves along the river bank.

Dace River wound through the south side of town close to Gio’s hall. I could still see the river but the surrounding countryside was too dark to make out detail. Silver snakes slithered over the river’s surface. I watched them resignedly; Tern had put me in a melancholy mood. I had run out of people to shout at, and was rather regretting storming off in disgust with the world because it was evident by now that the world had no intention of going away and leaving me alone.

Some of the snakes are actually part of the river. Fascinating. I tried to disentangle the snakes’ silver bodies and the reflection on stirred water, before I realized that the whole thing was simply a hallucination. Only take me a couple of weeks to quit. Shouldn’t be any problem. Theoretically. I shrugged, sending all the water that had gathered on my broad-brimmed hat down my back. I swore silently, taking my hat off and wringing out the rain.

I don’t even know if fucking her will be the same now Tawny’s had his big cock in her. I pulled the hip flask out of the top of my thigh boot and took a satisfying swig. It tasted green, like cut grass smells. I felt lighter and tighter every second. Under my long coat, my wings were warm. To cope with the gusts I had had to fly constantly flexing them open and closed at the elbow, and now they were aching.

The fencing school’s steep roof was a sheen of water reflecting the lanterns of people arriving. Rainwater was running in wide rivulets over the tiles, dripping off the guttering. Yellow lamplight beamed out of a high square window just below me. At the far corner of the whitewashed hall Gio’s watchman swung a lantern, illuminating the empty road. He saw there was no one else to come and banged the door closed. I flicked my wings out from the slits in my coat and bounced along the ridge. A couple of slates gave way. I scrabbled madly, slid with them down the roof. I hit the gutter, heels in the trough, my pointed toes over the edge. The tiles shot off, fell and broke on the road ten meters below. I lay with my back against the slope and listened. There was no response from the hall.

I grasped the lead gutter, swung myself over in a controlled drop onto the window ledge. I pressed against the frame, pulled myself into the smallest area possible, inhabiting space slyly as if stealing it, with the concentrated acrobat grace of a Rhydanne. I peered through the window.