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When Arya refuses to participate in the traditional post-wedding bedding ceremony, their roughly three dozen wedding guests catcall and shout bawdy insults at the both of them.
Some of what they say makes Gendry blush. The rest of it makes him want to find the nearest blunt object and beat their friends and family into a bloody pulp.
But Arya – his wife now; by the gods, his wife – just rolls her eyes at them all. She places one hand on his chest, letting him know, wordlessly, that she’ll handle this.
“We are perfectly capable of walking upstairs to our bedroom unassisted, gentlemen,” she says with bravado, placing special emphasis on the final word. Letting the handful of men from the Brotherhood and other assorted family and friends know that she considers them to be anything but gentlemen.
Arya raises one eyebrow at the small group, giving them at least a taste of what they wanted from them this evening. The room erupts in raucous laughter.
She turns to Gendry and gently kisses his cheek. They’re both fully dressed in their wedding finery and in a room full of people, but the feel of her lips on his heated skin causes his heart to race anyway.
She stands on tiptoe and murmurs quietly into his ear: “We should probably run now.”
He glances at the guests in front of them, getting drunker and rowdier by the second.
“Good idea,” he agrees quickly, grabbing her hand. “Let’s go.”
Until recently, Gendry never thought he and Arya would be here together like this. That she would be his wife, and he her husband.
Of course, that hasn’t stopped him from imagining this night hundreds, even thousands, of times over the years. He’s practically memorized how her small breasts will likely feel in his hands when he finally gets to cup them. How her body will tremble in pleasure and clench around him as he enters her for the first time.
He’d been the one to insist that they wait to lie together until Queen Daenarys legitimized him. If it had been up to Arya, they’d have had each other the very same week they finally reunited.
But despite how desperately Gendry had wanted her that night – even though his need to have her naked and writhing beneath him thrummed hotly through his veins – he’d stopped them.
“I want to have a name that I can give you first,” he’d told her, panting, when he’d stilled her hands. “A real name.”
And so now, in exchange for an earnest vow to the Queen that he will never seek to claim his birthright, he is no longer Gendry Waters but rather Gendry Baratheon by Queen’s decree, and about to bed the woman he’s been in love with since before he even knew what that meant.
His hands shake badly as he takes off Arya’s simple white veil and carefully lays it on his bedside table. Their bedside table. He turns to her, and she’s looking up at him expectantly, the light from the nearby candle’s flame dancing in her bright grey eyes. Earlier tonight Sansa arranged Arya’s hair into a complicated knot on top of her head, but an evening of drinking and dancing loosened it. Wispy tendrils of her nut brown hair fall down around her shoulders and frame her beautiful face, entrancing him.
Gendry wants to run his hands through that hair. He wants to run his hands over every part of her.
Arya takes a small step closer to him, showing no outward signs of the nerves that have suddenly paralyzed him and rooted him to the spot where he stands.
“Hi,” she says quietly, her voice shaking just a little, belying her calm outward appearance. She gently places her small, delicate hands on either side of his face and his eyes flutter closed involuntarily. She tenderly kisses the tip of his nose. First one cheek, and then the other. And then his chin.
He figures he must have kissed Arya half a thousand times in the two months since she’s returned to him. But it doesn’t matter. The gentle press of her lips to his skin, here, in this space, sends fire through his blood, almost as if they’d never touched each other before this very moment. Gendry whimpers with a sudden, overpowering need for her, and he wraps his arms tightly around her small body.
“Arya,” he whispers needfully into her ear.
Understanding his unspoken meaning, she backs him slowly towards his featherbed – their bed, now. When the backs of his knees hit the edge of the mattress he turns them around and lays her gently down upon it, unable to believe that they are finally here.