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Just after six o’clock in the morning, and their first kiss is a crash of fireworks and fury, nails on her wrist, Isabela’s tongue in her mouth before Aveline has time to say, “I ought to arrest you, you drunken dock rat, you port-soaked strumpet.” It’s clumsy. It’s wet. Isabela tastes like stale whiskey and the sea, still half-drunk from the night and very early morning, and the only reason Aveline doesn’t haul back and slap her is because Isabela’s got one of her hands caught in hers now and she’s sort of paralyzed, you see, with anger. Yes. Anger, rage, the righteousness that only a Guard confronted with a thoroughly unrepentant criminal-slash-Lowtown-scourge would know. Definitely anger making her heart tick like a time bomb in her chest. Definitely.
“You kissed Wesley with that mouth?” Isabela has pulled back, one hand on her hip now, eyes grazing over Aveline like a thick-cut Antivan steak on display in a butcher’s shop, and, oh, the nerve of this scurvy flooze. “You’re like a trout with a hook stuck in its lips, you know. But hey—hey, big girl. I’m sure there’s someone up at the Rose,” she breathes, still standing too close, “so go on. Have a tumble. On me.”
“Get back to your hovel or so help me,” she mutters, fixing Isabela with the best I-Know-Where-You-Live-And-I-Will-Hurt-You glare she can muster while she’s turning redder than three tomatoes and her heart just will not. Stop. Pounding. “I could have you hauled in right now.”
There’s a laugh, that too-familiar, sea-swept thing that digs into her side like ill-fitting armor and leaves a mark for the rest of the day. “Are you going to manhandle me? Oh, tell me you’re going to manhandle me, there’s just nothing better than a pair of big, rough man-hands right after the sun’s up. Come on. You’re authorized to use force. Deadly force. Authorized by Captain Isabela herself.”
“I’m authorized to have you deported so I never have to look at you again.”
“You wouldn’t,” she says, draping herself all over Aveline, legs and all. “You like me. You liiiiiiiiike me. Look at you, turning all red. For me.”
“If only my blade was as big as your ego.”
“Burning up with passion, and in the depths of longing, you’ve finally come to the one woman you’ve always wanted, your chiseled man-chin quivering in anticipation—”
That’s it. Aveline tries to throw her off but she just clings harder, and she doesn’t know why (or maybe she does), but she feels her face heat even more at the sight of Isabela’s breasts pressed against her shoulder. She tells herself it’s indignation, because what else? What else? “Get off.”
“Only if you’re helping me do it.”
Maker, but she is infuriating. Insufferable. Intolerable. And yet—and yet.
It’s not that she dislikes Isabela, not at all; it’s more like Isabela is that frayed edge on your underwear that is always just mildly uncomfortable enough to remind you that it’s still there and it’s not going anywhere, always scratching when you least expect it, and Aveline still isn’t sure how she feels about carousing with such a remorseless, handsy, pantsless pirate who may or may not even wear underwear—at least, not while she’s on duty. She supposes Isabela has a few sort-of-maybe all right qualities, though. Like, she’s very giving, and there is probably no sailor left wanting in Lowtown. And—all right, fine; sometimes, she gives her coin to children down at the docks, when she thinks no one can see. She has good taste in brandy, somewhere between refined and bracing, and she’s rather pretty (you know, for a pirate), and she’s made Aveline laugh once or twice or far, far more often than she should. Aveline figures that anyone who can make you laugh is probably worth a backwards glance, and besides, it’s hard to hate someone with such an impressive bosom and the gall to parade all her stolen jewelry around Hightown. That takes a certain sort of woman. Aveline just isn’t sure they’ve invented a proper word for it yet.
She also isn’t sure there’s a word for the way her heart is somersaulting out of time with her stomach right now. At least, that’s what she tells herself. That’s what she keeps telling herself when she realizes she hasn’t felt that topsy-turvy, jumbled-up flutter since Wesley, since Ferelden, since Lothering and roses on her table and letters she read so often she could recite them in her dreams, could still see the slanted scrawl, the I love you and love you and love you signed like the tangled threads of a thousand small, sun-drenched wishes.
But that was then and this is now, this is Isabela and it isn’t the same thing. Is it? “Go home. Sleep it off.”
“Rather—”
“No.”
Isabela mock-pouts, one hand behind her back and the other trailing down the swell of Aveline’s hip. “You don’t even know what I was going to say. Maybe I was going to tell you how much I like you. How much I admire your rock-hard dedication to justice, the steely girth of your authority.”
“You’re bad at metaphor and you’re a liar. What more could a woman want?” She isn’t going to laugh. She isn’t. Isabela isn’t funny, not even a little, and that crooked blade of a smile definitely isn’t gorgeous, definitely isn’t making her want to lean down and try for something a bit more proper. No.
“A solid gold ring. New bootlaces. Magic hands. A mouth that knows what it’s doing.” She tugs Aveline’s earlobe between her teeth and—and—Maker, why is that making her shiver? “Do you have magic hands?”
Whatever that means, she thinks she might be willing to find out. Under the right circumstances, of course, and she’s pretty sure being groped by Isabela in a particularly shady corner of the docks doesn’t qualify as the right time. “What if I do? What are you going to do about it?”
“I think I’d ask for a demonstration,” Isabela murmurs, nose pressed to Aveline’s neck, arm hooked through hers. She should have pushed her off ages ago. She should have turned and finished out her patrol. Instead, she’s tugging her a little closer, wondering what it might feel like without the armor, what Isabela would look like naked, which—well, the image in her mind is really, really good. Not that she thinks about it much, or anything; just in case they ever needed to raid The Hanged Man in the middle of the night. Or something. “What would you say to that, big girl?”
Blessed Andraste’s corset laces, this is actually happening. Isabela is propositioning her in the most disreputable part of Kirkwall and she’s going along with it, beguiled by her, her, oh, her womanly charms and her singsong voice and her terrible analogies, and isn’t this what her mother warned her about? Only, her mother warned her about men, soldiers and sailors and the like, never once mentioned dagger-wielding pirates and their fleeting fancies, never cautioned her about conflicts of interest or temporary dereliction of duty or all the number of things you can get up to in a dockside alley with a persuasive and, frankly, utterly beautiful woman.
And that is a problem. Isabela is a problem, a half-undressed, gold-wrapped issue making Aveline’s blood thrum in her ears and her mouth go all dry, and when Aveline says, “I think I’d have to take you up on that,” the problem of them tips itself over and off-balance when Isabela pushes her into the nearest empty alley and up against the wall, laughing that bright jangle of bells Aveline knows so very, very well. It is her Things-Are-About-To-Happen laugh. It is also Aveline’s favorite laugh.
“Then I think what we have here, Guardsman,” she’s saying in her best rough-and-tumble pirate queen voice, “is an understanding.”
And Aveline, with her hands pinned to the stucco wall of this not-even-slightly-respectable back alley, just laughs. “We have no such thing. Unless you’re going to admit you’re no legitimate merchant?”
“As soon as you tell me what you really hide under all that armor,” Isabela growls, low, almost predatory, like this is all the start to some sort of game, which—well, yes. “But that would spoil my surprise, wouldn’t it.”
“Wouldn’t it just,” she answers, and then Isabela is leaning in again, going in for the kill, and this time Aveline even remembers to close her eyes, all proper, or, as proper as you can be in a filthy back alley with a pirate pressed up against you.
This time, it’s slow. And hot. And terribly exciting, especially when Isabela presses her thigh between Aveline’s legs and bites her lower lip, which sends a sharp thrill blooming up her belly and makes her tingle all over, right down to the tips of her toes; Isabela laughs against her lips before she pulls away, eyes half-shut, her hands on Aveline’s hips, and the sight of it—that lopsided smirk, the constellations of those freckles on her shoulders—is a ragged breath stolen from her chest, teeth against her pulse, and when she pulls Isabela closer and kisses her hard, hard, hard, she can feel every shiver up her spine, every honey-smooth growl in her throat, every bit of territory given away to the flood of this and them and now.
“Well.” Isabela is still pressed against her, flushed, messy, gorgeous, and her voice is silk stockings around the ankles, the lyrical chant of the tides. That, or the adrenaline surging through her has sapped her of all sense and reason and her brain is going to start leaking out her ears any second now. “Well. Aren’t you full of surprises.”
She scoffs. “And what’s that supposed to mean?” It’s been at least fifteen minutes and she’s running late, so late she’ll have to run through half her morning patrol, but her hands are still on Isabela’s waist and her feet aren’t moving, planted firmly to the spot like a very bewitched, very breathless, very besotted tree.
“It means there’s a coquettish little lion with a mouth that definitely knows what it’s doing underneath all that bulky, hard, mannish—”
“If you don’t shut your mouth—”
Isabela just laughs and presses a finger to her lips, bright-eyed, restless. “You like it better open,” she says, sharp and hungry as a thief. “You know, you’re beautiful when you’re all flustered. Or—well, always, I suppose. You should loosen up.” She drags her teeth along Aveline’s jaw, taking her hands and sliding them down her waist to rest around her hips, and Aveline figures it’s only proper to reach around and grab a handful of Isabela’s rather shapely arse, and if the way she groans and grinds her thigh up against her is any indication, it is absolutely the right idea. “I can help you with that, you know.”
And here she is, in an alley, up against the wall with her hands on Isabela’s arse and the taste of a gorgeous, whiskey-drunk pirate on her lips, a thousand ancient excuses for why not? stacked like thunder on her tongue. Why not, why not, why not? “What did you have in mind?”
“My room,” Isabela whispers, silver-smooth, summer-sweet. “A bottle of rum. A big bed. Your thighs around my shoulders.”
And. Maker.
Willing herself not to blush is a little like willing the sky not to be blue or dwarves not to be hairy, and it’s as good an answer as any. “Tonight, then.”
“Mmm. Tonight.” One flash of gold and Isabela is off, hands on her hips, looking very much like she’d be up for it right here, now, in this alley, and it says a lot for Aveline’s frayed, frazzled, possibly slightly repressed nerves that she thinks she might actually be up for it, too. Or, maybe that just says something for Isabela. She doesn’t know. “You know you like me, Guardsman. You want me.”
“I do,” she says, honest because she will be nothing else, earnest because why shouldn’t she be, and Isabela just grins, stretches and turns to go.
She stays there for a few moments, her back against the wall and her mind half on her miserably late morning patrol and half on a thief’s promise of tonight, on the siren who will come to her by way of sea, bearing treasure and good rum and brand new insults to trade. How old is she, and she feels like a girl again all because Isabela kissed her, feels like a girl with flowers in her hair and the moon in her eyes, plans and promises and ten thousand wishes blossoming in her bones, coursing through her in waves and waves.
When she gets home that night, Aveline shuts her hand in the door, burns her bread, spills her tea and knocks her armor rack onto the floor. She sits up at her kitchen table, tries to read and can’t, gets up and paces, waits and waits until the sun is setting and she’s out the door, wild and jittery and joyous with frantic-heart desire.
All because Isabela kissed her.