Free Hammer & Air by Amy Lane Page A

potato and has a voice like a poker against a steel plate.”
    I laughed some more, but he grew thoughtful and cast me a glance from under lowered brows. “No,” he said with decision. “It’s a pretty story, but in real life you want someone you can know, good and bad, and who doesn’t make you long to jump on a sailing ship and never return.”
    I returned his thoughtful look with one of my own longing. “Yes,” I said gruffly. “That’s exactly who I want.”
    But he didn’t see my look. “Go ahead and read the next one, Eirn!” he begged, and my smile turned sad as I did what he asked. This one were about a pair of silly lovers, one of whom gets turned into a bird. It were a long story, and we had to mark it in the middle for the next night, because Hammer began to nod off in the middle. We made it to bed and stripped to our small clothes and crawled in. The softness of the mattress and the cleanness of the sheets were still blissful to both of us, and now that Hammer no longer threw off heat like a smith’s forge, I felt free to roll into his body as we had when we were camping in our bedrolls.
    He wrapped his strong arm around my chest and rubbed his cheek against my back and then made a sound of complaint.
    “You left your shirt on.”
    I grunted and stripped it off, throwing it to the end of the bed, and he sighed in contentment as his cheek rubbed skin this time.
    “Eirn?”
    “Yeah?” Hammer would have used the old word, “Aye,” but that weren’t my word.
    “You miss fucking?”
    “Yeah.”
    He yawned and pressed hard into my back, but he were too tired and we both knew it.
    “Tomorrow,” he promised.
    “When you’re better,” I told him, and I took the hand on my chest and kissed it before falling asleep myself.
     
     
    It were good we’d decided to settle in for the winter, because by the time Hammer were up and about and ready to venture outside, winter arrived. Unlike the winter in real time, in the forest that near to killed us, this one didn’t announce itself in built up frost and the occasional snow flurry—no. One day, Hammer and I tramped about and found the border of magic around the cottage (if we were careful, and sensitive to the changes in the air, it could be done without the horrible sense of dislocation I’d endured before) and the ground were dry grass, brown leaves and frosted branches.
    The next day, it were three feet of snow.
    Hammer and I cleared the snow out from around the cottage—mostly for something physical to do—and then spent the day inside. The cabinet gave us cocoa, cream, and honey (which neither of us had asked for) and I made us mugs of chocolate, which we drank standing up in the kitchen. Hammer said he could live on that drink if we had to, and when I looked at him to reply, I saw that he still had cream on his lip.
    I grinned then, and caught his hands to hold him still, and then playfully went to lick the cream off his mouth. He watched me move closer with his lips slightly parted and wide sober eyes, and as my tongue touched his skin, the moment went from playful to serious just that quick.
    Our lips met, slow and then savage, and we barely remembered to set our mugs down before we kissed our way to the bedroom, shedding our clothes as we went.
    We were naked, and I were lying on the bed, stretched out below Hammer as he pinned my hands above my head to keep me still so he could own my mouth completely, before it occurred to either of us that we were fucking in the daylight, on a bed.
    It were our first time on a bed.
    We both looked at each other and gasped, and he let go of my hands and pushed himself up on his elbows and lowered himself at the hips, and he were suddenly there, on top of me, looking at me quietly while our aching cocks throbbed against each other in time.
    There were something in his eyes then, something like the eagerness he’d had when I read him fairy tales, or that look I’d seen, way back in summer, when he’d