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[They used to do paintings of women like this. The limbs strewn about in decadence, the half-open mouth and its full spectrum of reds and pinks. The curvature. Estinien didn't go to school for art and he doesn't know the names of the painters or the years in which they did the paintings--but he knows they did paintings of women like this. They called them harem girls or Greeks although these were just ideas. They were ethereal, unattainable, in how they blushed and sprawled. They were impossible. They were fantasies that didn't breathe.
Aymeric's mouth is colored like their mouths. Her cheeks and her chin curve as theirs curve, and the way she is lying, so does the rise of her hip. In art, the shape of this body could just as well be an allegory, something pastoral: a lush hillside, rolling against the horizon. It promises fortune and fertility. It will see him through the winter if he takes good care of it.
Her eyelashes flutter while she sleeps. She is every impossibility of all that fawning art but she breathes beyond fantasy. She is reality in his bed--and now beneath his hand, as he pushes her hair away from her face with his palm. Her sigh hits his wrist, from the parting of her summer-seeming lips. None of the painters had this, did they? They thought their women impossible. But this one, she moves and mumbles. Her cheek bears the weight of his thumb with roses.
Estinien taps the side of the spoon against the lip of the jar, to rid the spoon’s bowl of dripping excess. It wouldn’t do to get her sticky, would it, not first thing in the morning, not all across the linens. The clinking isn’t enough to wake her, so he says,] Come on, then. It’s time for breakfast, Lord Commander. [She is only barely rousing, and he doesn’t care to flummox her with the explanation of how he’s just tapped the hive and this is the first of it. It only needs to be as simple as this:] I have need of your tongue this morning.
[She still isn’t fully awake, but she moves to prop up her head and open her mouth, even as her brow furrows in gentle confusion. Estinien puts the honey past her lips without delay. He guides the spoon carefully onto her tongue and then carefully away from it once she has taken the mouthful.
The painters never got to watch their women glisten like this. Estinien, meanwhile, can sit on the edge of the bed, beside her hills and the hidden meanings of her, and he can ask her,] How is it?
Aymeric's mouth is colored like their mouths. Her cheeks and her chin curve as theirs curve, and the way she is lying, so does the rise of her hip. In art, the shape of this body could just as well be an allegory, something pastoral: a lush hillside, rolling against the horizon. It promises fortune and fertility. It will see him through the winter if he takes good care of it.
Her eyelashes flutter while she sleeps. She is every impossibility of all that fawning art but she breathes beyond fantasy. She is reality in his bed--and now beneath his hand, as he pushes her hair away from her face with his palm. Her sigh hits his wrist, from the parting of her summer-seeming lips. None of the painters had this, did they? They thought their women impossible. But this one, she moves and mumbles. Her cheek bears the weight of his thumb with roses.
Estinien taps the side of the spoon against the lip of the jar, to rid the spoon’s bowl of dripping excess. It wouldn’t do to get her sticky, would it, not first thing in the morning, not all across the linens. The clinking isn’t enough to wake her, so he says,] Come on, then. It’s time for breakfast, Lord Commander. [She is only barely rousing, and he doesn’t care to flummox her with the explanation of how he’s just tapped the hive and this is the first of it. It only needs to be as simple as this:] I have need of your tongue this morning.
[She still isn’t fully awake, but she moves to prop up her head and open her mouth, even as her brow furrows in gentle confusion. Estinien puts the honey past her lips without delay. He guides the spoon carefully onto her tongue and then carefully away from it once she has taken the mouthful.
The painters never got to watch their women glisten like this. Estinien, meanwhile, can sit on the edge of the bed, beside her hills and the hidden meanings of her, and he can ask her,] How is it?
