This is my first story, written on a whim, whittled down and edited two or three times. Comments and criticism are extremely appreciated. Docs link [here](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GljjoA5v7Kfhb6CjHWYUuo-vmzdP8VNsf4-Ou0d5vQI/edit?usp=sharing) for comments. Edit: formatting.
**Saffron and Sapphires**
**I.**
On indigo nights when the moon was half-waning and the stars poked through the high-vaulted sky like the white back threads of a pitch-black rug, the daughter of the High Magister would burn motes of myrrh and meditate in her great room, alone, by cinder-orange candlelight. She burned the myrrh in a sandstone basin, etched with divine geometric patterns, in copious amounts so that the wafts of pungent vapors hid the sharp, acrid scent of indica smoke. She slept very little and when she did, her sleep was so riddled with lurid and frightening dreams that she preferred to stay awake. By midmorning, exhausted, she napped like a cat upon the balconies of the palace, hiding from the desert sun under canvas awnings. Her cadre of tutors would scold her for perceived laziness, but as it were, a very bright flame burned behind her lax, half-closed eyes. She would recite her verses, enumerate the points of her previous lectures, and by early afternoon she would sent the tutors on their way, having no patience left for them until the following day. In the long and luminous dusk, she walked the marble and gilded halls of the palace, supping on dried figs, lamb, and black tea in her quarters – again alone – until the daily visitors and sycophants of the palace dispersed – all at once, like mice in sight of a hawk – and she could watch the city fall into torchlit shadow. The sun faded into a ridge of sandy mountains which carved their silhouettes into the dusk sky. She would read from musty tomes until the dark came, trying to become drowsy, and would drift off for an hour or so, only to awake near midnight or even early the following day. Then, she took from an inlaid box a pinch of lehrak (footnote: any strain of indica) and a thin brass pipe, sprawled out across one of the many elegant rugs of her room, smoked until she was in a fine trance, meditated in the silence of night, practiced yoga (often finishing her routine with a session of hazy masturbation), caught a sliver of sleep before dawn, and began the cycle anew. So went her days and nights.
They called her the Sleeper. They called her this because they believed her nights as restful as their own and that she slept all day as well. Her dealer knew otherwise, but he called this as well, since everyone else did. He was source of two things: lehrak and news. He spoke all at once, as if he were a crowd of people, his hands shaking from the coffee he drank, cup after cup.
“Greetings Sleeper! Fine weather – clear skies! And did you hear of the papermaker, Atos, and there are some fine horses in town I believe that are being sold to the palace. Maybe tribute! And the coast this time of year is wonderful and yes, yes, I think you’ll really like this strain, very heady. And the palace guards look very pompous with their new helmets, yes? I’m not a fan of brass but I am a fan of textiles and jam. But you – what was I talking of – have you heard of the thief?”
“A thief?”
“Almost measured out – yes – what now? Oh in the markets.”
“What of -”
“Of what?”
“The thief.”
“Oh thieves in the night are something but to steal in the light of the gods is another. Would you like coffee?”
“No, no. Tell me of the thief.”
“Saffron?”
“No, the thief.”
“But that is his name. Or that is what people are calling him.”
And so he spoke in his unintelligible way of a thief who had been stalking the marketplace, about whom everyone had apparently heard but never witnessed, who struck like a wild falcon, and who was attributed to the theft of – among other things – a great satchel of Medrassian saffron. She thanked her dealer and returned to the palace, obscuring her identity with a heavy crimson veil until she arrived at the sprawling gardens.
Saffron, she mused, dangling her long, tawny arms over the stone banister of a high balcony, what a curious name for thief. And she noticed a particularly increased presence of guards about the palace, glaring at the city from their perches on the ramparts.
That evening, the palace walls were ablaze with torches for the first time in several months. The gardens were empty and so she walked, uninterrupted, from fountain to fountain in the dusklight, dipping her elegant fingers into the water. The princesses watched from their windows as the Sleeper wandered in the fading light. They were vexed by her boldness in the face of what they saw as imminent danger.
The night crept upon the palace, the stars gleamed, the smoothed hallways echoed with the leather soles of guard boots. The Sleeper read, her fingers dancing from yellowed page to yellowed page, her mind illuminated by thoughts of ancient riddles and lost rituals. Sleep waited like a ghost outside her door but did not enter so she packed the charred and sticky bowl of her pipe with fresh scraps of lehrak. The smoke curl like draining bathwater up to the high, lofty windows.
She had forgotten to burn the myrrh. She fubled with the chunks of resin, lit charcoal in the basin, waited for the coal to glow faintly, and then placed a piece upon the burning surface. It sizzled and sputtered, producing a little cloud of overwhelming scent. The cloud too rose to the high window and she followed with her eyes as it flew up across the sandstone walls, across the face of the great tapestry, to the sill, and over the tops of a pair of black boots.
The man’s face was obscured by black cloth and he held a finger to where his mouth would be. He did not stir and leaned back in the open stone window, his chin lifted high, his back straight and legs bent at the knee. She could have said anything at that moment. She could have said anything and he would have been whisked away to some slimy brick cell deep in the bowels of the castle to wither in the shadowy darkness where the air was humid and rank.
But she did not. For some time, she watched in silence, breathing calm breaths. She observed him as one would an wild dog. Then, after what felt enough time had passed, she carried on as usual with her meditation and yoga. She twisted into complex knots, moving from pose to pose with grace and perfection, her muscles taught, her joints fluid, her eyes half-closed as they always were. By the end, she lay – sweat on her limbs and brow – across the great woven rug which sprawled across a portion of the marble floor of her room in a final prostrate position, arms loosely stretched out as scene of crucifixion. The myrrh had dissipated, but she took another drag from the pipe. She breathed slow, calculated, the length of her black hair spread out across the grand geometric shapes of the rug.
She wore a loose blouse of paper-thin silk interwoven with filaments of amber thread, fabric of wealth which contrasted with undyed flax pants, hemmed to mid-shin, which were simply belted by a cord of woven hemp. She loosed the cord at her waist, noiselessly slipping her hand down, her mouth pursed, her brow still flecked with diamond-like spheres of sweat upon her caramel skin. She did not look to the high window, at the shrouded man who watched, breathing hushed into the inky sky; her eyes lazily traced the hexagons and lines of the painted ceiling, half-closed, sanguine and holy. She pressed the tips of her middle two fingers firm against the pearl of her clit until she felt the resistance of deeper flesh and bone below. She raised and lowered her hand, pressed her fingers like hooks into her flesh, sometimes sliding them into the warmth between her labia, but mostly moving them along some invisible orbit around her clit. It was ritual, a manner of practice that was ingrained in her mind and muscles as the start of a game of chess. She played her wandering mind against her body. She knew her moves, she knew how she might tug the hood of her clit upward then shift down, digging hard, she knew how her nipples responded against the silk with tensing and erection, their shape and color made clear by the thinness of her garment, she knew the pace, ever-increasing with shorter and faster breathing. The progress of the game she played was both muted and amplified by pangs of intoxication from the lehrak. It worked minutes into hours and the slightest tinge of pleasure into a long, oceanic-in-breadth plateau. Not just the throbbing of her body, the thick, clear wetness which teased escape at the edge of her labia, but a whole manner of senses. Salt on her lips, the dizzying height of the ceiling with its luminescent red-painted shapes against sandstone, her offhand which clasped the bones of her hips which – whenever she laid down – protruded slightly from her thin torso. Time seemed crumbling and wisp-like, a dance of candlelight and lehrak smoke which was flattened and halted by a tensing of her legs and stomach in an instant before another orgasm and another and another.
Then, she stopped. Whether it was a bout of tiredness which finally came to her insomniac mind or a piqued curiosity in the watcher above was uncertain. So in her half-awake state, she sat upright, wiping her slightly wet hand and fingers on her pant legs, arching her long neck skyward.
“You are Saffron.”
The man stretched as a cat and then spoke, tilting over the precipice of the wall while gripping the sill with his other hand.
“And you are the Sleeper.”
“My name is Orela.”
“And I have a name as well, Sleeper.”
“How do you know they call me that?”
“A thief is only as good as his information. I am merely one who knows the right things so that pieces of the world merely fall into my hands.”
“You’re funny, yeah?”
“I am and am not.”
“You take things. They don’t fall into your hands. And you are from Medrass?”
“Aye, Sleeper.”
“Why are you here? This is not city but a palace and the town which keeps the palace in silk and well-fed. You should be in Medrass, there’s no business for a thief here.”
“Boredom brings great things about. I travel when I am bored. Do you sleep because you are bored?”
“I do not sleep.”
“Then why do they call you Sleeper?”
“You know that already, don’t you?”
“I know things and I do not.”
“I sleep when the sun is up because I cannot when the sun is away. Do you just watch?”
“You have not invited me down.”
“But you wouldn’t.”
“I might.”
Saffron breathed a heavy breath, a sigh of unspoken thoughts. Behind him was the black night sky, pierced by white, radiant stars on a cloudless night. It was late, so late that it was nearly dawn. The Sleeper placed her long arms across her shins, grabbed each elbow with the opposite hand, and rested her head upon her knees.
“The sun will be up soon. The guards will find you and they’ll bring you down to the dungeons.”
“I’ll be gone soon, yes yes.”
“Why are you here?”
The Sleeper reclined and began to pile up pillows into which she would curl up, partially covered, resting for an hour or so until dawn lit the walls of her quarters as the ferns of the gardens slowly unfurled in the secret shadows of the date palms and banyan trees. She pulled her untied pants down slightly so the hair-covered, semi-padded rise above clit was visible and the sharp ridges of her hipbone traced a line to below the edge of the fabric.
“Are you here for this? Are you bored of the women of Medrass?”
She laughed a tired laugh and tilted her head bad into the mass of pillows. And she did not know, for she was exhausted from the lehrak and the exhaustion of pleasure and night-upon-night of insomnia that she had fallen asleep. Saffron had disappeared into the dew-covered gardens at the base of the palace. But she had imagined the conversation continued.
“I’m here to take you away.”
**II.**
The days wore on in heat and shadow, in paper and silk, in busy streets and dust-filled alleys, in sleeplessness and sordid dreams, in plumes of smoke and swollen flesh which ached for the touch of foreign hands. Time was an augur through a granite slab, days were shed as fractured bits of stone, unrecorded and languid. A faceless form slowly drilled down until one day the bit cracked. The passage of time was interrupted by the presence of a sapphire pigeon which landed upon the whitewashed battlements of the palace. The Sleeper sat upon a bench in the gardens, reading poems of the abstruse magi of the east, her long hair tucked into a complex knot, her lips lacquered with auburn lipstain, her fingers faintly rapping the wooden planks. She looked up, alerted by the slight movement on her periphery to see the ephemeral bird. It landed for a moment, preened its feathers, and was gone. But in such a brief span of time, her mind was torn of peaceful, placated thoughts. In their absence grew a painful longing. A blue-tinted pigeon transmuted itself to a scent of the ocean – or what she imagined the ocean to smell of – a mirage of salt-brine and sand and the visage of a sprawling coastline of sapphire and white, miles and miles of the southern coast, an endless, wild, unmapped ocean. She had never been to the sea. The bird was gone, a swift flight from the ramparts back into the grimy and dust-caked streets of the city. She must go to the sea.
Life had become a ragged garment, the threads unwound and frayed. Somewhere between luxury and routine, the Sleeper felt an oppressive boredom manifested as anxiety. This querulous, gray demon followed her day and night, crippling her appetite for knowledge (and food as well) and beset her already-little sleep with panicked dreams from which she awoke breathless, heart beating like a lightning storm. She found herself crying, silently, while reading the most mundane of texts and becoming furious at herself for wanting food or water. In the still and quiet hours of the night, she would not confine herself to her room. Instead, she walked the empty great halls with their open, arched windows. She would stand on balconies, looking across the black sky and the white-silver desert sands, a landscape from a dream filled with mute wanderers, their heads veiled in indigo hoods.
Sometimes, she sat naked in her quarters, feeling the her body, trying to discern how it was possible it was the same one she was born with, this milktea flesh, this crooked nose, these eyes of muddied citrine. And during this time she masturbated furiously and angrily, until her body was sore and her eyes were red and bleary. Her fingers worked inside her, pressing and circling ferociously while her other hand tugged and rubbed and twisted outside. She found respite from her thoughts for the seconds where her body became untameable and her torso convulsed and her legs wildly spasmed. Then, after the pulsing of her pussy faded, the ember of dread floated down from the high above again.
And without fanfare, without the prior alarm and torch-filled nights of the nearly five months before, a shadow-cloaked shade returned to the crook of the high window. She did not know how many nights he had been there before she noticed, for her own preoccupations had forced the notion of ever seeing the thief again out of her mind. But that night, as she sat in a cloud of lehrak smoke, she turned her weary head aloft to see his shape, legs bent, hands working away at a brass cylinder lock. She did not rise from her pile of pillows, upon which she was sprawled, limber and high, her fingers rocking the pipe from which she smoked. She hardly opened her half-closed eyes though her heart was at once pounding viciously. She was afraid not of him but of that he might disappear again as water through a sieve. So she called to him with words like a flowing brook.
“It’s been some time, Saffron. The days pass from sun to sun, and the sun goes from cloudless sky to the edge of the far mountains. You’re here – again – sitting in a my windowsill. Why are you here? Does your thieving bore you, now?”
“I am not bored.”
“Why are you here?”
“I give no reason for my presence.”
“I’ll call a guard,” she said, sitting upright, crossing her legs into a lotus pose.
“Why are you here, Sleeper? Things happen from here to there and one winds up living their life behind the great walls of a palace of the southern kingdoms. We might come up with a reason, yes, but there are none of greater or lesser than the reasons we make up – true or false.”
“You dance around the question by asking me the same? Do you think you’re clever?”
The Sleeper grabbed a candle and lit the pipe again. She glared through half-closed eyes. Saffron said nothing.
“Will you come down from the window?”
“No.”
“And why not?”
“There’s a statue outside this window. I climbed it to get here and I can only climb it to get down.”
The Sleeper stood, her half-closed eyelids decorated with the faded remnants of dark eyeshadow. She opened them more than usual and glided to the sandstone wall, moving her hand across it inquisitively as if it were the first time she had ever examined it. She looked to Saffron with a pensive gaze.
“Come down.”
“I cannot. I cannot get back out.”
“I will get you out before dawn.”
“You think I trust you?”
“You seen me touch myself.”
“That does not make me trust you.”
“What does it make you, then?”
Saffron laughed a subduedly, the sound silenced further by his thieving garments.
“What, that I want to jump down and fuck you? One night to risk for a life jail?”
“You can trust me. I’ll get you out.”
The Sleeper raised a hand to her chest and with her long fingers pulled her breasts together, the low neck of her silk top revealing her cleavage. Saffron peered down from the wall as the Sleeper looked up and their eyes met – his the color of dark, raw leather and hers of faded gold and brass. She raised her hands, pretending that she might catch him below. The top she wore – thin, white, loose, and threaded with wine-colored embroidery – pulled away from her chest with a gust from outside, revealing her chest and brown-clay-colored nipples as she held her arms aloft.
“I’ll catch you, I promise. Ah, but, I wouldn’t want to ruin my shirt if your boots are dirty.”
With that she removed the garment. Her breasts were exposed and decorated by the dancing shadows of oils lamps as their flames flickered slightly in the cool breeze which crept from the window to the room below. She glided her hands from her waist to her ribs and then extended her arms again, beckoning Saffron to descend.
“I promise I won’t keep you long. I have a proposition for you, after all.”
“You can tell me from up here.”
“No, you have to come closer.”
“You are obvious with traps.”
“It isn’t one.”
She moved from the wall and to an inlaid bureau, where she dug through a drawer to produce a hempen satchel. She then, in elaborate fashion, draped the end of the satchel across the waist of her pants, so that the bag hung against the rich hair and tawny skin of her pelvis.
“What might one keep hidden in small bags, Saffron?”
“I might guess something of value, Sleeper. But I will not come down until you tell me what it’s for.”
“I will whisper in your ear, and you tell me if it is enough, yes? I can get you out of the palace, that is the easy part. But you have to live up to what I want.”
Saffron had long since stopped fiddling with his lock and was now transfixed by the half-naked Sleeper who posed with her hands on her hips and her thumbs hooked on the inside of her waistband. For a while there was silence as he contemplated a great number of things – the contemplation and calculation of which are part of what distinguishes a careful thief from a careless one. And without another word, Saffron descended, hanging and then falling to the rug-covered floor with supernatural quietness. In an instant, he was up against the Sleeper and she peered into his deep, earthen eyes. He placed a hand upon her bare shoulder – a misdirection – for the instant she turned her head, she felt the satchel plucked from her waistband. He was suddenly standing several feet away.
“You move quickly, don’t you?”
Saffron said nothing, instead pulling the veil from his face. His skin was not dark but deeply tanned and his face was harsh and bony; he was not born in Medrass. He poured the contents of the bag into his palm and his eyes widened at the sight of a dozen finely-cut sapphires, the great value of which made him worry that the Sleeper’s proposition was beyond of his area of expertise.
“I don’t kill people, if that’s what you want.”
“It is too much, then?”
“Then murder isn’t what you want?”
“No! I only want to travel to Medrass, then to the coast, and to purchase some things along the way, perhaps stay a for some months on the shore. But you must pretend to kidnap me, yes?”
“Oh yes, that all sounds very simple.”
“Then you should give the sapphires back.”
“I should but I will not.”
“You’ll take me, then?”
“Ah, life is not simple for very long, is it,” he said, removing the wrap from his head, revealing dark brown hair which matched his eyes, “These things can be arranged, even if in haste.”
He smiled from a distance with a warm look of polite habit. She glided over to him, her bare feet landing noiselessly on the floor, and she looped her arms across his shoulders, holding her head close to his.
“We will leave in the morning, then?”, she asked, her lips against his neck.
“Yes.”
She was nearly as tall as him; her eyes just short of his. She loomed even closer, standing up on the ends of her feet, whispering into his ear.
“Ah, there’s more though, Saffron.”
“More?”
“Unfortunately.”
“It doesn’t sound unfortunate.”
“I need a favor, too. It will help me sleep for the long travel ahead.”
She bit the back of his ear. She couldn’t tell how hard, for he said nothing, instead moving his hands to her bare waist. She ducked away, laughing, collapsing at once into her pile of pillows, reaching for her pipe again. He stood, motionless, watching her fidget with her box and candles, finally lighting the pipe, exhaling a huge plume. She coughed and laughed.
“Watch, and tell me what you think! And you must help me for part of it.”
She slipped her pants below her waist, grabbing with her feet at the fabric. They were tangled at her ankles, but rather than reach down to remove them, she pulled her legs up impossibly high and then doubled-over. She pulled her pants from her ankles and flung them astray. She grabbed each foot, firmly wrapping her hands around them, and continued to bend onto herself as as effortlessly as one might open a book. She tilted her head down, her feet finally resting behind her head, as she placed her arms on her thighs, tugging the skin on her inner thighs so a very slight gap appeared between her wavy lips.
“What do you think? Can you help me?”
She smiled, turning up her bloodshot eyes to his, and ran a hand through the wiry black hair which wound around her clit and down her labia. Her mind fluttered from thought to thought like a hummingbird as she waited – coiled and patient -for his response.
He began with the wrap across his chest, a complex length of cloth which, when unraveled, revealed the muscled torso of one who is always climbing and running, like that of an acrobat. His shoulders and arms, too, were strong-looking without menace – practical strength accumulated from years of everyday use. He held the black wrappings in one hand, then slowly passed them to the other, then let the fabric fall to the floor. She smiled wide through parched lips and her eyelids divided her amber irises into half-moons. His face glowed with familiar warmth, the look of want, a desire to carefully entangle their bodies. He unbuckled his pants which felt to the ground with the clinking of metal instruments, knives and lockpicks, brass weights and wedges, the accoutrements of people who slip from shadow to shadow and are seen just when they want to be seen. A span of hair descended from his abdomen downwards where it blossomed into a tangle from which his cock arose, thick and slightly curved, the tip full and taught with blood. She grinned again, reflexively, the grin of a broken fast by a coming feast or a vow of silence relieved by a canticle, recited in tandem from a blood-tinted book – a work of flesh and heat. Limbs immobile and puzzle-twisted, she watched as he brought his head low as an animal drinks from a crystal pond. He paused between her thighs and – eyes looking up to her – he exhaled, slowly and profoundly, the hot vapor of his breath. The warmth caused an uproar in her heart which filled her lips with tingling blood.
“Not now, no. Just.”
He understood and rose, knees on the patterned rug, and placed the tip of his cock on the edge of her labia. She smiled again unknowingly, shifting her feet behind her head. Her soles folded as she tensed her toes. He placed his hands upon her upturned thighs, pressing hard with hard hands, and kept them locked in place. He began, deliberately, each thrust deep into her contorted body then out almost entirely so that just the very tip of his cock remained parting her. This he repeat, thrust upon thrust.
“Faster,” she muttered, closing her eyes, running her hands across his chest, her nails gently grazing his brassy flesh. He moved her feet from behind her head and spread her thighs wider. He kept her legs tilted with her feet in the air and she resisted him, trying in jest to uncoil herself. His grip tightened on her thighs. She turned her head sideways, tensing with each thrust which brought a hard pressure within her body. She opened her mouth slightly, whispering.
“Is this what you wanted, thief, when you first saw me from that high window?”
She knew without look the expression on his face, that of unmasked desire, a crazed and fierce look of lust. Still, she glanced – head still sideways turned – at his dark-eyed expression. He whispered in turn.
“Is this what you wanted, wishing for me to jump down?”
“Harder.”
“Is it?”
“Shh . . . harder, harder.”
His muscles bore the first signs of work, bands of sweat appear in the creases of his abs and on his bare arms. She, still doubled-over and pinned, began to feel the urge to scream. It was as if a slow fire burned inside her, silently heating parts once cold and neglected. She believed that she did scream. Her body abruptly pulsed with pleasure and she covered her mouth as she shook. Then, laughing quietly, he looked at her curiously.
“What?”
He pulled back, sitting on his heels, then stood, stretching his legs.
“Did I scream?”, she gasped.
“Are you worried?”
“Didn’t I?”
“You made a noise.”
“Loud?!”
“Hardly at all.”
“It thought I screamed.”
“You must be really high then,” he said, knotting his fingers and stretching his arms above his head, “You hardly made any noise. But you moved a lot.”
“Oh, oh.”
She laughed, her laugh dry and flat. He brought her a pitcher of water which she drank from hurriedly. She jumped up, wrapping herself around him, thrusting her tongue into his warm mouth, running her fingers across his jaw. He reached his arms across her back and their chests pressed together. Each radiated heat to the other, a heat which mingled with the cold night air as a breeze descended again from the high windows. She stretched upwards, her legs taught, then moved into a standing split, using his body to brace herself and maintain her balance. He grabbed her ass firmly and she felt him enter. But even with soft, shallow thrusts, it was tiring for both of them, and they separated. She danced away with a look of coy glee.
“On the floor, Saffron,” she announced, bending, forwards, letting her arms dangle loosely while pointing down. He obeyed, tucking his hands behind his head, his biceps bulging, with a bemused look on his face.
“I just need a little time, yes?”
“Are we in a rush?”
“No, I mean. You know.”
“I’m not sure. What were we doing, exactly?”
“Are you making fun of me?”
“You’re high and paranoid. Just ride my cock; you’ll feel better.”
She breathed the crisp night air. The world glowed as if its light was diffused by a prism. His cock – still glistening with wetness – stood as an immobile monument. Mimicking him, she brought her lips close, smelling the mix of his flesh and sweat and the peppery scent of her own body. She exhaled. Then she spit, the thin band of saliva running down across bluish veins and hard, stretched skin.
“You wanted something else?” she asked, catching the spit as it descended and rubbing it about his firm head.
“Another time, right?”
“For both of us.”
“Of course.”
“And how long is it to Medrass?”
“A week, perhaps longer. How long do you want it to be?”
“We’ll see, Saffron.”
She stood and descended again, moving her legs to either side of his waist. It felt as if his cock never ended as she lowered her pelvis down and down, each fraction of time amplified by the thought-swirling lehrak. She marveled how her body might stretch to accommodate the monument onto which she sank. Finally, her muscles stretched to their fullest, her cervix against the tip of his cock, she reached the end. She brought a delicate hand with hungry fingertips to her lips and the bore down through the folds to her bead of a clit working furiously – wrathfully – as she bounced and grinded her bones against his. She came violently, as if a spirit had been expelled from within her, her spine curving into a crescent, her other arm propping her from collapsing backwards. She gasped – this time aware of her gasping – and quelled her voice into a whimper. She whipped forward over him and her hair fell to his chest. She did not look up to him before beginning again, renewed and redoubled, her chest flush with color and sweat, her thighs tense against the bones of his waist, her fingers spiraling against her flesh, and breaths – short gasps – lurid smoke-filled rooms and dark-tanned muscle, skin, jaws, eyes, she was looking at his face with a silent scream, her body lurching and lunging, she saw a growing violence in his mouth, his lips, his erratically inflating chest, pounding now – as if she could no longer feel the intense rise and fall of her pelvis, the deep piercing cock, and then he too twisted up, his hand reached hard for her waist, pressing her up and down for short, uncontrollable seconds, seconds where they both assessed unconsciously that they were almost at that point where neither could do anything at all but die. Her eyes closed and she gasped, her muffled sounds drowned by his groans and breathing, and she felt his muscles tense everywhere, electrically, as the pulsing contractions of her body worked the soft flesh against his jerking cock.
The Sleeper turned her head up, fixing her eyes on his calm face. His expression was curious: serene but paused as if he was saying something but had forgotten.
“Good timing,” she said, raising her body. His still-firm cock slapped against his pelvis and she rested her lips on it as she oozed semen onto his lap.
“Sometimes people have good timing together,” he replied, grinning.
“Is there something funny, sorry?”
“Nothing is funny! Everything is very serious.”
“I’m very serious.”
“Of course, of course.”
She continued to sit on him for a while and dug her fingers to his chest and chest hair, his skin resisting her short, hard nails. Then, she stood, her thighs sticky and her skin tacky against the brisk night air. She poured some water onto a scrap of cloth, the coolness of the wet fabric sharp against her hot abs and thighs. She threw the cloth to him. It fell short.
“You can fend for yourself, yeah?”
“A fine thanks as well.”
She sat upon a pillow, naked, cross-legged, and wound her hair into a knot.
“Oh, poor you!”
She threw it within his reach. She tried looking for her pipe but gave up quickly. For the first night in some time, she felt that sleep would come easily.
“Tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow,” he affirmed. “It should not be more than a week or two. The going might be tough at times.”
“I am tough at times.”
“That’s good, then.”
“What is your name, though, Saffron?”
“Do you need to know?”
“I do. Give me a name.”
“Does it have to be mine?”
“I would hope.”
He put on his pants. She remained naked, her pale-brown skin brilliant in the fading orange glow of almost-gone candles. He reclined; she lay next to him, breathing in the flavor of his flesh.
“Ishar of Medrass.”
“You are not from Medrass,” she thought but did not say. She fell asleep, his body hot against hers. They sweat in their sleep as night turned to warm dawn. She dreamt of an ocean, silent and undiscovered, as she awoke by the thin, hot beams of morning light.
Source: reddit.com/r/eroticliterature/comments/5t30g7/saffron_and_sapphires_mf