Morning came in sideways through the blinds, a ladder of light laid across the floor and up the far wall, and Aria had watched it climb for the better part of an hour. She hadn't slept. She'd lain still under Dani's arm, breathing slow enough to pass, and listened to the building wake up around them — the pipes knocking, a door two floors down, a siren somewhere south that faded before it got close. The Elvish was still there behind her teeth. She'd been turning it over since the streetlight went off, and it hadn't worn thin. It had settled in, the way a word does when it stops being a word and starts being a fact.

Dani stirred against her, a long stretch that pulled her arm tighter across Aria's ribs before it slackened. Her eyes opened by degrees, unfocused, then finding Aria's face already turned toward her in the grey light. She blinked. She didn't look away.

"You slept," Dani said, voice still ragged with it. Aria opened her mouth, and the Elvish came up easy, slower than the night's wine-drunk spill of it, deliberate now, a thing she was choosing. Amin mela lle. She watched Dani's face while she said it — the small crease between her brows, the mouth parting, the way her eyes moved across Aria's like she was reading for a second language underneath the first. The Tongues had worn off an hour ago; she'd felt it go, the soft click of a spell closing behind her. The French was all gone now, but the Elvish hadn't gone with it. This was hers now, and she laid it out where Dani could see it, and waited to find out what Dani would do with a thing said twice.

Dani's thumb moved, slow, along Aria's jaw. "Say it again," she said, and it wasn't a request. Aria did, quieter, and Dani's eyes went somewhere past her — not away, just down, into whatever she was weighing. When she came back, she said, "The French. That was the spell."

"Yeah." Aria turned her face into Dani's palm, let the heat of it sit against her cheek. "Wore off about an hour ago. I felt it go." She held up her hand between them — the faint silver line across the palm where the.308 had gone through, healed to a scar she'd keep. "Tongues has a clock. That clock ran out. The French is gone, the Latin's gone, everything I borrowed last night is just — gone. I couldn't order coffee in Paris right now." A pause. She let the other half land on its own weight. "But the Elvish stayed. Amin mela lle. That one's mine. I didn't pull it from the column and I didn't cast it and it doesn't have a clock. I checked. I've been lying here checking for an hour."

Dani's hand went still on her jaw. The blinds laid their ladder of light across the bed between them, and Dani looked at Aria the way she'd looked at the flattened slug — like it was worth keeping, and worth being careful with. "So when you said it last night," she said, slow, "that was you. Not the wine. Not the spell." Aria shook her head once. Dani's mouth did something small and complicated, and she pulled Aria in against her chest, arm closing hard across her back, and said nothing at all — which, from Dani, was its own kind of answer.

She stayed there a while, cheek against Dani's collarbone, and let the quiet do the first part of the work. Dani's hand moved on her back, slow circles, no hurry in it, and Aria counted the passes the way she'd counted the blinds — five, six, seven — before she figured out how to say it without it coming out like a party trick. "It's not like remembering," she said, into the skin below Dani's throat. "That's what I thought it'd be. Like I'd learned a phrase and I was pulling it back up. It's not that." She turned her face, laid her ear flat against Dani's sternum, and listened to the thud under it while she found the next part. "It sits behind my teeth. Low. Like a stone I swallowed and it's just — there. When I say it, it doesn't come up from my head. It comes up from under my ribs. Like the words were already in the room and I'm just letting them out."

Dani's hand kept moving. Aria felt the circles get a little slower, a little more deliberate, the way Dani did everything when she was taking something in and didn't want to admit how much of it she was taking in. "You said it last night and I thought it was the wine," Dani said, quiet. "Then the Elvish. Then you said the spell wore off and it was still there, and I had to sit with that." Her thumb pressed once, flat, between Aria's shoulder blades. "So what's it feel like right now. This minute."

Aria lifted her head, looked at her — the grey light on the side of her face, the sleep still flattened into the pillow crease across her cheek — and answered honestly. "Heavy. It's heavy, and it's warm, and it's not going anywhere." She swallowed, and the stone moved with it. "That's the part I don't know what to do with. Everything else I've pulled from that column, I could put back. I could close the drawer. This one's not in the drawer. It's in me, and it doesn't have a clock, and I've been lying here for an hour trying to find the edge of it so I could hand it back, and there isn't one." She stopped. The next sentence was already in her mouth, and it came out smaller than she meant it to. "I think that means it's mine. I don't know what I do with a thing that's mine."

Dani was quiet for a long moment. Then she shifted, propped herself up on one elbow, and looked down at Aria with an expression that had nothing soft left in it — not cold, just serious, the way she got when a thing mattered and she wasn't going to let it slide past with a joke. "You want to know what you do with a thing that's yours?" She reached over Aria's shoulder, found the glass of water on the nightstand, took a drink, and set it back down with a click that landed like punctuation. "You use it. That's what a language is for, Aria. It's not a museum piece. It's a tool, and it's yours, and you're about to stand in front of sixty thousand people and read them a list of everything you don't have." She tapped Aria's sternum, once, with two fingers. "Show them one thing you do."

The game was at noon, Soldier Field, and the plan — such as it was — had been to fly her in over the lake, land on the fifty, and let the cameras find her before security could. Aria had rehearsed nothing. She'd written the list on the back of a receipt from Sera's kitchen and folded it into the coat pocket, and every time she tried to imagine the moment she came up blank, a white roar where the speech should be. But Dani was still tapping her sternum, and the Elvish was still sitting under her ribs, heavy and warm, and somewhere between the two of them the blank started to fill. She sat up. The blinds threw their ladder of light across Dani's bare shoulder, and Aria watched it and said, in Elvish, slow and deliberate, amin mela lle, and then in English, so there was no mistaking it, "I love you. That's the one I've got. That's what I'll say."

Dani didn't reach for the water again. She just looked at her, and something in the set of her mouth said she'd heard the English and set it down carefully, like a plate she wasn't done with, and now she wanted the other thing. "Say it in Elvish," she said. "Not the love one. The other one. The one you're gonna say on Sunday." She propped her chin on her fist. "The whole thing. Who you are. Say it like you mean it."

Aria sat with it. The list was on the coat pocket and the coat was on the chair across the room, but she didn't need the paper for this — the sentence had been forming under her ribs for two days, the same way the other one had, and when she opened her mouth it came up whole. "Amin Aria Silverleaf," she said, and the name landed wrong, the borrowed Elvish crowding a surname that was never built for it, so she stopped and started over and made it fit. "Amin Aria Silverleaf, ar amin sinome." She heard herself and frowned at the ceiling. The Silverleaf sat there in the Elvish like a stone in a stream, English-jagged, an RPG name the language didn't know what to do with. She turned it over. Silver was *mith*, the old word, the one that meant grey and gleaming both. Leaf was *lass*. And the way the language built a name was not to say the two words side by side like a label — it was to make them one thing, to let the first word do something to the second, the way *mithmel* did when you meant a silver-friend and not a friend who happened to be silver. So she tried it again, slower. "Amin Aria Mithlass," she said, and felt the shape of it settle, the two words married into one, silver working on leaf until it meant *the leaf that is silver* — which, she understood, standing in the grey light of a stranger's bedroom in a body that wasn't born to her, was exactly what she was. She said the whole of it once more, clean this time, no stumble. "Amin Aria Mithlass, ar amin sinome."

Dani had gone still, listening the way she listened to a record she liked — head tilted, no commentary yet. "What's it mean," she said, "the whole thing."

"It means," Aria said, and stopped, because the Elvish had come up easy and the English was the hard part, the way English always was now when it mattered. She watched Dani's face — the tilt of her head, the small steady patience in it, the way she wasn't going to fill the silence for her. "It means 'I am Aria Mithlass, and I am here.'" She let it sit. "Mithlass. Silverleaf, but not the way the sheet had it. The old word for silver is mith. Leaf is lass. And the language doesn't just set them side by side — it makes the first one work on the second. Silver doing something to the leaf. The leaf that is silver. Not a leaf that happens to be silver, not a name somebody picked off a list. A leaf that got made silver." She turned her hand over on the sheet between them, the silver line across her palm catching the ladder of light. "Which is what I am. I didn't pick it. It got done to me. And I'm still here."

Dani's eyes moved while she talked — down to her mouth, up to her eyes, over to the scar, back — and Aria watched them go, watching for the moment it landed, the way you watch a coin spin down to heads or tails. It came on the last part. Not the translation; the "I'm still here." Something in Dani's face went quiet and certain at once, the crease between her brows smoothing out into a look Aria had seen once before, on the range, when Dani had looked at the flattened slug and decided it was worth keeping. She didn't say anything. Her hand came up off the pillow and found Aria's open palm, and her thumb laid itself flat across the silver line, and she closed her fingers over it — warm, deliberate, not letting go. Aria felt the pressure of it through the scar, the small weight of a hand deciding to stay, and she said the whole thing once more in Elvish, quieter, a gift this time instead of a test. "Amin Aria Mithlass, ar amin sinome."

The kiss was not a reply to anything. Aria gave up the last of the space between them, one hand flat on the mattress beside Dani's hip and the other finding the side of her neck, and she kissed her with everything the Elvish had been carrying — the stone behind her teeth, the hour of lying still, the whole heavy warm fact of it. Dani made a sound low in her throat and got a hand into Aria's hair, and for a while there was nothing to translate and nothing to test. Just the grey light and the sheets and the two of them in the middle of it.

When Aria pulled back she stayed close enough to feel Dani's breath on her mouth and said it plainly, no spells, no second language. "Thank you. For last night." She swallowed. The scar under Dani's thumb went warm with the pulse in it. "The wine, the record, the elvish I couldn't hold. You didn't flinch at any of it. You just kept the light on and let me find the words." Her thumb moved once along Dani's jaw, the same slow line Dani had drawn on her a minute ago, handed back. "I've been running around this city for two weeks being a thing that happened to somebody. Last night I got to be a person in a room with you. That's not small. I wanted you to know I noticed."

Dani's fingers stayed in her hair, not pulling, not letting go. She looked up at her with the record-listening tilt still on, and for a beat she didn't say anything at all — which Aria was starting to learn was the most Dani answer there was. Then her thumb pressed flat against the scar, once, and she said, "You're welcome," and it came out steady and unpretty and real, and the blinds laid their light across the two of them and neither of them moved for the clock on the nightstand, which said it was a quarter past ten and Sunday was already on its way.

She didn't reach for the sheet. She lay there with the blinds striping her thighs and looked at herself, really looked, the way she'd been avoiding since the first morning in the woods — the way you avoid a mirror when the reflection knows something you don't. Her own hand moved down her sternum, slow, and the skin under her fingers was warm and smooth and hers. The breasts were heavy where they settled against her ribs, full and round with a weight that shifted when she moved, nipples gone tight in the cool air of the room. She traced the dip of her waist, the flare of hip, the long line of thigh, and every inch of it answered like it had always been the plan. Pale ivory, faintly luminous in the morning light, silver-blond hair fanned out across the pillow and spilling over her shoulder in a way she was already starting to take for granted. She flexed her calf under the sheet and felt the cord of muscle move under that soft skin — Olympic-marathon speed sitting quietly inside a body built for a lingerie ad. She turned her wrist over, watched the faint silver scar across the palm catch the light, and thought, with a certain amount of honest vanity: yeah. Okay. I get it.

Then she looked at Dani, and stopped being smug about it. Dani was propped on one elbow, hair a wreck of brown tangles, the sheet doing absolutely nothing to hide a body that had no business being in a stranger's bed on a Tuesday morning — wide hips, soft belly, full breasts with the sheet barely draped across one, and the long smooth line of her that Aria had spent the better part of the night learning by touch. Seven inches of her, soft now against her thigh, still half-hard with morning. Aria let her eyes go the whole length of her, unhurried, and Dani watched her do it with that record-listening tilt and didn't cover up. She didn't need to. She was a woman built like a rumor — the one everybody heard and nobody believed until they saw her. Aria reached over and laid her palm flat on Dani's hip, felt the warmth of her through the sheet, and said it out loud, because the thought had been sitting there since the blinds came up and it wasn't going to leave until she said it.

"Okay," Aria said, and the word came out like she was doing math. "Okay, so." She let her hand slide off Dani's hip and pushed herself up on one elbow to face her properly, and now that she was sitting up the sheet fell away from both of them entirely and neither of them did a damn thing about it. She looked at Dani. Then she looked down at herself, then back at Dani, and did the arithmetic out loud because it was the only honest way she had left. "You've got the hips and the mouth and the whole —" she gestured vaguely at all of Dani, "— the thing where you look like you'd ruin somebody's year on purpose. And I've got the ears and the eyes and the fact that I could arm-wrestle a forklift."

Dani snorted, which was not the reaction Aria had been building toward. "A forklift."

"A forklift," Aria said, unbothered, and reached over and took a lock of Dani's hair between two fingers, wound it once, let it go. "Look at us. Look at this bed. There is no version of the two of us walking into a room together where the room doesn't just — stop. People would crash cars. I'm not being vain, I'm being accurate. We are, statistically, probably the hottest couple on the planet right now, and I need you to understand that I am saying this as a former twenty-four-year-old man from Indiana who used to get winded on stairs." She flopped back onto the pillow with the satisfied thump of someone who had just filed a report. "I live here now. I get to notice."

Dani stretched, slow, one arm up over her head, and had the nerve to look pleased about it. "Former twenty-four-year-old man from Indiana," she repeated, tasting it. "And now you're an elf who could throw me through a wall."

"Through a wall," Aria agreed, "gently, and then apologize, and then heal you." She turned her head on the pillow to look at her, and the joke ran out of air somewhere on the way to its own punchline. Dani was watching her with that tilted, listening look, and the blinds had moved another inch, and the morning was just a morning, and they were two naked women in a bed in a city that had no idea what either of them was. "Sixty thousand people on Sunday," Aria said, quieter. "And I'm lying here doing body math."

Aria kissed her again.

No preamble this time, no Elvish, no arithmetic — just her mouth on Dani's and her hand already moving, sliding down the flat of Dani's belly, over the soft rise of her hip, and then past it, finding her. Dani's cock was warm and half-full against her palm, thicker than the morning had left it, and Aria took it in her hand the way she'd been learning to — no rush, no grip that asked a question, just the weight of it resting in her fingers like something she'd been given and meant to keep. Dani made a low sound into her mouth and got a hand in Aria's hair, and Aria felt the length of her fill and stiffen against her palm, the skin there soft as the inside of a wrist, the head already slick with the small wet glass the morning had left. She broke the kiss only far enough to look down between them — her pale hand wrapped around brown skin, the two of them in a stranger's bed in the grey light, the blinds striping Dani's thigh — and said it plainly, because it was true and the truth was the only currency this bed traded in.

"I want to watch you," Aria said. "Not the spell, not the wine. I just want to put my mouth on you and watch what it does to your face." She was already moving down the bed before Dani could answer, dragging the sheet with her hip, and Dani let her — propped on the elbow, the record-listening tilt gone sharp now, watching Aria settle between her thighs with an expression Aria couldn't read and didn't try to. She took her in her hand again and licked once, root to head, slow, and felt the whole long length of her jump. The taste was salt and skin and the faint bitter edge of sleep, and Aria closed her eyes on it and did it again, flatter this time, letting her tongue drag the vein on the underside until Dani's hand fisted in her hair and her breath came out through her teeth. She took the head into her mouth and held it there, working her tongue in slow circles against the ridge of it, one hand braced on Dani's hip and the other still wrapped around the base, and Dani said her name — not the whole of it, just the first sound, like the rest couldn't get out — and Aria looked up along the length of her own body to catch it. Dani's head was back against the pillow, mouth open, throat working, and the blinds had moved another inch across the room and neither of them gave a damn.

Aria slid her mouth down until her lips met her own fist, took as much as she could without choking, and stayed there a moment,

and then pulled back off her with a wet sound that filled the room, and came up the bed to kiss her again — Dani's own taste still on her tongue, salt and skin, and Dani made a low noise into it and dragged her in by the back of the neck like she'd been waiting for it. Aria got a knee between Dani's thighs and settled there, her hand already sliding back down the flat of Dani's belly, over the soft rise of her hip, and then lower — down between her legs, past the heavy soft weight of her sack, and further back, where the small tight furl of her was warm and already slick with everything the morning had been doing to her. Aria rested two fingers flat on it and let them sit there, no push, just pressure, and Dani's hips came up off the mattress an inch and her breath went out through her nose against Aria's mouth.

"Oh," Aria said, quiet, against her lips. "There you are." She didn't move her hand — just kept the two fingers there, spread flat, letting Dani feel the weight of them, and watched her face from six inches away while she did it. Dani's eyes had gone dark and half-lidded and her mouth was open and she was doing the thing Aria had been learning to read all week: the small tight swallow, the way her jaw worked once before she spoke. "Say it," Aria said. "Whatever it is." Dani's hand tightened in her hair. "Both," she said, and her voice had a raw edge on it that Aria hadn't heard before, something she'd been holding back and was done holding. "Your hand on me and your mouth on me and I don't want to pick." Aria kissed the corner of her mouth, once. "Then don't," she said, and slid back down the bed.

She slid back down the bed and took her in her hand again, but slower this time, no mouth yet — just her fist loose around the base of Dani's cock and her thumb drawing one long, unhurried stroke up the underside, root to head, and back down. Dani's hips rolled into it and her breath caught, and Aria did it again, watching her own pale hand move against brown skin in the grey light. "You know what I figured out this morning," she said, conversational, thumb circling the head, spreading the wet that had already gathered there, "lying there listening to the pipes knock. There's a whole list of things you've done for me that I've never done for you. You gave me a place to land my first night in this body. You gave me the points when I was running on empty and didn't make me ask twice. You let me say a thing in Elvish I couldn't hold and you didn't make it weird." She squeezed once, slow, and Dani's jaw went tight. "So I've been lying there thinking about what I've got that you haven't had yet."

She didn't wait for an answer. She got a hand on Dani's far hip and turned her — easy, no effort in it, the way a person moves a chair — until Dani's cheek and chest came down flat against the mattress and her knees were under her, hips up, the long line of her back rising to the small of it and then falling away into the round of her ass and the heavy weight hanging between her thighs. Dani made a startled sound into the sheet and then a different one, lower, when Aria's arms came around her from behind, both hands closing over her hip bones and pulling her back up to where she wanted her, knees spread, face still down, the sheet shoved up under her chest and the morning light striping the length of her spine. "There," Aria said, running her palms down the outsides of Dani's thighs and up the insides, feeling the muscle jump under the skin. "That's the view I've been missing."

Aria leaned down over the long arc of her back and set her mouth against the base of Dani's spine, right where the dimples sat, and worked her tongue up the knobs of it one at a time — unhurried, the way she'd been learning to do everything — until she reached the nape and Dani's shoulders had gone loose and her face was turned sideways in the sheet, breathing open-mouthed. Then she came back down, past the small of the back, past the swell, and let her tongue flatten over the tight furl of her, warm and already slick with the morning. Dani's whole body flinched forward into the mattress and then pressed back into it, and Aria stayed there, working slow circles with the flat of her tongue, the taste salt and skin, until Dani's fingers had knotted up in the sheet and she was making a sound down in her throat that wasn't words.

"Amin mela lle," Aria said against her, low, the stone behind her teeth moving with it, and felt Dani's hips jerk at the sound — the Elvish landing in a place English couldn't reach. "Amin mela lle. Amin mela lle." She said it three times, slow, one breath apart, and each one made Dani's back bow a little further into her mouth. Then she brought her hand up between Dani's thighs and found her cock where it hung heavy and slick and full, and she wrapped her fingers around it and pulled — one long, downward stroke, root to head, milking it toward the bed, and Dani moaned into the sheet and pushed her hips back into Aria's tongue and her cock forward into Aria's fist at the same time, caught between the two of them, and Aria did it again — stroke down, tongue up — and again, until the rhythm was one thing instead of two.

Aria kept the rhythm — mouth and fist working the same long stroke, tongue flat and slow over the furl of her, hand milking down root to head and back up, again, again. Dani's breath had gone to pieces against the sheet, wet and open, and her hips had stopped meeting the rhythm and started chasing it, fucking back into Aria's tongue and forward into her fist with a desperation that had nothing left of the morning's ease in it. The muscle in her thigh was jumping under Aria's palm. Her fingers had torn loose of the sheet and found Aria's wrist instead, gripping it, not pulling her off — just holding on, knuckles whitening, the way a person holds a rail. "Don't," she got out, ragged, into the mattress. "Don't — I'm right —" and her cock jumped in Aria's fist, thick and full and leaking, every stroke drawing a sound out of her that started in her chest and died in the pillow. She was right at the edge. Aria could feel it in the way her whole body had drawn up tight as a fist around the pleasure, hips stuttering, breath coming in short hard pulls — one more stroke, one more pass of her tongue, and Dani would come apart in her hands. Aria stopped.

She pulled her mouth off her, let go of her cock, and sat back on her heels — and Dani made a sound like something had been taken from her, a raw wordless protest into the sheet, her hips still pushing back into the empty air where Aria's tongue had been. Aria wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist and looked down the long line of Dani's back, at the wreck she'd made of her, and felt the grin come up from somewhere old and wicked and entirely her own. "Elves," she said, conversational, to the room at large, "are famously impatient." Then she rolled off her knees and onto her back, unhurried, and hooked her hands behind her knees and pulled them up and open — slow, deliberate, watching Dani's face over the rise of her own hip as she did it. The sheet was gone, the blinds had moved another inch, and she lay there in the grey light with her thighs spread wide and her cunt open to the air and slick with something that had been building since the first Elvish word landed, presenting herself the way a cat presents a kill, like it was a gift and a dare at the same time. Dani had gone still on her elbows, hair a ruin, mouth open, staring down the length of the bed at her. Aria tilted her hips once, a small lazy roll, and said, "Your turn."

Dani didn't move for a second. Then she was off her elbows and coming up the bed, and she didn't crawl — she walked on her knees, unhurried, the mattress dipping with each step, and she didn't stop until she was straddling Aria's hips, one hand flat on the mattress beside Aria's head and the other already wrapped around the base of her own cock. She looked down at Aria with her hair in her face and no softness left anywhere in it. "You want to watch," she said. "Watch." She dragged the head of her cock down through the wet — one long, slow pass, root to clit and back — and Aria's hips came off the mattress before she could stop them. Dani did it again, slower, spreading her open with the flat of it, and the second pass made a sound that filled the room. "That's mine," Dani said, and it wasn't a question. "You said it in Elvish and then you stopped me at the edge like it was a joke. It's not a joke." She lined herself up and pushed in — not slow, not careful, the whole first inch in one stroke — and Aria's mouth came open and nothing came out of it.

Dani didn't give her time to breathe. She seated herself to the root, pulled back to the head, and drove back in, and the wet sound of it was obscene in the quiet apartment. She got a hand under Aria's knee and shoved it up and back until Aria was folded open, and she set a pace that had nothing of the morning in it — deep, hard, every stroke ending in a smack of skin that Aria felt in her teeth. "You want the Elvish," Dani said, breathing ragged, not stopping, "then say it while I'm inside you." Aria tried. The word came out cracked, half-swallowed, and Dani fucked it out of her mouth with the next stroke. "Again." Aria said it — amin mela lle — and Dani's hips stuttered once, caught it, and drove deeper. "Again." She said it three times, and on the third Dani grabbed her by the jaw and held her face still and fucked her through the whole of it, watching her eyes while she did. "That's what it's for," Dani said. "That's what it's for."

Dani didn't let up. She held Aria's jaw with one hand and kept the pace brutal, the other hand braced on the mattress, and every stroke punched a sound out of Aria that she couldn't have stopped if she'd tried. The Elvish had come loose from her, gone, and what was left was just the wet slap of skin and the two of them breathing like they'd run somewhere. Dani's hair had fallen completely in her face and she didn't bother with it. She just watched Aria through the curtain of it, mouth set, eyes dark, taking the thing she'd said she'd take.

"Look at you," Dani said, low, not slowing. "You can throw a forklift and you can't keep your eyes straight." She shifted her angle, hitching Aria's knee higher, and found the place that made Aria's whole body bow up off the mattress. "There. That's the one. Stay in it." Aria's hands had gone to the sheets, then to Dani's forearm, then to the sheets again, and the small involuntary noises she was making had stopped being words several strokes ago. Dani leaned down over her without breaking rhythm, put her mouth next to Aria's ear, and said, "I waited all week for this. You think I didn't notice you flinching every time I touched you like you were doing me a favor? I don't want the favor." She drove in hard on the last word and Aria's back arched. "I want this."

She straightened up and took Aria's hips in both hands, no longer holding her jaw, just using her — pulling her down onto each stroke, meeting her own thrusts, and the sound the two of them made together filled the apartment and probably the hallway. Aria had stopped trying to track anything. She was just there, folded open and taken, and it was the first time all week she hadn't been calculating — points, spells, Sunday, the list. None of it was in the room. Dani was in the room. Dani was the whole room.

"Say it again," Dani said, and this time she wasn't asking for the Elvish. Aria got her mouth working, got the English out, cracked and honest. "I love you." Dani's rhythm didn't break, but something moved across her face — quick, caught, put away. She didn't say it back. She just took it, and kept taking it, and drove Aria up the bed until the headboard knocked the wall once, twice, a third time, and the blinds threw their stripes across both of them and the morning was just a morning and neither of them gave a damn about the clock.

Dani didn't stop. She drove down into her and stayed, hips grinding, the whole length of her buried to the root, and Aria felt the first pulse of her deep inside — a thick, hot throb that was its own answer to everything she'd been saying. Dani's mouth came down against her ear, breath wrecked, and she got the words out in Elvish, mangled and foreign on her tongue, every syllable a small disaster of accent — "Amin mela lle" — and Aria heard it come out wrong and heard it land anyway, because Dani had listened, Dani had kept it, and Dani was saying it back.

Then Dani came. Not the polite kind. She pulled back to the head and drove home one last time and emptied into her, and Aria felt it — the wet heat of it flooding her, the pulse after pulse of it, Dani's hips stuttering through each one, her cock twitching and jerking and spilling until it ran out of her and down between them and pooled on the ruined sheet. Dani's whole body locked over her, one hand fisted in the pillow by Aria's head, and she said it again through her teeth, ragged and right — "Amin mela lle" — and the second one was better than the first.

That was what did it. Aria came around her, clenching down hard on the cock still buried in her, and it rolled up through her like the Elvish had — from under her ribs, not from her head — and her back came off the mattress and her hands found Dani's shoulders and held, and she made a sound that had no words in it at all, in any language. The headboard knocked the wall a fourth time and neither of them heard it. When it let her go she lay there with Dani still inside her, both of them breathing like they'd run somewhere, the blinds laying their stripes across the two of them and the clock on the nightstand reading twenty past ten.

Aria lay still under her, breath still coming hard, and felt the last of the aftershock roll through her in slow waves — Dani's weight settling onto her, the cock still buried deep, softening now but not gone, the wet heat of everything Dani had put into her starting to run down the crease of her ass and soak into the ruined sheet. She could feel her own pulse everywhere at once, low and thick, and the Elvish had come loose from her entirely, the stone behind her teeth gone quiet, like the language itself had spent something and needed a minute. Her hands were still on Dani's shoulders, fingers slack now, and the blinds had moved another stripe across the room and the clock said twenty-two past ten, and none of it mattered because Dani was above her with her hair in her face and her chest heaving and her mouth open like she was going to say something and hadn't decided what.

Aria looked up at her — the brown tangle of her hair, the flush running down her throat, the small wrecked set of her mouth, the way she was still holding herself up on one arm like she didn't want to crush her even now — and the smile came up before she could stop it. Slow, and warm, and a little stupid. She reached up and pushed a curl back off Dani's cheek with two fingers, tucked it behind her ear, and let her palm rest there against the side of her face. "Okay," she said, and her voice came out rougher than she meant it to. "So. I'm really bad about insisting on safe sex." She said it lightly, like it was a confession about the weather. "I've been meaning to bring it up for a week and then you do a thing with your mouth and it just — leaves the building. Gone. No condoms in this apartment, no condoms in mine, and I'm going to be honest with you, I don't think either of us is going to fix that tonight." Her thumb moved once along Dani's cheekbone, and the smile on her face went somewhere softer, somewhere further away, like it had walked off the edge of a joke and kept going. "At this rate you're going to have me pumping out half-elf babies in no time."

She said it like a joke. She heard it land like something else. The room went quiet around it — the pipes, the siren somewhere south, the record long since run out — and Aria looked up at the ceiling past Dani's shoulder and let the thought sit there where she'd put it, because it had been sitting behind her ribs for a while now, the same way the Elvish had, and she was tired of pretending it wasn't. "I may be the world's only elf," she said, to the ceiling, "and also the world's only elf who's gonna have to explain to a gynecologist that there's no paperwork, no history, no —" she waved a hand at the general concept of medical records, "— anything. So. If we're doing the thing where I don't die of irony on Sunday, we should probably figure out whether elves even work like that before I find out live on television." She turned her head on the pillow to look at Dani, and the grin was already back, crooked and unbothered. "You're the one with the working uterus. I'm the one with the working — everything else. We're a matched set."

Dani propped herself up on both elbows, still inside her, still breathing hard, and looked down at Aria with the flat, unamused expression of a woman who had just been handed an entire new category of problem at twenty past ten in the morning. "You want me to be your ob-gyn consult," she said. "Right now. With my dick still in you."

"I'm a multitasker." Aria reached up and got a hand in Dani's hair, tugged once, proprietary, and felt the last of the morning's weight slide off her shoulders and land somewhere it couldn't reach her. "Besides, you're the one who brought up the wall. I'm just saying — if we're gonna keep doing this on purpose, and I'm pretty sure we are, then at some point I need to know what happens if the dice land wrong."

Dani didn't answer with words. She just came down off her elbows and settled her weight onto Aria — chest to chest, hips to hips, still half inside her, softening now, and she got both arms around Aria's shoulders and pulled her in until there was no space left between them at all. Her face went into the side of Aria's neck, and Aria felt her breath there, hot and uneven, and felt the small weight of everything Dani wasn't saying settle onto her sternum like a hand.

Then Dani's mouth moved up, past her jaw, and found her ear, and she said it low and private, the way you say a thing you've been carrying around for a while and finally found the room for. "I want kids. I always have." A pause, and Aria felt her smile against the shell of her ear — the crooked one, the one that came out when Dani was about to undercut herself on purpose. "But you're right. I did probably know a girl for longer than a month before I filled her up like a Twinkie and just — waited to see what happens." She pulled back just far enough to look at Aria's face, and her eyes were doing the thing Aria had learned to read: serious underneath the joke, watching to see if the joke had landed or gone wrong. "So. Not tonight. But I'm not gonna pretend I haven't thought about it. You asked. I'm answering."

Aria lay there under her and let the sentence finish landing, because it was the kind of thing that needed a beat. Not a confession, exactly. A fact, laid down the way she'd laid down the Elvish — heavy, warm, not going anywhere. She got a hand up into Dani's hair and held her there, cheek to cheek, and looked past her at the ceiling and the ladder of light the blinds had climbed all the way up the far wall, and said, quiet, "Okay." She turned her head and pressed her mouth to the side of Dani's jaw, once, no hurry in it. "Okay. Then we figure out the dice before we roll them." She felt Dani's laugh move through her chest, small and real, and neither of them moved for the clock on the nightstand, which said it was twenty-three past ten, and Sunday was already walking up the driveway.