Kazul wanted to whip around and demand that he tell her what he meant by that, but that would be giving in, and she simply refused to do that. He had to be the one to make the first move, to articulate his wishes first. She was clever enough to talk and tease, but when it came down to it she was inexperienced and unsure of herself, and could no more make the first move than she could fly.
Ru sensed some of what she must be thinking, maybe, for it wasn't difficult to see the tension in the way she held herself so very still, without even the tip of her tail twitching. It wasn't natural for a lion to be completely unmoving like that. Of course, part of the reason he felt that was was that Ru was a far more active lion than Kazul, but he was certain any lion would feel tension looking at someone doing such a good impression of a statue.
She knew she had let the silence drag on for too long when she heard Ru's intake of breath. She had no idea what he would say next, but she was certain it would finish the job of spoiling the mood that she'd begun by hesitating for too long. Mentally she cursed herself for her ignorance and inexperience.
Naturally she knew about sex. Living in her father's den it was difficult not to have some knowledge on the topic, but that didn't mean she knew what to do when teasing and flirting came close to being something more physical. She also had the overwhelming suspicion that she would not be very good at the physical follow-up to flirting. She wasn't the most lovely of her father's daughters, after all, or the most talented.
Maybe she was just reading Ru completely wrong.
"Solvtorn told me the lions who lived here before used to pay tribute to us - the Stormborn, I mean. We didn't raid here as long as they gave us so many Thralls and a certain portion of their herds and splendid gifts." She was speaking too quickly and her voice was higher than she would have liked, but Ru hadn't been given a chance to say whatever it was he was going to say. If the mood was going to be spoiled, she wanted to have some control over where it went next since she felt very much out of control.
For his part, Ru didn't move any closer to Kazul until she spoke again. He had been waiting to see what she would say, whether she would decide to rise to his bait and ask, or whether she would have a comeback - albeit a delayed one at this point. He had rather hoped she wouldn't react as she had chosen to do in the end, but it honestly didn't surprise him. He understood her better than she might think. At least some of the time.
Just the same, his eyes flashed a brilliant green when she finally broke her statuesque tableau to speak and look at him. She saw the flash, even though she was looking past him more than at him, and briefly she shivered, not sure quite what the flash portended, but struck by the feral look it gave Ru. It wasn't the reaction she expected him to have to her babbling.
"Did he?" Ru asked. "Did he tell you why they stopped?"
Kazul shook her head. She hadn't actually thought to ask. Solvtorn's stories tended to be far longer than they needed to be and she almost never wanted to risk asking for details, because he could go on and on ad nauseam.
"It was a bad year for the Stormborn. They lost almost as many viking crews as they sent out and the lean months were coming. So one night the Warlord led his Captains down to this place and the Head Priestess followed at a safe distance. Then the Captains rounded up everyone here and led them away one by one to where the Head Priestess waited. They sacrificed them all, down to the smallest cub."
He smirked as he related the tale. Ordinarily Kazul would have smirked, too. She was spectacularly unbothered by things like that most of the time, as was evinced by the way she'd joked about rape earlier. But instead of smirking at him and calling bullshit on his story she shivered once more. There was no wind, no external cause for her to shiver. It could only be something emotional.
Ru's smirk turned into a full grin when that thought occurred to him. The ability to make a girl shiver with emotion - any emotion - wasn't something to sneeze at, and if he could bring out nerves and anxiety, he could bring out other things, maybe. Briefly he entertained the idea of her shivering beneath him, feeling the exquisite expression that she couldn't help, despite her otherwise perfect control over her body.
"Don't laugh," Kazul growled when she noticed his smirk.
She pounced toward him and swatted him, deliberately pulling back so that the tips of her toes barely came into contact with his ear. At least, that was the plan. She didn't get much farther than pouncing and swatting though, because he ducked and moved in as though he might actually make some sort of counter-attack. Slightly panicked by being unable to read him and his sudden movement, Kazul let her claws slide out, snagging flesh where his ear joined his skull.
Ru's breath hissed in through his teeth as her claws sliced shallow cuts into his skin. There was pain, sharp, sudden, and sweet. His eyes went dark and he grinned. Would she figure it out? His grin might have provoked her further when she saw he wasn't actually damaged, but she stepped back anyway, calling off the attack. Perhaps it was something in the darkening of his green eyes.
"Are you worried you're going to hurt me?" he teased. "You'll have to try a lot harder than that."
"What makes you think I was trying?" Kazul retorted. She had recovered somewhat from the near-miss of a few minutes ago, or else she was pretending to have done.
"Weren't you? Then show me what trying looks like."
He wasn't surprised by any part of the leap which brought her sailing toward him except for the part where she sailed clear over his back and then turned around in a puff of dust to drag him down to the ground from the side he hadn't been paying attention to. He probably could have stayed upright if he'd wanted to put forth the effort, but it suited him to let her pull him down.
The ensuing scuffle earned him several scratches that carefully didn't break skin. She could have done worse, but Kazul always kept her claws mostly sheathed when fighting. Ru did the same, but even so there wasn't much contest between them. Kazul had gotten out of practice with her fighting and Ru had been doing more of it lately. She ended up with her teeth bared and lightly holding his ear as if she had captured a butterfly and wished to preserve it.
"No," she said, sitting back and taking her weight off him. "I can't. But you do deserve to be bitten, and hard."
"Go ahead," Ru invited her. His voice was perhaps a little hoarse.
She shook her head and shifted backward another self-conscious six inches, wrapping her tail close around her. Ru watched her closing herself off from him and realized very suddenly that if he let her, it would be a huge mistake. He surged to his feet and bowled her over, pinning her to the ground and capturing her throat in his jaws. She struggled briefly against him, but went still when she felt his teeth.
He released her throat briefly to say, "Like this." Then he brought his incisors to close on a small portion of the side of her neck. With his whiskers he could feel her tense at the touch of his teeth, but he could also feel the way her breath caught. A part of his mind was urging him to go further, to bite her harder and draw blood, making her squeal and then scream and then fall silent, but he pushed it aside with an effort that almost left him shaking.
"Like...this?" she asked, twisting under him to bring her head up. He felt the scrape of teeth over his flesh where his neck joined his chest, just above and to the side of where the lower portion of his mane was developing, where a human collarbone might be.
"Harder is okay," he said. She had come close though, and even that made his blood shimmer in his veins, as when a tuning fork is struck and eventually the note is too faint to be heard, but can still be felt. He wondered if he'd be able to speak if she bit him any harder.
Kazul protested without taking her muzzle away from his chest and he could feel her breath through his dark fur: "I don't want to hurt you."
"Go ahead," he said. "Hurt me."
