Snowmelt (the smut that wasn't meant to be)
I have continued to play in 7tree_hugger's sandbox ficverse some more [see What Polly Did Next: Winter (IV); see also my own Is it spring yet]. Snowmelt can be read on its own, but is somewhat spoilery for What Polly Did Next, so I suggest you read the epic first.
Notes: this is what happens when I attempt smut. Ahaha. It's T-rated (maybe barely an M, if you squint), Polly/ Mal fluff with Polly's mind firmly in the gutter, ~4000 words.
Posted with 7tree_hugger's permission. Story takes place at some point before the coda in Winter, albeit in a different leg of the trousers of time, since it's already spring in here whereas in the upcoming Spring it, well, isn't? We'll see when she posts it! So yeah, the timelines aren't compatible.
Summary: tl;dr Mal tries to pick Polly up for dinner, gets propositioned instead. Polly attempts seduction. There is a regrettable lack of privacy, which is heroically ignored, right up until it isn't.
Snowmelt
Polly Perks was the first to admit she wasn't a daydreamer. Go out and do it was what passed for a motto in her life (even if she was currently stuck doing firewood orders at the Border Blues' supply office. Life mottos are fickle things). But this, she thought. It had been easier when going out and doing it had consisted of her cutting off all her hair and joining the army.
Who would have thought that seducing a vampire would be such a - such a job?
It was thus that Polly's train of thoughts had got utterly lost on what she had intended merely as a little detour, long before the door to the supply office was opened with a flourish and a vampire, framed in bold evening light, greeted her with the most insinuating salute ever witnessed in these remote parts. Polly wasn't going to admit to the previous lapse of concentration, of course. Instead, she pretended to dot a few i's.
Admittedly, the daydream she wasn't going to admit to had started out much in the same way. Sweet, she thought.
"Let me finish my sentence and I shall be right with you, corporal," she said, her brain grinning like a fool, something brains weren't usually equipped to do.
"Sure." Mal took the opportunity to lounge against the doorframe, hands in her trouser pockets, looking thoroughly at ease with the world. Polly, of course, wasn't watching her. Much.
It was a good lounge, leisurely and just slightly off-balance, like a frozen swagger. It had potential.
Polly turned a page, dipped her pen into the inkwell and carefully drew a wriggly line on a scrap of paper - which existed for exactly this purpose -, then let it hover over the surface for an appropriate length of time, and finally placed a dot behind and a signature underneath it. Then she looked up.
"How can I help you today, corporal?"
That epitome of style moved. "I was thinking dinner," Mal said, closing the door behind her and advancing with a light spring in her step that told Polly that she was well caffeinated and had put anything so mundane as the day's work already out of her mind. "It's almost six," Mal added. She didn't hold with unpaid overtime.
"Can't, I'm afraid," said Polly. "Still working on the firewood orders." For a given value of true, that was the truth. She hadn't finished them yet.
"You said that when I came to take you to lunch," Mal pointed out.
"I had a sandwich," Polly said loftily. That, and a long and very interesting kiss by the weapon shed. Which had been the reason she'd only had time for a sandwich in the first place. "And these are very complicated demand equations. If we have money left over by the end of next winter, they'll cut our budget!"
"Just order four times what we got this year," said Mal. "They'll deliver about half the order and maybe we'll get warm that way. There, problem solved. Or you know what, just spend everything we've got."
"On firewood?"
Apparently Mal didn't share most of her species' special relationship with exact numbers. She indicated her general lack of enthusiasm for the world of sensible mathematics by way of a shrug, then perched down on the edge of Polly's desk, squinting down at her ledger.
Whoops.
A big, friendly, sharp grin spread over Mal's mobile face. Before Polly knew it, the vampire teased the pen out of her fingers. Quite close to Polly, she pulled the piece of paper towards here and began to write.
Polly tilted her head to read Mal's curly, and, she thought, somehow both old-fashioned and flashy handwriting upside down. It was easy, by now she knew all the curls and hooks and the way an s would sometimes look like an f.
Dear Diary, she read, Today I was a wee bit diftracted, so I drew you some spirals.
"Hey!" Polly attempted to skewer Mal with a glare. That grin, of course, remained, but it was good training for lesser privates. "Corporal, please," she added. A girl could doodle if she wanted to, right? She attempted to retrieve the paper.
Mal defended it with her life, dipped the pen into the inkwell, and scribbled some more. This time Polly couldn't read it, the paper being hidden by a blue-clad arm and an admittedly short curtain of, as always, slightly longer-than-regulation-allowed hair.
Polly sighed. "Oh look, Mal, it rains Klatchian Rare Roasted."
In Mal's defense, she didn't fall for it. But she did look up to say "Yeah, right", giving Polly ample opportunity to snatch the paper out of her hand.
I don't think I like Mal anymore today, she read. Mal always teases me!
"An astute observation," said Polly, gathering up her files. "And I wasn't distracted! Or diftracted, as it were."
Mal's face fell theatrically. "That is a bit of a letdown. Do you require me to go out and practise?"
"Knock yourself out," said Polly. "Wasn't it only half the fort who'd rush over to assist you, you said?" Once again she was focusing her attention on the stack of papers in front of her.
Mal snorted. "Yeah, well, apparently I'm dreamy," she said.
"It was one little anonymous love letter," Polly said. "And I think it may have been a joke."
"It isn't easy, being burdened with such immense charm," Mal said, unimpressed by Polly's logic, and added, "and a unique relationship to the soap issuing office."
"As the soap issuing office," Polly said, turning over a page full of numbers, "I assure you I give everyone a fair chance to wash."
"Ah," said Mal. "It's small gestures like this that truly make the world a better-smelling place. Never mind me, I'll be waiting over here until you ordered the firewood."
"It'll only take a minute," said Polly, and Mal winked, leant in for a quick kiss on the lips (Polly had been amazed how fast this had become a habit, and how fast she had grown accustomed to the logistical feat of minimising the nosebumping) - and sauntered over to the fireplace. There were delicate sounds that Polly refused to let distract her: a mechanical grind, a pour, a boil, another pour. A sip, a sigh. Soon the warm smell of coffee had filled the room.
How could a beverage that smelled so nice taste so awful? Polly thought, again rather distractedly. Really, Mal could keep it. Kept her happy, too. But the smell was very nice.
Polly paused for a second, then ordered four times the firewood they'd had this year, but doodled for a while after so Mal wouldn't notice. In any case she had the time, a cup of coffee would usually take Mal a full twelve minutes from start to finish, if they hadn't urgent business (there had been one very impressionable case of urgent business in which Polly had seen her practically inhale the stuff).
She then stepped over to the window, leant against the sill and stretched her limbs a little. The courtyard lay mostly in shadows now, but the evening sun still reached the roofs of the west wing opposite, tinged them golden.
"You finished?"
Polly hadn't noticed, until she did, that Mal had come up behind her, carrying her coffee in both hands. She felt her eyes on her.
"Yeah," she said. "'S an arithmetic masterpiece."
"Nice," said Mal. "Just as long as my coffee engine doesn't ever freeze up again. 'S all I'm asking."
"Just as long as we have priorities," said Polly, as her gaze swept over the courtyard, which had finally regained its usual brownish hue instead of the winter white.
"I'm so happy the dratted snow is gone," said Mal conversationally, covering that last bit distance of distance between them so Polly could feel her body warmth from her calves up to her shoulder blades, which tightened just a tiny little bit. She breathed out. A moment later, Mal's arms snaked around Polly's waist, one hand still holding the mostly full coffee mug, not spilling a drop. Her vampire, the multitasker.
See, Polly thought, who needs daydreams when you can have this in regular intervals, as Mal lay her head on her shoulder and lightly, lightly breathed on her neck.
Polly instantly felt electrified.
One has to keep in mind that the only experience most Borogravians had with electricity, up to this point anyway, generally took place during thunderstorms. They also tended to be over very soon.
Polly remembered the sledges, and the knitting. What would the vampire think of doing during a season she actually liked?
A little belatedly, Polly 'hm'd in acknowledgment of Mal's statement on the weather. She felt her stomach grumble a little and made a mental note to definitely take Mal up on her dinner invitation. In a little while. But surely there was time for drawing her fingers lightly over Mal's forearm that lay across her belly, then hooking them under her tightly buttoned sleeve just to reach a little more skin than what was currently available for display. There. Much better.
She felt Mal smirk against her neck, then the vampire raised the coffee cup up to consumption level and took a leisurely sip.
"It's barley soup today, anyway."
Polly quite accidentally swayed against her. "What is?" The hand with the cup was lowered again, and Polly could feel the heat from it on the back of her hand.
"Dinner," Mal informed her.
"Ah," said Polly, trying to think of an interesting feature of the surrounding landscape to point out in order to justify remaining at the window with her nose almost to the glass. One could point out the lack of snow only so many times. She was just glad the window wasn't easily viewable from the door. "Didn't you say that about lunch?"
"Did I? I seem to recall it was groats for lunch."
"Something grey, anyway."
"Mmh."
There was a soft vibrato to that little sound that Polly was sure hadn't been there before. She would have noticed it, because it sure made the little hairs on the back of her neck stand up and that never happened when she first met Mal. At least not in a good way.
Sergeant Polly Perks of the Border Blues had to admit to herself that a dinner of barley soup was not at the forefront of her thoughts. And certainly not at the bottom. Any assertions of her not being distracted may by now be laughed out of court.
And furthermore she realised she probably wasn't alone in the predicament if the thumb of Mal's unoccupied-by-coffee hand drawing a sensuous little circle on the coarse fabric of her shirt, somewhere in the general vicinity of her hip, was anything to go by. Of course, between the shirt and the sensible undershirt some of it got lost, yet her brain still went up a gear.
She may have sighed. Her she was, being sensuously embraced by a person who she'd liked since forever and who she had been exclusively kissing for the better part of a season, and she still hadn't figured out how to properly change the topic to the thing that had been on her mind recently. Sex.
See? she thought pointedly to herself. I can say it in my mind. Sex sex sex. Sex. Oh god.
If she let things go on as they did, what with Mal being as polite about it as she was, Polly would probably still be daydreaming about this by the time she made lieutenant. She just had to go out and do it. Bring it up, that was. She was pretty sure Mal wouldn't mind. The conundrum, as it were, lay elsewhere.
It wasn't that she didn't have any idea of what she might be expecting, having always been blessed with pretty vivid imagination and, admittedly, having read a handful or so of very, very abominable books. She definitely had a list of things that she'd one day like to try, even if she was a little worried they weren't strictly reality-proof.
She just didn't know what was done typically by real people who were facing her conundrum - she was beginning to like the word - of courting a very old and, in all likelihood, very experienced female vampire, and all that in a castle where one seldomly was alone. She didn't even know if there were enough girls in her situation that the word "typical" was applicable at all. Or if she wanted to go a typical route at all.
She just she wanted to get a little closer to Mal, a little more horizontal, and a lot less clothed. It was the details that were killing her.
Oh, bite me, she thought suddenly, it's a beautiful day, and the only person in the vicinity who is even remotely qualified to help me out is already snuggling up to me in a rather amorous fashion. Go ahead.
So Polly drew a deep breath and asked about it. Namely the if, the when, and the how.
She felt rather proud, if a little worried, at the speechlessness that persisted for a whole twelve seconds or so, while Mal had a puzzled sip of coffee. Polly resisted the urge to poke her arm. Instead she just stood very, very still and held her breath a little, listening innocently to the pounding of her heart. She was sure it must be audible all the way to the roof.
"Oh, ok," said Mal, having regained her cool. "Yes please to the first one."
Polly breathed out. "Phew." Funnily enough, however, the answer did nothing to calm her agitation. On the contrary, the world suddenly became much more exciting.
"Yes, I am full of surprises," said Mal, with a smirk. "I can do next Wednesday to the second one."
It turned out that Polly had merely been postponing that poke and now she applied it to the ribs. It was met with a satisfying squirm. "Wednesday is fine," she said, trying hard to keep her voice level.
"As for the how," Mal began, and stopped. With a minimal turn of her hand, she placed the coffee cup on the window sill. It wasn't even finished! Polly was rather impressed with herself, when Mal added, "Do you require a comprehensive list? Or just some suggestions?"
"You are impossible," said Polly.
Mal shrugged. "Sorry."
"I meant mainly the practical side, sort of thing," said Polly.
"Yeah, that's what I was hinting at," said Mal.
"I mean, practical as in, you may have noticed we have no privacy at all so obviously we should be doing something about this," said Polly. It was the truth, she thought. Before you could do anything you needed to have space to do it in. That was the sensible order in which to do things. A sudden burst of curiousity made her add, "But by all means, let's hear what you have in mind."
Mal laughed. "Dear diary, why must Mal be such a tease all the time?"
Nothing in in her life had prepared Polly for what followed. Apparently she hadn't been the only one distracted by daydreams lately, she thought, with great satisfaction. That much variety couldn't be produced ad hoc, could it? She couldn't help the rather satisfied smile creep up on her face.
Mal's suggestions, declared in low, slow tones and delivered directly into her attentive ear, were certainly very... suggestive. Mal's arms around her tightened just a little, a minuscule change in pressure that nevertheless sent happy little shivers in interesting directions. A thumb was dragged, lightly, over the line just above where her trousers ended. Fingers tugged a little at the fabric, maybe to catch a little skin there, but left it alone in the end.
It was all rather enjoyable. A small part of her brain kept comparing notes with the Book of Abominations. The high hit count was, she thought, promising.
Mal could have been, of course, reading a map to her at this moment, Polly realised, or a menu, or the classified section of the Ankh-Morpork Times. She mused on that fact until she realised one of the honeyed phrases had been adorned by a question mark.
"What?" she said. "Why are you even asking?" Outside somewhere, a sun finally set. She noticed her room was almost the only one not lit by now.
"At some point after the age of two hundred one learns not to assume these things," said Mal. "Do excuse me, I'm just curious." Light kisses dropped along the edge of her jaw, and on the soft skin underneath her ear. Hair tickling. Oh.
"Ah, okay," said Polly. When in doubt, bustle, she remembered vaguely. Only she wouldn't bet on it being helpful. For a moment, Polly wasn't sure whether she should be offended at the question, or mildly interested that Mal had been considering the possibility at all. What did she think went on in Munz?
Then Polly figured, seeing as how she was about to do it with a vampire who was also a woman, or rather, a woman who was also a vampire, or even just -Nuggan forbid - planning to do something that might actually be enjoyable, "should" and "shouldn't" should probably omitted from her vocabulary. As it were.
"No," she said. "Never. But if it's any help, I'd really like to one of these days."
"Yes, we ascertained that already," said Mal.
"Oh, for Nuggan's sake," said Polly. She lifted her arms to where Mal was right behind her, entwining her fingers behind Mal's head, drawing her towards her. Polly turned her head and finally they were kissing, Mal's mouth perfect on hers, her breath, her lips, her tongue; even her teeth weren't much of a nuisance this time. Polly did realise she was, despite clothes, thus pretty exposed - or make that accessible, since she didn't really mind - as Mal's hands began an almost innocent saunter upward on her ribcage, only stopping when they had definitely reached territory that had so far today been sadly left unexplored.
A happy sigh escaped Polly's mouth.
Wednesday really was a long way off, she thought. She was almost sure it had been a joke, and wondered how best to inquire whether Mal's actual intention had been to ask her to take off all her clothes at once. In any case, she noticed, they were being just a tad more adventurous than usual. She considered turning round to face Mal in order to make the kissing a little less cramped, but Mal's hands moving on her breasts were perfect the way they were, and so was the feeling of her torso pressed against Polly's back. Her breath may have grown a tad quicker. She removed one hand from the back of Mal's neck in order to loosen her own collar.
It sure was an evening of slow decisions. Hadn't there been something about dinner? Polly barely remembered. Something grey, anyway. Polly removed one hand from the back of Mal's neck in order to loosen her own collar, and since that didn't quite help in trying to catch her breath, loosened it some more. She was rewarded with a soft, lingering kiss on where her neck met her shoulder, a quick flicker of a tongue on her flushed skin.
"Corporal," she breathed.
That dark head was raised. "Yes, ma'am?" it inquired. Half-lidded eyes glittered mischievously.
"This has been going on long enough. And enough is enough, I mean."
Considering the degree of involvement they had been in, Mal untangled herself fairly quickly and took a small but crucial step towards decorum, that was, back. Now Polly stood there, alone by a few measly centimetres, thinking, that wasn't quite what I meant.
"Sorry," said the vampire. One day, Polly would learn to apologise that nonchalantly.
Polly took that chance to turn round and reach for Mal's hands.
"What the hell, it's a beautiful day, and I am going to screw your brains out," she informed Mal. "Right now. Right here. If you agree, obviously."
Polly only had a fraction of a second to feel really, really stupid. She consoled herself by thinking that, for that same fraction of a second, Mal was probably really, really surprised. That was two times in one evening! Then Mal raised a beautiful eyebrow at her, but, Polly noticed with satisfaction, not too hard. She followed Mal's gaze towards the narrow cot that had already proved to be able to hold two people in it at once, provided they didn't move.
Then Mal turned her attention back to Polly, and she squeezed her hand, smirking. "Challenge accepted."
"Good," said Polly. "I'm locking the door."
Her brain, of course, was doing cartwheels. Already she had forgot how one, theoretically, approached the propositioned activities. If all else fails, she thought wildly, it was probably acceptable to lie back and let Mal have her sweet, corruptive way with her. Also had the advantage of drastically reducing the probability of injuries on the narrow bed.
And at least that was a better approach than her attempts at shaving Blouse. Pretend you have an idea what you're doing, produce a lot of foam, hope a war breaks out before you get a chance to perform.
Or maybe (another thought squeezed through) the floor would do in a pinch. She didn't know, but she was certainly very excited about it all.
Now where was the blasted key?
They had been separated by more than a metre for more than five seconds already, which was probably why Mal was able to relocate her attention on something else for a moment.
"So, Polly," she said, in a far more casual tone than before.
"I hear you," said Polly. "You're going to inform me that Ganzfield is on the other side of the door, yes?"
"He sure is advancing," said Mal. "Corporals really are competing for your attention today."
"I hate everyone," said Polly. "It's a beautiful day. What's he doing indoors?"
"He's a clerk," said Mal. "He was born indoors."
"Most of us were, Mal."
"Whatever," said Mal. "As for the privacy situation -"
And in that moment, the door opened after a polite knock that neither of them had acknowledged, and there was Ganzfield, coughing politely and wielding a form and looking from one of them to the other and seeing nothing much out of the ordinary -
"I'll think of something," finished Mal.
"Good," said Polly.
"Are you coming to dinner?"
"In a minute, soon as I sorted out," strangled, "Ganzfield -"
Mal smiled at her sharply, her thoughts efficiently communicated, and left. For now.
Later, at the dinner table, Polly noticed with interest that they were both wholly and utterly unable to keep a straight face.
Notes: this is what happens when I attempt smut. Ahaha. It's T-rated (maybe barely an M, if you squint), Polly/ Mal fluff with Polly's mind firmly in the gutter, ~4000 words.
Posted with 7tree_hugger's permission. Story takes place at some point before the coda in Winter, albeit in a different leg of the trousers of time, since it's already spring in here whereas in the upcoming Spring it, well, isn't? We'll see when she posts it! So yeah, the timelines aren't compatible.
Summary: tl;dr Mal tries to pick Polly up for dinner, gets propositioned instead. Polly attempts seduction. There is a regrettable lack of privacy, which is heroically ignored, right up until it isn't.
Snowmelt
Polly Perks was the first to admit she wasn't a daydreamer. Go out and do it was what passed for a motto in her life (even if she was currently stuck doing firewood orders at the Border Blues' supply office. Life mottos are fickle things). But this, she thought. It had been easier when going out and doing it had consisted of her cutting off all her hair and joining the army.
Who would have thought that seducing a vampire would be such a - such a job?
It was thus that Polly's train of thoughts had got utterly lost on what she had intended merely as a little detour, long before the door to the supply office was opened with a flourish and a vampire, framed in bold evening light, greeted her with the most insinuating salute ever witnessed in these remote parts. Polly wasn't going to admit to the previous lapse of concentration, of course. Instead, she pretended to dot a few i's.
Admittedly, the daydream she wasn't going to admit to had started out much in the same way. Sweet, she thought.
"Let me finish my sentence and I shall be right with you, corporal," she said, her brain grinning like a fool, something brains weren't usually equipped to do.
"Sure." Mal took the opportunity to lounge against the doorframe, hands in her trouser pockets, looking thoroughly at ease with the world. Polly, of course, wasn't watching her. Much.
It was a good lounge, leisurely and just slightly off-balance, like a frozen swagger. It had potential.
Polly turned a page, dipped her pen into the inkwell and carefully drew a wriggly line on a scrap of paper - which existed for exactly this purpose -, then let it hover over the surface for an appropriate length of time, and finally placed a dot behind and a signature underneath it. Then she looked up.
"How can I help you today, corporal?"
That epitome of style moved. "I was thinking dinner," Mal said, closing the door behind her and advancing with a light spring in her step that told Polly that she was well caffeinated and had put anything so mundane as the day's work already out of her mind. "It's almost six," Mal added. She didn't hold with unpaid overtime.
"Can't, I'm afraid," said Polly. "Still working on the firewood orders." For a given value of true, that was the truth. She hadn't finished them yet.
"You said that when I came to take you to lunch," Mal pointed out.
"I had a sandwich," Polly said loftily. That, and a long and very interesting kiss by the weapon shed. Which had been the reason she'd only had time for a sandwich in the first place. "And these are very complicated demand equations. If we have money left over by the end of next winter, they'll cut our budget!"
"Just order four times what we got this year," said Mal. "They'll deliver about half the order and maybe we'll get warm that way. There, problem solved. Or you know what, just spend everything we've got."
"On firewood?"
Apparently Mal didn't share most of her species' special relationship with exact numbers. She indicated her general lack of enthusiasm for the world of sensible mathematics by way of a shrug, then perched down on the edge of Polly's desk, squinting down at her ledger.
Whoops.
A big, friendly, sharp grin spread over Mal's mobile face. Before Polly knew it, the vampire teased the pen out of her fingers. Quite close to Polly, she pulled the piece of paper towards here and began to write.
Polly tilted her head to read Mal's curly, and, she thought, somehow both old-fashioned and flashy handwriting upside down. It was easy, by now she knew all the curls and hooks and the way an s would sometimes look like an f.
Dear Diary, she read, Today I was a wee bit diftracted, so I drew you some spirals.
"Hey!" Polly attempted to skewer Mal with a glare. That grin, of course, remained, but it was good training for lesser privates. "Corporal, please," she added. A girl could doodle if she wanted to, right? She attempted to retrieve the paper.
Mal defended it with her life, dipped the pen into the inkwell, and scribbled some more. This time Polly couldn't read it, the paper being hidden by a blue-clad arm and an admittedly short curtain of, as always, slightly longer-than-regulation-allowed hair.
Polly sighed. "Oh look, Mal, it rains Klatchian Rare Roasted."
In Mal's defense, she didn't fall for it. But she did look up to say "Yeah, right", giving Polly ample opportunity to snatch the paper out of her hand.
I don't think I like Mal anymore today, she read. Mal always teases me!
"An astute observation," said Polly, gathering up her files. "And I wasn't distracted! Or diftracted, as it were."
Mal's face fell theatrically. "That is a bit of a letdown. Do you require me to go out and practise?"
"Knock yourself out," said Polly. "Wasn't it only half the fort who'd rush over to assist you, you said?" Once again she was focusing her attention on the stack of papers in front of her.
Mal snorted. "Yeah, well, apparently I'm dreamy," she said.
"It was one little anonymous love letter," Polly said. "And I think it may have been a joke."
"It isn't easy, being burdened with such immense charm," Mal said, unimpressed by Polly's logic, and added, "and a unique relationship to the soap issuing office."
"As the soap issuing office," Polly said, turning over a page full of numbers, "I assure you I give everyone a fair chance to wash."
"Ah," said Mal. "It's small gestures like this that truly make the world a better-smelling place. Never mind me, I'll be waiting over here until you ordered the firewood."
"It'll only take a minute," said Polly, and Mal winked, leant in for a quick kiss on the lips (Polly had been amazed how fast this had become a habit, and how fast she had grown accustomed to the logistical feat of minimising the nosebumping) - and sauntered over to the fireplace. There were delicate sounds that Polly refused to let distract her: a mechanical grind, a pour, a boil, another pour. A sip, a sigh. Soon the warm smell of coffee had filled the room.
How could a beverage that smelled so nice taste so awful? Polly thought, again rather distractedly. Really, Mal could keep it. Kept her happy, too. But the smell was very nice.
Polly paused for a second, then ordered four times the firewood they'd had this year, but doodled for a while after so Mal wouldn't notice. In any case she had the time, a cup of coffee would usually take Mal a full twelve minutes from start to finish, if they hadn't urgent business (there had been one very impressionable case of urgent business in which Polly had seen her practically inhale the stuff).
She then stepped over to the window, leant against the sill and stretched her limbs a little. The courtyard lay mostly in shadows now, but the evening sun still reached the roofs of the west wing opposite, tinged them golden.
"You finished?"
Polly hadn't noticed, until she did, that Mal had come up behind her, carrying her coffee in both hands. She felt her eyes on her.
"Yeah," she said. "'S an arithmetic masterpiece."
"Nice," said Mal. "Just as long as my coffee engine doesn't ever freeze up again. 'S all I'm asking."
"Just as long as we have priorities," said Polly, as her gaze swept over the courtyard, which had finally regained its usual brownish hue instead of the winter white.
"I'm so happy the dratted snow is gone," said Mal conversationally, covering that last bit distance of distance between them so Polly could feel her body warmth from her calves up to her shoulder blades, which tightened just a tiny little bit. She breathed out. A moment later, Mal's arms snaked around Polly's waist, one hand still holding the mostly full coffee mug, not spilling a drop. Her vampire, the multitasker.
See, Polly thought, who needs daydreams when you can have this in regular intervals, as Mal lay her head on her shoulder and lightly, lightly breathed on her neck.
Polly instantly felt electrified.
One has to keep in mind that the only experience most Borogravians had with electricity, up to this point anyway, generally took place during thunderstorms. They also tended to be over very soon.
Polly remembered the sledges, and the knitting. What would the vampire think of doing during a season she actually liked?
A little belatedly, Polly 'hm'd in acknowledgment of Mal's statement on the weather. She felt her stomach grumble a little and made a mental note to definitely take Mal up on her dinner invitation. In a little while. But surely there was time for drawing her fingers lightly over Mal's forearm that lay across her belly, then hooking them under her tightly buttoned sleeve just to reach a little more skin than what was currently available for display. There. Much better.
She felt Mal smirk against her neck, then the vampire raised the coffee cup up to consumption level and took a leisurely sip.
"It's barley soup today, anyway."
Polly quite accidentally swayed against her. "What is?" The hand with the cup was lowered again, and Polly could feel the heat from it on the back of her hand.
"Dinner," Mal informed her.
"Ah," said Polly, trying to think of an interesting feature of the surrounding landscape to point out in order to justify remaining at the window with her nose almost to the glass. One could point out the lack of snow only so many times. She was just glad the window wasn't easily viewable from the door. "Didn't you say that about lunch?"
"Did I? I seem to recall it was groats for lunch."
"Something grey, anyway."
"Mmh."
There was a soft vibrato to that little sound that Polly was sure hadn't been there before. She would have noticed it, because it sure made the little hairs on the back of her neck stand up and that never happened when she first met Mal. At least not in a good way.
Sergeant Polly Perks of the Border Blues had to admit to herself that a dinner of barley soup was not at the forefront of her thoughts. And certainly not at the bottom. Any assertions of her not being distracted may by now be laughed out of court.
And furthermore she realised she probably wasn't alone in the predicament if the thumb of Mal's unoccupied-by-coffee hand drawing a sensuous little circle on the coarse fabric of her shirt, somewhere in the general vicinity of her hip, was anything to go by. Of course, between the shirt and the sensible undershirt some of it got lost, yet her brain still went up a gear.
She may have sighed. Her she was, being sensuously embraced by a person who she'd liked since forever and who she had been exclusively kissing for the better part of a season, and she still hadn't figured out how to properly change the topic to the thing that had been on her mind recently. Sex.
See? she thought pointedly to herself. I can say it in my mind. Sex sex sex. Sex. Oh god.
If she let things go on as they did, what with Mal being as polite about it as she was, Polly would probably still be daydreaming about this by the time she made lieutenant. She just had to go out and do it. Bring it up, that was. She was pretty sure Mal wouldn't mind. The conundrum, as it were, lay elsewhere.
It wasn't that she didn't have any idea of what she might be expecting, having always been blessed with pretty vivid imagination and, admittedly, having read a handful or so of very, very abominable books. She definitely had a list of things that she'd one day like to try, even if she was a little worried they weren't strictly reality-proof.
She just didn't know what was done typically by real people who were facing her conundrum - she was beginning to like the word - of courting a very old and, in all likelihood, very experienced female vampire, and all that in a castle where one seldomly was alone. She didn't even know if there were enough girls in her situation that the word "typical" was applicable at all. Or if she wanted to go a typical route at all.
She just she wanted to get a little closer to Mal, a little more horizontal, and a lot less clothed. It was the details that were killing her.
Oh, bite me, she thought suddenly, it's a beautiful day, and the only person in the vicinity who is even remotely qualified to help me out is already snuggling up to me in a rather amorous fashion. Go ahead.
So Polly drew a deep breath and asked about it. Namely the if, the when, and the how.
She felt rather proud, if a little worried, at the speechlessness that persisted for a whole twelve seconds or so, while Mal had a puzzled sip of coffee. Polly resisted the urge to poke her arm. Instead she just stood very, very still and held her breath a little, listening innocently to the pounding of her heart. She was sure it must be audible all the way to the roof.
"Oh, ok," said Mal, having regained her cool. "Yes please to the first one."
Polly breathed out. "Phew." Funnily enough, however, the answer did nothing to calm her agitation. On the contrary, the world suddenly became much more exciting.
"Yes, I am full of surprises," said Mal, with a smirk. "I can do next Wednesday to the second one."
It turned out that Polly had merely been postponing that poke and now she applied it to the ribs. It was met with a satisfying squirm. "Wednesday is fine," she said, trying hard to keep her voice level.
"As for the how," Mal began, and stopped. With a minimal turn of her hand, she placed the coffee cup on the window sill. It wasn't even finished! Polly was rather impressed with herself, when Mal added, "Do you require a comprehensive list? Or just some suggestions?"
"You are impossible," said Polly.
Mal shrugged. "Sorry."
"I meant mainly the practical side, sort of thing," said Polly.
"Yeah, that's what I was hinting at," said Mal.
"I mean, practical as in, you may have noticed we have no privacy at all so obviously we should be doing something about this," said Polly. It was the truth, she thought. Before you could do anything you needed to have space to do it in. That was the sensible order in which to do things. A sudden burst of curiousity made her add, "But by all means, let's hear what you have in mind."
Mal laughed. "Dear diary, why must Mal be such a tease all the time?"
Nothing in in her life had prepared Polly for what followed. Apparently she hadn't been the only one distracted by daydreams lately, she thought, with great satisfaction. That much variety couldn't be produced ad hoc, could it? She couldn't help the rather satisfied smile creep up on her face.
Mal's suggestions, declared in low, slow tones and delivered directly into her attentive ear, were certainly very... suggestive. Mal's arms around her tightened just a little, a minuscule change in pressure that nevertheless sent happy little shivers in interesting directions. A thumb was dragged, lightly, over the line just above where her trousers ended. Fingers tugged a little at the fabric, maybe to catch a little skin there, but left it alone in the end.
It was all rather enjoyable. A small part of her brain kept comparing notes with the Book of Abominations. The high hit count was, she thought, promising.
Mal could have been, of course, reading a map to her at this moment, Polly realised, or a menu, or the classified section of the Ankh-Morpork Times. She mused on that fact until she realised one of the honeyed phrases had been adorned by a question mark.
"What?" she said. "Why are you even asking?" Outside somewhere, a sun finally set. She noticed her room was almost the only one not lit by now.
"At some point after the age of two hundred one learns not to assume these things," said Mal. "Do excuse me, I'm just curious." Light kisses dropped along the edge of her jaw, and on the soft skin underneath her ear. Hair tickling. Oh.
"Ah, okay," said Polly. When in doubt, bustle, she remembered vaguely. Only she wouldn't bet on it being helpful. For a moment, Polly wasn't sure whether she should be offended at the question, or mildly interested that Mal had been considering the possibility at all. What did she think went on in Munz?
Then Polly figured, seeing as how she was about to do it with a vampire who was also a woman, or rather, a woman who was also a vampire, or even just -Nuggan forbid - planning to do something that might actually be enjoyable, "should" and "shouldn't" should probably omitted from her vocabulary. As it were.
"No," she said. "Never. But if it's any help, I'd really like to one of these days."
"Yes, we ascertained that already," said Mal.
"Oh, for Nuggan's sake," said Polly. She lifted her arms to where Mal was right behind her, entwining her fingers behind Mal's head, drawing her towards her. Polly turned her head and finally they were kissing, Mal's mouth perfect on hers, her breath, her lips, her tongue; even her teeth weren't much of a nuisance this time. Polly did realise she was, despite clothes, thus pretty exposed - or make that accessible, since she didn't really mind - as Mal's hands began an almost innocent saunter upward on her ribcage, only stopping when they had definitely reached territory that had so far today been sadly left unexplored.
A happy sigh escaped Polly's mouth.
Wednesday really was a long way off, she thought. She was almost sure it had been a joke, and wondered how best to inquire whether Mal's actual intention had been to ask her to take off all her clothes at once. In any case, she noticed, they were being just a tad more adventurous than usual. She considered turning round to face Mal in order to make the kissing a little less cramped, but Mal's hands moving on her breasts were perfect the way they were, and so was the feeling of her torso pressed against Polly's back. Her breath may have grown a tad quicker. She removed one hand from the back of Mal's neck in order to loosen her own collar.
It sure was an evening of slow decisions. Hadn't there been something about dinner? Polly barely remembered. Something grey, anyway. Polly removed one hand from the back of Mal's neck in order to loosen her own collar, and since that didn't quite help in trying to catch her breath, loosened it some more. She was rewarded with a soft, lingering kiss on where her neck met her shoulder, a quick flicker of a tongue on her flushed skin.
"Corporal," she breathed.
That dark head was raised. "Yes, ma'am?" it inquired. Half-lidded eyes glittered mischievously.
"This has been going on long enough. And enough is enough, I mean."
Considering the degree of involvement they had been in, Mal untangled herself fairly quickly and took a small but crucial step towards decorum, that was, back. Now Polly stood there, alone by a few measly centimetres, thinking, that wasn't quite what I meant.
"Sorry," said the vampire. One day, Polly would learn to apologise that nonchalantly.
Polly took that chance to turn round and reach for Mal's hands.
"What the hell, it's a beautiful day, and I am going to screw your brains out," she informed Mal. "Right now. Right here. If you agree, obviously."
Polly only had a fraction of a second to feel really, really stupid. She consoled herself by thinking that, for that same fraction of a second, Mal was probably really, really surprised. That was two times in one evening! Then Mal raised a beautiful eyebrow at her, but, Polly noticed with satisfaction, not too hard. She followed Mal's gaze towards the narrow cot that had already proved to be able to hold two people in it at once, provided they didn't move.
Then Mal turned her attention back to Polly, and she squeezed her hand, smirking. "Challenge accepted."
"Good," said Polly. "I'm locking the door."
Her brain, of course, was doing cartwheels. Already she had forgot how one, theoretically, approached the propositioned activities. If all else fails, she thought wildly, it was probably acceptable to lie back and let Mal have her sweet, corruptive way with her. Also had the advantage of drastically reducing the probability of injuries on the narrow bed.
And at least that was a better approach than her attempts at shaving Blouse. Pretend you have an idea what you're doing, produce a lot of foam, hope a war breaks out before you get a chance to perform.
Or maybe (another thought squeezed through) the floor would do in a pinch. She didn't know, but she was certainly very excited about it all.
Now where was the blasted key?
They had been separated by more than a metre for more than five seconds already, which was probably why Mal was able to relocate her attention on something else for a moment.
"So, Polly," she said, in a far more casual tone than before.
"I hear you," said Polly. "You're going to inform me that Ganzfield is on the other side of the door, yes?"
"He sure is advancing," said Mal. "Corporals really are competing for your attention today."
"I hate everyone," said Polly. "It's a beautiful day. What's he doing indoors?"
"He's a clerk," said Mal. "He was born indoors."
"Most of us were, Mal."
"Whatever," said Mal. "As for the privacy situation -"
And in that moment, the door opened after a polite knock that neither of them had acknowledged, and there was Ganzfield, coughing politely and wielding a form and looking from one of them to the other and seeing nothing much out of the ordinary -
"I'll think of something," finished Mal.
"Good," said Polly.
"Are you coming to dinner?"
"In a minute, soon as I sorted out," strangled, "Ganzfield -"
Mal smiled at her sharply, her thoughts efficiently communicated, and left. For now.
Later, at the dinner table, Polly noticed with interest that they were both wholly and utterly unable to keep a straight face.