experts abandon

Lora's no blushing bride. It may be so that she's easily flustered when complimented out of the blue, or by strangers with no real reason to do so, and she is by all means a gracious person, but...

Architect, her composure is so attractive, even as she's bargaining with Minoth about whose pants - well, chaps (or skirt and bulky boots) - come off first.

Which is definitely what he's not supposed to be thinking, since they agreed to this on a basis of platonic activity only, but they're friends, right? Friends can care about each other, be interested in each other, appreciate each other. Friends don't have to feel dirty doing all that. That's what friends are for.

Right?

Well, so Minoth feels a little dirty. They do happen to be in a secluded clearing in the woods, using a thin blanket as cover against the grass and dirt and bugs, et cetera. And Lora does happen to be taking his pants off.

"What, no foreplay?" he'd joked - however impotently, since she was clearly the one taking charge.

Lora had rolled her eyes good-naturedly. "And just what kind of foreplay do you think I can get into when you've got no skin exposed?"

Certainly not dirty talk, was the bit left unsaid. And Minoth could get along with that. Instead of mouthing off any more, he'd stuck to feeling up Lora's thighs until she met his careful gaze and let him trail his hands up farther.

His thumbs trace the barest hint of stretch marks at the very inner corners, just below a thick carpet of red, slightly wavy hair. Minoth is very conscious of all the dangerous things that could happen to his wrists if they linger between two such powerful appendages for too long, and the thought only emboldens him.

Now his hands move to Lora's waist, with a brief and efficient detour to remove her smock, and his mouth to the boundary between leg and vulva, nearing taint. In this way, Lora gets pushed down on her back - Minoth is still, in fact, mostly clothed, if you count his leotard remaining firmly in place, but he feels naked in the way that you do when you forget to take your socks off first, so he doesn't intend to stop from moving things along, here.

Lora's calves, however, clamp around his flanks as her fists clutch for stray patches of grass, locking him down to his current choice of activity - foreplay, is it? Minoth peers up to meet her gaze between the valley of her chest.

Can't get cocky, right? "How are we doing?" How am I doing? This is crazy? Help?

"You're pushing me away," Lora says, smirking despite shortness of breath. "And here I thought I was your friend."

"Well," Minoth replies, grinning in kind, "then come back, mi amigo, come back!"

Perhaps poorly planned is her return, however; Lora winces when her sternum strikes Minoth's Core. Though there's no way to prevent that possibly-awkward collision, Minoth does relent to removing the rest of his clothing, undershorts included.

Lora's eyes light up brighter at that. She really does hate foreplay, then. One hand braced on Minoth's trapezius, the other cupped in his armpit, she shifts back and cants her hips at the right angle to slot over his clit with her own. Meanwhile, hands slip to a comfortable median position: gripped first loosely, then tightly, one in another. There are more important things than arms to wrestle, here.

Now is Lora's turn for a check-in glance. Minoth looks equally hungry, but along different dimensions, as if he'd been thinking about kissing her back, groping her ass, biting her tits. She'll consider it (it's not that she has no partiality at all), but oh, he is a gentleman.

No, this is what she'd been looking for when Minoth had so happily obliged. Happy as pertained to both circumstance and demeanor, that is. It's not the kind of thing Lora would have had the confidence to bring up with someone she knows only so well as the traveling Flesh Eater had she not suspected fortune on her side as well.

Minoth is bigger than her, but her clit's still bigger than his, and Lora has more than a little fun trying subtle changes in direction, speed and pressure to get Minoth to gasp and tense, then relax and contort the other way. Were he not holding her fingertips in his grasp, she'd attempt tweaking his nipples. Maybe it's not fair to be distracted, though.

In aid of her focus, and only that, Lora brings her hands to her sides in order to guide Minoth when she removes them. Instead, she's got her sights set on his ponytail, since it cannot be comfortable having that bump against the ground behind him. Lora asks permission only with the side of an eye, slipping the tie onto her own right wrist and running her fingers through Minoth's hair from roots to tips.

Minoth keeps her balance for her all the while. When Lora returns, his palms slide down her waist to her hips, and now he's helping her drive all her weight into his core, over and over, rolling her hips and rolling her eyes back. She'd like to keep them open and watch for Minoth's own layers of climax, but there's only room for so many indulgences at once, Lora supposes.

With the rhythm firmly planted, Lora adds a few well-timed squeezes of her thighs. Minoth's eyebrows raise at that, and she even has the temerity to grin at him - not wink, though. That would be Minoth's department, if he felt quite so saucy at the moment.

Instead, he's grave, contemplative, almost to the point of solemn. Lora runs her hands over his chest and ribs at odd intervals, waiting for whatever it is to drop. Their nether regions are still hard at work, but at the level of a pleasant hum that would be noticed more in its absence than its current presence.

Every time Lora begins to think Minoth's abandoned pulling his weight, he catches an especially raw nerve on her clit, and she hasn't the synapses left over to keep keeping track.

Perhaps he's thinking about all the crickets they've crushed in the course of their little escapade. Perhaps he's thinking about the last sex scene he wrote.

"Is this frotting or grinding?"

Lora exhales, using the side of a sweaty index finger to finish moving insistent locks of damp hair out of her eyes. "What's the difference?"

"Dunno," muses Minoth. "One's gay, one's not."

"I think we're a comfortable neither."

"Easy for you to say!"

But that's just the thing: it's so, so easy. When you say "friends with benefits", it's a catty, snarky euphemism just as dirty as what it implies, belies, entails. The innocent should think it a nod to shared health insurance, to hyper-pragmatically bureaucratically-motivated and-then-not-only unions, to adulthood, and it does relate to adulthood, but in such an...immature way. It's embarrassed of itself and arrogant all in one. And that...that's embarrassing.

Why can't adults just be proud of themselves and their attachments? What polite conversation are you even going to be in where you can say one but not the other?

Lora watches Minoth ponder all this and passively invite a slower, gentler tempo, until she can brace elbows down on either side of his torso and just breathe.

"Were you done?" he asks, faintly.

"Were you expecting more?" Contrary to her spunky tone, Lora doesn't arch back up to fighting form; it's a genuine, and tired, question.

After all, she'll gladly leave the rhetoric, such as it is, to Minoth, when she can.

Now Minoth makes a beckoning motion, that she should come down to the hard ground he so yieldingly saved and spared her from to lie alongside him. Lora does, but she's quite careful about the curve of her back as she does so.

Minoth's casual invitation turns to catlike inquisition. "No touch?"

"No vulnerable feminine protection touch," Lora corrects.

"So we'll cuddle like guys in a locker room." Minoth shrugs, though the light in his eyes is serious. In actuality, his description hits most of what Lora's going for: joint recuperation from the joint exertion, without too much emotional counterpoint. Unless she truly needed resuscitation, in which case grateful and tender touch would be welcomed.

Minoth is warm, heavy; Lora's knotted-up muscles meet a resistance with just enough give to press the wrinkles out of her.

Then his hand, large and rough but with surprisingly slender digits, cups the side of her face, and she feels a kiss brush the other side.

The contact is gone just as quickly; somehow Lora thinks he hadn't even thought about it, or hadn't let himself think about it long enough to stop, because he just couldn't help himself.

"To sleep now?" she says, voice light.

"Just closing my eyes for politeness," and so dutifully, they are lidded. "Take your leave of me any time. But throw a blanket over instead, would you?"

What a fascinating display of decency. "You thought I would leave you?"

Another shrug. "Knight's prerogative."

"Well, this knight," Lora pauses to deliver a cheek kiss of her own, with twice the force and smack, "has a little more loyalty than that."

Now Minoth's eyes are what act of own volition, bursting open above a laugh that shouts out from the back of his throat to the usually-absent apples of his highly-severe high cheekbones.

"What are we?" Wonder spiked with the sparkling, sharded remnants of that laughter coats his voice; Lora knows what he means is, what are you, you wonderful thing?

"Neither here nor there, but a secret third thing. In other words, whatever we" - you, you wonderful thing - "want."

"Maybe next time you'll throw me around a little, then!"

"Maybe," Lora replies, yanking Minoth's far arm over her middle and turning over, away. "Knight's prerogative."