“Tired?” Jaskier laughs, reaching over her shoulder to tousle Geralt’s hair.
“Hmm.” She tightens her grip on Jaskier’s waist, bringing her knees up to bracket Jaskier and hold her in place.
Across the firepit, conversation crackles on, faces flickering in the dim light and laughter lifting loud over the edge of the mountain. It wears on Geralt, Jaskier knows, grinding her short temper down to a smoldering nub. Sometimes, it’s taken out on her, but no matter. Jaskier knows how to put Geralt in her place.
Geralt’s nuzzling her now, rubbing her face against the soft skin at the base of her neck. Every few passes, Jaskier shivers with the scrape of teeth and tongue, gentle enough to tease, but not so light as to tickle. A strand of ash-white hair falls over her shoulder and Jaskier catches it, twisting it between her fingers and watching the way it catches the firelight.
A few meters away, someone laughs, one of the dwarves, she thinks, and Geralt tenses, growling so softly Jaskier would never have heard it had they not been so close.
“I know, love. They’ll go to bed soon.” She reaches for Geralt again and gets a nip to the neck and a low grumble for her troubles. “No touching?”
Geralt hums. “No.” There’s a pause and Jaskier is about to ask if she should pull away when Geralt says, “I’ll touch you. Don’t touch me.”
“Alright.” Jaskier keeps her hands to herself, folded in her lap, and Geralt continues to nuzzle her neck and shoulders, going all the way to the lace edges of her gown before retreating to familiar, uncovered territory.
It’s cold tonight, and gooseflesh rises wherever Geralt hasn’t been in a moment or two. The memory of her warmth makes the wind bite sharper, but Jaskier can’t bring herself to mind, not when Geralt is playing catch-up with the cold, chasing the shivers across her neck with a burning hot mouth and soft, slow breaths.