For once, I picked the responsible option.
The inn had a common room, and common rooms had morning men in them.
The crier had a crowd, and crowds had eyes.
I had a torn shirt, soaked trousers, and a body still filing its report down the inside of my boots, and whatever I walked into today, I was walking in cleaner.
The menu folded itself away with what I swore was reluctance, and I went looking for water.
The pump yard hid in a gap behind the bakehouse row. An iron hand pump stood bolted to a worn stone trough; the chandler's stall next door was shuttered tight, and I wedged its half-door shut behind me for the illusion of privacy.
The bakehouse wall breathed warmth through its vents, ovens glowing orange somewhere inside, pushing yeast and honey into the cold morning air. It was the closest thing to a bathroom I'd had in two days, and I could have kissed the pump handle.
The first gush was ice. It hit my chest and wrung a gasp out of me, goosebumps racing down my arms, my nipples pulling tight enough to ache. I cupped water between my thighs again and again, and watched two days of legend swirl off me in white threads and run down the drain groove of the trough stone.
I scrubbed dried cum off my inner thighs with my thumb, wrung my ruined panties out twice, and let the cold sting my swollen pussy back into some kind of alertness.
By the third rinse I was shivering, clean, and half-human again, and I stood there dripping in the yeast-warm air, understanding that this was the thing I missed most.
Soap. Cold water. A door that shut.
My entire old life had lived downstream of small private moments like this one, and I had never once noticed them happening.
Behind me, buckets clinked.
He came around the corner with a water yoke across his shoulders and a pail hanging from each end, and he was the size of the doorway he'd come through.
Half-orc, six-four at least, built like a barn door, grey-green all over, forearms dusted white to the elbow with flour, two copper-capped tusks catching the morning light.
BAKER, DOLV, LV 3, said the small grey letters over his head.
He stopped mid-stride. His nostrils flared, once, twice, and the black at the centre of his eyes spread and swallowed the amber whole.
"Been smellin' somethin' since I left the ovens," he said slowly. "Thought it were the honey-yeast."
The yoke tipped. The buckets hit the cobbles and burst, water sheeting across the yard, splashing his boots, running everywhere. He didn't notice.
"It weren't."
He crossed the yard in four strides.
Flour-dusted hands landed on my wet shoulders, and I watched his face do its work, dazed, reverent, fighting itself and losing politely.
His palms slid down my arms slow as syrup, and the front of his apron rose like a tent pole finding its purpose. He leaned in and breathed me in, damp hair, neck, the shell of my ear, one long shudder rolling through the whole barn-door frame of him.
"'M Dolv," he said, like an apology. Then, softer, with his whole chest behind it: "Please. Please."
Even charmed, he asked. I put it in the ledger with everything else. The bullywug hadn't asked. The troll hadn't asked. This one said please with his pupils gone black and his hands shaking on my arms, and somewhere the world was quietly learning manners around me.
"Okay, Dolv," I said. "Okay."
He fumbled the apron strings like they were coded, and then there was no more apron in the conversation. Olive-green and blunt-headed, thicker than my wrist plus change, a fat rope of vein running the length of him, and heavy tight balls dusted with flour.
It was the heaviest thing I'd ever held, and I'd held a troll's. My cold, wet fingers wrapped around it and he groaned from somewhere down in his chest, and the heat of him came through my palm like a stove lid.
And I was wet again.
Traitorously, embarrassingly fast, two minutes off an ice bath and my body was already back at the counter placing its order. My brain, meanwhile, was doing the useful math: the bakehouse wall was thin, the yard echoed, the street was ten paces off, and the town was waking up on the other side of it. Someone was going to hear us. The only question was how many someones, and the answer was in my hands, so to speak. Quiet was a strategy. I intended to fail at it as quietly as possible.
He turned me toward the trough and bent me over the rim.
Ice-cold stone under my forearms, furnace heat at my entrance, and Dolv did not rush. He pushed in one relentless inch at a time, dough patience, a baker's patience, and I felt him climb through me until I could feel him in my throat.
My hand clamped over my own mouth, and it stayed there, because the noises wanted out and the street was right there. Then he settled into it, a labourer's rhythm, deep and steady and tireless, and my wet ass clapped his belly on every stroke, plap, plap, plap, and the trough water sloshed along in time, and his heavy balls swung up and slapped my clit with each landing, and I bit my own palm and stopped pretending any of this was laundry.
"So small," he rumbled above me, wonder all through it. "Takin' ALL of it."
Then his hand splayed across my lower belly, and he pressed, and felt it, the long blunt bulge of himself moving under my skin, and that was the end of the baker's patience.
He hammered.
The trough rang. My hand did nothing against the sounds now. He buried himself to the root and flooded me, scalding pulse after scalding pulse, and I bit my hand and came with him, clamping down, milking him in waves while the water sloshed over the trough lip.
And he didn't soften. Not a flicker.
He turned me mid-act, still hilted, and stood me up face-to-face, hooking one leg over his thick forearm. He slid home into the flood of his first load with a liquid schlick that echoed off the yard walls, and then he went slow. Deep grinds instead of strokes, flour-dusted chest against my wet, cold nipples, his forehead coming down to rest on mine. He kissed me, clumsy and careful of the tusks, and stirred his own mess inside me in slow circles, and I came apart with no noise at all this time, just trembling, gushing around the root of him, and he rumbled his approval low in his chest and held me through the whole length of it, patient as proving dough.
The troll had covered me. This one cradled me. The encounters were developing manners, and I was starting to wonder who was training whom.
Then the patience ran out.
He scooped me up off the ground entirely, one huge hand on each of my cheeks, put my back against the warm brick of the bakehouse wall, and pounded up into me, fast and vicious, and my tits shook, and my head lolled, and the wet slap of it was outrageous in the quiet morning, plap-plap-plap-plap, echoing off stone, announcing us to the entire street, and I had stopped caring somewhere around the third stroke.
The scream came up out of me and broke against his shoulder as I erupted, spraying clear over his thrusting cock, splashing the trough, the cobbles, everything below us. He roared, softly, into my hair, and came again without slowing, and two minutes later he seated himself to the root and shuddered out a third, long pulses, deep ones, while I dangled in his arms and took all of it.
Silence. His breathing slowed. He blinked once, twice, and his eyes cleared as fog wiped off glass.
He looked at me, dangling in his arms, impaled, dripping, and went grey to the tips of his ears, which on a grey-green man was a serious commitment to horror.
He set me down with the same shaking gentleness the gate sergeant had used, tucked himself away without looking at anything, and stared over my head at the wall.
"'M so sorry," he said. "I don't, I never—"
Then he bolted sideways to the bakehouse sill, came back, and pressed a round loaf into my hands, hot through the crust, and after it a small wooden token stamped with a wheat sheaf.
"Baker's mark," he mumbled. "Whatever ye want. From any oven in town."
He heaved the yoke and empty buckets up, slopped the last of the water across his own boots, and fled around the corner, glancing back exactly once. Stricken. The troll had looked back twice. The ledger grew.
I stood there dripping, freshly dirty again, one cleanup spent on a down payment for another, and laughed until the loaf nearly dropped.
Then I washed for real.
Thorough, top to bottom, three pumps of the handle, a second wring for the panties, my ruined shirt knotted under my chest where its buttons used to live.
And then I sat on the trough rim with a loaf worth crossing a swamp for, and I ate breakfast.
The crust crackled under my thumb. Steam climbed off the torn white inside of it and vanished into the cold air, and the middle was still warm, yeasty and faintly honeyed, and it was the best thing I had eaten since I'd woken up standing in a marsh.
Nobody was touching me.
Nothing was counting down, except the one clock I knew about, gently, at midday.
The sky went properly gold over the bakehouse roof while I tore off pieces and ate them out of my hand, and for a hundred whole words' worth of world, everything was fine.
The chime disagreed on schedule.
INCIDENT RESOLVED: UNREGISTERED ENTITY SATISFIED (×1)
SATISFACTION LOG — ENTITIES SATISFIED: 8
[ERROR: EXPECTED 7]
[RECOUNTING]...
[RECOUNTING]...
[IGNORED]
HYGIENE: RESTORED. TWICE.
"Eight," I told the loaf. The system had counted, found one more satisfied entity than its books allowed for, recounted twice, and closed the drawer on its own fingers. And it had noted, in its dry little way, that I had now bathed twice this morning, and that only one of them had taken. The system had started leaving commentary. I didn't know yet whether to be flattered or audited.
EXP: +20 — TOTAL 110/200
HP 34 → 44 (+10)
CONSUMED: MORNING LOAF — EATEN WARM, SOMEWHAT MIRACULOUSLY.
"Somewhat miraculously" was doing a lot of work. Somewhat miraculously, bread fixed four hit points. Somewhat miraculously, I had been standing in the one yard in town where the healing item grew on a sill.
ITEM ACQUIRED: BAKER'S TOKEN
ANY BAKERY IN ALDERMOOR WILL SERVE YOU FIRST, FREE OF CHARGE.
AND POSSIBLY WEEPING.
I rubbed my thumb over the wheat-sheaf stamp. The weeping clause was new. I decided not to test it today.
The status window bloomed while I was still chewing.
ZELIA BISHOP — LV 2
ROUTE B — STAGE 2 OF 6
ACTIVE QUEST: A ROOM AT THE STAG
Down the street, the Gilded Stag's sign creaked on its brackets in the morning wind, and across the square the crier was still hammering the Viscount's notice into the stone, gold and title, three days hence, a companion of exceptional presence. The town was properly awake now. Shutters banged, cart wheels ground the cobbles, and every one of those sounds belonged to a man who hadn't smelled me yet.
Clean. Fed. Forty-four of fifty. A perfume in my pocket that made men docile, a token that made ovens weep, a pouch of coppers, and two clocks, one at midday and one at three days. Yesterday I'd owned a vial of cursed lube and a broken stat. The power curve, quietly and against all odds, was bending my way.
NEW MAIN QUEST: A ROOM AT THE STAG — ACTIVE
[INN] / [CRIER] / [BAKEHOUSE]
The menu hung over the wet gold cobbles, patient as ever, and the sign down the street creaked like it knew I was coming.
[INN] / [CRIER] / [BAKEHOUSE]