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He is worried about breaking her.
She is still so small, after all this time. But she is not that girl anymore, no more than he was a boy. Wine slicks their lips, and in the dim light of the inn she seems so much darker, but it is still her. And in the songs he knows there are supposed to be flowers tangled in her hair, and he is supposed to have armour that he didn't steal off a dead man, but that stops mattering when they start kissing.
His hands find her stomach, and he can trace the thin scars, maps in the skin of a stranger, and for a moment he feels like stopping. Tell me where you've been, but the question dies on his lips as she pushes herself onto him, and suddenly he feels like he's become lost in his own skin. Phantom hands reach up and lift up her dress, and in the distance Tom is playing some song downstairs, and none of it feels real anymore.
He'd lain with Jeyne a thousand times under itchy blankets, but not like this. And he wonders if when she; Arya, he has to say her name, lest it become a curse; left she took a part of him with him. The part of him who believed in happy endings for everyone. Or if he'd always loved her, the ragged wolf with bared teeth and dirty claws. And the realisation is both exhiliariting and frightening, just as their hips begin to align and she guides him into her.
She moves slowly, dreamily from the wine. The bed is hard and uncomfortable, and he has to hold onto her to keep them both steady (he tells himself that, though a part of it he knows is the desperate need to keep her close, as if their bodies would meld together like liquid metal, and she could run away from him no longer). They make no noise; afraid of their friends below; instead pressing their lips hard into each others' skin, eyes screwed shut to try and shut away the world outside, the cold that chills their skin.
They come together, gasping. It feels like a sudden shudder of rain as she gasps and collapses onto him for a second, hair spilling over his shoulder, and for a moment it feels like she might be his. He tastes her tears on his cheeks and he moves to wipe them away, afraid he's hurt her, but instead she just swats him away and tells him to stop being stupid. But there is no sting in her words, so he pulls her towards him and kisses her, wraps them in their woolen blanket. They move together again, silence and motion blurring into one, exploring every inch of skin.
"Where have you been?" He asks when they finally decide to sleep. He can see the whites of her eyes in the darkness. She breathes in, slow. For a while he thinks she isn't going to answer him and he shuts his eyes.
"Braavos." She says, quietly, and he wonders if he is imagining it.
"Why?"
"Because it was the only place I could go."
It had been five years. I can make you happy, he wants to say. I was here, I would have kept you safe. But he can't say it. He has never been good at saying things. He wonders if that's why they both fell into bed together, because the words he knows that exist between them neither can say, not yet. So he brings her closer, and he realises she is sleeping, and she's warm. Warm like the summers he can barely remember, when Tobho would let him wander the streets and he would eat brown stew by the fountain, licking the sauce off his fingers and watching pigeons scrabble for bread. Maybe one day they could go back to King's Landing together and sit by that fountain, laughing and letting the warm water gather around their ankles. The thought makes him sad. You'll never get there, a sharp voice echoes in his mind, and he realises it's his Mother. In his mind he can smell the stale urine again, the whip of her hand against his bare legs, the fear and the hunger mingling with the smell of Arya.
She murmurs a little in her sleep, in some language he cannot understand, and he moves to hold her closer. He can feel her scars again, brushing against his own skin. He shuts his eyes and memorises them, willing to make them his own. He will find who gave her these scars, he thinks. I will hunt them down and make them regret it. He will learn his letters and scribe her name in their skin and leave their skin red-hot, cooking.
But then she murmurs again, twists in his arms, and he can feel the beginnings of a smile against his chest. His hands lift away from her stomach, finds her lips, and traces the angle of her sleepy smile with his thumb, trying at once to erase all thoughts of scars from his mind.