Need ribbons through me, chasing away any humor, anything but his lips and his body and my attention on those two things. I cup his face in my hands and kiss him, a moan rippling up from my core as I rememorize his taste, his smell, a sensory siren song of that cinnamon bourbon old-fashioned but a thousand times warmer and more intoxicating.
He moves against me, his hands still gripping my suit jacket, and he breaks the kiss when he lowers down from where he’d risen up on his toes. His eyes are shut, his breathing still hard and fast.
“Coal,” he says, coarse, and it tugs at the base of my stomach. “You’re very good at that.”
I smile and lean in to kiss one of his shut eyelids, the skin paper-thin and so delicate. “Good at what?”
“Going—ah, going slow,” he stutters. I kiss his other eyelid. “Making me feel—”
He jolts and his eyes fly open, realization shining as he looks up at me.
The realization deepens to intention. “Loved,” he whispers.
My smile will never go away. I’m going to be an absolutely insufferable asshole for the foreseeable future.
Hex shakes himself and tightens his grip on my suit jacket. “But I—” He leans in and rests his forehead against my chin. “Can we go slow later?”
It takes me a beat to realize what he’s telling me.Thathe’s telling me something, asking me for it, and a new kind of heat sets every muscle on fire until I wonder if I’m glowing.
“What do you want?” I whisper, moving to press tiny kisses down his cheekbone.
Resolution descends over him in the way he squares his shoulders, still holding on to my coat, and he looks up at me with a level stare.
“Do not let what happens next undercut the meaning of my words,” he tells me.
I frown. “Okay?”
“We can go slow later,” he repeats. He licks his lips, rolls one in between his teeth. “But I believe the correct way to say this is,Right now, I need you to fuck me.”
Magic sizzles around him and what looks like a wad of white fabric materializes over our heads.
Without missing a beat, Hex bats it aside, and it bounces across the floor before coming to a rest by the wall.
It’s some kind of ghost decoration.
A laugh gathers in my throat and is one millisecond from exploding out of me. All my thoughts go from him using his portal in the middle of the Christmas Eve Ball to nowthiswhen—
Holy shit.
Did he say—
I whip my gaze to him, wide-eyed.
He stares up at me like he asked me to place a food order and he’s just hanging out until I fork over my credit card.
“Are you all right up there?” he asks. “Need me to say it again?”
“No. Yes, but no. Oh my god.”
“Coal—”
“There’s a gauze ghost on my bedroom floor because you told me to fuck you.”
Hex looks caught between laughing and wincing and finally just drags his hands over his head with a self-deprecating moan. “I’m a bit off tonight. This is rather dangerous. I—”
He stops with a weighted exhale, one that trembles enough to make me step forward and touch his jaw. He looks up at me and shakes his head but there are tears at the edges of his eyes, I think I’ve experienced the full width of human emotion in the last forty minutes alone.
“Shit, sweetheart,” I say, then he’s in my arms and I couldn’t be holding him closer if he was actually a part of me. He shudders and I push my face into his neck, inhaling him, and I might be shaking too.
