“Mmhmm.”
“And you bought me flowers.”
I feel his smile. Feel the stretch of his lips against my skin. I shiver.
“Yes.”
“I want to eat this dinner you made me next to those flowers you bought me.”
A bite on my neck, one that has my knees wavering, his arm banding across my lower back to hold me to him. He’s hard and I am, too, and if I grind on him once, twice, well, that’s notmyfault, is it, when he’s gasping in my ear like that?
“Dinner,” he growls, hoarse.
He steps back, smooths out his shirt, and blows a long exhale. I’m sure I look just as disheveled, touching my kiss-swollen lips.
Exasperation is scrawled all over his features.
“Sit.” He points at the table.
“Barking commands at me. So chivalrous.”
His chin tips down. Prickles race up my spine, fizzling at the base of my neck. Warning, instinct; gods, it’s delicious now.
“Sit at the table, Sebastian,” he tells me. “Or I’m going to fuck you over the back of my couch, and we’ll never get around to eating.”
My breath catches. Doesn’t just catch; it’s fully reeled in, vanishingabove the surface, leaving me down below in cool dark water and utter stillness.
I’d hoped that was where tonight would end up. We haven’t taken that step yet, not as fuck-buddies, but now? I didn’t know if it’d be on the table.
Apparently it’s on the back of the couch.
And hopefully his bed.
Possibly the shower.
Fuck.
I take the seat he indicated, the one closest to the flowers at the head of the table, and watch him over the island as he sets about reheating food with an easy warming spell. I point at the wine bottle, and he nods, so I pour us each a glass as I note his television across the room.
It isn’t a television. It’s a tank. A reptile tank? With stones and logs, a light, dishes for food and water.
And on a log, curled up in a tight oval, is a pink snake.
“Um. Thio?”
Ceramic clatters as he moves a lid. “Yeah?”
“Your familiar. What is it again?”
His eyes dart to the tank and he grins. “Ah. That’s Paeris.”
I watch him sort out food for a minute, waiting for his explanation. None comes.
“You have a magical creature,” I say. “Living in a reptile tank. Like apet.”
He ladles something out of a baking dish. “You know very well he could go back to the Familiar Plane anytime he wants.”
“What if you need him for spell work?”
