“Look at you,” he murmurs, like a confession. “I knew you’d be a fighter, even here.”
“I’m not fighting you,” I breathe.
His mouth curves. “Not yet.”
Waiting is a kind of hunger that builds and builds until my skin vibrates with it. After a moment, he bends and kisses the place just above my navel, then higher, dragging his tongue over me and tasting my skin like he has all the time in the world. I fist the sheet and watch his lashes lift and fall as his lips map me, so slow and precise, until he’s at the top of my mound, his breath warm where I’m most sensitive. He doesn’t touch me there. Not yet. Instead, he drags the t-shirt the rest of the way up, nudging the fabric past my collarbone, and I help him, arms up, surrendering the last thin barrier between us. He tosses the shirt to the floor without breaking eye contact, and the sound it makes is a small, soft surrender of its own.
“Beautiful,” he says, and it isn’t pretty talk. It sounds hungry and filled with anticipation.
His hands frame my breasts, thumbs playing with my nipples me as he kisses over the tops, his tongue lapping at my tattoo, then finally, he takes my mouth. The kiss is hot and hungry, feeling as though we’d waited years to do this. He tastes like coffee and rain and something darker that has always belonged to him alone. His tongue slides against mine, and I gasp into him, my leg hooking around his hip on instinct. He fits between my thighs like he was made for that precise space, like my body has been waiting, memorizing this shape in absence.
He grinds once, slow, deliberate, and the friction steals my breath. I can feel his hardness rub against my core and my body lights up. The sound that leaves me is not polite. His answering growl was a sin I wanted to wear. His hand slides under me to cradle the back of my neck, holding me where he wants me while his other palm skims down, catching the tilt of my hips asI move with him. Heat blooms, blooming again, blooming more. My nerves light, a string of lanterns catching fire one by one.
“Tell me, “He rasps, mouth at my jaw. “Tell me what you need.”
“You,” I whisper, the word torn out of me. “I need you.”
“Show me.”
His hand finds its way between my legs and the heel of his hand pressed exactly where I ached. The pressure was perfect. Firm, rhythmic, building, and I’m gone. I’m right there, I’m falling apart as I clutch at his shoulders while he works me up slow and steady. I grind into his palm, helpless and greedy, chasing each pulse he gives me. He keeps kissing me, swallowing my sounds, drawing them deeper, owning every tremble as he begins his claim on me. The tension builds tight and I’m so close I can see it. My body arches back, my whimpers become moans, and slowly the pleasure breaks me open, and with a soft cry into his mouth he takes my orgasm like a vow.
I shuddered, trembling through it, the aftershocks rippling while he kept me grounded, murmuring into my hair, “That’s it. Take it like my good girl”
I breathe. I float. I come down to find his forehead against mine, his chest heaving, his eyes darker than midnight.
“More,” I whisper, shameless. “Please.”
He nods, voice rough with surrender. “Yeah, baby. More.”
He strips the last of his clothes, not teasing anymore, any semblance of rejection lost in the lust. His body is heat and hard lines and years of work, every scar and tattoo told a story…his story. He braces over me, one hand at my thigh, opening me without words, and suddenly I feel him. I hold my breath as his cock slides into me with a slow, aching push that feels like being filled and taken. My gasp turns into his name. His breath catches, just once, as he holds still, buried deep. He’s letting me adjust, letting us adjust, foreheads pressed together, feeling likethe world narrowed to this exact point where two people decide to ruin their lives and save them at the same time.
“Look at me,” he says.
I do. And he starts to move.
He pulls back and I moan into his mouth as I feel every inch of him glide through me. The rhythm he sets is steady and relentless, and he’s built for worship and wreckage. He puts his weight on me and keeps me caged with his hands. I felt trapped and yet safe. His mouth was all over me, my throat, shoulder, the soft place under my ear that makes me whimper. I meet each stroke, taking and giving, the slick slide of us growing louder, the bed groaning in protest, the room shrinking to heat and breath and a drumbeat that lives in his chest, matching my own. When I start to fall again, it’s slower this time, deeper, the kind that doesn’t rip through me, but claims. He follows me, cursing softly into my mouth, hips snapping against mine through the end as he lets go with a raw, quiet sound that feels like a secret he never planned to share.
We breathe as we hold one another. He then kisses my forehead, my cheek, the corner of my mouth, gentle now in a way that makes my eyes sting. He gathers me close and I slide my leg higher around his waist, tucking under him like I belong there.
“You’re safe,” he says against my hair. “I’ve got you.”
I want to tell him I believe him. I want to live in this soft, breathless place where nothing old can find us. I close my eyes and suddenly the temperature drops so fast my skin pebbles. The body by my side isn’t warm anymore. It’s empty. Hollow. The breath against my cheek smells wrong, almost rancid. A laugh crawls over my skin, low and hateful, and the hair at the back of my neck lifts.
“Little witch.”
A sharp voice comes from everywhere. From inside the closet. From behind the walls. From under my skin.
“Pretty little witch.”
I shoot up out of bed and tell myself this is a dream. But my legs begin to tremble, my mouth dries up, and the taste of ash flares at the back of my tongue. The mirror across the room fogs from the inside out. Something drags its nails through the condensation and leaves a mark there. I freeze, it’s a familiar sigil. One that I look at every day and is etched on my chest.
“Poor little witch,” the voice purrs, taunting me. “Always wanting what she cannot have. Sinful little wretch,” it cackled.
I go rigid as it steps out of the mirror. It’s tall and lean, splitting into sharp angles that don’t belong to a man. A grin too wide to be a mouth. The scent of burned ash sliding under the door, under the bed, under my ribs. His eyes are like burnt pits and heat rolls off him like a furnace.
“Where is he?” I rasped.
“Here,” the voice says from everywhere. “And nowhere you can touch.”
