“Only when you stop touching me,” I whispered.
He smiled, but it was more of a wound than a grin. “God, I missed your mouth.”
“Then use it,” I said, and pulled his face down to mine.
The second kiss was hungrier, less apologetic. Our teeth clashed, and I tasted blood again. I let him have my mouth, mytongue, my jaw. I let him bruise my lips until they went numb. His hands fisted the hem of my t-shirt and pulled it off in one smooth, violent motion, baring my chest to the light of evening.
His eyes went darker. He cupped my left breast, thumb grazing the nipple, and when I arched into him he growled—an actual, animal sound, low and dangerous. He took my breast into his mouth, sucking and biting until I twisted underneath him. Every touch sent sparks through my body, white-hot, pain-pleasure until I couldn’t tell where one ended and the next began.
He worked his way down, kissing every inch as if to prove I was real. When he hit the line of my sweatpants, he paused.
“Let me,” he said, voice thick.
I nodded, “please.” He hooked his fingers in the waistband and pulled them down, slow, baring my thighs, my scars, my everything. He stared at me for a long moment, eyes flickering over the marks Silas left, the yellowed bruises. I’d put up one hell of a fight, even in my delirium.
He kissed the worst one, gentle, then laid his cheek against my hipbone.
“You’re fucking perfect,” he said. “I want to kill everyone who ever touched you.”
I grasped his hair with my fingers, pulling him up to me. “I don’t want to talk about them. Only you.”
He got the message. He kissed down my stomach, then further, mouth hot and soft as he licked a line down the inside of my thigh. His tongue found my clit, slow and deliberate, and I arched up, hands clutching the comforter, breath leaving me in a single, shattered moan.
He was patient, but I wasn’t. I clamped my thighs around his head, grinding against his mouth, and he let me. He devoured me, not with the practiced precision of a lover but with the ravenous, greedy want of a starving animal. I came once, maybe twice, before I could even process what was happening. It was rapture.Every spasm was a fresh birth of something that had been dead too long.
He licked me through it, then kissed back up my body, pausing at every rib, every cut, every inch he could claim. I tried to reach for his sweatpants, to tear them down, but my hands were shaking too hard.
He laughed, soft. “Impatient little bird.”
“Fuck me,” I said, voice raw.
He obliged. He kicked off his pants, and when his cock sprang free, I almost laughed at how desperately I wanted it. I’d been dead, then alive again. And then on the brink of death once again only to be physically taken from him. Now I was alive and fucking starving, not just for sex but for proof of life evidenced by his body inside mine.
He lined himself up, tip brushing my entrance, and paused again.
“Look at me,” he said.
I did. His eyes were luminous, glassy with the promise of tears he’d never admit to.
“Never leave me again,” he said. “I can’t breathe without you.”
I reached up, traced the scar on his chin, the one that had appeared after he’d deployed his second time. “I won’t. Not ever again.” It was a vow.
He pressed in, slow but relentless, filling me until I couldn’t tell where I ended and he began. The mate bond flared between us, a live wire under the skin. He moved, hard and deep, fucking me with a force that bordered on violence, but every thrust was a benediction, a prayer answered by the chorus of my own moans.
We fucked like we were the last two people alive. I wrapped my legs around his hips, as far as my legs could reach. He buried his face in my neck, biting hard enough to draw blood. I scratched his back, marking him as mine. Every time he whispered “little bird” or “mine,” it shivered up my spine like an electric current.
A blue light lit his face faintly, or maybe it was just in my head, but when I came again it flashed behind my eyelids and for a moment, I thought I saw angels, wings and all.
He came with a howl, knot swelling inside me, and I clenched around him for everything he had. We stayed fused like that for minutes or hours, breathing together, letting the world fall away.
He pulled me into his arms and kissed the top of my head.
“You saved us,” he said, voice breaking. “You saved me.”
I didn’t have words for the ache in my chest, the certainty that I would die a thousand times if it meant coming back to this.
So I just held him, and let the blue mark glow in the dark, a beacon for the living and the lost. I needed to ask Menace about it. To see if he saw it as well or had I tipped over into ‘cuckoo for Coco Puffs’ land?
