He pulls back far enough to look down at me again and, fuck, there’s that look in his eyes. That hungry, devouring look that makes me feel like I’m the only thing in the world that matters.
Then he slides down until his lips press against that sliver of skin at my hip.
I gasp as his mouth nibbles and sucks there. My fingers comb through his hair while he scoops one hand under my ass and raises me to his lips.
Everything smells like wintergreen gum. I drag him back up to me because I need him to kiss me again and I need it now. His mouth is as warm and commanding as it was before. Maybe even more so.
Our tongues clash and explore. He shifts the angle and cups my neck again. I’m grinding my hips up to him, and he’s grinding back down into me, but carefully, because he still thinks I’m breakable, even though what I want to tell him is that every girlwants to be broken, just so long as she can be sure that the man doing the breaking knows how to put her back together again.
His free hand skates down. It passes over my shoulder and the thin line of my arm. Glides centrally, brushing my chest, then down again.
He hesitates at the waistband of my leggings, though. Pulls back again. The sun has risen far enough that we’re awash in gold. It’s cold as fuck where my neck is exposed to the wind off the water, but beneath the blankets, both of us are burning to bits.
In the elevator, we both acknowledged that this—this—was a bad idea. There’s no point in repeating ourselves now.
He just looks down at me. Fuck knows what he sees or why I’m going along with this insanity.
But all I have to do is nod.
Then we both know there’s no going back.
As soon as I do, his hand slides inside of my leggings. My panties are a thin scrap of cotton, and they’re embarrassingly soaked. He rubs his middle finger across my seam and the smallest whimper passes my lips. My hands scrabble for purchase on his shoulders.
Another pass and I cling harder, moan again. But when he teases my underwear aside and strokes a finger through my folds, that’s when I make the sound that’s been building since the elevator.
“Bastian…” I whine, with such a catch on the first syllable of his name that I feel him go rigid above me.
“I know,” he tells me as he starts to work a fingertip inside of me. “I fucking know.”
A curse punches out of him when I clench around his finger—a broken, reverent, “Christ.” He curls upward until he finds a spot that makes my back arch off the trunk floor.
My hands fumble for his wrist, nails biting his skin, but he doesn’t let up. “Look at me,” he rasps. I open my eyes and he nods. “That’s it. That’s so good. Let go. Let go for me.”
My mouth forms a silent O as it hits. He presses his palm flat between my legs to ground me through it.
I cry up toward the sunrise-streaked ceiling of his trunk as it ravishes me. He keeps pressing as he watches. Everything is golden light and sensation and Bastian.
When I finally stop twitching, he pulls his hand free slowly. I shiver at the loss of contact, then prop myself up on my elbows and settle my dazed eyes on him.
“Why do bad ideas always feel so good?” I ask with a wheezy laugh, as the sunrise I wanted to see so badly warms up my skin, wintergreen simmers on my tongue, and the perfect ache of Bastian’s beautiful hands pulse between my legs.
All he can do is shake his head and laugh along with me. “I have no fucking clue.”
31
ELIANA
bloom: /blo?om/: noun
1: a white, chalky coating that appears on chocolate after exposure to temperature changes or moisture.
2: it wasn’t there and then,boom,there it is.
I still don’t really know what just happened.
But, as weird as this sounds, now doesn’t really feel like the right time to talk about it.
Bastian and I are sitting in a sunlit bubble of silence, and for a change, the usual antagonistic tension is absent. It’s easy to sit here, not quite cuddling him but not quitenotcuddling him, either, and just breathe in sync as the sun keeps sliding up the sky like an over easy egg.
