“‘My lips,’” he repeated, ragged. “Are you going to do that part as well?”
She smiled slowly, running her little, pink tongue along the curve of her mouth. “I shouldn’t,” she said. “You haven’t earned it. But, alas, I do wish to.”
“Hattie…” he managed, certain his vision was going to darken if she continued to reference what he thought she was referencing.
“And when I have finished,” she said, kneeling forward, her hair falling over his lap, “you will cease your torment. Won’t you?”
“I …”
“Hm,” she said, and then she pressed her lips to his cock with a curious flick of her tongue.
The world did go dark then, or perhaps it exploded in color. Elias could not rightly say. He gripped the blankets at his sides and tried to remember to breathe, watching her with the kind of silent awe one usually reserves for moments of epiphany or miracle.
The hot drag of her tongue over him was as exquisite as it was unbearable. The sweetness of her breath, the way he couldfeel her little gasps of delight rumbling through him as a physical thing.
He watched her until he was certain he could not hold back another second, at which point her name ripped from his throat, and she rose back up to sitting, a look of triumph glinting in those amber eyes.
She crawled backward, falling back onto her pillows with her arms raised in welcome as he tried to remember how to control his limbs, gasping for air and licking his lips and blinking the stars out of his eyes.
When he fell into her arms, he did so with gratitude, and just as she’d said, he held nothing back any longer. Though he still retained enough of himself to go slowly this time. He remembered to savor it because he hadn’t yet.
He hadn’t, and he desperately wanted to.
And, of course, if he didn’t slow down, he was going to shatter. He wanted to shatter. Badly.
But he wanted her to shatter first.
“Talk to me,” she begged. “Tell me what you want.”
“You,” he gasped, his limbs quaking with the force of his pleasure. “Only you. Forever. Just like this. God, Hattie.”
“Oh,” she sighed, arching up as though it had been a caress instead of a collection of syllables. “Say my name again. Elias, please.”
“Hattie,” he said. “My Harriet. I want you like I’ve never wanted anything. I am yours now. I have always been yours.”
She shuddered, her hands clinging to his arms, legs locking around his as she unspooled at the sound of his confession. And she said his name as she found her bliss. She cried out and whimpered, “Elias!” at her moment of pleasure.
At which point, he understood why the reverse had impacted her so much, and he lost himself as well.
He lost himself completely.
And he kissed her as he found completion.
For a long time after that, they simply held one another, breathing and listening and smiling against the other’s bare skin.
“I think perhaps you were right,” she said, just as their muscles slackened and sleep began to take them. “Torment can be lovely.”
He nodded, stifling a yawn. “Spoken by the woman who has always been mine. I am glad you agree.”
She caught his yawn, burrowing closer into his side. “Elias, I think I will sleep for a while now,” she said, no longer wired or tossing about in restlessness. “Perhaps when I wake, you can torment me a little more.”
He nodded, resting his cheek in her hair, and surrendered to the call of sleep himself. “Of course,” he murmured as he drifted away. “It would be my pleasure.”
Epilogue
Six weeks later
The summer’s endfestival had never been Hattie’s favorite time of year. Perhaps she had not appreciated it properly, after the incident with Elias on the pier, even as time had covered that memory in a thin layer of dust, just beyond reach of her direct consciousness.
