Or he’d been focused on other things at the time.
And now the focus was on him, and the touch was so gentle, and he clearly did not know how to process any of those things.He isn’t used to them, he isn’t used to being treated softly and kindly, her mind suggested, and when it did her heart seemed to squeeze. She didn’t know what to say, didn’t know how to reassure him.
Her words felt plain and weak in the face of something so utterly gut-wrenching. “You can take all the time you want. I won’t make you do anything you don’t want to,” she tried, and she couldsee that got him halfway there. It made him stop, and his hands almost dropped.
But then he tried to play it off.
“There’s nothing I don’t want to do. I’m a demon, I can handle anything.”
“Yeah, that might convince you. But I’m not sure it’s gonna convince me.”
“Well, why the hell not?”
“Because I know that being used to pain can make pleasure take its place.”
That makes no sense, she thought. But apparently it made enough that he dropped his hands entirely, all at once. And he seemed stunned. She actually heard him swallow, thickly, in a way that really had her wondering which way this was going to go. It felt like she’d just pushed him to the edge of a nervous breakdown. Like he was going to crumble, somehow.
But that just made it more shocking when he started unbuttoning his shirt.
He didn’t even stop there, either. He laid face down on the bed, head on the pillow. “Just go slow, okay,” he said as she stood there, heart a bird in her chest, all the soft things she wanted to say to him on her lips.
Substituted, at the last second, for this: “I promise I will.”
“A little at first.”
She nodded. “Of course.”
“Stick to my back, no going lower.”
“The only way I would is if you asked me to.”
An intake of breath, then. She knew why now, though.
Having the choice had obviously never really been a thing to him. And even if it had, he’d clearly never imagined a choice like this. That he could say the word, and she’d unbutton his jeans, get underneath them, touch whatever she found there.
And now that was in his head as she gingerly knelt beside him, on the bed.
The question he could ask.
The things she was willing to do.
“Don’t sit so close, okay? If I snap into demon form it’ll knock you off the bed,” he said, ashamed sounding, half into the pillow. So she did as he suggested, she shuffled back. But she put a reassuring hand on him as she did so. She gave his shoulder a squeeze, as if to say,I’m not scared.
And that seemed to settle him.
Or, at least, it settled him enough that she was able to dip the brush, and get it to within a millimeter of his skin. She let it hover just over the place below the nape of his neck, where she’d stroked last. Poised to write, the words ready in her head, but unable to go any further.
He’d gone so tense.
She could actually see the muscles in his back, rigid as anything. His biceps, bunched at his sides. And the hands he’d laid under his forehead weren’t just hands anymore. He had made fists and shoved them against his eyes. Like he could screw these feelings out of him that way. “I was wrong about slow,” he gasped out. “I was wrong, I was wrong, I was wrong. Just do it like you’re ripping off a Band-Aid.”
And she wanted to.
Her hand felt almost heavy with magic and desire, it trembled with it; she almost had to get ahold of her wrist with her free hand to hold it where it was. It just seemed like the most natural thing in the world now—and especially when he clearly needed it. He trembled to feel that tense air between the tip of her brush and his skin. He rocked on the bed, so ready it was agonizing.
But still she did nothing.
He had to reach back and grab her hand. “I don’t want to tellyougo,” he said, as he forced that makeshift ink onto his body. “Because if I have to tell yougoI won’t. I cannot tell you what I want, I can’t. So you have to do it, you have to do this until I say stop. Until I holleruncle. Until I beg for mercy. Do you understand?”
