His chin glistened, and he slowly licked his lips, first the top, then the bottom one, a rumble rising from his throat. “I don’tknow how I managed to go this long without this.” His grasp on my thigh turned compressing, branding—my capillaries were surely rupturing and would paint my skin with deep purples in the shape of his fingers tomorrow. “Without you.”
Between my pants, I confessed, “I don’t know if I can forgive you.”
Rising, he wrapped my leg around his hip. “I have nothing but time. I can wait.”
“But I can’t.” Not when I doubted I’d see him again. This had to be a dream. Only my mind could be cruel enough to conjure such a scenario as this.
Yet I desperately searched for the button on his pants, his belt already freed from its buckle. Both of us scrambled to shove his pants down enough for?—
He plunged inside me in one deep thrust, filling me so fully, so completely, so thoroughly, a soundless gasp wrenched out of me and a groan from him.
As my nails dug into his back, his teeth sunk into my flesh, destroying my pain receptors. The ache nagged at the hole in my chest to shrivel up as I clenched around him.
He replaced his mouth with his hand, his thumb kneading the area he’d assaulted. Thorns of pain latched onto the minor injury.
“Do you trust me?” he asked.
“I…” Not many things in my life felt this right. Listening to his request, not an order, but an actual question, I admitted, “I do.”
“Good.” He withdrew and pushed back inside, drawing a whimper out of me. “Now hold on.”
I tightened my hold on him.
He set a vicious pace, overpowering my common sense as the slapping of our bodies filled the forest. Lifting my thigh higher, he deepened the angle, and then caught my throat.
Him seizing control of my airway felt so natural a tear fled the protection of my eyelashes. Instead of crushing my windpipe like the messenger Ilasall had sent, Gedeon compressed the sides of my neck, constricting my oxygen flow.
Soon, my weight lightened. My grip on his sides relaxed as I lost coordination of my body and floated somewhere between pleasure and pain, consciousness and unconsciousness.
“Let it go. All of it.” His distorted encouragement joined the rhythm of him moving inside me—brutal and unrestrained.
My pelvis tightened so hard it bordered on ripping?—
He released my neck. “Come for me.”
I crashed in a dizzying rush, spinning and spinning, like the whirl low in my abdomen.
His thumb found my clit. It spurred thesnapto close in on me?—
Gedeon bit the seam of my throat and shoulder, and the sting shredded the veil of delay.
Isplit apart.
Convulsions rocked through me as I spasmed around him, hard enough to make his pace falter, his grunts stutter. Drowsiness carried me so high, I cried out, contracting again and again.
His pace quickened, turning jerky and violent?—
He stilled, throbbing inside me, his guttural groan tickling my ear as he filled me. His chest heaving, he rocked in and out, coaxing my disorientation to subside.
Leaning against the tree, I scratched his scalp, stroked his shoulders, touched him any way I could, refusing to entertain the possibility of separation.
“I don’t think I can let you go,” he murmured. “I want to carry you to bed and have you fall asleep on top of me.”
His words slammed me back to reality, and I pushed at his chest to put some distance between us. “You can’t. You chose to leave us, Gedeon. You can’t change your mind now.”
“Kali…” Abruptly pulling out, he fixed his pants, his jaw creaking from how hard he ground it. “Fuck.”
“Exactly,” I seethed, maneuvering my panties around my boot and yanking them up. The waistband snapped against my belly, yet the bite of cotton did nothing to lessen my glare at him. “This all is a fucking mess.”
