“Mine.” The word comes out reverent. “And I'm yours. Say it.”
“You're mine.” Tears slide hot down my face, mixing with the water. “You're mine, Aubrey. Always, forever mine.”
He pulls back and drives forward, setting a rhythm that builds the pressure in my belly with every stroke. His mouth finds my throat, pressing his lips to my pulse point and breathing me in. The pressure coils tighter. My thighs start to shake. My breath comes in short gasps that I can't control, sounds spilling out of me. He's hitting that spot with every thrust now, relentless, perfect, his rhythm faltering as his own pleasure mounts.
“I'm close,” I manage. “Aubrey, I'm so close.”
“I know.” He presses his forehead to mine, his eyes finding mine through the steam, holding my gaze. “I feel you. Feel how tight you're getting. Come for me, Espie. I want to feel you come.”
My orgasm hits. My back arches off the cold tile. My inner walls clamp down around him, pulsing, pulling, milking him as I cry out his name. Heat slams up through my belly and out into my arms and legs until my fingers are tingling. Each pulse rolls into the next. Each one harder than the last, until I'm sobbing with it, tears mixing with the shower spray.
He follows me over with a broken groan. I feel him throb inside me, feel the heat of his release flooding me, feel his whole body shudder as he buries his face in my neck and comes apart in my arms. My name falls from his lips over and over.
My lips brush over the scars on his neck. The raised silver lines I traced earlier with my fingers. Bite marks. Old ones. Whoever they were, they aren't getting him back. I taste salt and shower water and Aubrey, and possessiveness roars to life in me. A fierce, animal want. The instinct to claim him I didn't know lived in me. Mine. Mine. The word rises up and fills my chest until there's no room for anything else.
My mouth moves to the unscarred place at the junction of his neck. Under my lips I feel the gland there, swollen, thrumming with a heat that wasn't there a minute ago. My teeth find the shape of it. His pulse hammers against my tongue. His skinholds for one suspended heartbeat under the pressure of my jaw, taut and warm and alive, and then it gives.
I taste copper and warmth, and his groan vibrates through every bone in my body. His teeth find the gland at the junction of my neck in the same moment, and the world breaks open.
His essence floods through me. Liquid heat, pouring from the bite at my throat into my bloodstream. It moves with my pulse. Surging where my heart pumps it next, settling into the marrow of my bones. My vision blurs at the edges. The shower fades. The tile fades. The water fades. There is only this. The heat of him spreading through me, finding the cold spots, filling them. Cedar and chamomile. Grief and tenderness. All of him, pouring in. A second heartbeat starts up behind my sternum. His. Mine. Both at once.
I sob against his throat. My teeth still locked around his pulse. His arms tight around me. His blood on my tongue and his essence in my blood. I don't know where he ends. I don't know where I am.
A gear clicks into place deep inside me. A sound only I can hear. My shoulders drop. The clenched fist I've carried under my sternum for years uncurls and stays open. The wrongness shifts. The crooked piece of me that has sat askew since forever rights itself. Wholeness snaps into existence where there was only fracture before.
I unlatch my teeth. He unlatches his. We pull back just enough to look at each other. His bite on my throat throbs with my heartbeat, sending warm pulses down my collarbone with every beat. The mark I've left on him is a perfect curve of teeth pressed into the soft flesh where his neck meets his shoulder.
“Oh.” The sound falls out of me. I don't know if it's a laugh or a sob or a prayer. “Oh, Aubrey.”
“I know.” He cups my face, and his thumb traces my cheekbone like he's mapping me. “I feel you in me. Gods, you're in me.”
“You're in me.” A laugh breaks out of me, wet and shocked. “Aubrey, I feel your heartbeat in my chest.”
“I feel yours.” His forehead presses to mine. His tears mix with mine. “You're so warm. You're so warm in here. Like there's a sun lit up behind my ribs.”
“I didn't know.” My fingers shake where they trace the bite I left on him. The mark of me on his skin. “I didn't know it would be like this. I didn't know two people could be like this.”
“Neither did I.” He laughs, and the sound shudders through both of our chests because we're sharing one now. “Gods. Espie. You're everywhere. Inside my ribs. Inside my heart.”
“Mine.” The word comes out fierce. Possessive. “You're mine.”
“Yours.” He kisses the bite he's left on my neck. The lightest touch of his lips. His mouth lingers there, breath warm over the throbbing mark. “For as long as I'm breathing.”
We stay pressed together against the tile, the water cooling around us. My legs still wrapped around his waist, his forehead pressed to my shoulder. Tears stream down my face. I don't know when I started crying. The release mixing with the shower spray, and I can't stop, can't even figure out if I want to.
His hand finds my cheek, his thumb brushing under my eye where the tears keep coming.
“Why are you crying?” His voice is soft, careful. “Tell me. I need to know.”
“I don't know.” A laugh breaks out of me. “I don't know. I think... I think because I chose this. And it was good.”
“Espie.”
“It's never been good before.” The words come out before I can stop them. “Not once. Not in my whole life.”
He holds me tight. He doesn't speak. His thumb just keeps moving slow across my cheek.
“You're my first.” I press the words into his throat, against the bite I left there. “Aubrey. You're my first.”
