“If you like. Perhaps you’ll discover a new way I like to be touched.”
She soon found that she didn’t need his guidance. She could navigate his pleasure by reading the tensing of his muscles, the pace of his breathing, his sighs, the way his legs shifted restlessly. She set herself free over his body.
Oh, the earthy pleasures of the sweat and the curling hair on his chest and the trail of it that led down to his cock, the salty taste of his skin beneath her tongue, the leathery little bump of his nipples. The little scars, a mole or two—she kissed them—and the tattoo of the dagger beneath his arm. She dragged her finger around its outline, her eyes locked with his.We understand pain,she was saying silently,and we understand how to make it our servant. We conquer it with beauty and pleasure.
She had never dreamed that she could ever be so shockingly vulnerable while never feeling more powerful and safe. This profound, dangerous, mysterious, remarkable thing—sex—seemed easy with him, because he’d shown her how touching was a language. How sex was a conversation between their bodies and their hearts. That it had movements, like a symphony, rests and crescendos.
She traced the shape of a heart with her fingers over the places his heart bumped against his chest, and then she lightly closed her teeth over his nipple, and she knew, when one hand covered the back of her head,and his fingers curled into the little quilt, that she possessed the magic to drive him to madness, too, and this notion spiked her own desire.
And she saw his cock stir, and swell again.
She wanted to hear him beg her with words, as she’d begged him. And then she wanted to save him from that desperate want by giving him what he needed, just as he’d done for her. She wanted to hear his breath come ragged and short. She wanted to see his eyes go black, black with lust and mindless intent. And then she wanted to be taken again.
He hissed in a breath that ended on a little groan when she dragged her hand over his cock. “Like this?”
“Your fist,” he rasped. “Take me in your fist.”
She closed her fingers around him gently, and he covered her hand with his and showed her how he wanted to be touched. And she did, and in her fist it swelled and leaped like a living thing, and she felt weak and wild again. She was the magician, this time. He was at her mercy.
“Aurelie...” he gasped.
“Do you want me again? Please, I want you, Hawkes.”
“Yes. Yes,” he said. “Come to me...”
She came to him as though he was pulling her from a choppy sea, and stretched out alongside him. He rose up over her and he arched her hips up to take his thrust into her, and locked her legs around his back. She pressed her palms into those lovely indentations in the muscles of his arse that seemed made for that purpose, urging him on, rising up to meet every thrust of his pale hips. Gasping when he dipped to touch his tongue to her nipple.
“Christ,” he groaned, gratifyingly.
Every touch, every sigh and moan, every wave of bliss, brought her closer to herself. To wholeness. Anddrifted her farther away from everything that had ever hurt her.
It ripped her out of herself and she bowed backward with a silent scream, her fingers digging into his shoulders.
“Oh, God... Aurelie...”
She held him while he shook with it.
He propped himself up on his elbows and looked down at her. And then gently rolled away.
“Sweetheart...” he said softly. “Are you weeping?”
She was. Quietly and softly.
He thought his heart would break again. But he also knew the value of tears.
“It’s just emotion,” she said. “I think perhaps every emotion. So many lovely new ones are arriving, and so many terrible ones dissolving.”
He was quiet for some time.
With his thumbs, he gently gathered the tears brimming on her lashes and for a solemn moment they gazed at each other.
“I love you,” he said quietly.
That was the secret she’d driven from him with the gift of her body, the way he’d driven a secret from her last night.
His voice was graveled. The words felt strange in his mouth, and he thought it was perhaps because he hadn’t said them aloud since... perhaps he’d said them as a boy. Suddenly he felt more naked than he already was.
Was it true? Yes. It felt as though it had always been true. It didn’t matter how they’d arrived at this love.
