“Show me?—”
“Turn over.”
I turned over.
I heard him move on the mattress and then felt his hands on the backs of my thighs, warm and deliberate, and I pressed my face into the pillow and told my nervous system to stand down.
The position itself was its own thing to manage. Face down, hips tipped up slightly by the angle of his hands, exposed in a way that had no analogue in any previous experience I could pull from. My whole back was tight with the effort of staying still and not catastrophizing this into something it didn't have to be.
Then he pressed his palms to the backs of my thighs and spread them, easy and unhurried, and exhaled slow and warm against my skin.
“Fuck,” he said quietly. Not to me. Just to himself, or to the room, or to whatever he was looking at, and the specific reverence in his voice made my hands curl against the headboard.
“What?” I said into the pillow.
“Nothing.” A pause. The warmth of his breath moving closer. “You're just—” He pressed his lips to the top of my inner thigh and dragged them upward. “You're really something, Rook. That's all.”
I didn't know what to do with that so I said nothing, which was becoming a pattern.
He ran his thumbs inward along the crease where my thighs met my ass, and the specific exposure of that pulled a slow breath out of me that I let go into the pillow.
He pressed his lips to the base of my spine.
Then lower.
He stopped there a moment, and I felt his breath and then he made a low sound against my skin that wasn't quite a word but had the quality of one.
“Soren.” His name came out muffled in the pillow and not remotely controlled.
“Still okay?”
“Yes.” More breath than word. “Yes, don't stop.”
He didn't stop.
He pressed his mouth to me, open and warm, and the sensation was something I had no prior category for — not even close to anything I'd been braced against, nothing like what I'd imagined in the abstract. It shot straight past my ability to stay detached in the first three seconds and kept going. My hands found the headboard above me, and I heard the low sounds I was making into the pillow and couldn't do anything about them.
“Look at you.” He said, and his voice had gone rough and a little wondering
“Soren—”
“I mean it.” He pressed his lips there again, slower this time, taking his time in a way that made my thighs tremble. “You're beautiful. You know that? Right here—” Another press of his mouth, open and warm and devastatingly patient. “The hair, the way you're—” He exhaled against me and I felt it everywhere. “You're fucking beautiful, Rook. I need you to know that.”
He worked slowly, learning what made my hips cant toward him versus what made me tighten up and pull away, and hewent by that information like it was the only map he needed. His hands were on the backs of my thighs, thumbs pressing into the muscle there, and every time I moved he moved with me rather than against me. The room was warm and close and smelled like hotel soap and skin and the specific musk of both of us in close proximity, and all of it together was too much sensory information to organize into anything rational.
“You taste—” He stopped himself, then didn't. “You smell so good. Fuck.” His voice had gone to gravel. “I've been thinking about this.”
“About—”
“About you. Under me. Like this.” He pressed his mouth to me again, lingering, and the wet sound of it and the heat of his breath at once made me grip the headboard hard enough that my knuckles went white. “About what you'd sound like.”
He pulled back slightly and I felt the cool air where he'd been and made an involuntary sound of protest that I would have been embarrassed about if I'd had any processing power left for embarrassment.
“There it is,” he said, warm and pleased and a little unsteady. “That's what I wanted to hear.”
He came back, deeper this time, and the sound I made into the pillow was not quiet. It had no pretense in it. It was just the direct output of what his mouth was doing to a part of me that apparently had a great deal to say once it was paid the right kind of attention.
“That's it,” Soren said against me, and the vibration of his voice went through me like current. “Don't hold that in. I want to hear you.”
