He was naked.
He was all mercury-pale, the shimmer at his cheekbone running down the center of his chest and through the line of his belly to the base of his cock. His thighs were lean and corded, the shimmer at the inside of them identical to the shimmer on his face. His cock was long, heavy, flushed with silver at the head and gold at the shaft, the color of a secret kept in the dark for a century.
I made a sound.
It was the wet-animal sound I had made on the silver plain, but this time it was not hunger, not ache, not want. It was relief.
He climbed onto the bed, knees wide, the fire throwing his shadow up onto the mirrored ceiling, and then he lowered himself over me.
He put his mouth at my throat. He licked up the line of my carotid, slow, the tongue warm and alive, and then he bit, not hard, but with enough force that I felt the heat travel all theway down the line of my spine. He sucked, kissed, then moved down, taking the right breast into his mouth again and this time holding it there, tonguing the nipple until the bond flared and I moaned for him.
He did the same to the left, but this time he slipped his hand between my legs, the bare palm flat against my mound.
He said, “You are allowed to want. You are. But you must know that you are already whole.”
He slid a finger between my folds and found the clit at once, drawing a lazy circle, then two, then three. The circles got smaller, more precise, each one dialing in to the precise place my body was most alive. He pressed, slow, then withdrew, then pressed again.
“Tell me what you want,” he said.
“Daddy, I want you,” I said.
He put a second finger inside.
He said, “Look up.”
I did.
The girl in the mirror was a riot of color. The gold in my skin ran down the center of my chest, out to my breasts, and into my throat. The bond at my wrist was blazing, the inside of my thighs slick with color, the arch of my back so clean and high that for a second I thought I would snap in half.
He pressed his mouth to the top of my thigh, just below the hipbone, and bit.
He said, “You watch, baby. You watch what you look like when Daddy makes you come.”
He went down on me.
He licked from the base of my cleft all the way up to my clit, then circled it with his tongue, then sucked, then let go, then licked again. His hands held my thighs open, and each time I bucked against him he pressed me back, gentle but absolute. He worked the clit with a precision that bordered on mathematical,every change in angle or pressure instantly detected and recalibrated. When I was close, he knew, and drew back, letting the edge recede before starting again.
He did not speak.
He licked, he sucked, he fingered, and when I was ready to break he put his mouth to my clit and sucked, hard, and I came. I came with my eyes open, watching myself in the mirror, the color at my skin flaring so bright that for a second it went white.
He did not let up.
He fingered me through the first one, and when I started to come down he said, “Again, baby. Eyes on me.”
He sucked the clit again, this time slower, more deliberate, his hands under my ass holding me off the bed so that I could not squirm away. He licked, slow, dragging the tip of his tongue across the hood, then inside, then back, never letting the rhythm stop. When I started to shake, he pressed his tongue flat, the whole length of it, over my clit, and I lost the world.
The second orgasm hit harder than the first.
I screamed.
Not a human scream, not a demon scream, not even a scream a body was supposed to be able to make. It tore out of me and filled the room, ran up into the mirrored ceiling, and came back down in echoes.
In the mirror, the girl on the bed was a goddess.
Her mouth was open, her eyes were wild, the color in her skin alive with the fire of the bond. She looked like nothing so much as a thing that had been desired for a thousand years, and was now, at last, being worshiped in the way it had always deserved.
He licked me clean, then crawled up the bed and kissed me, the taste of myself on his tongue.
