The contact steals my breath. Not because of fear. Because I’m touching too much of him at once.
His chest under my hands. His thighs beneath me. His breath against my mouth. His claws at my waist, careful, careful, careful, while everything in him feels anything but.
I have been hungry for years. But not like this. This hunger isn’t a hollow, it’s a flame.
It doesn’t make me smaller. It fills the spaces I carved out of myself and tells me they were never meant to be empty.
My eyes sting. Absolutely not. No tears in a lust-glow cavern. There should be laws. Kavor notices anyway, of course.
He draws back. “Pain?”
“No.”
“Arm?”
“No.”
“Sera.”
“No.” I swallow hard. “Not that.”
His hands still.
I look at his throat because his face is too much. “I hate wanting things.”
The words are ugly. True. Mine. His chest rises under my palms.
“I know,” he says.
No fixing. No argument. No lecture about how I deserve more. Maybe I do. Maybe I don’t. The point is, he doesn’t hand me the truth like medicine and tell me to swallow it.
He knows. And that, more than anything yet, almost undoes me.
“I hate it,” I say again, quieter. “Because wanting makes a person visible. And if you’re visible, someone can count everything you have. Take it. Decide you’ve had enough.”
Kavor’s hand slides up my back, stopping between my shoulder blades.
A warm-cool weight. An anchor.
“Then want here,” he says.
My gaze lifts. His voice is rough.
“Here, where only I can see. And I will not take it from you.”
The tears become a real threat. I deal with them by kissing him so hard his back hits the stone behind him. A low sound tears from him. The red flashes brighter in his eyes.
The cavern answers.
Blue light rises around us, strands swaying toward the ridge, pool-water trembling, the sample pulsing between our bodies. Ifeel it through my ribs. Through my blood. Through the bandage on my arm, and through the pulse low in my belly.
Kavor turns us, one arm around my back, keeping me from sliding on the ridge. The movement puts me between him and the stone, but I’m not pinned. Never pinned. His hand braces beside my head, giving me a wall made of him and still leaving me a way out.
That might be the most dangerous thing of all. A wall with a door.
I laugh against his mouth. It comes out breathless and strange and half-broken.
He pulls back just enough to look at me. “What?”
