She freed me from my trousers and got a hand around as much of me as her fingers would close on, which was never all of it. She looked up the length of my body, her mouth already gone soft and wanting, and I had to plant both hands on the bed and hold.
I didn't tell her she didn't have to. Some careful, miserable part of me wanted to, the part that had spent a lifetime making sure I never asked a soul for a thing they might resent giving. But she knew.
She knew exactly what she was doing on her knees in front of me, and she wanted to do it. One word against it would have been me deciding for her again, the way I'd decided everything for her behind her back the whole way through. I was done with that. I shut my mouth and let her have me.
She took the head of me into her mouth, and I made a sound I hadn't known was in me.
She couldn't take much. There's too much of me; we both knew it, and it didn't slow her for a second. She took what she could and worked the rest with her hand, her tongue dragging slow over the broad of me, her eyes coming up to mine every little while like she wanted to watch what she was doing to me. And what she was doing was dismantling me on the edge of my own bed. The wet heat of her mouth, the small, greedy soundsshe made. The way she pressed her thighs together where she knelt, worked up by my being worked up, the both of us caught in the same loop pulling tighter.
I let one hand into her hair, but I didn't push. I held my fingers spread against her skull while she took me apart.
"Chloe." It came out wrecked. "Mate, please. I'm close."
She hummed around me like she'd be glad of it, and that nearly ended me. I gathered her hair into my fist and drew her off, gently, the loss of her heat almost more than I could stand.
"Up here." My voice had gone to gravel. "Come up here. I want my mouth on you."
She arched a brow, still on her knees, lips swollen. "Bossy."
"You had your turn." I lay back and reached for her, hands at her hips, already lifting. "Get up here and put yourself on my mouth. Hold onto something."
She climbed the length of me, flushed and grinning and game, and swung a knee over my head. Then she was settling down over my mouth, both hands reaching back to catch the base of my horns for balance, and I had her exactly where I wanted her.
I'm too big for half of what I want to do to her. Most things I have to do slow, mindful of every place I could hurt something small and precious without meaning to.
Not this.
Here she could brace on me and grind down and take what she needed, and there wasn't a careful bone left in my body, only her, the salt-sweet soak of her right over my tongue, the weight of her coming down, her thighs gone tight on either side of my head.
I licked up into her, and she swore, her grip on my horns going hard. That grip lit me up at the base of them like a struck nerve, the pleasure forking straight down to where I was already aching, so that I groaned against her and felt her jolt at the buzz.
"Oh. Do that again."
I did it again. I did everything again, both hands splayed up over the backs of her thighs to hold her down on me right where she wanted, and I feasted on her, slow and then not slow, reading every sound she made and chasing the ones that climbed. She rode my mouth without an ounce of shame, working herself on my tongue, her fists wrenching at my horns every time I found the spot, each pull of them singing the heat back through me until I couldn't have told whose pleasure was whose.
She came with my name in her mouth and her thighs shaking around my face and both hands locked at the base of my horns, holding on.
I lifted her off before her legs could give, and she came down onto my chest, boneless, her heart going wild against my ribs.
I held her there and let her find her way back, my hands moving slowly over her damp skin, and the want in me banked to something patient. I'd waited this long, I could wait while she caught her breath.
She didn't take long.
"Okay." She pushed up on her hands, hair stuck to her flushed face, eyes gone dark and certain. "Okay. I want you. All of you. Now."
She reached back and got a hand around me and rose up, and I went still under her.
This was the part I'd never once believed I'd get, back when I was a thing they pointed at other things to break them. Her astride me, in charge of it, taking me at her own pace, and me holding still and letting her. I dug my hands into the bedding on either side of us and made the whole shaking length of me wait, because this was hers to do.
"Hold still," she breathed, notching me against her.
"I've got it." My jaw was tight. "Take your time."
She sank down onto me by degrees; her face going slack with it, and I felt every bit of her open to take me. I held dead still through all of it, sweat standing out on me, every animal part of me screaming to drive up and bury itself, beaten down flat under the want to give her exactly this and nothing less. She worked me into her until there was no more of me left to take, until she was flush against my hips with me as deep as I had ever been, and we both went still there, joined and shaking.
The pull in my chest had hauled me toward her for weeks. East down the ridge road, across a crowded street, through the bars of a cell. It had never once let up since the first breath of her in that office. Now she was here, all the way down on me, signed and mine and going nowhere, and for the first time the pull had nothing left to do. It went quiet. It went so quiet it near undid me worse than her mouth had.
"Mate." I couldn't keep it in any longer. "My mate."
