His hands close around my waist, and he lifts me off the table, and my legs wrap around him, and my back hits the wall, and his mouth is on mine before I finish the breath.
The kiss is the entire evening compressed into one point. The blood and the music and the crimson dress and the way he looked at me across a cavern full of beings who have lived since before language existed.
The wall behind me pulses gold.
His hands slide from my waist to the open back of the dress, and his fingers spread across my bare skin, and the bond goes so bright I can feel it in my teeth.
“Best night,” I say against his mouth.
He doesn't answer with words.
His mouth moves to my jaw, my throat, the place below my ear. I push my fingers into his hair and pull, and he makes a sound low in his chest that I feel more than hear.
The dress has a single closure at the back of the neck. He finds it without looking.
Efficient. Of course.
The crimson fabric falls.
He steps back to look at me. The gold light from the walls is doing the same thing to his face that it did in the cavern, and I reach for him before he's finished looking because tonight I am not particularly interested in patience.
Carries me to the bed.
His shirt goes. Then everything else, and his skin is cool against mine.
I close my hand around him and stroke slowly, and his hips press forward before he catches himself, a sharp exhale through his teeth, his jaw going tight. I watch his face and do it again, feeling the weight and length of him, the way his breath changes when I vary the pressure, the way his whole body holds very still when I find the right grip and work it.
He lets me have this for longer than I expect.
Then he puts me on my back.
His mouth closes over my breast, cool lips and the slow, deliberate press of his tongue circling my nipple until it tightens and my back lifts off the mattress. He moves to the other breast and gives it the same attention, unhurried, taking his time, his hand sliding up the inside of my thigh while his mouth works. He knows exactly what this is doing to me. Every small catch of my breath. Every time my hips shift.
He is absolutely using that information.
His mouth moves lower. Across my chest. My stomach. He pushes my thighs apart and settles between them and looks up at me from there.
"Look at me," he says.
I do.
His mouth finds me, and the first cool press of his tongue against my center pulls a sound out of me that bounces off the stone walls, and I don't care even a little. He works slowly, deliberately, tracing and circling, his tongue flat, then pointed, then circling in a pattern that my entire nervous system begins anticipating.
I try to close my thighs, but he pins them open. Both hands, cool fingers pressing firm into the soft skin of my inner thighs, holding me exactly where he wants me, and it’s absolutely driving me crazy.
He seals his mouth over my clit and sucks and my hips come entirely off the bed. His hands are the only reason I stay connected to the mattress. He slides two fingers inside me and curls them forward in a slow, deliberate press, and the combination of his mouth and his fingers and the bond carrying all of it simultaneously builds something at the base of my spine that I know is going to be significant.
He doesn't rush any of it. He works me with the same precision he brings to everything, reading every response and adjusting, finding the exact rhythm and pressure that has me fisting the bedding with both hands and breathing in short broken intervals.
Tonight, with the Fae blood in my system, the sensation has edges I don't normally have access to. Everything is brighter. More immediate. His tongue and his fingers and the low gold light and the music still threading faintly through my bones, and I feel all of it at once, layered, and it is almost too much.
Almost.
He curls his fingers again, and his mouth seals tight, and I come apart with his name leaving my mouth and the walls blazing gold and my hands locked in his hair, and he works me through every last second of it, slow and thorough, until I am pulling at his shoulders.
"Now," I say.
"Celeste."
