Page 18 of Chosen By the BRATVA Grump

“Oh, that’s Tobias saving his own life.” Her voice is already going. “Everything gray needs one thing that isn’t. It’s basically the whole secret.”

Then she is out, dead weight and warm, her mouth open against my skin.

Kimmie

I wake at ten past five, because that is what my body does now whether I have anywhere to be or not, and it takes me a good four seconds to work out why the bed is the wrong shape.

The bed is exactly the shape it has always been. I’m the thing that’s different. I’ve been folded into about a fifth of it, wedged in the strip between Natan and the wall, one knee thrown over both of his thighs and my hand flat on his stomach like I fell asleep checking the engine was still running.

He’s on his back with one arm up over the pillows. In the gray light coming through the gap in my curtains he looks less like a man who lifted me up a flight of stairs and more like a large piece of furniture that got delivered to the wrong address. His mouth is slightly open. There’s a crease down his cheek from the pillow seam.

I reach over him for my glasses and put them on so I can see him properly, which is possibly the greediest thing I have ever done at five in the morning.

Because that’s what I’m doing. Looking at him because looking at him makes me feel good. The white line through his eyebrow. The dark hair going down from his navel and disappearing under my sheet. The hand hanging off the edge of a bed that was never designed with him in mind. And underneath it I’m working out what I want and then running the old calculation about whether wanting it makes me too much.

Last night Natan told me to say what I want out loud, in words, and he’d do it. He didn’t say anything about the reverse. I decide that’s an oversight on his part and not my problem.

I ease the sheet down to his hips. He’s already half hard, which I understand is a thing that happens to men in the morning without any input from their eyes, but I choose to be flattered anyway.

Moving down the bed takes some engineering. There’s a lot of him and very little mattress, and I end up on my front between his knees with my hair falling over one shoulder and my glasses sliding down my nose. I have to push them up with the back of my wrist like a woman about to do something technical.

I take him in my hand. He’s heavy, and warm, and thickening against my palm, and he gets a great deal more interested in the proceedings almost immediately. I’m still congratulating myself on how quietly I’m managing all this when he says my name.

“Kimmie.”

“Do you want me to stop?”

“No.”

I look up the length of him. He’s propped on one elbow with his hair flattened on one side and his eyes on me, wide awake, and there’s nothing sleepy in his face at all.

“Ask me something,” I say.

He takes a second. His jaw works.

“Are you going to put your mouth on me?”

“That is the single best question anybody has ever asked me.” I lean down. “Yes.”

The first stroke of my tongue goes right up the underside of him, and his stomach hollows out. I take the head of him into my mouth and hold there, tasting salt, feeling him twitch against my tongue, and he makes a sound that I intend to think about for the rest of my natural life. His hand comes down into my hair. He doesn’t push. He gathers it back off my face and holds it there in a loose fist, which somehow makes the whole thing filthier.

I take more of him. My jaw protests almost immediately, and I ignore it. What I can’t fit I wrap my hand around, and I work him in long slow pulls, and I let myself make a noise around him because it turns out I want to.

“Fuck.” It comes out of him cracked in the middle.

I lift off him, keeping my hand moving, chin wet, extremely pleased with myself. “Tell me.”

“What?”

“You made me do it. Now you have to.” I run my tongue up him again, very slowly, watching his face. “Tell me what you want.”

For a man who says everything he means, he takes his time. Then his fingers tighten in my hair.

“Slower. Use your hand at the base.” His voice has dropped somewhere below his usual register. “And look at me while you do it.”

I do all three, and the looking is the part that undoes me. He watches my mouth on him with his teeth set and his chest going. Every so often his hips come up a fraction and he stops them, and I can see the effort that costs him.

“Deeper,” he says. “If you can.”