CHAPTER 39
Ileaned in and kissed him so hard, he nearly bit me back.
My hands went under his clothes, pulling at the fastening.
He wasted no time in peeling open the buttons of my shirt while his free hand ran steadily over the front of my trousers, feeling the outline of my stiffening cock.
His legs, hooked around mine, drew me in so I was trapped against his mouth, which migrated from my lips, to my neck, lower.
He shoved aside my shirt to suck on a nipple.
It was harried and manic, the desperate hunger to devour one last meal before we both starved, but I still asked, “Any more rules I should know about?”
“Pretend like this isn’t our last night together.”
I nodded feverishly. “Okay.” I’d pulled enough buttons open to pull his shirt down over his shoulder. I mouthed over the mark I’d left and traveled lower to make more.
He pulled me back by my hair to kiss me again, working on my belt buckle. “And you? What do you want?”
“To taste you.”
He abandoned my belt buckle to undo his own and lifted his arse so I could pull his trousers down. “My hips are too banjaxed to do this standing.”
“Bedroom?” I asked.
He got off the counter, shimmied the rest of the way out of his trousers and briefs so they pooled around his ankles, then turned and opened the cupboard to retrieve a glass instead.
“Torturing me for a glass of water?”
“It’s important to stay hydrated.”
I had a moment to admire him while he poured from the tap.
His dress shirt still hung on by a single button, its hem hitched up on one hip, falling over the other, exposing only one curved cheek.
He stood with one foot arched, his weight on the other, all long legs under the bottom of that shirt.
He looked like a half-opened birthday present.
He caught me staring and looked almost shy. “Well? Are you coming?”
“God, I hope so.”
He bit his lip and offered me a sip from the glass. He tipped it to my lips before taking a gulp of his own, then headed for the bedroom.
Lunaris had lit it with candles and a softly glowing lamp. Rose petals were scattered underfoot. Kessian looked even more shy when he turned and lay down on the bed.
He propped himself up on his elbows, one knee bent, shirt open in a wide V. I grabbed some pillows from the bed and tossed them on the floor.
He pulled his plait over his shoulder, untying and combing his fingers through it. “Are you setting up a picnic?”
I grinned. “Yeah.”
He cocked his knees apart. I grabbed both ankles, pulled him to the edge of the bed, and kissed a line up his thigh to the place where his body hair got thicker. His breath caught.
“I’ve never done it like this before,” I said.
“It’s easy. Lick me like an ice cream, suck me like you’d want to be sucked, and finger me when I’m getting close.”
I planned on teasing him just a little more than that, but truly appreciated the direction. I tasted sweat as I licked up the crease of one thigh, then the other. His hips flexed, a frustrated breath escaping between clenched teeth.
“Tal.”
We were pretending, but if the world wasn’t ending, I would have drawn things out so much longer. Still, I said, “Beg.”
He groaned, opening his legs wider. “Please.”
I’d have asked for more detail if the husky way he said it didn’t send a jolt of pleasure southward. I held his thighs apart, nuzzled into his thatch of pubic hair, and licked a long stripe over his pussy.
He flopped back against the pillows with a satisfied sigh as I tongued into him, sweat and musk and his peculiar wild magic invading my senses.
I put my arms around him, thumbing the trail of hair from navel to sex while swirling my tongue over his cock and sucking it into my mouth.
He thrust shallowly into the suction, making a low keening noise in his throat.
I didn’t think of the looming deadline, or how the nomenclature of the word “deadline” made my heart speed, or of the way Kessian desperately ground against my mouth like he wanted to expedite the finale so we could, perhaps, have enough time to go again.
We were pretending. I didn’t think of those things.
I sucked him down, let him rut against my mouth with his fists in my hair, and I teased him with the tips of my fingers just inside him, never past the first knuckle, never enough to make him feel full.
He rocked and tried to take more, and when that didn’t work he shouted, “Tal, will you please just fuck me already!”
I sank two fingers in to the knuckle and he cried out, “Curl them. Yes, just like tha—”
His thighs closed around my head as he came. I tried to ease him through it with slow ministrations of my fingers and tongue, but the pleasure must have been sharp as a knife, because he begged me to stop. I did, pulling off him and wiping my mouth with the back of my arm.
He looked down at me, panting and pink-cheeked, eyes hooded and dark. His thighs were red from the scrape of my stubble.
I gulped. “How much longer until you can go again?”
“I don’t have a refractory period.”
“Then hand me that damn water,” I said, half laughing and half shuddering as I climbed over him to take a sip, and he rubbed his palm more firmly against the front of my trousers.
“You still have all your clothes on.”
I started on my shirt’s few remaining buttons. My hands were shaking.
“Come here,” he said.
I moved up the bed, straddling his hips. He sat up, and the only sound was the guttering of a candle and the soft pick as he undressed me one button at a time. When he got to the last one, he pulled the shirt down my arms, tossing it aside without taking his eyes off me.
He traced a lazy finger down the midline of my belly hair, and all the muscles in my stomach jumped.
“You can take off the rest.” He leaned back on his elbows, kicking one leg up. “I’ll watch.”
I was a basket of nervous energy. I got off the bed and kicked off my shoes first. Then one sock at a time. I unbuckled my belt, undid the clasp of my trousers. Kessian’s eyes tracked my movements, his dagger-sharp smile curving the edges of his mouth.
I hurried up because I wanted to kiss that mouth.
I dragged both trousers and pants off in one go, balling them up and tossing them. My cock bobbed free, still heavy and hard. Kessian made no attempt to disguise where he was looking. I walked over and put one knee up on the bed beside him.
His eyes finally raked up to meet mine, a glint of mischief in his expression. “I didn’t say anything at the time, but from that first night we met, I fucking knew it’d be big.”
“It’s not that big.”
“Only men with big cocks say that. They all look big next to mine.”
“You know a lot of men with big cocks?”
“I’ve met a few.”
I crawled over him until he lay flat against the bed. “Is it all right if I do my best to make you forget them?”
One of his hands hooked around the back of my neck, drawing me in so he could whisper in my ear, “Yes, please.”
Then he lay back, his hair spread out like strokes of paint against the covers, his knees knocked apart to make room for me, and he looked so tender and beautiful, it hit me how unfair it was that I’d never see him this way again.
But we were pretending.
I played with a strand of hair that had fallen past his ear, combing it back with the rest, and he did something that nearly cracked my heart in two.
He leaned his temple against my knuckles and nuzzled into my hand, until I was splaying my fingers against his cheek, into his hair, and he looked at me with an invitation in his eyes.
“Should I ask Lunaris to conjure a condom?” I whispered.
“I don’t think we’ll really need that here,” Kessian whispered back.
I didn’t know what the rules of the strid were around contraception. If our bodies were technically floating off in a river somewhere, he was probably right, but he certainly felt real with his hot skin against mine.
“You sure?” I said.
“Tal, I know we’re pretending, but if this is our last night together, I want you bare.”
It felt like my brain was made of ceramic and he’d just smashed it against a paving stone.
“I’m afraid I’m too turned on to speak,” I said frankly.
“Don’t speak. Kiss me again.”
I followed his command and pressed his lips apart with my tongue. I let my knees slide out from under me, my arms making a halo around his head, combing his hair back so I didn’t trap it under us. And then there wasn’t much space between us.
The tip of my cock kissed the crease of one thigh, leaving a drop of precum on his skin.
His tongue plunged into my mouth, and his hips twitched up, and one of his hands snaked between us, guiding me.
I groaned at the feel of his fingers wrapped firmly around me, his bush tickling the tip.
He dragged my cock head up his pussy lips to part them.
When he had me where he wanted me, he broke the kiss.
“Taliesin,” he said. Just that. Just my name.
I sank my weight. His mouth fell open, but no noise came out.
Just a tense, drawn-out silence as he let me in.
He was so slick and warm. As I finally bottomed out, he did let out a small sound.
A low-pitched sigh. I stopped holding my breath and released it all at once, and he kissed me like the noises I made were for him to swallow.
I didn’t move except to sidle my hips a little from side to side, letting him adjust.
He didn’t want to wait. He resisted the restraint of my hands, sidling onto my cock, taking me deeper. I ground my teeth together to quell the spike of heat in my belly.
“I hear it feels even better when you move,” he whispered in an echo of our first time.
Again, I let him goad me. I rocked my hips, making the mattress bounce. He stopped teasing and held on to me. I pulled out and snapped back in. That punched a surprised and delighted noise from him, which devolved quickly into panting breaths and plaintive moans.
Pleasure bloomed between us, his body pillowed under mine.
I felt like I was being embraced by all of him—his arms, his legs, his cunt.
Welcomed in. And it wasn’t our first time, nor the second, but it still felt unfair that the third would be the last. We hadn’t known each other long, but I didn’t feel like a guest in his arms. I felt at home and suddenly understood why the strid would be driven mad by the loss of that feeling.
I rolled my hips deeper, and he buried a noise in my neck.
“Is that … good?” I whispered.
A long string of expletives was my answer.
I’d like to think I’d kept it together well until then, but hearing him fall apart and cuss me out for making him feel good, it ratcheted everything up. Made it more intense. I fucked him harder, spinning out and so damn close to losing control. I buried my face in his shoulder to muzzle myself.
It didn’t help; it just meant that everything Kessian said was moaned directly into my ear.
“Jesus, Tal, fuck. You’re doing good. You feel so good.”
“Please,” I ground out. I didn’t even know what I was begging for. “I need to. I’m going to—”
“Me too.”
I reached down and thumbed over his cock just as he clenched down around me.
I saw stars, or maybe that was just the freckles dusted over his skin.
I couldn’t hear the noises I made, but I know I made them.
I throbbed and emptied myself, and he quivered and rocked through it until we both slumped, sweaty and limp.
My arms and legs were shaking as I tried to rise and get off him, but he pulled me back into his arms and started kissing my lips, my cheeks, my closed eyelids.
“I’m crushing you,” I said.
“You’re better than any weighted blanket.”
The rush slowly ebbed into a quiet awe. The heavy lure of sleep drew me in, but I resisted. I wanted to be with him as long as I could be.
Kessian carded his fingers through my hair, soothing me. “I wish there was time to sleep.”
“If there was, I wouldn’t want to. I’d miss you.”
He looked at me like I’d told him a terrible secret.
He traced my spine with his fingers, and I counted and kissed the stars along his shoulders and collarbones.
“They used to be just normal freckles, until I came to Shearwater,” Kessian said.
“They’re beautiful. They’ve always reminded me of stars.” I kissed the one that fell right between his clavicles, like the pendant on a necklace. “We should make wishes on yours.”
Kessian got really quiet. Then he said, “I wish this night could last forever.”
We were supposed to be pretending, but we couldn’t pretend anymore.
I’d said this once in a dream. It still hurt the second time. “We made the time we had count.”
He managed to hold back tears, but it was a near thing. “Water?”
“Yeah.”
He leaned over to get it for me, tipped the glass to my lips like he had before. He’d set the pocket watch open on the bedside amongst empty potion bottles and the sachet of paracetamol I’d given him that night he couldn’t sleep for the pain in his leg.
I should have taken him up on round two back then. If I’d known there’d only be three …
The exhaustion of the night wore away at my resistance to sleep. My eyelids were so heavy. I kept shaking awake, focusing on the tiniest details of Kessian’s face, memorizing it like it was the last time I’d ever see it, because it was.
Kessian noticed. He kissed my temple. His warmth, the soft rise and fall of his chest and steady heartbeat were like a lullaby.
Distantly, I thought, no, I have to get up.
It’s time. When I realized one of the empty potion bottles on the nightstand was the sleep spell I’d given him, it was too late.
I fought it, but I lost.
I woke to Lunaris’s horn blaring, my bed empty except for the divot that once held Kessian. The pocket watch still stood open on the nightstand. There was a note inside.
It read, I’m sorry.
There were three minutes left until midnight.