Chapter 34 #2
My stance widened slightly as the ground shifted under my feet, my grip tightening just enough to keep him secure as my body changed.
My shoulders narrowed.
My height dropped.
My hands used less force and more control, but I kept him in my arms the entire time.
I carried him out of the water and onto the grass, the ground firmer under my feet as the last of the change settled into place.
Then I lowered him, slowly and carefully, onto his back.
He peered up at me from the grass, hair wet against his forehead, chest rising and falling too fast. The evening sun cut across his face at an angle that caught in his eyes.
I did not know what my expression was doing.
I did not know if I had one. I only knew I was kneeling over him and that something in me had gone very quiet and very focused.
“Come here,” he requested.
I lowered myself, though not quite as fast as my body desired. I braced one forearm beside his head, cautious of my weight, and brought our chests together.
He was warm. Warmer than the water, warmer than the air outside. I had not been warm like that in a while.
His hand cupped my cheek, thumb brushing the underside of my jaw. “Breathe, Calder.”
I had not realized I had stopped. The exhale was uneven on its way out.
He smiled and guided my mouth down to his once more. His lips were soft, yet the kiss was firm and insistent. His tongue moved against mine, and I followed, learning the shape of it, and the low sound that left me was involuntary.
He looked at me for a long moment. “God,” he murmured. For a moment, he looked as though he had not intended to say it aloud.
I did not understand why that word rippled through me the way it did.
He flattened his palms on my chest, drawing them down my sides to my stomach, and I felt every inch of it. I had never been touched like this before.
Pale skin. Freckles across his shoulders. The dark line of hair below his navel. The rise and fall of his ribs.
I had watched humans from a distance for three hundred years. I had observed them. I had never wanted one. The distinction mattered. The distinction was the whole of it.
I did not want any mere human beneath me. I wanted Milo Hart. Specifically, the freckle below his left collarbone, the small scar at the corner of his mouth, and the way his breath hitched when he caught me looking at him.
“You can touch me,” he said. “That’s the part where you touch me.”
I touched him, starting at his collarbone, tracing the lines of it in a tender path downward. My hand looked enormous against his chest, my fingers spreading easily across his skin. He let out a small sound when I brushed his nipple, and I stopped, observed, and then did it again on purpose.
He laughed, breathless. “Quick study.”
His hands moved to my hips, drawing me closer. He looked up at me, watching my face. I watched his.
“Still with me?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me if that changes.”
“Yes.”
The heat of his skin washed over the length of my shaft, and my hips jerked instinctively in response—a short, rough motion forward before I caught myself, bracing harder against the ground beside him.
Milo made a soft sound underneath me that went through my entire body. His hands slid along my arms before settling against my shoulders. “I need you to fuck me,” he strained.
I stilled immediately. “The term–I have only heard used in anger.”
For a second Milo simply stared at me, then his expression softened so completely it almost undid me. “Okay,” he murmured, one hand sliding along my neck. “That’s not what I mean.”
I waited. His thumb brushed slowly against my skin before he spoke again. “I want you inside me. I want that with you.”
The words seemed to linger in the air between us. It was not that I failed to understand, but because I did.
And because some instinctive part of me still briefly pictured him meaning all of me instead. Milo must have seen something in my expression because a startled laugh escaped him.
“Not literally your entire body,” he clarified.
“I understood eventually.”
“You did not.”
“I was reconsidering the structural limitations.”
That earned a helpless sound from him, half laugh and half groan, before his forehead dropped briefly against my shoulder, the act more intimate than anything else we had shared.
“You want me inside you,” I echoed. “Until I release?”
Emotions flickered across Milo’s face then, embarrassment, affection–desire. “Oh my God,” he puffed under his breath.
I frowned slightly. “Was that incorrect?”
“No,” he said immediately, still smiling as he lifted a hand to brush my face. “No, that was… actually kind of unfairly hot.” Then he watched me carefully. “Do you want that too?”
I considered the question seriously. Not the act. The act I understood, mechanically. What mattered was whether I wanted this specifically with him, whether there was any part of me capable of refusing him anything when he looked at me that way.
There was not.
“Yes,” I whispered.
“Good.” His hand curled around the back of my neck, pulled me down for another kiss, brief and hard. “Come here. I’ll show you.”
He guided my hand to his mouth. I did not understand at first, until he sucked two of my fingers past his lips and swirled his tongue around them, saliva dripping from the corners of his mouth, and the sight of that—his mouth around my fingers, his eyes on mine—drove every coherent thought briefly from my head.
He drew back and guided my hand lower, down his stomach and between his thighs.
“Slow,” he instructed. “One first. Go slow.”
I did as instructed, watching his face the entire time. His eyebrows drew together; his breath caught. His hand tightened at my shoulder. I stiffened, but he shook his head. “Keep going. That’s—that’s good. That’s good.”
When instructed, I added a second finger, then curled them at his word. His back arched off the grass and he swore. I stopped, alarm, only for him to let out a breathless laugh. “No, no, that’s the spot. Do that again.”
So I did.