Chapter 17 Starlit Confessions #5
I set my own pace, slow at first, learning the particular geometry of this, learning what made his hands grip my thighs hard enough to bruise.
The moonlight laid itself across his throat, his chest, the lines of his collarbones, painting him silver and shadow, and I pressed my palms flat against his stomach for balance and moved with increasing purpose.
“Gideon.” A warning wrapped in reverence.
“I know.” I moved faster.
His hands slid from my thighs to my hips and gripped, not guiding, just holding on, and his wolf was in it, in the possessive press of his thumbs against my hip bones, in the way his body arched up to meet each downward roll of mine with an instinctive, powerful urgency that sent sparks up my spine every single time.
The sounds coming from both of us had long since abandoned any pretense of restraint.
My own voice was a continuous, broken thing, pitched low and riding the exhale of every thrust, and Ronan beneath me was making sounds that scattered across the water and into the dark trees like something the forest was going to hold onto long after we were gone.
“You feel—” He stopped. His hips snapped up. “Fuck, you feel—”
“I know,” I said again, breathless, riding him harder.
The orgasm when it arrived gave me approximately one second of warning before it unmade me completely. I felt it gather at the base of my spine and then it crashed outward with a force that yanked my head back.
My cock pulsed untouched and I came in long, shaking stripes across his stomach, his chest, a hot splash that caught his jaw and the corner of his mouth, my whole body shuddering with each wave while Ronan gripped my hips and watched with his eyes blown black and his lips parted and an expression on his face like he was witnessing something he intended to catalogue for the rest of his life.
“Ronan, fuck, fuck—”
He reached up and dragged his thumb through the come cooling on his own jaw and brought it to his lips without breaking eye contact and my spent cock made a valiant and somewhat embarrassing attempt at interest.
“Your turn,” I managed, barely.
I moved again, deliberately, clenching around him, and felt the moment his control gave up entirely.
His grip on my hips went iron-tight and he drove upward once, twice, a third time with a force that would have moved me entirely if he had not been holding on so completely, and then he groaned from the bottom of his chest, a sound that broke apart into something almost-howl at the top of it, and came.
I felt it, felt him, felt the way his cock thickened as he spilled, swelling harder and fuller inside me with each pulse of his release, stretching me further just at the moment of his undoing, and the full, claiming weight of him locked inside me pulled a helpless, oversensitive whimper from my throat that I did not attempt to swallow.
He shook for a long time.
His hands went loose on my hips eventually, sliding to my thighs in a grip that was warmth rather than urgency, and his breathing came in long, ragged pulls at the night air.
I sat astride him in the moonlight and felt him soften by increments, felt his release warm inside me, and experienced the specific, satisfied exhaustion of a body that had been thoroughly and completely used.
I leaned down.
He watched me with half-lidded eyes as I pressed my mouth to the come cooling on his jaw first, licking it clean with slow attention, tasting myself on him in ways that sent a low, satisfied hum through my chest. He made a rough sound when I moved to his cheekbone and then his temple, following every stripe I had painted on him with methodical care, cleaning him with my tongue while his hands moved through my hair with the loose, unhurried affection of a man in no state to be coordinated.
I worked down to his chest. His stomach.
Taking my time, pressing my lips to each place, tasting salt and skin and the particular evidence of what we had done here in the grass under the indifferent stars.
He watched me move over him with an attention that was soft now rather than hungry, his pale eyes tracking every motion with something that lived in the neighborhood of wonder.
Then I lifted his arm.
I pressed my face into the hollow of his armpit and breathed him in and then put my mouth on him there, slow and thorough, and felt the full-body shiver that moved through him from the contact.
He made a low “hhh” that melted into something longer and less structured, his free hand coming to rest between my shoulder blades with a warmth that was pure reflex.
I moved lower.
I took him into my mouth when he was soft and sensitive and tasted of both of us, cleaning him with the same unhurried attention I had given everything else.
“Gideon.” Rough and quiet and completely stripped of anything complicated.
I released him and kissed my way back up his stomach, his chest, his throat, until I reached his mouth.
He kissed me immediately, deeply, tasting what I had gathered on the way, and then he rolled us sideways until we were facing each other in the blankets, and he kissed me slower, and I felt his tongue coax mine open, felt him take what I was holding and offer it back again, passing it between us in the dark with a laziness that was almost playful.
We lay there afterward with our foreheads together, breathing the same small pocket of warm air, and the lake made its small sounds behind us and the forest held its breath and the moon kept moving through its ancient circuit with complete indifference to the fact that we were both entirely wrecked and entirely satisfied and entirely unwilling to move.
“That was...” Ronan started.
“Yeah.”
We lay there under the stars, his weight warm against me. My soul, which had been pulled tight and aching for a month, finally eased into a comfort that felt like healing.
For the first time in weeks, I felt whole.