Chapter 36
Bastien
On the third night, she comes into the study and takes the papers out of my hand. I don’t hear her on the stairs. I have heard that woman moving around since she got here, and now she’s right here in one of my shirts with the sleeves turned back four times, and I never heard a step of it.
“You’re supposed to be resting.”
“I am resting.”
“You’re at a desk.”
“I’m sitting at a desk. It’s the same thing with better light.”
Whatever Ecaterina put in me finished burning out sometime in the second night. I spent the worst of it in a chair, alone, with the door locked, and nobody knows how close it came. I intend to keep it that way.
She comes around to my side of the desk. Her hair is loose, and she’s moving carefully on the right. The collar of the shirt sits open enough that I can see the mark under her collarbone.
Three days. It’s the size of a coin.
“What are these?” She has the top sheet before I can put my hand on it.
Two pages. A designation typed at the head instead of a name. A countersignature at the bottom in fountain pen. Her deed. My letter. My signature on both.
She reads four lines.
“This is me.”
“Yes.”
“You kept it.”
“It came from Vasile’s desk in a leather folder. I put it in a drawer the night I signed it.”
“And now it’s out of the drawer.”
“Yes.”
She holds it a moment longer. Then she turns it face down on the pile and squares the edges with two fingers.
“Come upstairs,” she says.
I don’t argue with that.
She shuts the bedroom door and starts on my shirt.
I stop her hands.
“Don’t tell me to rest,” she says.
“I wasn’t going to.”
“Then what?”
“Take that off first. I want to look at you.”
She steps back and pulls the shirt over her head.
There’s a pink scar on her shoulder now. The bruise down her left side has gone yellow at the edges, and the needle scars run up the inside of both arms, same as always. She stands there and lets me look.
“Well?” she says.
“Come here.”
She comes. I kiss the mark under her collarbone, and her hand comes up into my hair.
“Bastien—”
“Quiet.”
I turn her and find the one behind her shoulder and put my mouth there too. She takes hold of the bedpost with both hands and leans her weight into it.
“That’s not fair.”
“What isn’t?”
“You’re fully dressed, and I’m holding furniture.”
“I’ll get to that.”
I walk her backward to the bed and lay her down. I take her breast in my mouth, and she arches up off the sheet. I use my teeth, carefully.
“Oh.” Her head goes back. “Do that again.”
I do it again. My hand goes down her stomach and between her thighs, and she’s already wet, already moving against my fingers before they’ve settled.
“There.” Her hips lift. “Right— there—”
I work her slowly, two fingers and my thumb, and watch the flush come up her chest. She’s climbing fast, her hands fisting in the sheet, her breath going short.
Then both her palms land on my shoulders, and she pushes.
I let her.
“Stay there,” she says.
She strips the rest of my clothes off me without ceremony. Then she sits back on her heels, and she looks at me the way I looked at her. She takes her time about it.
“You’re pretty, you know that?” Her fingertip is between her teeth. She lets it go and traces it down my chin to my throat to the center of my chest.
“I’m not pretty. Pretty is for flowers. And birds. And you.” I brush her cheek with my thumb.
“Okay, beautiful then.” She smooths her palms down my shoulders, over my biceps to my wrists.
“That’s you too.”
She rolls her eyes. “Beautiful in a very macho and manly way.”
“I can live with that.”
Her thumb finds the scar on the back of my right hand and stops on it. She doesn’t say anything. Neither do I.
Then she bends her head, and her mouth starts at my stomach and goes lower. When it closes over my cock, the breath leaves me in one hard rush. My hands close on the sheet instead of on her, because if I touch her now this ends in about a minute.
“God,” I say.
She isn’t practiced at it. She doesn’t need to be. She watches my face the whole time she works, patient, thorough, finding out what works. Everything works. She takes me deeper and hums, low, and my hips come up off the bed. I don’t fight it. There is nothing in me that wants to hide from her.
“Serenity—”
She lifts her head just enough to speak. “You’ve never let me do this.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I wouldn’t have stopped.”
“Then don’t stop.”
I have spent months being careful with this woman. I told myself the care was for her sake, because she’s small and I’m not. That was a lie. I was afraid of what I’d do if I ever stopped.
Then I sat in a room and waited for the sun, and everything that wasn’t her stopped mattering. I couldn’t harm her if I tried.
“Come here,” I say.
She starts up my body, and I catch her at the waist and turn her under me instead, onto her back, her hair fanned out pale against the dark of the pillow. When she reaches for me, I take both her wrists in one hand and set them above her head.
“We’re not in a hurry,” I tell her.
“Speak for yourself.”
“I am.”
I start at her mouth. I have kissed this woman a hundred times, and every one of those was me taking something. This one isn’t, and she can tell. She goes still under it, and then her mouth softens and opens, and she gives it back slower than she’s ever given me anything.
I go down her throat. Her heart is right there under my lips, quick and strong, and I stay on it a moment. Just listening to the beats.
“Bastien.” Her wrists flex under my hand. “What are you doing?”
“Paying attention.”
I work down her body. The mark under her collarbone. The soft inside of her elbow, over the scars, and her breath goes uneven when my mouth touches those, because nobody has ever touched them like they’re worth anything. Her ribs where the bruise is going yellow. The point of her hip.
Then I settle between her thighs, spread her wide with my thumbs and trail my tongue along the entire slick line of her.
“Oh—” Her hands come down out of my grip and land in my hair.
I let them stay. I take my time, learning her all over again from this close, what makes her thighs tense and what makes them fall open, the exact pressure that pulls that low sound out of her.
There’s no performance in her at all. She rolls her hips against my mouth and says my name and pulls my hair hard enough to mean it.
“I can’t— Bastien, I’m—”
“Come,” I tell her. And she does, back arched, fingers twisted into the sheets, a moan low in her throat. I stay with her through it, gentler and gentler, until she’s twitching away from my tongue and laughing and shoving at my head.
“Enough. Enough. Come here.”
I come up her body and settle between her thighs and push into her while she’s coming down, and she makes a sound like the air’s been pressed out of her.
She’s tight and impossibly hot against my cool flesh, and I go in slow, watching her face the whole way, until I’m buried to the hilt. She takes all of it, and her breath catches and stays caught.
“Move,” she says. Her voice has dropped.
I don’t, not yet. My forehead comes down against hers instead, and I stay there a second longer than either of us needs. Her heart is going hard enough that I can feel it against my own ribs.
“What are you waiting for?”
“Nothing.” I lift my head enough to look at her properly. “Everything.”
She doesn’t ask me to explain that. Her hands slide down my back instead, and she pulls me into the first stroke herself.
I keep it slow. Long, full strokes, all the way out and all the way back, watching what each one does to her face.
The flush climbs her chest and up her throat.
There’s a sound she makes at the deepest point of every stroke, small and involuntary, and I would trade the contents of all of my houses to keep it.
“Faster,” she says.
“No.”
“Bastien—”
“I’ve had you fast.” I take her hands and lace my fingers through hers and press them into the mattress on either side of her head. “I’ve never had you like this.”
She looks up at me then, and something in her face changes…
as if she’s just noticed we’re doing something other than what we’ve always done.
She doesn’t ask again. Her legs come around me and she matches the pace instead, unhurried, her hips rising to meet every stroke, and for a while there’s nothing in the room but that, and the lamp, and the shutters closed against the night, and the two of us moving as if we have years.
I keep her there a long time. When she starts climbing, I feel it before she does—the way her fingers tighten in mine, the way her rhythm loses its patience—and I let her build slow, stroke by stroke, until she’s pulling against my hands and saying my name and not much else.
“Please. Bastien. Please.”
I’ve never heard her beg for anything, in that ward or in this house. She’ll beg for this, and only this, and only because she knows I’ll give her anything here.
I give her what she’s asking for. My full weight, my speed, nothing measured and nothing held. The headboard knocks the wall, once, then again, then in time with us.
“Yes—” Her nails are in my shoulders. “Like that— Just like that—”
She breaks the first time with her head thrown back, and I keep moving straight through it.
There’s no bite in any of this, no blood, and she’s as loud as she has ever been.
The sound was never about the blood, or about what I could do with my teeth in her throat. I should have worked that out long ago.
When she goes soft and heavy under me, I slow again. Not stopping. Long and deep and easy, letting her drift on it.
“I can’t again,” she says, into my shoulder.
“You can.”
“I can’t—”
“Serenity.” I get an arm under her hips and change the angle, and her whole body seizes around me, and her eyes come open. “You can.”