Chapter 14 #2
He couldn’t say it. His face was burning and he was harder than I’d ever felt him, pressed against my thigh, and the question was written across every inch of him even though his mouth couldn’t form the words.
I answered by pushing him onto his back.
His eyes went wide. He lay beneath me breathing hard, his hands hovering at my hips like he wasn’t sure he was allowed to hold on.
“You can touch me,” I told him, settling my weight across his hips. “Wherever you want.”
His hands found my waist. Gripped. I took him in my hand and he gasped, his hips bucking, and a sound tore from his throat that was animal and human at the same time.
I guided him. Positioned him. And then slowly, so slowly, I sank down.
The stretch was intense. Sixteen years of nothing and then this, the fullness, the pressure, the overwhelming intimacy of having another person inside my body.
My hands braced on his chest and my eyes closed and I heard myself make a sound that was surprise and relief and grief, because I’d forgotten what this felt like and the remembering was almost too much to bear.
Beneath me he’d stopped breathing entirely.
His hands gripped my hips with a force that would leave bruises and his eyes were wide and glassy and his mouth was open and I could see every muscle in his body locked tight with the effort of not moving, not thrusting, not doing the thing every instinct in him was screaming at him to do.
“Breathe,” I told him.
He gasped. A ragged, shuddering intake that sounded like a man surfacing from deep water.
I rocked my hips. Just once. Just a small, slow movement to show him how this worked.
The sound he made. I’d never heard anything like it.
A groan that started in his chest and tore its way up through his throat and broke apart in the air between us.
His fingers dug into my hips and his head pressed back into the pillow and I watched tears leak from the corners of his closed eyes and slide into his hair.
He was crying. The man who’d slept in caves and survived alone for decades and driven wolves off with nothing but teeth and fury was crying because a woman was making love to him for the first time in his life.
I leaned down and kissed the tears from his temples. Kissed his closed eyelids. Kissed the scar on his cheekbone and the corner of his mouth.
“Stay with me,” I whispered against his lips. “Open your eyes.”
He opened them. Amber and wet and completely undone.
I moved again. Slow. A rhythm for him to learn, the way I’d shown him everything else, patient, deliberate, giving him time to feel each sensation before the next one arrived. His hands on my hips followed the movement, gripping and releasing, learning the pace.
“You can move,” I told him. “Move with me.”
His hips lifted. The first thrust was clumsy, too hard, wrong angle, and I adjusted, shifted my weight, guided him with the pressure of my hands on his chest. The second was better. The third made us both gasp.
“There,” I breathed. “Like that. Just like that.”
He found the rhythm and held it, tentative at first, then steadier, his body learning what his mind couldn’t teach it. His eyes watched my face with fierce concentration, cataloguing every sound, every roll of my hips, every shudder I made.
His rhythm faltered. His rhythm broke and his grip on me tightened and I could feel him losing the thread, the pleasure pulling him under faster than he could fight it.
“I can’t ...” He choked on the rest, his face burning. “It’s too. I’m going to ...”
“Let go.” I rolled my hips. “It’s all right. Let go.”
He shattered.
His whole body arched beneath me, every muscle locking at once, and the sound that came out of him was nothing I had language for, raw and wrecked and primal, ripped from somewhere so deep it left the rest of him empty.
His hands clamped on my hips and held me still while his body pulsed inside me, wave after wave, his face twisted with a pleasure so intense it looked like pain.
I held myself above him and watched him come apart and felt the wall I’d built the day William died crack wide open. Because the look on his face wasn’t the look of a man getting what he wanted. It was the look of a man receiving everything he’d believed he would never, ever have.
He went limp beneath me. His chest heaved and his face was wet and for a long moment neither of us moved.
Then his eyes opened. Amber and dazed and immediately, devastatingly ashamed.
“I’m sorry.” He sounded utterly wrecked. “You just, before, but I couldn’t last long enough to ...”
“Stop.” I leaned down and pressed my mouth against his. Soft. Unhurried. “That was perfect.”
“But you didn’t, we didn’t, together ...”
I kissed him quiet. Held his face in my hands and kissed him until the shame loosened its grip and he settled.
“We have time,” I murmured against his lips. “This doesn’t have to be everything at once.”
He looked at me with surprise.
“Stay,” he whispered. “Please stay.”
“I’m here.” And for now, that was enough.
I eased off him and settled against his side, my head on his chest. His arms wrapped around me and held on like a man who’d spent his whole life drowning and had just been taught what air was. His heartbeat slammed against my ear, too fast, too hard.
We lay like that while the fire burned low. His hands moved over my back in slow, aimless patterns, touching me because he could, because I’d said he was allowed, because for the first time in his life someone had meant it.
After a long time, he stirred. He was hard again against my thigh, impossibly soon, inhumanly soon, and his face was flushed and hopeful and terrified in equal measure.
“Already?” I couldn’t hide the surprise.
He looked away. Ashamed again.
I turned his face back to me. “That wasn’t a complaint.”
This time I guided him onto his side and pulled him into me from behind, his chest against my back, his arms wrapped around me, his face buried in my hair.
The angle was deeper and I heard him choke when he pushed inside, felt his teeth graze the back of my neck, felt the groan vibrate through his chest into my spine.
“Slow,” I murmured, reaching back to grip his hip and set the pace. “Like this. Feel it.”
He moved behind me — slow and deep and shaking with the effort of following my lead instead of chasing the need. His arms wrapped around my ribs, holding me against him, his mouth pressed open against the nape of my neck, breathing me in with every stroke.
This time was different. The desperation had burned off and what was left was an instinct that was rawer and more fragile, two bodies learning each other in the dark.
He figured out that a certain depth made me moan and he sought it again and again.
I reached between my legs and touched myself while he moved inside me and he made a broken sound against my hair when he felt my fingers working.
“I want to feel you,” he whispered against my neck. “I want to feel it when you ...”
“You will,” I whispered. “Keep moving. Don’t stop.”
The pleasure built like a tide, slower this time, deeper, fed by the warmth of his body behind mine and the steady rhythm he’d found and the sound of his breathing in my ear. When the orgasm came it rolled through me in long, slow waves and I clenched around him and heard him gasp.
“Go.” I pressed back against him. “With me.”
He came with his face buried in my hair and his arms locked around me and a sound that might have been my name or might have been something older than language.
His whole body shook against mine and I held his arms where they wrapped around my ribs and let the aftershocks roll through both of us until they faded into stillness.
We lay tangled together while the logs popped in the fire and the light through the boards turned from black to gray. His arms didn’t loosen. His face stayed pressed into my hair.
“Talia.” A long time passed before he spoke.
“Hmm.”
“Thank you.” He said it so quietly I felt it more than heard it. “For showing me. For being patient. For not making me feel like less.”
My eyes burned. I laced my fingers through his where they rested against my stomach.
“You’re not less.” I turned in his arms. “You’ve never been less.”
He pressed his mouth against the back of my neck and didn’t say anything else. He didn’t need to. His arms said it. His heartbeat said it. The way he held me said it louder than words ever could.
I closed my eyes and listened to him breathe and felt his body warm and solid against mine and for the first time since William died, the bed didn’t feel empty.
“There’s one more thing,” I stared at the ceiling.
We hadn’t moved. His head rested on my chest and my fingers were in his hair and our legs were tangled together under the furs.
“About the dream,” I continued. “Before I woke up on the ice.”
He went still against me. His breathing didn’t change but his body did, a subtle tightening, a gathering, the way an animal goes quiet when a shadow moves wrong.
“I was running through the forest.” I stared at the ceiling because I couldn’t look at him while I told him this. “A black wolf was chasing me. Like the one from the night I escaped the village, enormous, dark fur, golden eyes. But it wasn’t hunting me. It was playing. Like we knew each other.”
His hand had gone still on my ribs.
“And then it changed.” My face was burning. “It became you. And then it changed back. And I ...”
I stopped.
“And you what?” he asked. He kept everything out of it on purpose.
“I didn’t want it to stop,” I whispered. “Either of them. The wolf or the man. And when I woke up I was on the ice and I ...”
The silence said it for me.
He was rigid against me now, every muscle locked. His heart hammered so hard I could feel it against my breast.
“A black wolf,” he repeated. The control in him was almost painful to hear, too tight, too even, like a wire stretched to its limit.
“Yes.” I swallowed. “What does it mean? Is something wrong with me?”
“Nothing is wrong with you.” He pulled me closer, his arms tightening with a fierceness that contradicted every measured word. “The dream doesn’t mean anything.”
He was lying. I could hear it in the tension threaded through every word. Could feel it in the rigidity of his body, the way his heart refused to slow down. He knew what the dream meant. The silence told me that much. So did the way he wouldn’t look at me.
I lay against his chest and listened to his heart race. I knew he was hiding something. But I didn’t push. I wasn’t ready for the answer.