Epilogue Stay #2
I pull the belt free. The leather makes a sound. Her eyes track it.
“Down,” I say. “On your back.”
She lies down on the blanket. The red light on her skin.
The mark on her thigh glowing pearlescent in my spectrum.
I kneel beside her and lift her wrists above her head and loop the belt through the heavy cargo anchor set into the floor — the industrial kind, bolted through the deck plate.
It holds. She tugs. The leather creaks but doesn’t give.
Her arms stretched above her head. Wrists bound to the floor anchor. Her body laid out on the blanket, bare, in the red light, and the sight of her is —
Three months. Three months and the sight of her still takes my breath away .
“Good?” I ask.
“Good.” Breathless. “Very good.”
I strip myself, never breaking eye contact with her.
I start at her throat. Then the freckle.
Both tips. My mouth working down her body with the patience of a male who has three months of knowledge and all the time in the world.
I know her now. I know the spot below her left ear that makes her breath hitch.
I know the spot on her ribs that makes her squirm.
I know the exact pressure on her nipple that makes her pull against the belt, and the pulling is the gift — the deliberate strain toward me with her hands held.
I work her breasts with my mouth. Both tips. Alternating. The fang-drag across the underside that makes her gasp. The growl that vibrates through my mouth into her skin and makes her arch. She is loud already and I have not gone below her navel.
Lower. Stomach. Hips. The mark on her thigh — my tongue on the pearlescent shimmer, the shared pulse through the bond. Inside her thighs. She opens for me, wrists bound, and I put my mouth on her, and both tips make contact, and the sound fills the storage unit.
I take my time. Both tips working independently. The edging that has become our language — three times I bring her to the crest and hold her there, building, not letting her fall.
“Jazil, please —”
The third edge. I let her fall. She comes against my mouth with a sound that is my name and something wordless, and I hold her through it, tongue gentling.
She is breathing in ragged gulps. I kiss up her body. Slow. Tasting the aftermath. Stomach. Ribs. Breasts. Throat. Freckle. Mouth. She tastes herself on me and makes the sound — half-moan, half-laugh.
“Now,” she breathes. “Both. I’m ready.”
I kneel between her thighs. My hands slide down her hips, over the curve of her, and my fingers find —
A toy.
Small. Smooth. Warm from her body heat. Seated inside her, in the other place. She used it before the hunt — inserted it, prepped herself, ran the laps with it in. She has been hiding in a storage unit with a toy in her backside, waiting for me to find it.
“Surprise,” she says. The brave-eyes. The blush spreading down her chest.
“How long?”
“Since before the laps. About forty minutes.”
“You ran laps with —”
“I ran laps with it. Yes. It was an experience. I had to concentrate very hard on the running part.”
I press my forehead against her stomach. Breathing. Because my mate ran laps through a residential maintenance level with a toy inside her to prepare for me, and I need a second before my brain shuts down entirely.
“Can I take it out?”
“That is the idea.”
Slow. Careful. Easing the toy free. She gasps when it clears — the release of pressure, the stretch relaxing — and I set it aside and my fingers replace it. Checking. Slick. Warm. Open. Ready.
“Good girl.” Against her hip. “My thorough, sneaky, magnificent female.”
“Don’t make me wait. I have been waiting for forty minutes with a —”
I don’t make her wait.
The claiming shaft first. Familiar. Home. The ridges she knows. She takes me with the sound that is yes and there and always. I hold still. Letting her adjust. Both of us are breathing hard. The bond-feedback opening between us.
Then the other. Careful. Slow. The secondary finding the entrance she prepared — slick and warm and open from the toy and my fingers. The first press and she tenses. Breathes. Opens.
“Don’t stop,” she says through her teeth. Hands gripping the belt above her head. “Don’t you dare stop. I have been thinking about this for three weeks.”
I press forward. Both sliding in. Two channels. Two pressures. Two different textures and rhythms. My brain short-circuits. Hers short-circuits. The bond-feedback opens and we are both short-circuiting together.
“Oh — both — I can feel them separately, the ridges in the front and the, oh God —”
They move. Independently. The claiming shaft pulsing with the ridges. The secondary flexing on its own rhythm.
“Jazil — I can feel them both — the pressure is, oh God —”
I move. Both. Different rhythms. Finding the counterpoint that makes her eyes roll back and her wrists pull against the belt.
On the crate beside us, the oil bottle — warm, uncapped, placed there as part of her meticulous planning — begins to rock. The movement of our bodies on the blanket, the rhythm transferring through the floor, the crate shaking with each thrust. The bottle sways. Tips. Rights itself. Sways again.
I am not watching the bottle. I am watching her face. The expression of a woman taking both of me and the expression is delight. She is loud about it. Three months of trust have made her fearless.
“There — there — both at the same, Jazil, please —”
The bottle tips.
The oil pours off the crate. Down onto her stomach. Her chest. A warm golden cascade that coats her skin, and she gasps — the sudden warmth, the slick contact on oversensitized skin — and the gasp makes her body clench around both of me, and the clenching sends a bolt through the bond.
“The oil — the oil just — from the crate, I’m covered in, Jazil —”
I look down. She is gleaming. Oil coating her body from collarbone to hip, catching the red light, slick and golden, and I am inside her — both — and she is bound and oiled and flushed and full.
She starts laughing. The bright, breathless one. “This is the most me thing — the crate, the OIL, during DUAL — I can’t —”
I am laughing too. Both inside her. The laughter makes her clench, and the clenching cuts through the laughter and replaces it with something sharper.
“Oh — the laughing — the oil made everything more slippery and the —”
She’s right. The oil has changed everything.
Smoother. Deeper. Both moving with less resistance and more sensation.
The warm oil on her skin is catching the red light, and she is glistening, and the visual of my mate — bound, oiled, flushed, full — is seared into my memory with the permanence of a bond-mark.
I thrust. Deep. Both. The rhythm that makes her grip the belt and arch and make sounds from beyond words. The feedback loop through the bond — I feel what she feels, she feels what I feel, layered pleasure spiraling.
The orgasm builds through the bond. Hers and mine. The plateau — long, vast, both coming at the same time, feeling each other coming, the hum-sense singing at a frequency that is joy.
She screams. I follow. Both. The dual release. The feedback loop catches, and the second wave rolls through and takes a long time to stop.
We lie on the blanket. The oil situation has spread beyond all containment. We are both gleaming. The storage unit looks like a crime scene at a spa.
“I am going to have to clean this up,” she says.
Boneless. Looking at the ceiling. “The residential maintenance crew is going to have questions I cannot answer.” She sits up on one elbow.
Looks at the blanket, the oil, the belt, the storage unit.
“I should probably apologize to — no.” She stops herself.
Laughs. The laugh of a woman who has caught the old reflex mid-fire and finds it genuinely funny now.
“No, I am not apologizing to a storage unit. The storage unit volunteered.”
“HORATIO will send a drone.”
“HORATIO does not have jurisdiction on the residential level.”
“HORATIO has never let jurisdiction stop him.”
She laughs. She reaches for me — hands belt-marked, the skin pink — and I unknot the leather and kiss both wrists, and she threads her oily fingers through mine.
“The oil is in your ridges,” she says. Lifting my forearm. Examining. The oil has settled into every ridge, gleaming. “It has colonized your ridges. Every single one.”
She scrubs at them with the edge of the blanket, and it does not work, and she starts laugh-snorting, and the laugh-snort is my favorite sound in the universe.
I carry her back to the quarters. Slick and warm, and laughing. We leave oily footprints in the corridor that are going to require an explanation I have no intention of providing.
The shower. Hot water on her skin, cool on mine.
I wash her with the care of a male who has just had his mate bound and oiled on a blanket.
I wash her wrists. Kiss the marks. She washes my arms — scrubbing the oil from the ridges with soapy fingers, the afterglow ridge-touch that has become our quiet ritual.
She finds oil in places. Behind her ear.
Between her fingers. In the ridges of my forearms, which makes her laugh so hard she snorts and the snort makes her laugh harder and I am standing in a shower watching a woman I would die for laugh-snort about oil in my arm ridges and I am the happiest I have ever been.