Chapter 5 #2
The fog outside was very thick, the street below quiet, and she watched it the way she sometimes watched things when she was too tired to look away — unfocused, passive, just letting the shapes move.
There.
Her hands tightened on the sink.
A shape in the fog across the street, two stories down.
Still. Not a car, not a bike, not a fire hydrant.
The fog blurred any edge, but through the blur she could make out the vertical line of a standing figure.
A man’s height. A man’s stillness. The wrongness of it crawled up her arms. Then the fog shifted, and she blinked, and he was gone. The street empty, the streetlight hazy.
Nica stood at the window a long moment, her heart going faster than it should have. Nerves. You’re exhausted, and you’re leaving, and you are seeing things.
She went to bed.
And in the dark, somewhere past the edge of waking, he came to her.
It didn’t feel like a dream while she was inside it.
It felt like heat — like she’d been lowered into warm water that breathed, water with a pulse and a scent and a will.
Demetri was there in the way of dreams, suddenly and completely, with no door and no beginning, his body a long line of dark heat above her, his mouth already at her jaw, and she knew the scent of him the instant it reached her: cedar and smoke and something hotter beneath both, the same scent that had wrapped around her in the storage bay and refused, all day, to leave her.
In the dream there was no ladder to fall from, no Margaret, no missing button, no reason at all to hold herself apart from him.
In the dream she was already his, and the knowledge of it moved through her like the warm water, and she turned her face into his mouth and let it.
Mine, he said against her throat, low and doubled, more rumble than voice, and she felt it travel down through her chest to pool low in her belly.
When his mouth found hers there was nothing tentative in it.
He kissed her the way a starving man eats, open and deep and certain, one hand sliding up to cradle her jaw, tilting her head to take her deeper, and she opened for him and tasted him — smoke and heat and something dark and ancient she had no name for.
She heard herself make a sound into his mouth, needy, unashamed, a sound the waking Nica would never have let out.
He answered it with a growl that vibrated through her teeth and down her spine.
In the dream she could feel all of him at once, the way you feel things in dreams — the fever-heat of his skin, the iron weight of his body, and something more beneath the surface of him, vast and coiled and watching.
When she dragged her eyes open his had gone red, kindling in the dark like coals, and smoke curled from between his lips as he kissed her, and she was not afraid.
In the dream, there was nothing in him to fear.
In the dream, the beast in him was already hers.
Mine, he said again, low and doubled, the man’s voice and the deeper one braided together. Mine. Say it.
“Yours,” she breathed, and did not question it, because in the dream it was simply true.
His hand left her jaw and moved down, slow and deliberate, tracking over her collarbone, the curve of one breast — pausing to roll her nipple until she gasped and arched — the flat of her stomach, and lower, until his fingers slid between her thighs and found her already slick and swollen and aching for him.
He groaned against her mouth, wrecked. “So wet,” he murmured. “All of this. For me. Only me.” His teeth grazed her lower lip. “Say it is only ever me.”
“Only you.” The words spilled out of her, helpless. “God, only you —”
She couldn’t say more. She could only arch into his hand, and he gave her exactly what she needed — two thick fingers parting her, gliding through the slickness, sinking into her with a slow, knowing curl while the heel of his palm ground against her clit with a pressure her own hand had never once managed alone in the dark.
He stroked her like he’d been made for it, like he’d spent centuries learning the exact rhythm her body wanted before it knew to ask.
The heat built and built, coiling tighter with every pass of his hand, and through all of it his mouth never left hers, swallowing every gasp, every whimper, every broken plea.
That’s it, the doubled voice rumbled into her, felt more than heard. Let me feel it. Give it to me. Come apart on my hand, and know it is mine that took you there.
The coil drew so tight it had nowhere left to go.
She broke on a silent cry into his mouth, her whole body clenching around his fingers, the pleasure rolling through her in long, pulsing, endless waves — and he did not stop, wringing every last shudder out of her, his forehead against hers, his red eyes burning into her own while he murmured something low and reverent in a language she didn’t know, the words rough with a hunger that felt older than the city she slept in.
The fire in him rose. She felt it gather where his hand still cupped her, a heat that wanted to pour into her, to mark her, to make the dream true —
She woke gasping.
Her body was on fire, her core still pulsing from the orgasm the dream had given her, her thighs slick, her nipples tight and aching against the sheets.
The taste of smoke lingered on her tongue.
The phantom of his hand still burned between her legs, and low in her belly something pulled toward him — toward a man across a bridge she’d met for two hours, a stranger with impossible eyes — a pull that had no business being that strong, that felt less like wanting and more like being called.
It was official. She was losing her damn mind.
Nica rolled over and punched her pillow in frustration, her heart still racing, her body still humming for a man who wasn’t there. Sleep was a long time coming.