Chapter Thirty-One
Elias could not sleep.
And judging from the amount of rolling about that was happening on the far side of the bed, Hattie couldn’t, either.
It was odd, after spending so much of the day exhausted, to have any trouble at all, but he imagined they both had quite a lot on their minds, and for a time, he even thought he oughtn’t interrupt her thinking, as disruptive as it appeared to be.
Finally, she sighed, flopped onto her side, and squinted at him in the dark.
“You are awake,” she declared, as though he’d done something amiss.
He chuckled, turning his head on the pillow to face her. “So are you.”
“Yes, well,” she said sourly, “I am not the one who enjoys torment.”
He laughed fully at that, moving to roll over to face her and prop his head onto his hand. “When I said that,” he told her, “I did not mean all torment. Only one very specific kind.”
“I don’t believe you,” she returned. “You enjoyed that puzzle box, and that was torture carved in wood.”
He laughed again, harder this time, his chest shaking with the action as she glared. He could not help it.
“Libba and Ruby took it,” he told her. “After we reassembled it. They are going to try next.”
“Fine,” said Hattie, flinging herself back onto the pillows and staring at the canopy ahead. “Let them. I never shall touch the thing again.”
“Hattie,” he said seriously, “I think I love you best when you are having a strop.”
She only hissed in response, which made him grin so wide, his face ached.
“Especially,” he added, “when it is my fault.”
“Oh, shut up,” she said, crossing her arms, which looked perfectly absurd, prone as she was and haloed in shuttered moonlight. “You are insufferable.”
“Am I?” he asked, flattered despite himself. “I always thought the same of you.”
She gasped, turning her head with her mouth already open to rebuke him, but never got to speak as he swooped down to catch her ire with his own lips, delighted at how it spiced her kiss.
She froze as though she might shove him off and then chose to pull him to her instead, opening her mouth under his to invite him closer.
“Should I show you what sort of torment I meant?” he asked, rolling over her and bracing his arms on either side of her head, gazing down at the way her curls spilled out over the pillow. “The kind I enjoy so much?”
“I recall,” she said sharply, “you leaving me in the hallway alone. Leaving me on my bed unkissed. I don’t care to be stoked and doused again, Elias. I shan’t tolerate it.”
“Ah, you lack imagination,” he teased, leaning down to kiss her jaw, her chin, her neck. “Sometimes the torment isn’t a douse, only a very slow addressing of the flame itself. You know, that was always my intention for our first time. It is only that you ruined it.”
“I ruined it?” she repeated, giving a little thrash under him that made him grin and nip at her throat.
“You did,” he said, pinning her with his hips and running his hands along the silk covering her arms. “You made it impossible to go slow. You broke me.”
“Hm,” she said, mollified for the moment. One of her legs snaked out of her nightrail, wrapping around his hip and stroking along the backs of his thighs. “You seem plenty whole to me.”
He exhaled, a sound of defeat and surrender. “You are doing it again.”
“Am I?” she asked, sounding very pleased by the prospect. “Good.”
“Oh, you are asking to be tormented worse than before, Harriet,” he chided, reaching down to stroke the leg that was wrapped around him and following it up to the curve of her backside. “Do you really want to challenge me like that?”
“Of course I do,” she replied. “It is not as though you’ve ever been victorious.”
It was his turn to gasp in outrage.
“Alone in that hallway?” he mimicked. “Unkissed in your bed?!”
She grinned, her teeth glowing in the low light of the night. “Mere parrying,” she said, rolling her hips beneath him until his breath escaped him in a sharp, little hiss.
“‘Parrying’?” he repeated, dipping down to speak into her ear, soft and warm, their skin sliding against one another. “It sounds like you want to meet my sword again.”
“Only if you are prepared to face torment in equal measure,” she replied, her hands raising to stroke the sides of his face. “You are, after all, an excellent teacher in such matters. Did you think I might only learn one dialect of the silent language and not all?”
He flashed his teeth at her, searching her eyes in the dark. “I had not considered it.”
“Foolish,” she chided, dragging him down to kiss her again. “Perhaps this time, I will riposte instead. It seems, for a man who loves torment, that you inflict it far more than you experience it.”
“Oho,” he chuckled, running his hands up her thighs to ruck up the thin material of her nightrail. “You are mistaken. This very body of yours has been tormenting you since my very first blush of desire. It has been a long and arduous gauntlet of denial.”
“By your own hand,” she retorted, lifting her arms so that he could peel the fabric from her body. “Not mine.”
“I assure you,” he told her, pulling the gown away and setting it gently aside and then sitting back on his heels to observe her as he moved to remove the fabric covering his own form. “My hand tried its best.”
“Elias!”
He grinned at her, pulling away the cotton that confined his chest and then lifting to divest himself of the pajama trousers. He lifted his chin in satisfaction at her intake of breath at the reveal of just how hard she had made him, at the proof that his claims were true.
He leaned forward, parting her legs and stroking the soft, supple skin on the insides of her thighs, just shy of touching her where he knew she wanted him to. “You never had to wait,” he whispered, “until recently.”
She made a frustrated little flutter in her throat, twisting her hips in an effort to force his touch higher, and received only a chiding click of his tongue in response.
“What about you?” she whispered, sharp and glinting in the dark. “With the way you stroke that wineglass at me. What if I were to touch you that way? You couldn’t stand it.”
“I already told you,” he said softly. “That is unintentional.”
She pushed herself up on her elbows, scooting her hips closer as he teased just short of pleasuring her. “Perhaps it was,” she answered, reaching out to mimic what he was doing, to run her fingertips along the flesh of his thighs. “I do not for an instant believe it remains so.”
He smirked, refusing to answer her one way or another.
“You know what you are doing,” she breathed, inching up to cradle him at the base, feather soft and delicate as she demonstrated the motions she had watched him inflict on the poor crystalware.
“Stroking the texture at the bowl of the goblet, stroking the length of the stem. Pressing your lips to the rim.”
“‘My lips,’” he repeated, ragged. “Are you going to do that part as well?”
She smiled slowly, running her little, pink tongue along the curve of her mouth. “I shouldn’t,” she said. “You haven’t earned it. But, alas, I do wish to.”
“Hattie …” he managed, certain his vision was going to darken if she continued to reference what he thought she was referencing.
“And when I have finished,” she said, kneeling forward, her hair falling over his lap, “you will cease your torment. Won’t you?”
“I …”
“Hm,” she said, and then she pressed her lips to his cock with a curious flick of her tongue.
The world did go dark then, or perhaps it exploded in color. Elias could not rightly say. He gripped the blankets at his sides and tried to remember to breathe, watching her with the kind of silent awe one usually reserves for moments of epiphany or miracle.
The hot drag of her tongue over him was as exquisite as it was unbearable. The sweetness of her breath, the way he could feel her little gasps of delight rumbling through him as a physical thing.
He watched her until he was certain he could not hold back another second, at which point her name ripped from his throat, and she rose back up to sitting, a look of triumph glinting in those amber eyes.
She crawled backward, falling back onto her pillows with her arms raised in welcome as he tried to remember how to control his limbs, gasping for air and licking his lips and blinking the stars out of his eyes.
When he fell into her arms, he did so with gratitude, and just as she’d said, he held nothing back any longer. Though he still retained enough of himself to go slowly this time. He remembered to savor it because he hadn’t yet.
He hadn’t, and he desperately wanted to.
And, of course, if he didn’t slow down, he was going to shatter. He wanted to shatter. Badly.
But he wanted her to shatter first.
“Talk to me,” she begged. “Tell me what you want.”
“You,” he gasped, his limbs quaking with the force of his pleasure. “Only you. Forever. Just like this. God, Hattie.”
“Oh,” she sighed, arching up as though it had been a caress instead of a collection of syllables. “Say my name again. Elias, please.”
“Hattie,” he said. “My Harriet. I want you like I’ve never wanted anything. I am yours now. I have always been yours.”
She shuddered, her hands clinging to his arms, legs locking around his as she unspooled at the sound of his confession. And she said his name as she found her bliss. She cried out and whimpered, “Elias!” at her moment of pleasure.
At which point, he understood why the reverse had impacted her so much, and he lost himself as well.
He lost himself completely.
And he kissed her as he found completion.
For a long time after that, they simply held one another, breathing and listening and smiling against the other’s bare skin.
“I think perhaps you were right,” she said, just as their muscles slackened and sleep began to take them. “Torment can be lovely.”
He nodded, stifling a yawn. “Spoken by the woman who has always been mine. I am glad you agree.”
She caught his yawn, burrowing closer into his side. “Elias, I think I will sleep for a while now,” she said, no longer wired or tossing about in restlessness. “Perhaps when I wake, you can torment me a little more.”
He nodded, resting his cheek in her hair, and surrendered to the call of sleep himself. “Of course,” he murmured as he drifted away. “It would be my pleasure.”