Everly #2
He's already moving lower, his hands shaking against my hips like they've forgotten how to be steady.
He pushes my shirt up over my breasts and stops there a second, just looking—jaw tight, eyes gone dark, like he needs to memorize it before he lets himself touch.
Then his mouth finds one nipple and he sucks it into a hard, aching point while his thumb works the other, and I arch up into both hands at once, heat dropping straight from my chest to somewhere lower, already needy.
His shadow pours off him where his hands have been, cold and startlingly solid. It loops once around my wrist and presses it into the mattress before it lets go again, testing what I'll allow.
He strips the rest off me with that same shaking thoroughness—my shirt over my head, my underwear dragged down my legs and dropped somewhere I don't track—and settles between my thighs like a man kneeling at the only altar he believes in, dark hair falling over his forehead, his eyes lifting once to mine like he needs to see my face before he starts.
This time the shadow doesn't let go. It slides under my knees and holds them open, cool ropes of it looped soft around each thigh.
"I've thought about this every hour in that house," he says against the inside of my thigh, and there's nothing of the Frost King in it, nothing cold left at all. "Across the table from Wheeler. In the dark. It's the only clean thing I have left to think about, so I think about it constantly."
"Callum—"
"Let me." His mouth moves up an inch. "Please. I never say please. Let me have this."
He drags the flat of his tongue through my wet folds and circles my clit, and I make a sound I don't decide to make, high and startled, not mine and completely mine at once.
He does it again, watching what it does to me, and against my thigh I feel him groan, low and rough, like the taste of me is its own kind of relief.
"Fuck," he says, quiet, like the word got loose before he decided to allow it.
Then he stops being slow. Two fingers push into my pussy and curl, finding the spot that makes my whole body jump, and his tongue works my clit steady and unrelenting.
Heat starts pooling low in my belly, coiling tighter with every pass.
The cold of his shadow rises to meet all that heat—not just at my thighs now but climbing, a cool current up my spine that has no business feeling like a hand and feels like one anyway.
He tracks every breath off me and answers it.
When I arch he presses harder, and the shadow at my thighs tightens with him, like it's listening too.
When my hand fists in his hair—dark, damp at the roots now—he groans against me, open-mouthed, like the contact is the only thing keeping him in his own body.
I can feel how hard he is against the sheets when his hips shift, though he never once asks me to do anything about it.
He lifts his head just enough to speak, mouth wet, breathing hard. "Say it. Out loud. I want to hear you ask me for it."
"There," I tell him, my voice cracking on it. "Fuck—like that. Don't stop."
"Yes." Like the word costs him something. Then his mouth is back on me and he gives me exactly that. My voice stays mine through all of it, wrecked and present, leading him by it, and he follows. He follows like following is the prayer.
His fingers curl. His tongue doesn't let up. The shadow at my thighs pulls tighter, holding me open right at the edge of too much. The coil low in my belly draws impossibly tight, every muscle in my thighs shaking with how close I am.
I break apart around all three at once—his fingers, his mouth, the cold that closes on me like it means to keep the pleasure in rather than let it go.
Heat floods every nerve I own. My spine bows off the mattress.
I clench around his fingers in waves that don't want to stop.
I come with his name in my mouth and my hand locked in his hair.
Every thought goes out of me but the pleasure.
And when I reach for him—when I come back to myself enough to want to give it back, my hand going for his belt and my grimoire reaching with it, shadow rising in me to meet his own discipline, my blood-sense catching on the hammer of his pulse—he closes his fingers around my wrist and holds it still.
"No," he says. Rough. "Not—not yet."
I can feel how much it costs him to say it. That's the thing. Through the bond and through my hand on his wrist both, I can feel exactly how much he wants, the want of a man standing at the edge of a long fall and choosing the ledge.
"Callum."
"If you touch me I break all the way." He presses his forehead to mine, breathing like he ran here.
"And I haven't chosen yet. Not out loud.
Not the thing you all keep not asking me.
" The Well, or his mother. The question that lives in every room he's in now.
"I won't take that from you until I've earned the right to give it back.
So let me—" his thumb strokes once over the pulse in the wrist he's holding, "—just let me give you this.
And nothing back. Tonight that's the most I have that's clean. "
It's the most Callum thing he has ever done, giving everything and refusing to be repaid for it, and I let him, because refusing him the refusal would be its own kind of cruelty.
He holds me after, fully clothed against my bare back, the burn on his hand a hot point I can feel without seeing.
"You can talk about it," I say into the dark. "Whatever it costs. I'll hold it for you."
For a long time he doesn't answer. His arm tightens across me, just once. I feel his breath move my hair.
"I know," he says finally. "That's why I came here.
Not anywhere else." And then nothing—nothing at all, not her name, not what his shadow did, not the sound she made before she stopped.
He gives me everything tonight except the one thing he's carrying, and I don't reach for it, because some things you have to be allowed to set down, and he isn't ready to be allowed.
Neither of us says the word the night is about.
***-
I still can't get used to her.
Helena Grimoire is past a hundred and twenty years old and she looks twenty-five.
The binding kept her the way amber keeps a fly—whole, exact, every eyelash in place, and wrong with it, young like a photograph is young, nothing to do with being alive.
I keep catching myself staring, trying to make the smooth, unlined skin agree with the hundred and twenty years underneath it, and it never does.