Chapter 24 Last Lifetime
Last Lifetime
Orpheus stared at me. For several seconds.
And then his entire face lit up.
“I love you.” The smoke returned to his voice, thick with sincerity. “You are my greatest treasure in every lifetime.”
“I love you, too.” I shook my head, bewildered by my own certainty. “I don’t know how I know that. But I love you, too. And forget about those orders. You can touch me n—”
He was on top of me before I could even get the “now” out.
His lips covered mine, and his kiss was somehow like both Aengus’s and Diarmuid’s combined.
His weight pinned me below while he drank me down, his forked tongue tangling with mine.
We kissed, just kissed, for a long, long time. Two strangers who’d known each other forever saying hello.
Until I pulled back. “Was the two-eggplant detail a variant thing, or…”
Okay, it was a Drakkon thing. Like, species wide.
I found that out when Orpheus bridged my hips up on his waist, pushing into my once again clenching sex while his secondary member found my still-wet back hole.
“Home.” His breath steamed over my naked front. “I am home.”
I wish I could have been as eloquent. A long groan fell from my lips when he began moving, establishing a rhythm with just the right amount of pressure in both holes.
I was no longer in heat, but my body continued to burn, sucking both his lengths in greedily.
I could only hope I felt as good around him as he did inside of me.
He bent his legs beneath me and gathered me to his chest as he sat back. Then his hands went to my waist, pushing me down, forcing me to take him deeper.
“This is where I live,” he informed me, moving me up and down his lengths like I weighed nothing. “Even when the variants are inside of you, holding my place. This is where I live.”
Why would he say something like that? Even more messed up, why did him doing so make me climax with a helpless groan.
He pulled me off of his still-hard lengths.
Then came what felt like a series of drills—just much, much more pleasant than what Diarmuid put me through outside.
He took me on my hands and knees…
against the bed post…
on my side while expertly fingering my clit…
sitting up while holding my thighs pulled back to either side of my chest with my knees bent over his hands…
and on his back, his large hands guiding my hips.
This one he held me in. Longer than the others. His green eyes staring up at me while I rode him, my hands braced on his chest.
I set the pace, and he let me, his fingers pressing bruises into my hipbones that I already knew I’d want to keep.
There was something about being above this massive, ancient, terrifying being who had loved me a thousand times and watching his composure finally come apart beneath me.
His head fell back. His breath broke, releasing more steam.
But just as I thought he might come undone, he flipped me onto my back, pulling my thighs to either side of him.
“You are mine again. Mine… mine… mine!”
I lost track of how many times I came. The sharp clarity that had returned with the disc melted into goop as my mind became a pile of jelly, incapable of forming thoughts. All I could do was come. Again and again.
And still he remained hard.
“Orpheus… I can’t…”
The moons were gone, and the first rays of daylight had begun to stream into the cave.
Orpheus had me in his lap again. His skin was so hot, smoke was hissing not just from his nose, but his shoulders and chest. His entire body.
There was another orgasm building, and he’d called me brave, but it scared me. White stars tingled at the edge of my vision, and I feared I would lose consciousness before I got to feel his release inside of me.
“Orpheus… Orpheus… please… come home… come home!”
The words babbled out like drool. I wasn’t even sure what I was saying.
But then his unrelenting thrusts stuttered.
He put me on my back… and slowed.
“You are welcoming me home, Treasure?” he asked, holding my gaze magnetized in his. “You remember me? Remember this is where I lived?”
I nodded, unable to look away, helplessly drowning in the emerald-green sea of his eyes.
He cupped my face, and I cupped his, my palm finding his jaw as if I’d done it thousands of times before.
His hips moved between my legs, and we fell into a synchronous rhythm without either of us having to look away to keep it.
It felt like all of my Dories were rising up through me.
Every version of me who had ever loved him, pressing their memory into my skin.
And every version of him—every cycle of patience and grief and stubborn, relentless devotion—was right there in the way he held my eyes like I was the only prize worth possessing in any timeline.
The orgasm was building, faster and faster like a train, but now I felt it coming for him, too, as we undulated together, not caring how hard we were about to get hit.
This was the answer to every question I’d ever had.
Why me?
No…
Why… us?
Why… love? Smashing our two distant stars together across space and time.
This is why. A sudden knowledge washed over me.
And I understood something my mother, Aunt Naomi, and even Orpheus never had. This love we shared was a privilege. It wasn’t to be rued or grieved.
Because of the time loop, we had loved each other across 1,000 lifetimes. Every variant of Dorie. Every copy of Fenrir. We’d been given a thousand chances to get it right.
And this was the one where we did.
“Treasure… Treasure…” he chanted. “I am undone.”
I thought the final orgasm would kill me. Reduce me to ash.
But when it came, breaking through like daylight as Orpheus finally spilled into me, nothing fractured.
A new peace stole over my mind with the wave of pleasure, warm and golden, leaving nothing but healing behind.
I did not pass out, as I feared I would.
In fact, it felt… it felt like something had been repaired inside of me. Inside of us. Inside of…
“Are you feeling this, too?” I asked, still trembling against him.
“We have repaired the broken circle,” he announced in his geneticist voice. Like it was fact.
He rocked into me one more time, keeping himself buried there, despite his release.
“I can sense it as well,” he said. “This will be our only lifetime together.”
Only. Not last. Only. As in: the one that mattered. The one we’d earned.
I looked up at him. And smiled.
“Then let’s make every single moment count.”
I hope you loved Dorie and her dragons as much as I do.
They’ve repaired the broken circle, but one last challenge remains before their happily ever after.