Chapter 13
ELIAS
The mattress dipped beside me. A shadow fell across my face, eclipsing the orange streetlamp glow leaking through the blinds.
I kept my breathing even, a practiced stillness I learned years ago, hiding in plain sight.
But my heart hammered a frantic rhythm against my ribs. It was him. I knew it without looking.
"Samuel?" His name was a ghost in the dark.
He didn't speak. A trembling hand settled on my cheek, the calloused tips of his fingers a strange counterpoint to the nervous tremor running through his arm. His touch was a question. And a surrender.
"What are you doing?" I whispered, my voice rough.
A beat of silence. "I don't know."
Liar. For the first time since I met him, Samuel Price knew exactly what he was doing. He was throwing the first stone. Tearing down the walls he had so meticulously built.
He leaned in, and his lips met mine.
It wasn't a sin. It wasn't a mistake. It wasn't a moment of weakness.
It was a choice. Deliberate. His mouth was soft at first, a hesitant question, and then it turned firm, resolute.
It was a full-body confession, a renunciation of everything he thought he knew.
A current passed between us, sharp and clean, scouring away the silence and the shame of the last twenty-four hours.
My own hesitation evaporated. I reached for him, my hand tangling in the hair at the nape of his neck, pulling him down.
His mouth opened, and I tasted the clean, minty flavour of his toothpaste and the deeper, muskier taste of him.
Samuel. He groaned, a low vibration in his chest that I felt in my own.
He climbed onto the bed, straddling me, his weight a welcome anchor, his hands finding the front of my shirt, bunching the fabric in his fists.
"Samuel," I breathed against his mouth, a desperate prayer. "Are you sure?"
He pulled back, his face a landscape of shadows and moonlight, his eyes wide and dark and bottomless. All the rules, all the prophets, all the fear swam in those depths. And he drowned them.
"No," he said, his voice raw. "But I don't care."
That was it. The breaking point. The two words that unravelled a lifetime of obedience. 'I don't care.' It was the most honest thing he had ever said to me. The most honest thing he had ever said to himself.
My hands were under his shirt then, palms flat against his ribs, and he shuddered, a full-body tremor.
He broke the kiss to sit up, pulling me with him until we were kneeling, face to face on my narrow bed.
His mouth found my neck, then my jaw, then the hollow of my throat where my pulse hammered a wild, frantic beat.
I dropped my head back, my fingers digging into the hard muscle of his shoulders, clinging to him as he mapped my skin with his lips.
He was charting a new world. We both were.
"Tell me to stop," he murmured, his breath hot against my collarbone. His voice was a ragged plea. A final, desperate offer of an escape hatch I knew he prayed I wouldn't take. "If you want me to stop, tell me."
I answered by pulling his shirt over his head.
It snagged on his wrists for a moment, and we fumbled with it, a clumsy, graceless movement that broke the tension.
He laughed, a short, breathless sound of disbelief, and then the shirt was gone.
In the dim light, his chest was pale, perfect.
The body of a statue, all lean muscle and smooth skin, but it was warm.
It was alive. I ran my hands over his ribs, his stomach, feeling the muscles there contract under my touch.
He was so beautiful it hurt. He was a cathedral built to honour a god that wanted to see him in ruins. And I would worship there instead.
I pressed him back against the pillows, my mouth following the path my hands had blazed. I kissed the space over his heart, feeling its frantic rhythm against my lips. He gasped my name, not Elder Vance, but Eli.
"It's okay," I whispered against his skin. "This is okay. You're okay."
I kissed lower, over the sharp jut of his hip bone, my own desire a hot, coiling thing in my gut. But this wasn't about that. Not yet. This was about him. About showing him his body wasn't a battlefield. It was just a body. A beautiful, human body that deserved to feel something other than shame.
He arched into my touch, a silent, desperate plea.
My hands slid down his legs, over the rough hair on his calves, the knobs of his ankles.
And then I remembered. That first night.
The sound he’d made when I’d touched his foot.
A small, sharp gasp of surprise that had nothing to do with guilt and everything to do with pure, unexpected sensation. A crack in the armour.
His feet were cold. I held one in my hands, rubbing warmth into the high arch, the long toes. He watched me, his breath hitched in his throat, his face a conflict of terror and an emotion I couldn't name. It looked like hope.
I bent my head. My lips closed over toes, my tongue lapping gently.
The reaction was instantaneous. A lightning strike.
Samuel's back bowed, lifting him clean off the mattress.
A sound tore from his throat, a raw, guttural cry that was part pleasure, part pain, part something else entirely.
It was the sound of a tightly wound spring snapping.
The sound of a dam breaking. It was unholy.
And it was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard.
In that single, sharp, involuntary spasm, every ounce of his guilt was erased. Obliterated by a jolt of pure, undeniable pleasure he couldn't reason with, couldn't pray away, couldn't bargain with. It simply was.
A slow smile spread across my face, and I pressed it against the salt-dusted skin of his sole.
I had him. Not his mind, not his soul—those were still at war.
But I had his body. I had found a secret language it understood, a pressure point that bypassed the frantic, panicked sentries in his head.
It was a new kind of power. A new kind of truth. And it was ours.
I stayed there, my mouth against his skin, feeling the aftershocks of his cry tremble through him.
It was a fault line tremor, the first sign of a continental shift.
He was a landscape remaking itself right under my hands, under my mouth.
I lifted my head, my eyes tracing the long, elegant line of his leg, up the taut muscle of his thigh, to where the defined muscle of his lower abdomen carved a sharp V toward his hips.
He laid there, pinned by pleasure, his chest rising and falling in ragged, shallow bursts.
His eyes were closed, his face a mask of shock and dazed surrender.
I moved slowly, crawling up his body, my knees bracketing his legs.
I didn't want to break the spell. I wanted to live in it.
I kissed the inside of his knee, the soft skin there, and he flinched, a sharp intake of breath.
I moved higher, my mouth tracing a line up the pale skin of his inner thigh.
He tasted of salt and clean laundry and a faint, electric tang that was purely him.
My own desire, usually a cynical, solitary ache, felt different now.
It was tangled up with something else. Something fierce and protective.
I wanted to erase every sermon he had ever heard that told him this was dirty.
I wanted to burn it all down with the slow, deliberate heat of my mouth.
His hands, which had been clenched in the sheets, uncurled.
He brought one up, his fingers hesitant, and brushed them through my hair.
It wasn't a push. It wasn't a pull. It was a question.
An exploration. I kept kissing his skin, my tongue tracing the faint blue line of a vein, and his fingers tightened, just for a second, in my hair. Permission granted.
I reached his hips and paused. I looked at his face. His eyes were open now, dark and liquid in the gloom. They glistened with unshed tears, but it wasn't sadness I saw. It was awe. He looked like a man seeing the ocean for the first time. Terrified and mesmerized.
"Turn over," I whispered. My voice was a low rasp.
His throat worked, a difficult swallow. He didn't speak, but he obeyed.
His movements were stiff, awkward, as he rolled onto his stomach.
He buried his face in the pillow, his shoulders hunched, a posture of supplication and defence.
The vulnerability of it punched the air from my lungs.
The long, elegant curve of his spine, the two dimples at the base of it, the pale, perfect globes of his ass.
He was a masterpiece of shame and beauty.
A living, breathing pietà of his own making.
I knelt behind him. I reached out, my hands hovering over his skin for a long moment before I finally touched him.
I placed my palms flat against the small of his back, feeling the tension there, the fine tremor running just beneath the surface.
I slid my hands down, over the swell of his ass, and he tensed, a sharp, full-body clench.
"Shhh," I murmured, my voice close to his ear. "It's just me. Just Eli."
I kept my hands there, just resting on him, letting the simple weight and warmth of my touch be an anchor.
I felt the tension in him lessen by a fraction.
Then another. I drew my thumbs down, tracing the valley between, and he made a small, muffled sound into the pillow.
A whimper of protest or pleasure, I couldn't tell. Maybe they were the same thing for him.