Chapter Twenty-Four
Austin
Austin applied the adhesive to her last pinkie and blew on it to make it tacky.
Hyacinth giggled, trying not to wiggle but she’d already told him it was ticklish.
While he was trying very hard to be in the moment…
To smile with her, laugh as she blabbered about her dream or about Aravis, about Snuffles, but his mind kept replaying that moment on the stairs.
The pure panic in his veins when he didn’t find her in his arms. The anger that overwhelmed him when she all but agreed to let them have her! No! You are mine!
He glanced up at her, finding her watching his meticulous application of fingernails to her tips, and couldn’t help the thought.
You’re mine now. And I won’t let them take you.
You don’t get to leave me after you took ahold of my heart.
I’ll protect you to the end, with every stitch and breath in my body, I’ll keep you safe. Even if it was from herself.
“You are upset…” she finally spoke softly, gaze falling to her lap.
“No,” he lied with a shake of his head.
Hyacinth snorted, “Now, that for sure, was sarcasm.”
“It was not.” Austin’s lips cracked a smile involuntarily. “It was a lie, however.”
Hyacinth beamed, poking him on the tip of his nose with one of her finished fingers. “See! I knew it. You are upset.”
Austin didn’t know how to answer her. Instead, he continued to press a new pinkie nail to her finger, counting down under his breath as the adhesive attached.
It was strong enough to keep them over her nailbeds.
But it would be easily convinced to pop off if her real nails regrew.
Not all undead could regrow pieces of their anatomy like they would if they were alive.
Some Dragos, once turned undead, could no longer regenerate a tail once their old one fell off.
Teeth and nails were the hardest to replace.
Austin wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t grow them back unless she replaced the hand or fingers themselves.
“What did I say that upset you? I understand you’re angry with me, but I am unsure of what I did to cause that.
And I like you too much to linger in this, Austin.
” Her words were soft, curling around his ears.
It didn’t help that she took up his chin in her other hand and hoisted his attention to her face. “Please.”
Austin sat on one of the many work stools in the lab, leaning over her lap. She was perched on a slab, legs swinging on the outsides of his chest. Melting forward into her touch, his gaze roamed her pretty face. Lavender eyes memorized every inch of him with worry.
“You would just give yourself to them?” he croaked, eyebrows furrowed.
“If it meant stopping her…Austin, you didn’t see the carnage I did. You’re not the one whose been killing people in her sleep.” Hyacinth dropped his chin to pluck at her chemise sheepishly.
“But you don’t know that!” Austin didn’t mean to yell, but the words boomed out of his chest.
“I saw her do it! With my body!” Hyacinth yelled back, flapping her hands up and down in front of herself as if to accentuate her point.
“Hyacinth—”
“You don’t get it because you’re a person.
You think of yourself as a person! You do not think of yourself as a spirit controlling a-a-a meat puppet!
I am but a soul possessing this flesh! I am not a person!
” Her hair stood on edge, including the patches of it that ran down her arms. Austin froze, staring up into her wide eyes welling up with tears.
She looked everywhere but him as the words tumbled out of her mouth.
“I want to be a person. So. Bad. I want to be friends with Melody and a part of this family. I want to learn to knit with Agatha. And I want so desperately to explore this desire in my body for you. To see where it leads, to feel your body against mine. I want all of that, because I want to be a people. But I am not…so long as she also has claim to-to-to…me. To my body.”
Austin straightened, giving her the space to get it out of her lungs.
She swayed on the slab, tears trickling down her cheeks.
He knew he should focus on the part where she was sad.
Desperate for ownership of her own body and mind, that’s the thing he should have been worried about.
Then his cheeks warmed and his collar stung, skin itchy and uncomfortable as he replayed her words.
I want so desperately to explore this desire. To feel your body against mine.
His heart thump-thump-thumped in his chest like a massive, wet fish flopping against a dry dock helplessly. He was breathless and clammy at the palms. Austin glanced down to his lap where he saw the outline of his cock in his pants. This is NOT the time. No! Bad cock!
But then his gaze followed movement out of the corner of his eye. Fingers curled under his chin and pulled his attention up the rest of the way. She stared at him with determined eyes.
“Maybe if I stuff this corpse full of something else, I can shove her out?” she breathed, arching a brow.
Despite the tracks of tears down her cheeks, his focus was on those plush lips she kept tugging on with her teeth.
The way they curled up on her face when she caught him doing it.
He wheeled his stool closer, a moth to her flame, as she led him back to her. “You think it’ll work?”
“Only one way to find out,” he confessed in a rush of air out of his lungs. Her fingers teased him out of his seat till he stood between her knees. Austin, despite the hunger growing in his belly for the feel of her lips against his, croaked, “You are upset. We shouldn’t.”
“You are upset,” she countered.
“You have a better reason,” he retorted, hands falling to the cold metal beside her hips. She leaned back an inch to be able to look him in the eye as he leaned over her. Fingers traced up the inside of his arms to the front of his shirt.
“You were upset first,” she whispered like she was worried someone would hear. The sound was so breathless it ran a shiver down his spine and left his scalp tingly.
“I don’t have any other reason why we shouldn’t,” Austin wheezed.
“Good,” she grinned wickedly, curling her fingers around his shirt. “Do you still like when I tell you what to do?”
“Yes,” he begged, slumping against the worktable. It groaned under his full weight as he melted like chocolate for her. Hyacinth’s warm, rumbly chuckle made his toes curl against the frosty, tile floor.
“Then take off this shirt. I want to feel you beneath my fingers,” she commanded so softly he thought he’d imagined it.
Yet his body obeyed her so helplessly. Reaching behind himself, he swiftly tossed the fabric over her head.
His gaze locked onto her lilac orbs. They glittered with mischief and delight before roaming down his face, to his chest. Her fingers traced the massive ‘x’ shaped stitching down to his belly where he was closed up in two different places.
Austin shivered when she ran her fingers down the stitches near his hip. “Do you like when I touch you?”
“I like when you look at me, Hyacinth.” He nearly burst like a balloon pressed against a sewing needle. “I love when you touch me.”
She shifted closer to the edge of the worktable.
The warmth of her core pressed against the front of his pants was enough to make his knees weak.
Then she plucked the strings at the front of his pants and they went limp.
Weighed down by all the desperate, salacious thoughts he’d stuffed in his pockets about the woman in front of him, his trousers were ankle traps in an instant.
His cock sat in her lap, just happy to be freed from his cotton prison.
Her fingers traced a ring of stitches around the base with a curious hum. “Austin?”
“I…uh…” Oh, right, that. He laughed sheepishly as he tried to explain his ridiculousness while her fingers teased the silky skin up his cock.
Austin was still wearing his original cock, but he didn’t always use that one.
Once upon a time, it was funny to switch it out on a whim because he could.
Different species had different anatomy and sometimes it was easier to ride a horse for 3 days straight with a mating tentacle instead of a cock.
The moment it was stitched in place, it worked like all his other limbs, taking the same stimuli and responses that all his body parts did.
But suddenly it felt childish to tell the pretty woman stroking him with both hands…that sometimes he would change out his cock for more wacky options because he was bored.
“I sometimes change it for other options,” he confessed with a dreamy sigh as she pressed the pads of her thumbs to his tip.
She circled it, toying with the drop of pre-cum that’d already formed.
Hyacinth spread it with the precision of someone who knew what they were doing.
Which was baffling and refreshing, as he wasn’t sure he knew how to tell her what he liked.
Hyacinth stroked her hands back down his shaft, taking extra time to trace the deep dorsal vein that wrapped around the middle of him.
Austin was longer than he was thick, but that didn’t mean anything when the pretty woman smiling up at him couldn’t wrap a single fist around him.
Yet, she didn’t flinch as she applied pressure at his base and stroked back up to his tip.
“Could I ask you to change it for me?” she inquired before she pushed off the metal ledge.
Austin nearly stumbled backward, but she had him by the reins.
She held him fast with one hand before dropping to sit on the stool he abandoned earlier.
It put her mouth right at his tip. There’s no way it’s going to fit.
Yet she swiped her tongue up the underside of his cock and sent his brain spinning out of control.
Wait, she asked a question! He had to grab ahold of the worktable to keep himself up. Dizzy didn’t describe it.