Chapter Twelve #2
I lay my palm flat against the long scar that runs down his sternum. The cold of him is the cold I've known. The skin is smooth except where the scar interrupts it. My hand looks small against him.
He doesn't move.
I trace the scar with my fingertip. From the top to the bottom. The full length of it. I touch each of the smaller scars across his chest — the round pucker of what was once a stab wound, the long line of what must have been a blade across his ribs. I don't ask. He'll tell me when he tells me.
I drop my hand lower. I touch his stomach, the hard plane of it, the cold ridges of his ribs under my palm. They don't rise and fall, because he isn't breathing.
I lift his hand.
I take it carefully. I turn it over in mine.
I look at the long fingers, the way they're made — the proportions, the bones at the knuckles, the smooth gray of the skin between them.
I look at the claws. I run the pad of my finger along the underside of one.
It doesn't cut me. It's sharp only at the tip. The sides of it are smooth.
He's been holding still for me.
I look up at his face. His expression hasn't changed but his eyes are dark and his mouth is slightly open and I can see him holding himself in check.
I let go of his hand.
I step closer to him. I tilt my face up.
"Now you," I say. "Now your turn."
He breaks.
It's the only word for it. The hold he's been keeping on himself for two weeks gives way all at once, and his hands come to me and his mouth comes to me and I'm gathered against him before I know I've been moved.
The cold of his whole long body presses against the warm of mine through the thin black tank top.
His face is in my hair. He's breathing me in.
Long deep pulls of breath against the side of my throat.
His nose against the skin behind my ear.
The cold of his face moving across the warm of mine.
He's starving.
I feel it in the way he holds me. The hands at my back aren't the careful hands of last night. They're pressing me to him with the strength of a creature that's been alone for too long and has finally found something it can't bear to be away from again.
His mouth is everywhere.
He starts at my hairline. He moves down.
His lips find my temple. The corner of my eye.
The hollow at the side of my jaw. He kisses the line of my jaw, slow, mouth open, the cool of his tongue meeting the warm of my skin in the wet places where his mouth lingers.
He moves to my throat. He spends a long time at my throat.
The pulse hammering under his mouth, the soft sounds I'm making, the way he keeps his closed lips against the place where my heartbeat is loudest.
He lifts my arms.
He pulls the tank top off over my head and lets it fall to the floor.
The cold air finds my breasts and my nipples tighten before his mouth does.
He drops his mouth to my collarbone. He kisses the curve of it.
He moves down. His mouth finds my breast — the soft underside first, the way he's approaching, and then his cold lips close around my nipple and I make a sound.
He doesn't rush.
He spends time on me. The other breast. The hollow at the bottom of my ribs.
The soft place where my waist curves into my hip.
He kneels on the floor in front of me to do this.
His face moves across my belly. He presses his open mouth to the soft skin below my navel.
His tongue traces the line of my hip and I feel my own hips press forward into him without my having decided to do it.
He pulls the loose pants down.
I step out of them.
I'm naked in the late afternoon light. The sun outside the window has gone the orange of just before setting.
The light through the open curtain falls across my body and across him kneeling in front of me, and he looks up at me, and his black eyes flash the dull shine of an animal's caught in headlights, and I almost forget to keep breathing.
He kisses the inside of my thigh.
The cold of his mouth on the warm soft skin there — the place where the heat of me is gathered, just inches above where his face is now — I make a sound and my knees almost give.
He stands.
He stands in one long motion and he lifts me — lifts me, my whole body, as if I weigh nothing in his hands — and he carries me to the bed and lays me down on my back.
He moves over me. His cold has stopped being strange to me.
The weight of him is barely a weight at all.
He's dense, denser than a person should be at his size, but the way he holds himself above me is so careful that I don't feel any of it. He's balancing on his arms.
He looks at me.
His face hovers above mine. The black eyes. The thin mouth. The teeth I can't see now because his mouth is closed.
"Tell me," he says.
His voice is rough. It's the second word he's spoken since he came through the window.
I lift my hand to the back of his head. I draw him down.
"Yes."
He lowers himself.
The first feel of him against me — the cold press at the heat of me — is so much that I gasp. He pauses. He waits. He has all the time in the world and so do I, and he's waiting for me to be ready, and I'm ready, and I press up against him and the cold slides into the warm and I'm full of him.
The shock of it rolls through me in a long slow wave.
He doesn't move at first. He's buried in me and he's holding completely still. I can feel him deciding — deciding to wait, deciding to be careful, deciding to give me what I want and not what his hunger is screaming for.
I move.
I lift my hips up under him. The motion runs through both of us. He makes the low broken sound from last night again. He starts to move.
He moves slow.
The cold of him sliding inside the warm of me.
The drag of it. The sound that leaves my throat with each push.
He braces above me on his long arms and he watches my face the whole time.
He's watching what's happening to me. He's reading the slight changes — the tighten of my mouth, the catch of my breath, the way my eyes go dark and unfocused — and he's adjusting himself to what my body is telling him.
I bring my hands up. I rest them against his chest. The cold gray of his skin against my palms. The long scar under my right hand.
He moves faster.
He's finding a rhythm. My hips have begun to move under him on their own, lifting up to meet him, and the cold and the warm are sliding into each other in the quiet rhythm of bodies that have learned what they're doing.
I'm gone. I'm gone. I'm beyond thinking.
There's only the cold and the warm and the slow build of the third wave I felt last night, the wave that took me apart, beginning to build again.
He lowers his face.
He kisses me. His cold mouth on my warm mouth. Careful of his teeth. The cold tongue meeting mine inside the kiss. I taste a faint trace of my own blood from earlier — the nick on my tongue — and the taste makes him groan into my mouth.
"Farkas." It comes out as a breath against his lips.
He moves harder.
The wave breaks.
It breaks against me from inside. It breaks slower than last night, deeper, the build of it longer, the height of it taller. The room narrows. The light from the window narrows. I'm clenched around him and my back is arched off the bed and I'm crying out his name into his mouth as it happens.
He keeps moving through it.
He keeps moving until I'm soft beneath him. Until the last wave has gone through me and I've settled back into the bed with my chest rising and falling and my hand still pressed against the scar on his chest.
He stills.
He hasn't come. He's still hard inside me. He's holding himself still inside me, watching my face, breathing me in.
I look up at him.
His face is the face of a creature who's been kept from a thing for a very long time and is now inside it.
"Farkas."
"Yes."
"What do you need."
His mouth opens and closes. He doesn't have the words.
I move under him, drawing my hips up to meet him, and I guide his face down to my throat — to the place he wanted earlier and wouldn't take.
My pulse beats hard against the cold of his cheek.
His mouth opens against it. I feel the fine edges of his teeth come to rest on my skin, and I feel him hold them there, trembling, not closing.
"Take what you need," I say.
He breaks the second time.
He moves into me harder than he's moved.
The cold drag inside the warm of me. The sound of him — the low groan that leaves him with each push, the inhuman sound underneath it.
His face in the crook of my neck. The press of his closed mouth against my pulse, the teeth held back even now, even like this — and I can feel what the holding costs him in every cold, shaking line of his body.
When he comes he goes still and silent. The cold of him deeper inside me than he's been. The faint cold spread of his release. He shudders once against me. He stays where he is, his face buried in my throat, his body braced over mine, for a long moment in which neither of us moves.
He lifts his face.
He looks at me.
He isn't the creature I saw on the ledge. He isn't the gray thing in the daylight. He's something else. Something that's been let in.
He lowers himself beside me. He gathers me against his chest. His arms come around me. His body curls cold around the warm of mine, and I press my face against the long seam of the scar, and his hand comes up and his long fingers slide into my hair, and we lie like that.
The sun has gone behind the building across the lot. The light in the room has dimmed. The day is ending.
"Farkas," I say into his chest. My voice is quiet. I'm tired the way I haven't been tired in a long time, the kind of tired that has weight to it.
"Yes."
"Tell me about you."
* * *
Farkas
I tell her.