31. The Other Fire #2
It's the first bold move I've made, and I make it badly, all teeth and impatience, as though I’m cashing out all at once.
Sawyer lets me have it for exactly three seconds.
Then he takes it back.
One hand slides into the hair at the base of my skull and grips, and the kiss stops being mine.
He tilts my head where he wants it. He slows me down to his pace with nothing but the pressure of his fingers and the patient, punishing thoroughness of his mouth, and the sound that comes out of me is not a sound I have made in front of another person in a very long time.
He drinks it down like the last of the bourbon.
My back hits the grass. I don't remember deciding to lie down. I don't think I did decide it.
One moment I’m being reasonable, the next the man is over me, one knee planted between my legs, both my wrists gathered up in one broad hand and pressed into the cool grass above my head like he's done it a hundred times.
He breaks the kiss just far enough to look down at me.
His pupils have swallowed the firelight. His grin has gone crooked and wolfish and thoroughly pleased with itself.
"Yup," he says, breathing hard, entirely too satisfied. "The fucker's a top."
A laugh punches out of me before I can stop it.
"You're talking about yourself in the third person."
"I'm confirming a hypothesis." He shifts his weight, settles it, and I feel exactly how much of it there is.
His nose drags along my throat, right over the pulse, breathing me in — iris and pear blossom and white musk, the sage I rub between my fingers all day, all of it kicked up hot and wanting under his mouth.
"You had a theory about me. I could see you running it back there. Go on. Say it."
I should not tell him.
Telling him will only make the grin worse.
"You remind me of Amber," I say.
That does it.
Sawyer pulls back a fraction, one brow climbing, delighted and affronted in equal measure.
"You'd best mean that as a compliment, Bellamy, or this is going to go a real different direction."
"In the bedroom." Heat crawls up my neck, but I'm committed now, and there's a reckless freedom in finally saying the thing instead of filing it.
"She takes command. Always has. You learn fast that it's rare…
an Omega who'd sooner run the whole operation than be run.
Most people fold the second you hand them the reins. She never folded once in her life."
I hold his gaze. The wrists he's still pinning flex once against his grip, testing, learning the shape of it.
"You've got the same thing. You walk into a room and you've already decided how it's going to go. I've been trying to figure out for four days whether that would drive me insane or—"
"Or," Sawyer supplies.
"—or," I drawl out the word but have no intention of continuing.
He hums, low and pleased, the magnolia going molten between us.
"For the record. I find it downright tragic how hard it is to come by. A partner who'll take the reins."
His mouth ghosts along my jaw, unhurried, cataloguing.
"Amber wouldn't fold for God himself. You"—his hand tightens, testing, and my breath goes ragged—"you're a different animal.
You bend so everybody around you stays comfortable, then you go home and call it being easygoing.
That's not the same as folding, Bellamy.
Folding's a choice. You've never once made it on purpose. "
He sees the whole courthouse. Every brick of it.
It should feel like exposure. It feels, instead, like a door coming unlatched.
I've spent five years learning to read people so I could stay a step ahead of them, so I could hand them the exit before they knew to want it. It unsettles me down to the soles of my boots that Sawyer got there first.
He read me, beat me to it, then set the door in my own hand and folded my fingers shut around the knob.
You take it, or you don't.
Nobody's handed me a choice that clean since I was young enough to believe I'd always get to keep the good ones.
"Here's my worry," he goes on, conversational, as if we're discussing the seating chart and not the fact that he's got me flat in the grass with my wrists in his fist. "Two Alphas is a whole lot of front-of-house in one bed.
I've watched packs come apart over less.
So I've got to ask you a serious question, and I want an honest answer, none of your smoothing.
" He looks down at me. Under the tease, there's something real in his face, something checking.
"You got a submissive bone anywhere in that body?
Because if you don't, we are going to butt heads for the rest of our natural lives, and I'll enjoy every minute of it, but I need to know what I'm signing. "
"You always this romantic, or am I special?" I ask.
"I'm this thorough. You'll learn the difference, and you'll learn to like it.
" His weight settles a fraction heavier, pinning the point home along with the rest of me.
"I plan weddings for a living, Bellamy. I don't walk into anything without reading the whole contract first. Call this the venue walkthrough. "
"That's the least romantic thing a man has ever said with his knee between my legs."
"And yet." He rolls his hips, slow, just the once, and whatever I meant to say next dissolves into a sound I'd deny under oath.