7. Chapter 7
Not Biting, Just Tasting
Meredith
Elves. Mother fucking elves. And Santa. This bullshit was real? Maybe I was hallucinating. Or maybe I was dead and went to hell.
They’d put me in a room that looked like a cross between a hunting lodge and a hospital, all exposed timber and soft blankets.
A monitor by the bed beeped at a rhythm I assumed was attached to my vital signs.
Maybe I was dreaming. This had to be a nightmare, because elves didn’t exist. I sat up, trying to make sense of a room full of people four feet tall telling me I was somewhere they called the North Pole.
“I know. It’s a big fake village about fifteen miles from where I live.” I attempted to roll my eyes, but that slight motion hurt my head.
“No. That’s the public facade. You are under a protective dome. You’re in the real North Pole, where Santa lives.”
The short, delusional people began another explanation when the first wall came down.
And not metaphorically. The far wall splintered inward in a spray of plaster and lath. Through the wreckage tore several hundred pounds of a very familiar, very furious reindeer. His antlers scraped the doorframe wider as he barged in on his way through.
“Dash?” I knew that reindeer! He wasn’t dead.
I was off the bed; some instinct in me overrode every ounce of sense I had left, because the small, dark-clad woman standing between me and the door had gone rigid with alarm.
She reached for something at her belt that looked exactly like the dart rifle from the woods.
“Don’t!” I got a hand on her arm a second before she could raise it. “Don’t shoot him again.”
“Ma’am, he’s not stable. He needs to be…”
“He’s not going to hurt me.” I didn’t know why I believed that, standing in a room with a wrecked wall, and a half-ton animal bearing down through the dust with his sides heaving, and his eyes fixed on nothing but me.
But I believed it anyway, all the way down in my gut. I was certain he wouldn’t hurt me.
He crossed the room in two giant strides. My body offered one option: stand my ground. Running from something built like a freight train felt like the fastest way to end up under it. And no matter what, I didn’t want to end up under him, at least, not while he was in reindeer form.
He didn’t run me down. He came in slow at the last second, his effort to corral the speed visible.
I watched as his muscles trembled with the strain of pulling himself back from full speed.
Then his weight pressed me gently against the wall, his hooves braced either side of me, his enormous head dipping until his nose found the curve of my throat.
He took care not to pin me with his antlers.
A giggle burst through my lips.
“Get back. Get away from her.” An older man’s authoritative voice cut through.
I pressed my hands against Dash’s broad chest, massaging the skin, and stood on my tiptoes to catch a glimpse of a man that looked so much like the image of Santa I’d heard about since I was a little girl.
“Santa?” I squeaked. “He’s not hurting me.”
“Yes,” the man, red-faced and out of breath, said from inside the room.
Three more of the small security elves fanned out with weapons half-raised.
More poured in through the hole in the ruined wall.
“I hear you.” None of them mattered next to the warm, impossible drag of Dash’s tongue along the line of my throat.
I stifled a moan. “He’s not hurting me,” I said again, louder for everyone to hear.
I heard how strange my voice sounded to my own ears.
The room had gone dead quiet around the wet, rhythmic sound of him licking a slow, deliberate path from my collarbone up to my jaw.
To anyone looking (and to me as the recipient) none of Dash’s motions read as violence.
For my part, I took it to mean something closer to relief.
As if he were a man parched, finally reaching water.
“Ma’am, that is not typical reindeer behavior. We need to…” the squeaky elf said.
“I said he’s fine.” My voice cracked a little on the last word, because it wasn’t entirely true.
Fine wasn’t the word for what was happening in my body right then.
No one but I felt the slow curl of heat low in my stomach with every drag of his tongue against my skin.
My pulse fluttered hot under the place his mouth kept returning to. And so help me, I wanted more.
He worked down my throat to my collarbone, then found my wrist where I’d braced it against his shoulder, and licked there too, slow and thorough, like he was memorizing the shape of my pulse through skin.
I heard myself make a sound I hadn’t planned on making.
It was low and involuntary. Under other circumstances, I would feel mortified that I made that sound in public.
Today, I didn’t care. Heat crawled up my neck, and it had nothing to do with embarrassment.
“He’s just,” I swallowed hard, aware every eye in the room stared at us.
I knew Santa himself stood there watching this happen to me with an expression somewhere between horror and pity.
“Dash isn’t hurting me. He’s licking me, and while it might be strange, it’s fine.
He’s not biting or breaking skin. It’s fine. ”
Okay, so it was a white lie. Because Dash’s licking was not fine. Fine did not cover the way my knees had gone soft, or the way my whole body had angled itself toward him, chasing the drag of his tongue like it was the only point of gravity left in the room.
His huge head dipped lower, past my collarbone, skimming my chest. With a start, I realized someone must have taken my bra off when I was unconscious.
His lips huffed a warm breath over my chest, and my nipples pebbled.
I stifled a moan. Dash’s nose inhaled and he pressed himself as close to me as he could.
His velvety-soft antlers pinned my hands above my head, and I was powerless to move.
His nose grazed along the waistband of the borrowed sweatpants someone had dressed me in.
Every alarm bell I owned should have gone off right then.
Should have had me shoving him back and demanding the room clear out, and instead what came out of me was a breath that shook clean through my body.
He licked, once, slowly, along the exposed skin just under that waistband, and something in him broke.
I felt his shift happen. The shudder ran the length of his whole massive body, his hide rippling, and then bone and muscle folding in on themselves in a rush, fur receding into skin, hooves narrowing into hands that closed around my hips in a protective manner.
By the time the shift finished, Dash was a man pressed against me, bare as the day he was born and shaking, his mouth still at the exact place his tongue had been a half second before, only now he had human lips and teeth.
A low groan vibrated against my hipbone, sending a jolt of electricity clean through to my spine.
“Out,” I heard myself say, my voice disembodied to my own ears. I don’t know who I addressed the command to; to the room, to the elves, to Santa himself standing there with his mouth slightly open as he drank in the scene in front of him. My voice sounded rough and strange. “Everybody. Out. Now.”
I don’t know who moved first. The door, or the ruined space where a wall used to be, cleared fast, full of hurried footsteps and low, urgent voices.
I remember hearing Santa saying something about ‘we should discuss the implications of this,’ but I was beyond caring.
I cared that Dasher had his head mere inches from my dripping pussy, and his hands were on my body, and I wanted more.
He was on his knees in front of me, with his hands still locked on my hips and his forehead pressed against my stomach, breathing like he’d run a hundred miles to get here.
“Meredith.” My name came out of him wrecked, half a prayer.
“I know.” I didn’t know what I meant, or if I knew what was happening. My hands found their way into his dark hair without me deciding to put them there, and the ache low in my body had nothing left to do with logic. “I know, I’ve got you.”
He rose up, licking my body in slow movements, his mouth trailing kisses where his tongue had already been.
He kissed my throat, collarbone, the curve of my shoulder, and when he finally reached my mouth, the kiss he gave me was nothing like I’d experienced.
It was raw hunger from a man who’d spent days lost in a body he didn’t understand finding the one safe point.
Me. I met it with a hunger of my own that scared me more than the wrecked wall had.
My borrowed sweatpants hit the floor somewhere between the wall and the bed.
I don’t remember deciding that either, or who pushed them to the ground.
It could have been my hands on his pushing them down, or he could have done it while my thoughts were consumed with his kiss.
Either way, I didn’t care. I dripped for him.
His hands, broad and certain despite the tremor still running through them, mapped every inch of me as if he was afraid I’d disappear if he stopped touching long enough to check.
The sound he made, a low rumble in his chest, sent a gush of moisture flooding the space between my thighs when I got my hands flat against his chest, and felt his heart slamming there like something caged.
“Tell me to stop,” he said, against my mouth, barely words at all. “Tell me now if you’re going to.”
I shook my head.
“Words, Meredith. Words.”
“Don’t stop.”
He lifted me onto the bed as if I weighed nothing more than a feather, and everything after that came apart into heat and friction.
I wrapped my legs around his waist, seeing the relief only his glorious cock could give me, but he pushed them away to make sure I had a pillow protecting my neck.
“I must taste you.” He took care of the slow ache in my core, lapping at my center in languid strokes of his tongue.
His hands reached up to play with my breasts while he feasted on my center.
Dash groaned against my clit, and my body shuddered.
My legs clamped against his head, and he returned to his ministrations.
“Do that again,” he groaned, leaning up, stroking himself.
He returned to circling my clit with his tongue, building an ache inside me that he chased with a focus that bordered on devotion.
His mouth found every place his tongue marked me, and he peppered kisses and suckled, his motions deliberate until I gripped fistfuls of his hair.
I screamed his name in a voice I didn’t recognize as my own.
“That’s my girl. Come for me. Give me everything you’ve got. ”
I was still coming down from the high of my orgasms when he loomed over me and slammed himself into me in one stroke. A third orgasm wracked my body, and he pistoned into me, my core squeezing him for more delicious friction.
I couldn’t form a coherent thought, not that I wanted to with his mouth at my ear murmuring my name like it was the only word he had left.
He slowed, his hips now moving in deliberate rolls, drawing sounds out of me I’d never made before.
My nails found his back and held on like he was the only solid thing left in a world that had turned sideways.
Whatever came after this, whatever came later - Santa, the wrecked wall, the questions I hadn’t asked yet - none of it existed past what remained of this room. For now, only the two of us existed, and the low, ragged sound of my name in his mouth, mattered.