Chapter 8 #4
I shifted. One adjustment, my hips settling against hers, seeking pressure, seeking friction, seeking anything to relieve the ache that had been building since the meadow dream, since the diary, since the moment I’d come home and found her grown, and the thin cotton between us was not enough, was never enough, and then it wasn’t there at all, her hand had found the waistband of my underclothes and pulled, and my cock sprang free, hard and aching, and her thighs parted beneath me, her shift torn aside or pulled free, I couldn’t tell, didn’t care, and then I was inside her.
One thrust. Accidental, driven by need and proximity and six years of absence condensed into a single point of contact, and my cock slid into her wet heat with an ease that should have been impossible and felt, instead, like the most natural thing in the world.
We froze. Both of us. One heartbeat of perfect, terrible stillness, my cock buried inside her to the hilt, her body tight around me, her eyes wide, her mouth open, her breath caught in her throat, and the world narrowed to the point where our bodies joined and the sound of the lake lapping at the shore and the distant call of a skybird somewhere above the trees.
The frozen moment lasted one heartbeat. Long enough for my brain to form exactly one coherent thought, which was This cannot be happening, followed immediately by Please God do not let this stop happening.
Gabriella’s legs tightened around my hips.
Her thighs, smooth and strong, locked against the outside of mine, holding me inside her with a pressure that left no room for misinterpretation.
Her blue eyes found mine, wide, shocked, and beneath the shock was something raw and open and completely, devastatingly want.
“Don’t stop,” she whispered. Her voice broke on the second word. “Please, Gabriel, I really want this.”
My last restraint snapped. Snapped, like a bowstring under too much tension, the release immediate and total. I thrust into her hard, my hips driving forward, and the sound she made was halfway between a gasp and a moan, her back arching off the grass, her hands finding my shoulders and digging in.
After that, there was no thinking. There was her body and mine and the way they fit together, which was better than any dream had any right to be.
I fucked her on the grass beside the lake, her wingless back pressed into the earth, my scarred chest against her smooth one, and the afternoon light turned our skin gold and the wildflowers we’d crushed beneath us released their scent with every movement, sweet and green and mixing with the salt smell of her arousal and the musk of my sweat.
She was tight. God, she was tight, her inner muscles clenching around me with each thrust, her body accepting me completely, taking me deeper than I’d thought possible, and the wet heat of her was so good it made my vision blur at the edges.
Her breasts were perky and fit perfectly in my palms, her pink nipples stiff and hard.
I rolled one between my fingers and she moaned, the sound low and broken, her head tipping back into the crushed wildflowers. The sight of her like that, bare beneath me, taking me, wanting me, sent a fresh surge of heat through my cock.
I lowered my mouth to her breast and sucked.
The taste of her skin, clean and faintly salty from the afternoon sun, mixed with the green scent of the grass and the crushed petals.
She arched harder, pushing more of herself into my mouth, her hands sliding from my shoulders into my hair, holding me there as if she was afraid I might suddenly remember who we were and pull away.
I didn’t pull away. I fucked her slowly, then deeper, letting every inch of me drag against her tight walls.
The wet sounds of our bodies meeting filled the quiet space between the lake and the trees.
Each thrust pressed her wingless back into the earth, and I could feel the difference, no soft feathers, only smooth, warm skin and the delicate ridge of her spine under my hands.
That absence, the thing the village had mocked her for, felt more intimate than anything else.
It belonged only to her, and now it belonged to me too.
“Gabriel—” Her voice cracked. “You’re inside me. You’re really… God, it’s you. You’re really inside me.”
“You just noticed?” I asked her playfully, though her words hit like a second climax of their own.
This was real now. We had crossed the line between what we’d been and whatever we were becoming, and there was no pretending otherwise.
And yet her legs only tightened, pulling me deeper, and her inner muscles fluttered around my cock as if her body had decided the rules no longer applied.
She only giggled.
“I know,” I rasped against her throat. “I know this changes everything. And I still can’t stop.
” I thrust harder, burying myself to the root.
“I’ve wanted this since I came home. I dreamed of you.
I came thinking of you while you slept in my arms. And now you’re here, open for me, and I’m not letting go. ”
Tears slipped from the corners of her eyes, but she was smiling through them, radiant and wrecked. “Don’t let go. Please don’t ever let go.”
I kissed the tears away, then claimed her mouth.
Our tongues met. The kiss tasted of salt and need and six years of missing each other.
I kept fucking her, slow, rolling thrusts that made her whimper into my mouth.
Her hands slid down my back, tracing the ridges of old scars, then lower, gripping my ass and pulling me in as if she could fuse us together.
The pressure built fast. Too fast. Her body was too tight, too wet, too perfect. Every time I bottomed out I felt the soft give of her cervix against the head of my cock, and the thought that I was that deep inside her nearly finished me on the spot.
“I’m close,” I warned. “Gabriella, I’m going to come inside you.”
She nodded frantically, hips rising to meet every thrust. “I want to feel it. I want every drop of you.”
I drove into her one last time, hard and deep, and held myself there as the orgasm tore through me.
My cock pulsed, thick ropes of cum flooding her unprotected pussy.
The pleasure was blinding, white-hot, almost painful in its intensity.
I groaned her name against her neck, hips jerking helplessly as I kept pumping more and more of myself into her.
The heat of it, coming raw inside her on the grass where we had once played as children, made the climax stretch longer than any I had ever known.
She came with me. Her body clamped down, pulsing around my spurting cock, milking every last drop.
A broken cry left her throat, half sob, half moan, and her nails dug into my shoulders hard enough to leave marks.
I felt the gush of her release around me, hot and slick, mixing with the thick seed I was still pouring into her.
We stayed locked together, trembling, breathing hard. My cock twitched inside her with aftershocks, and each small pulse drew another soft sound from her lips. I could feel my cum already beginning to leak out around the base of my shaft where we were joined, warm and messy against her thighs.
I didn’t pull out. I braced my forearms on either side of her head and looked down at her. Her blue eyes were glassy, lips swollen from kissing, cheeks flushed, the wildflower still somehow tangled in her hair. She looked thoroughly fucked and completely at peace.
“I love you,” I said quietly. The words felt heavier than any battlefield vow I had ever spoken. “Not just as the girl I grew up with. I love you the way a man loves a woman, completely. I think I have for longer than I knew.”
Her hands came up to cup my face. “I love you the same way. I always have. I just never thought you’d ever look at me like this.”
I kissed her again, slower this time, tasting the truth of it. Beneath us the crushed wildflowers released their scent in soft waves. The lake lapped gently at the shore. Somewhere above, a skybird called once and then fell silent.
When I finally began to soften, I eased out of her with care. A thick trickle of my cum followed, sliding down the cleft of her ass and into the grass. The sight of it, my seed leaving her body, sent a fresh, possessive ache through my chest.
Gabriella watched me do it, eyes dark with renewed hunger. “Marking me?” she whispered.
“Claiming you,” I answered. “Even if the world never knows, you’ll know. Every time you feel me drip out of you later, you’ll remember whose you are.”
She pulled me down for one more kiss, soft and lingering. Then she laughed quietly against my mouth, the sound light and free in a way I hadn’t heard since before the war.
“We’re a mess,” she said.
“Completely.”
“We should bathe,” she said quietly. “The lake. It’s right there.”
We rose. Our clothes were scattered across the grass, torn in places, grass-stained, bearing the evidence of what had just happened with the honesty of fabric that had not volunteered for this assignment.
We left them there. Walked to the water’s edge hand in hand, naked, the afternoon light gilding our skin, and stepped into the lake together.
The water was cool. Clear enough to see the smooth stones beneath our feet, the occasional flash of a small fish darting away from our disturbance.
I cupped water in my hands and poured it over her shoulders, watching it run down the clean line of her back, her body bare and whole and beautiful exactly as it was.
She turned to me. Her hands found the scars on my chest, the puckered one beneath my ribs where the spear had gone through, the smaller ones across my shoulders from arrows that had grazed but not penetrated, and her fingers traced them with a tenderness that made my throat tight.
“These,” she said. “I hate these. Every one of them. I hate that you have them and I wasn’t there.”
“I’m glad you weren’t there.”
“I know. I still hate them.”