Chapter 20 #3
She was babbling now. The words coming loose the way they only come loose when she’s all the way down, English running into Greek, surfacing the way it does when she’s undone—please and Daddy and then a string of soft Greek I couldn’t follow, agápi mou in there, and parakaló, please, please, her hips rolling helpless and her thighs falling open and the bare slick heat of her gleaming in the gold light, begging in two tongues for a touch I was still keeping just past her reach.
“I know,” I soothed, and I dripped one more, low, on the soft inside of her hip where I knew she’d feel it everywhere, and chased it with my mouth so close to where she ached that she sobbed. “I know what you need. Soon. I’ve got you. You don’t have to ask. You don’t have to do a single thing.”
And then I gave her the one she didn’t see coming.
I waited until the wax across her chest had set pale and cool and hardened, until she’d half-forgotten it was there in the haze of everything else, and then I caught the edge of one of the blooms with my thumbnail and I peeled it off her, slow, a long deliberate pull, the dried wax lifting off her warm skin in one piece — and the feeling of it, the strange tugging cool reverse of the heat, a sensation she had no map for, made her cry out and arch and shudder all over again, fresh, undone by something she’d never felt before.
“There,” I breathed, peeling another, slow, watching her come apart under each one. “One more thing your body’s never done. One more thing you don’t have to understand. Just feel it. Just let me.”
I peeled them all, one by one, slow, and with each one she shook harder and sobbed softer, the words gone out of her entirely now, just sound, just breath, just the high helpless music of a woman taken all the way down and held there—and she was gone. All the way gone.
“Good girl,” I whispered, my forehead against her temple, the blindfold soft under my lips.
“So good. You’re all the way down now, aren’t you.
All the way gone for me.” I smoothed the last of the cooled wax from her skin and laid my warm hand flat over her racing heart.
“I’ve got you. I’ve got every bit of you.
And now—” I reached for the knot of the cloth over her eyes.
“Now I want you to come back up just enough to see me.”
I pulled the blindfold off before I took her.
I’d thought about it, whether to leave it, but I wanted her to see, to be immersed in me in the end. So I eased the soft cloth up off her eyes and let the lamplight find her, and I watched her come back up out of the dark and her gaze swim and focus and land on my face.
“You did so well,” I said.
She looked at me like she was finding land. Pupils blown wide, the grey-green of her eyes gone dark and soft and wet, just my Katerina, gone all the way down and looking up at me out of the bottom of it, and she lifted her scarred hand and laid it against my jaw the way I lay mine against hers.
“You did well,” she breathed back.
I stripped slow, watching her watch me.
First the shirt—buttons popped one by one, her eyes darkening as my chest came into view.
Then the belt, the buckle clinking loud in the quiet room.
The zipper next, teeth parting like an invitation.
I shoved my pants down, kicked them off, left my cock straining against my boxers just to make her squirm.
She bit her lip.
I hooked my thumbs in the waistband. “You read, baby girl? Or you wanna keep pretending you ain’t staring?”
Her breath hitched.
I peeled the fabric down. My cock sprang free, thick and already leaking, the tip glistening. I palmed myself, stroked slow, just to watch her pupils blow wide. “Look at you. Soaked.”
I climbed back over her, my knees sinking into the mattress. Spread her thighs wider with my hands, her pussy glistening, swollen, begging. I dragged the head of my cock through her slick, coating myself in her. She whimpered.
“Feel that?” I pressed just the tip in, teasing. “That’s how bad you want me. Dripping like a faucet.”
She arched up, tried to take more. I pulled back.
“Nuh-uh, princess. Not yet.” I rubbed my cock against her clit instead, slow circles, her hips jerking under me. “You wanna come? Gotta ask nice.”
“Please—”
“Please what?”
“Please fuck me, Daddy.”
I grinned. “Good girl.”
I pushed in, inch by inch, her tight heat swallowing me whole. She gasped, nails digging into my arms. I bottomed out, my balls pressed against her ass, and stayed there, letting her feel every thick inch.
“Fuck, you take me so good,” I groaned. “Like this pussy was made for my cock.”
I pulled out slow, then slammed back in. Her back arched, tits bouncing, mouth open on a moan. I set a brutal pace, hips snapping, the wet slap of skin on skin filling the room.
“Look at you,” I growled. “Taking it like a fucking champ. My good little girl.”
Her legs locked around my waist, pulling me deeper. I reached between us, thumb circling her clit in time with my thrusts.
“Come for me,” I ordered. “Now.”
She shattered, screaming my name, her pussy clenching around me like a vice. I fucked her through it, then flipped her onto her stomach, yanked her hips up, and drove into her again.
No rules tonight. Just us. Just this.
I followed her a breath later.
It felt like heaven.
We breathed together, the two of us, as one.
I eased out of her gentle and gathered her up before the cold could find her, because she gets cold after, she shivers, the body coming down off the height of it, and I reached and dragged the heavy blanket up over the both of us, wrapped it close around her shoulders, swaddled her in it like the thing she was, which was mine to keep warm.
“Drink,” I said, getting the glass off the nightstand, holding it to her mouth. “All of it. Don’t argue.”
“M’fine,” she slurred, soft and far away and trying out the old armor on pure reflex, the verbal tic that used to be a wall.
“I know you’re fine,” I said, smiling against her hair. “Drink anyway. Doesn’t count as arguing if you do it.”
And she drank. That was the whole arc of her, right there, in a sip of water — the woman who’d have died of thirst before asking, taking it now, easy, from my hand, because she’d finally learned the difference between being handled and being held.
I tipped the glass and she drank it down and let her head fall back against my chest, heavy, boneless, spent.
I gathered her in. Got my back to the headboard and pulled her up against me, her cheek over my heart where it had been a hundred times now, under the hidden Madonna inked on my ribs, and I wrapped the blanket and my arms around the whole of her and held the woman who, six months ago, did not know how to be held.
From the foot of the bed came a grumble.
Olimpo. Of course. The great scarred bulk of him sprawled across the floor exactly where he’d be most in the way, the bald burned road down his flank rising and falling, disturbed from sleep by all the noise and registering his judgment of it the only way he knows.
“Yeah, yeah,” I told him. “Go back to sleep, old man. You’ don’t even have to think about the ovens in the morning.”
He sighed, enormous, put-upon, and settled. And Katerina laughed against my chest, low and helpless and sleepy.
I didn’t need charm. I didn’t need charisma. I had her.
There was a small hard weight in the back of the sock drawer I’d been carrying for three weeks, something shiny and glittery and expensive. I was waiting for the right night to put it in her hand and say the words, in front of everyone, in front of the whole world.
But that could wait. The right night would come, and I’d know it when it did.
Tonight I just held her, and she let me, and that was the whole of the world.