47. Luna #2
I got him out of his shirt and set my hands on the whole scarred, honest length of him, the ink and the old hurts and the furnace heat of his skin, and he let me, as he only ever lets me, with no wall left standing anywhere between us.
I mapped him just as he was mapping me, palms flat to the hard plane of his chest, down the ridged muscle of his stomach that jumped under my touch, and when my hand slid lower and closed around him, sure and slow, he made the low, broken sound that belongs to me and to no handle he has ever worn.
I stroked him once, and again, learning exactly what pulled the breath clean out of him, and I caught the ruin of that sound against my own mouth.
"Luna." Only my name, and it came out of him wrecked, half a warning and half a plea.
He caught my wrist and drew my hand gently away, pinning it to the sheet, because he has never once let me finish him first when he has other plans for me.
"Not yet," he said, rough. "Tonight I get to spend on you.
" And he took his time with me the way he does with anything he means to hold onto for good.
His mouth followed his hands down the length of me, slow, over my ribs, the soft plane of my stomach, the crease of my hip, and then he settled between my thighs and set his mouth to me, and the first unhurried stroke of his tongue tore a sound out of me I did not recognize as my own.
He unstrung me by patient degrees, holding me open to the exact rhythm that took me apart, finding the catch of breath that meant more and giving it back to me again and again, one hand splayed warm and heavy across my hip to hold me still when I tried to arch away from how good it was.
I had both fists in his hair and was saying please in the voice I keep only for him, and he would not hurry and he would not stop, gentle and merciless at the same time, until I came apart against his mouth with his name breaking out of me.
He gathered me back up while I was still shaking, kissing his slow way back to my mouth so I could taste on his lips exactly what he had done to me.
Then he rose over me and I drew him down, greedy now and long past pretending otherwise, and there was nothing left in the whole world to be afraid of.
He braced above me on his forearms, careful of all of me in a way that was brand new between us, and I felt the blunt, heavy heat of him settle against me where I was slick and open and aching for him.
He notched himself there, only the first press of him against me, and held, not taking yet, just resting at the very edge and letting us both feel the promise of it until my breath went ragged under his.
Then I reached down to close my hand around him and guided him to exactly where I had been aching to have him, and he let me set him there, and he held a moment longer without moving and watched my face in the low light.
"Look at me," I said, and handed him back his own oldest order, and he did.
He pushed into me then, slow, one careful inch and then the next, and I felt myself stretch and give and open around him, the thick, aching slide of it tipping over into the almost-too-much that is exactly enough.
He pressed deeper every time my body eased for him, pausing when my breath caught, gentling me, then giving me more, until he was seated all the way home and we both went still, joined and breathing each other's air, undone by being wanted this completely with nothing hidden and nothing chasing us out of the room.
Then he began to move, deep and slow and certain, drawing nearly out to the edge and sinking back home until I gasped, no fury in it and no apology underneath, only us and a whole life waiting on the other side of it.
He set a rhythm that took me apart by inches and built me back up higher, one hand sliding beneath the small of my back to tilt me up into every stroke, and I hooked my legs higher and took him deeper and heard his careful control finally begin to come apart in his breathing.
He kept his eyes on mine the way I had asked him to, and I told him I loved him, not Shadow, not the alpha, him, and he gave it back into my mouth until even the words ran out and there was only breath and the slick heat of us moving as one thing.
I felt the second wave climb in me, tighter and higher than the first, and when I told him, he slid his hand between us and pressed his thumb exactly where I was desperate for it and drove me straight over the edge.
When I broke the second time I pulled him over with me, and he spilled into me with my name on his lips and the whole of his careful self in honest ruins, and he held me through every last wave of it and pressed his face into my hair and let himself be, one more time, a man who had clawed his way out of the dark and been let all the way into the warm.
Afterward we lay tangled and quiet, his hand spread flat over my stomach without either of us having decided to put it there.
"I want to ask you for something," he said into the quiet, "and it is not the ring yet.
That comes later, done properly, when you least expect it and cannot code your way out of it.
" He smiled against my hair. "I am asking you to build a life inside my world.
Not a room I keep you safe in. Not a wall with you living behind it.
A home, with your name on the deed and your hands on how it runs, and me somewhere inside it learning to be a person instead of a fortress.
On your terms, Luna. Every last one of them.
I have lost all interest in anything that is not the two of you and the ordinary morning we get to keep waking up into. "
I thought about the ledger I had spent my whole life waiting to be collected on. I thought about how the bill never came, because there was no bill, because every so often a girl out-codes a god and simply gets to keep the entire impossible everything.
"Yes," I said. "To the man. To the life. To all of it, on our terms, in a home and never a cage." I turned my hand under his, over the small new future we were both guarding now. "But I want the terms in writing. I am, and I cannot stress this enough, extremely thorough."
"I have noticed," he said, and he laughed, quiet and free, into my hair. "It remains my favorite thing about you."