Chapter Seven Claudio #2
I let her lead. For ten seconds, maybe fifteen, I let her set the pace, because she needs to know she's driving this.
She needs to know that the second she stops, I stop, despite the raging need that courses through me.
That the power is hers even when my hands are on her body and my mouth is on her skin.
She pulls back just enough to breathe. Her forehead against mine. Her fingers in my hair.
"Touch me," she says. "Please."
The please undoes me.
My hands find the hem of my shirt on her body and I slide them underneath. Her skin is warm. Smooth under my palms, the curve of her waist, the ridge of her ribs, the soft plane of her stomach that tenses under my touch. She inhales. Sharp. I stop.
"Don't stop," she says. "That wasn't a bad sound."
I drag my hands higher. She lifts her arms and I pull the shirt over her head and she's bare underneath, no bra, just skin and the dark room and the silver light from the window painting lines across her body.
She's beautiful. Not in the polished, constructed way I've been seeing for six days. In the raw way. The real way. The way that makes my chest ache and my hands shake and my brain go quiet for the first time in longer than I can remember.
I put my mouth on her collarbone. She tips her head back. A sound escapes her, low and open, and I chase it with my tongue. Down her throat. Across the ridge of bone. The hollow between her breasts where her heart is hammering fast enough that I can feel it against my lips.
Her hands pull at my shirt. I lean back enough to strip it off and she looks at me the way I looked at her.
Taking inventory. Not the cold kind. The hungry kind.
Her fingers trace the tattoo on my forearm, then move up to my shoulder, across the scar from a knife fight four years ago, down to my chest.
"You're warm," she murmurs, like she's surprised by it.
"What did you expect?"
"I don't know. Something colder."
I almost laugh. "I've been told."
She puts her mouth on the scar on my shoulder.
A kiss. Soft. Precise. Like she's mapping the history of my body with her lips.
She moves to the next scar, the one on my ribs from a bullet graze, and kisses that too, and the tenderness of it is so at odds with everything we are that it makes my throat close up.
I pull her into my lap. She comes, straddling me, knees on either side of my hips.
The contact is immediate and devastating.
Her pussy against my cock, nothing between us but her underwear and my boxers, and when she shifts her weight and presses down I grunt and grip her hips hard enough to bruise.
"Sorry," I manage.
"Don't apologize." She rolls her hips. Deliberate. My vision goes white at the edges. "I want to feel you."
I kiss her. Deep. My tongue in her mouth and my hands on her ass and her hips moving against me in a rhythm that's going to kill me if she doesn't stop.
She doesn't stop. She grinds against me with a focused intensity that I recognize because it's mine, it's the same single-minded precision I bring to everything, and feeling it reflected back at me through her body is the most disorienting thing I've ever experienced.
My mouth finds her breast. She gasps when I close my lips around her nipple, her fingers tightening in my hair, her back arching into me. I suck, and she moans, and the sound goes straight to my cock. I switch to the other side, tongue circling, teeth grazing, and her hips jerk against me.
"Claudio." My name in her mouth sounds like a different word. Something sacred. Something profane. "I need more."
I flip her onto her back. Not rough. Controlled, my hand behind her head so she doesn't hit the headboard. She lands on the pillows and I'm over her, and her legs wrap around my waist and pull me down against her.
I kiss down her body. Throat. Chest. The space between her ribs where I can feel every breath she takes. Her stomach, where the muscles flutter under my mouth. The jut of her hip bone. The edge of her underwear, plain black cotton, nothing fancy.
I look up at her. She's propped on her elbows, watching me. Her hair is wrecked and her lips are swollen and her chest is flushed and she's watching me with those blue eyes that see everything, and I need her to see this.
"I want to taste you," I say.
"Fuck. Yes. God, please."
I pull her underwear down her legs and she lets me. I settle between her thighs and put my mouth on her, and the sound she makes is worth every sleepless night, every cold motel, every mile of highway that led to this room.
She's wet. Soaked. I lick through her lips with the flat of my tongue, and her hips buck off the bed, and her hand finds my hair and grips.
I find her clit and circle it, slow, learning the pressure she needs, the rhythm that makes her thighs clench against my ears.
I slide two fingers inside her and she clenches around them, tight and hot, and the noise she makes is somewhere between a curse and a prayer.
"Fuck." Her voice is raspy. "Right there. Don't stop."
That didn’t even cross my mind. A smirk spreads over my face as I work her with my mouth and my fingers as her eyes flutter shut.
But mine are wide open. Watching. The way her brow furrows.
The way her lips part. The way her composure dismantles piece by piece until there's nothing left but the woman underneath, gasping and shaking and gripping my hair like I'm the only thing keeping her from flying apart.
She comes with my name on her lips. Not a scream.
A whisper. Broken and breathless and so quiet I almost miss it.
Her body arches off the bed and her thighs clamp against my head and I feel every pulse of her orgasm against my tongue, and I lick her through it until she pushes my head away with a trembling hand.
I crawl back up her body. She's shaking, flushed, breathing hard. Her eyes are glazed and her hair is everywhere and she looks absolutely wrecked and pride rips through me. I did that. I put that expression on her face.
"Hi," she says. Drunk on it. Dazed.
"Hi."
She reaches between us. Her fingers find my waistband and tug. "Off."
I strip off my boxers, and she wraps her hand around my cock and I stop breathing. Her grip is firm and confident, and she strokes me once, twice, and I have to grab her wrist because I'm closer than I want to be and we haven't even started.
"Condom," I say through my teeth.
"Please tell me you have one."
"Bag. Side pocket."
She laughs. Low, throaty, a sound I haven't heard from her before. "Of course you packed condoms."
"I pack everything."
"Strategic."
"Shut up."
I reach for the bag by the bed, dig through the side pocket, and find the strip. I tear one off and roll it on while she watches, her eyes tracking the movement with an attention that makes my hands unsteady.
I settle between her legs. The tip of my cock presses against her entrance and we both go still.
"Look at me, principessa," I say.
She does.
I push in. Slow. Her lips part and her eyes widen, and her hands grip my shoulders, and I feel every inch of her taking me in, tight and wet and so fucking good that my arms shake.
I bottom out and hold. Her legs wrap around my waist and her ankles lock at the small of my back, and we stay like that, connected, breathing each other's air.
"You okay?"
"I'm perfect." She rolls her hips and I groan. "Move."
I move.
Slow at first. Long strokes that drag out and push back in, and she meets every one with a tilt of her hips that changes the angle until I find the spot that makes her eyes roll back and her nails dig into my shoulders.
I memorize it. The angle, the depth, the pressure.
I commit it to muscle memory the way I commit everything worth keeping.
"Harder," she says.
I brace my forearms beside her head and give her what she's asking for.
Same pace. Harder. Over and over, snapping my hips into hers.
The bed frame hits the wall and neither of us cares.
She's making sounds now, real sounds, the kind she'd never make in daylight.
Moans and gasps and half-words that dissolve into breath, and I swallow them with my mouth on hers.
"You feel so good." My voice doesn't sound like mine. Rough, low, needy. "Fuck, Charlotte. You feel so fucking good."
Her nails rake down my back. The sting is sharp and real and I love it, love the proof that she's here, she's present, she's not behind the mask or inside the armor, she's underneath me with her walls down and her body open and my name in her mouth.
Reaching between us, I press my thumb against her clit. She cries out and clenches around me so tight my vision blurs.
"Come for me," I say against her mouth.
She breaks.
Her whole body locks up, back arching, fingers digging into my back hard enough to draw blood, and she comes with a sound that's half my name and half something wordless, and the clench of her around my cock drags me over with her.
I come hard enough that my arms give out.
I catch myself on my elbows, bury my face in her neck, and the groan that comes out of me is the most honest sound I've ever made.
She holds me through it. Her arms around my shoulders, her legs around my waist, her hand in my hair, holding me against her while we shake apart together.
Then everything is quiet.
I pull out carefully. Deal with the condom. She's lying on her back with one arm across her stomach and the other above her head, staring at the ceiling with an expression I can't read and don't try to.
I lie beside her. Not touching. Close enough that I can feel the heat of her skin. The room smells like sex and sweat, and the cold mountain air seeping through the window frame.
She rolls onto her side. Faces me. Her hand comes up and touches my jaw again, the spot where she hit me earlier. Her thumb traces the bruise.
"You're shaking," she says.
I am. My hands, my arms, a fine tremor running through my whole body that I can't stop.
Not from exertion. From the wall I just blew a hole through.
The one I built the same year she built hers, for different reasons but with the same materials.
Control. Distance. The careful architecture of a man who decided that wanting things was a vulnerability he couldn't afford.
"I know," I say.
"Is that a bad thing?"
"I don't know." The honesty surprises me. "I haven't done this in a long time."
"Me neither."
She moves closer. Tucks her head under my chin, her hair finding it’s way into my mouth. I put my arm around her and pull her against me, and her body fits into the space against my chest like it was designed just for me.
"If you tell Emilio about this," she murmurs against my collarbone, "I'll kill you myself."
"He already knows."
"How?"
"He's my twin. He knows everything."
She laughs. Soft and warm and real, vibrating against my skin.
I hold her in the dark and listen to her breathe, and her breathing slows, and for the first time in days, so does mine.