24
‘Please don’t do this.’ The plea thins to almost nothing on my tongue.
‘I’m not.’ His gaze slides down to the bottom of my tracksuit top. ‘You are.’
My eyes follow his, my hands uselessly curling in my lap against the paperback.
‘Start with the hem,’ he whispers.
His finger hooks loosely into the fabric and traces a slow circle beside my stomach. The muscles there seize beneath his touch.
I lean away. His knees tighten around me slightly, pushing me back against the solid heat of his chest.
There is nowhere to go. No place for my hands except where he wants them.
I finger the hem. Untangle it from his hold, then pull it up – slow at first.
It catches on the lace of my bra as I squirm to keep clear of him.
Elias tilts away just enough to let the top pass over my head.
The second it is gone, cold air strikes from one side, the heat of his body from the other. I curl my shoulders inwards, arms folding across my front as if I can collapse into a small enough shape to hide from his gaze.
The book tumbles from my grip and lands open across my lap. Before I can reach for it, he catches the spine, lifts it from my thighs and raises it up towards me.
‘So you can be a good girl,’ he says quietly. ‘Continue reading.’
Every instinct screams to keep my arms where they are, keep myself shielded from his gaze, from feeding his hunger.
But he waits.
Barely moving, I lower my hands from my chest and take the damn paperback from him, feeling more exposed with every inch of skin I stop protecting.
Elias’ head is back in the space between my neck and shoulder. His breath skims there as his gaze travels down my collarbone.
I feel that look as if it were his fingers instead.
As if he is tracing what he has not yet touched.
A wrong thing inside me answers him. It’s faint. And it burns beneath the fear.
Flipping back to the lost page, I aim my attention at it, my grip clenching around the book.
‘His member marked her with every pass. Thick and long, it invaded her throat.’
Elias’ hand at the back of my neck shifts until his thumb grazes the skin just below my ear.
‘The sugar and salt mixed as his prec—’ I halt.
‘His precum,’ Elias corrects.
I take two breaths, staring at the word, but it won’t form on my tongue.
His fingers weave through my hair, slipping through the strands until they capture the roots lightly. He draws my head back with measured control, baring my throat and trapping the scream trying to escape me.
His lips graze the corner of mine, pine and salt filling the narrowing space between his skin and mine until my lungs can no longer stand it.
‘Say it,’ he whispers gently.
My vision darkens at the edges.
My eyes climb up to the ceiling. ‘The sugar and salt mix as his precum leaks onto her tongue.’
‘Look at me.’ Breathless, his words crash against my cheek.
He angles my jaw until our lips are barely an inch away.
‘Does it taste like that?’ he asks.
His attention is fixed on my mouth. His own part, the tip of his tongue brushing once over his lower lip as if watching me has only made him thirst more.
My teeth lock until pain sparks through my jaw. My nails bite crescents into my palm, but it is my own pulse I want to punish for racing beneath his hand.
Because he’s just shown me that whatever it is we’re doing… it’s bringing up something in me I didn’t know existed.
‘It’s salty,’ I dare. Not even a twitch. ‘The sweetness is from the jam.’
His gaze holds to my mouth as he reaches for the preserve. He never looks away. Not when his fingers gather a dark smear from the plate and bring it towards me.
The moment I catch the whiff of berries, something explodes inside me.
He drags the jam across my upper lip with care, leaving the sweetness there like a mark.
Then he waits. Observes it glistening there.
I hold out against the pressure longer than I should. Then my tongue slips over my upper lip and clears the jam from it.
His eyes darken. His nostrils flare.
He realigns us until we’re both facing the fire and his chin settles at my shoulder. His breathing quickens. His other hand is at my hip, squeezing tighter as he fights whatever has taken hold of him.
‘Choose,’ he murmurs close to my ear, ‘the zip of my jeans… or what’s beneath them.’ He barely pushes it out.
My fingers twitch.
Beneath the terror, against every sane instinct, a blistering kind of shame works through me at the realisation that his desire and mine are not entirely separate.
Even if the circumstances surrounding it are.
But with my pulse stumbling and heat winding up from the base of my spine, whatever distinction there was has begun to rot away.
If I was brought to this frozen hell with the devil beneath an angel’s mask, then a reckless part of me doesn’t want only what he offers – it wants it all.
Because the world has taken too much from me. It has taken too much from us both.
A soft moan strikes my cheek before I reach to the side towards his waistband.
But finally, something snaps in me and I stop pretending I want to pull away.
I push the book aside, twist at the waist and start on the buttons of his jeans. When the first pops open, he pulls me closer against him, both arms enveloping me in a hard embrace.
His arms lock around me so tightly I can scarcely breathe, yet his face turns away as though even this much contact burns. The hold feels less like possession now and more like he simply can’t make himself let go.
The sound of the zipper dragging down is almost damning in the quiet. My knuckles graze the solid shape of him beneath it, reminding me—
—that he never wears underwear.
I don’t stop there. The sides of his trousers part until the loosened denim no longer conceals the hard length of him. But before I allow myself that first look—
‘Stop.’ The word tears out the instant he’s free.
My muscles lock immediately.
His eyes squeeze shut. One breath punches out of him, then another, each one shallower than the last, each landing as though something is tearing loose inside him.
And I do something stupid: I let my arms curve around his broad shoulders, palms spread over the sinewed stretch of muscle at his back. Just to show him where my hands are. That despite the terror he gave me, I refuse to give it back to him.
And I wait.
And wait some more.
‘Read.’ He withdraws, forcing me away and turning me towards the fire, denying me the sight of him.
Warily, I reach for the paperback like his demon did not just frighten us both.
‘The sugar and salt mix as his precum leaks onto her tongue,’ I reread the last part. Give it two beats before the rest comes out. ‘And she drinks him by the drop with each plunge and pull.’
Elias presses his face to my neck, but only one hand slides around my shoulder and down my arm in a slow, obscene drag that makes my skin pebble.
My voice falters when I understand what the other hand is doing.
I wish I could capture him like that through my lens. Beautiful and terrible at once.
Even now, my mind still frames what he won’t let me watch: the flicker of firelight over his knuckles, my pale shoulder cutting him from view, the measured movement of his arm caught only in the shadow across the bearskin.
I reduce it to light and shape and composition.
Anything but what he’s doing beside me.
My eyes stay on the page, fixed with a ferocity that makes the letters swim in my vision.
But the knowledge still arrives through every broken breath he leaves against my throat.
Through the faint shift of his body behind me.
Through the awful, intimate rhythm that turns the silence into something that will forever be carved into my memory.
Need has reached the point where my thighs clench with pain in betrayal of myself.
Why aren’t I sickened by this?
No, I am.
I am sickened. I am afraid. Ashamed of what this brought up in me. I want to crawl out of my own skin.
But curiosity hooks beneath my ribs and pulls and stretches and twists and rips me to shreds.
One glance, it whispers. One glance to make sense of him.
To know how undone or cruel or beautiful he looks in the act of destroying us both a little further.
My fingers tighten on the book until the cover bends.
I don’t look. I don’t give him that. I don’t give myself that.
‘Her mouth becomes a worship of its own kind,’ I force out. ‘And finally, he learnt what power tasted like when surrender was offered.’
Elias inhales sharply. And suddenly, his voice joins mine, but it’s low and ragged.
‘And she learnt too,’ he reads beside my ear.
Our voices blend into lines where pride and the strain of pleasure fail us.
‘They watched the hunger bloom in each other’s eyes—’ A moan escapes him.
It crashes against my neck and sends my pulse spiralling.
‘Until neither of them could pretend they were innocent of wanting.’
His breath catches as his body gives a violent shudder. His hand doesn’t stop.
Air won’t leave me either.
My mind keeps reminding me that this is an intelligent man beside me. A deeply troubled man, but… not empty. Even now, even here, there is a mind behind the monstrosity, purpose in this filth. This is not impulse – or not entirely.
I don’t hate his hand. I don’t hate his lips that keep reading alongside me. I hate that he makes need gather low in my body without my permission. That flesh can answer while every lucid thought still knows this is wrong.
I hate that I understand him.
That some terrible thing in me reacts.
‘He broke so beautifully,’ I read as his beard scrapes lightly over my neck, his body trembling softly against me. ‘His hand still fisted in her hair, his head tipped back, and the sound that left him was not pleasure alone.’
Elias goes silent.
‘She took him whole, tasted the final shudder of him and understood, with a horror that was too much to take, that release did not make monsters human. It only proved they had once been that. But now, she was his monster. And he was hers.’