32 #2
His shoulder flexes. His hand leaves the controls. It drops into the narrow space between us. Knuckles graze the inside of my thigh on the way down. I can barely call it a touch, but it still sends my body into vicious unrest. The darkness in me lifts its head at the sight of him obeying.
Triumph.
Hunger.
An ugly kind of thrill.
I watch his face change as his hand begins to move. I witness restraint turning into ruin by fractions.
And with my pulse hammering between my ribs, I guide the nozzle back where he wants it.
Even the water bites into me harder this time.
His hand keeps moving. His jaw sets rigidly. And my control comes apart.
In the next heartbeat, his grip leaves my leg and his palm slams against the wall above my shoulder.
I don’t lower my knee. I keep the inside of my thigh pressed to his, and his eyes drop just long enough to take in the sight.
When they meet mine again, they burn brighter.
His forehead nearly touches mine.
And as droplets cling to his lashes, his gaze tears through all my barriers.
I stop fighting myself.
My eyes close. My chin tips towards the white glare of the lights overhead and I let our demons devour me.
My back bows off the tiles as it crashes into me. The light splinters behind my lids into a million colours. My body detonates. My mouth opens, and this time I don’t keep the sound from him. I give it to him in one shaky moan that leaves my throat raw and my pride in pieces.
Elias makes a rough, wounded noise against my cheek, as if I’ve hurt him somewhere where fingers can’t touch.
Dropping the handle, I hear it clink against the tiles, spraying everywhere. It startles me, because nothing in me has properly returned yet. My skin is still lit from the inside, every nerve too close to the light, every breath working through the wreckage he has just forced me through.
His eyes fall to my mouth. It reminds me what he’d told me… that he never…
I need to step back.
I should. I ought to gather whatever is left of my dignity from the wet tiles with both hands and run away.
But he is… Elias.
Without letting myself weigh the rights and wrongs, I sink slowly to my knees, my hands curling around the hard muscle of his legs. In that moment, I am not the thing he has cornered. I am not the body he has pulled apart under the shower.
And I dare to look.
No—
I claim the sight.
The wet line of his stomach. The held-back power in his thighs. The hand that still does not quite know whether to reach for me or keep to the wall. The size of him. Heavy and glorious.
Beautiful is too soft a word for him.
I’m almost outraged at how much perfection can be packed into a single body.
I have heard him threaten. I have heard him laugh. I have heard him disguise cruelty as philosophy and turn silence into a weapon.
I have never heard him sound as breakable as now, breathing rough above me and keeping the one thing he wants to ask clenched tight between his teeth.
And my lips part for him. I let him have the last choice.
He hesitates. Wars with himself.
But in this instant, there’s no mercy left in me. No noble reason I can polish later and call it something else.
I am wet. Shaking. Furious. Blistering with need.
My tongue extends and runs a small line over the tip of him. The muscles in his jaw ripple as he grits his teeth harder.
But… he finally tips his hips forward by a fraction.
I swirl my tongue around him until I coax a tremble from his spine, and he moves the hand still propped against the wall to reposition himself.
His fingers stay wrapped around his base, controlling what little movement he allows when his crown barely brushes my lips.
His thighs begin to shiver. His shoulders bow slightly, his breath catches and stays caught.
A dark, reckless part of me rises to meet it.
I lean in before this need can sour into sense, and I take him into my mouth as far as I can.
The curse that falls from him cracks the air. His other palm slams against the tiles. The sound that follows might be protest, but I can’t hear him over the water gushing beneath us.
He doesn’t move away, though. He doesn’t stop me as I take him in and out of my mouth, dragging him to the edge.
My eyes peel open. His head is tipped back, water spraying up into the ceiling from the upturned showerhead and streaming down his sinewy throat, following the lines of ink into damnation.
Every hard ridge of his abdomen draws tight. The tension climbs into his chest beneath the black chains, his breath snagging somewhere behind his teeth. And he grits through the last of the tremors as he spills inside my mouth.
I drink the sin straight from the source.
The room loses all sound except the traitorous rush of the water as the final rumble rolls out of his throat and the shaking slows. Then stops entirely.
I lean against the wall, too aware of myself, of the intimacy, of what I’ve just chosen, and what he let happen.
When he looks down at me, a warm kind of darkness streaks his face first. Starkly male. Almost victorious.
It reaches that hidden place in me that stretches in satisfaction and makes me want to do it all over again.
But just as quickly, his eyes lose me without him looking away. Pleasure collapses, leaving his face blank. He opens his mouth, but no breath follows. His hands lift, stop halfway.
A sick weight drops through me.
I had thought I was giving something back to him. But it seems memory has taken him somewhere else entirely.
He steps back. Rubs at his face until both hands press against his mouth. His chest stops moving as his lids flutter closed.
Oh no.
I fumble to push away the shower spray, wiping water from my brows as I shoot to my feet.
‘Elias—’ His name breaks out of me, but he is already turning.
Reaching for him, I try to calm him down, but he shoves me away.
Air surges in where the warmth of his body was.
He bolts from the shower room as if something inside him has torn free. His knee clips the bedside table beside the doorway. The camera rocks once, tips and strikes the floor with a crack that makes my heart stop.
He snatches it up and slams the door behind him.
My hands hang at my sides. The door is still shaking from the impact, and I can’t decide whether to follow him, scream after him or be sick at what my own desire helped us do.
I keep forgetting the hurt in him does not make him harmless. It makes him unpredictable. A man can be terrifying and breakable at once. Elias has made a religion of both.
Curling into myself, I allow the trembling to take over me. I’m slick with steam and need he’d coaxed out of my body. Limbs ache from too much of everything. My pulse is still galloping in my throat, but the moment is already bleeding into a ruined kind of aftermath.
I rub my face hard, trying to wipe away the heat. The water. The shame. Whatever’s crawling across my skin like fingerprints I can’t scrub off – and maybe don’t want to.
The silence echoes when I cut off the water. It winds around many truths and dares me to break the lies that mask them.
But I stand there, naked and dripping on the tiles, staring at the skewed shape of my reflection in the chrome nozzle.
I don’t know whether that last fragile thread of common sense has snapped and whatever happened just now has simply crawled into the space it left behind.
Somehow, my heart doesn’t know whether to mourn or demand more. But tonight, it no longer matters.
Because I can feel him just behind that door.
Trapped on the other side of the same thing that has me sitting here.
The blizzard may have locked down the house, but the past has locked down the rest.
Together, they will make us face our demons again – or we will keep ignoring them until they rise anew.