Chapter Fourteen #2
“It’s not that easy, sweetheart,” I whisper. “It’s like the cultists. Both are problems that require more finesse to get out of than I’d originally hoped. But that’s okay. We’ll figure everything out, and as we do, we’ll be together. That’s all I care about. Being with you.”
Bel slams his eyes shut, exhaling hard. “You can’t talk like this when we have to go back out and finish lunch with your parents.”
“We’re not finishing lunch with my parents.”
His eyes snap open. “We’re not?”
“I’m taking you home.” I wipe the last of the moisture from under his eyes. “We can try this again some other time, when we’re—”
“No.” He takes my hand and fixes me with a look of determination. “You’re sweet, but no. I want to stay. I want to go back out there, apologize to your parents, and have lunch with my boyfriend’s family.”
A soft smile tugs my lips. “You’re sure?”
“Yeah,” he says, then gives a lopsided smirk. “Besides, how else are we going to earn that reward?”
I exhale a snort. “That’s what matters most, after all.”
“Have you seen your dick? That’s all that matters.”
My face heats as I laugh, but he squirms around me to stand and throw himself at the sink, where he quickly fixes his smudged eyeliner.
With a hard sniff at his reflection, he says, “Let’s do this. Cock awaits,” and marches out of the bathroom.
Gods. I really do love that man.
Bel’s apology is formal but sincere—he’s not sorry about standing up for me, but he is sorry about yelling and shaming my parents.
In public. But his display endeared him to my mother even more, because she cuts him off by gushing about how he leapt to defend Orok’s honor, and then goes on to list all her ideas for further spreading Urzoth’s strength.
We both listen, and Bel asks how each of her ideas embodies Urzoth’s teachings.
It gets her into a probably too-deep discussion of our dogma, all that strong as stone, hard as rock stuff; but also the finer details, the things Reverend Drach hinted at, and the things I rarely, if ever, hear my mother admit to believing, that although Urzoth is made of stone, he is a god of strong emotions, like love.
I’m not sure I speak the whole meal. I sit there while Bel interacts with my mom, pulling these ideologies out of her and genuinely, eagerly soaking up all the information, his hand on my thigh and his body slightly leaning toward me the whole time.
As much as I love watching him win over my parents—well, my mom; my dad will like him if she does—I need this lunch to end.
Now. And the longer we sit here, our plates cleared and dessert half eaten, the paparazzi outside having dispersed an hour ago, the less I listen to what Bel and my mom are saying, and the more I pay attention to the heat of his body against mine, the smell of his apple illusion magic, the way his eyelashes fan across his cheekbones when he closes his eyes in a laugh.
He loves me.
He defended me. Again.
I want you to be free, Orok.
But I already am. I am every moment I get to be with him, and finally, finally, Bel turns to gaze up at me, presumably to ask a question, and he notices the look I shoot him, the heat burning from my core.
I’m quick to get the check after that. I hug my mom and dad goodbye, and she fawns over Bel, promising to be in touch and get him some Urzoth books she told him about, but I’m dragging him out the door as she’s still talking.
Bel giggles, a delighted, sexy noise as I march him up the sidewalk, my apartment only one block away.
Other pedestrians fall out of my path, and I should maybe be concerned that I’m being such a lumbering, overbearing weirdo right now, but I can’t stop it.
He brings out this side of me, and it isn’t even that—he’s the only one I’ve ever felt is worthy of this side of me. The ferocity, the brutality, the swelling force that so many people attribute to Urzoth’s strength. It’s for Bel. It’s only for him.
We surge into the lobby of my building, the doorman and security guard greeting us, and Bel says an actual hello to them, but I keep him moving.
The elevator’s there and I haul him into it, and before the doors are even shut, I have him caged to the wall, towering over him, burying my nose in his curls.
He smells like him, and the restaurant, and the soap from the stadium; I want him to smell like me. Need him to smell like me.
Bel sucks in a faltering breath as I lap at the skin under his jaw. “D-did we earn our reward?” he stutters. “I definitely feel like we did. We both survived, yeah? We—gods, that feels good—walked out of there intact.”
The elevator dings, the doors peel open, and I heft Bel up.
He squeals in protest. “Orok! Your injury—”
“This arm’s fine.” To prove it, I sling him higher until he’s draped over my good shoulder, hanging there far too temptingly. I slap his ass, and he devolves into a helpless laugh.
“Oh my gods. Tell me no one’s around to see me like this.”
I already have, in fact, scanned the hall. It’s clear. “Uh-oh, paparazzi got ahead of us.”
Bel lurches, trying to spin around. “What? Where? I—”
He notes the empty hall.
And drops back down to slap my ass. Except he barely reaches my lower back.
“Hilarious,” he deadpans.
I grin and shift him to dig my keys out of my pocket, but as I unlock the door and deactivate the security wards, I lower him to press his back against the wall.
“To answer your question,” I say into his open, gasping mouth, those glossy lips slick on mine, “this isn’t about surviving the lunch.
This is because my boyfriend”—he used that word and I’m wild for it; it’s ours now—“won over my parents. He’s earnest and brave and sexy as fuck, and I need to stretch him open for me so I can let him feel how much I love him. ”
Bel whimpers, hips rolling against my stomach as he babbles, “Yes, that. Oh my gods. Yes, please.”
I get the door open and we topple inside. He tugs me down to lay kisses and bites all up my neck, interspersing his attack with progressively needier mewls, nails digging into my neck.
I spare enough composure to relock the door and reactivate the wards.
Another startled squeak when I scoop him up again, but I only take him as far as the bedroom before I’m tossing him onto the comforter. He rolls, half finding his balance, half yanking off his clothes, and he struggles around until he comes up for air, shirtless, cheeks flushed.
“Like this?” he asks on his knees, and it takes me a beat to realize what he’s asking. In his human form.
“However you’re comfortable,” I say honestly. “Every version of you is perfect.”
That flush goes to raging scarlet as he shimmies out of his remaining clothes. His tail thrashes against the bed, the only part of him rose gold, a delicate contrast of his two presentations. He’s a sunset, every hue of pink in a perfectly clear sky, coral and rose and a pastel blush.
Panting, he looks up at me, coy and yearning. “You’re not getting undressed.”
I rock my neck side to side. The pain from my injury is all but gone. “I dunno. My shoulder’s pretty sore. I think you’ll have to put on a show for me.”
What starts as concern quickly morphs to a popped eyebrow of interest. “Oh yeah?”
“Mhmm.” I kick off my shoes, move around the bed, and sit propped against the headboard.
Phei’s healing spells were potent, but I keep the sling on. This is the game, after all.
Bel immediately crawls up me, the contrast of his lithe, naked body while I’m fully clothed sending a debilitating pulse of arousal through me.
I regret leaving on my jeans when he straddles my lap to grind his dick against mine.
My own cock’s been hard since the restaurant and the sensation’s muted by the fabric, and Bel rotates his hips, his face pinching in a delicious moan.
With my good arm, I dig my fingers into his hip, helping him writhe, the flex of his muscles shuddering under my palm. “This what you want? Let you get off on me like this?”
Bel shakes his head, curls flying. “No. Want you in me again. You promised.”
Gods damn, his pout. Does he know how potent it is? Does he know he could ask me for anything, in this plane or ones I can’t even reach, and I’d rip apart the magic of our reality to lay it at his feet?
“All right, sweetheart. Need you to get ready for me, though.”
Bel reaches for my hand, guiding it back around his ass, but I change course to drag my hand to his stomach. The muscles jump under my fingertips; I groan, thrusting up against him.
“I want to watch you,” I tell him, absorbing the way those brown eyes dip further into desire, pupils blowing out, lashes fluttering. “Show me how you fucked yourself before me.”
He sips in a stunted breath. “Yeah. Yeah, I can do that.”
Then he’s scrambling off me and racing into the bathroom, to the closet that’s past the shower. He didn’t have much in the boxes we brought from his old apartment, but he’s somehow taken over more than half the space already, including claiming a bunch of my own clothes.
I need to take him shopping. Just pull up at a storefront, hand him my card, and let him go wild.
Gods, he’d look pretty in some suits; or maybe more of those flowy satin tank tops like he wore to the charity gala.
Get him something like that, but a dress version, so I could lift it and fuck him anywhere I—
Bel stumbles into the room. He fluffed his hair while he was gone and reapplied some lip gloss, his mouth now a shiny blush-pink color—and he’s wearing a pair of black lace assless panties.
Which he shows me by doing a quick little spin.
They cup his dick but frame his tail and ass in a way that’s absolutely sinful.
My jaw drops.
If possible, he’s blushing even more, breathing even harder. “I bought these a while ago,” he whispers. “I always hoped I’d get to—to, um, wear them. For someone.”
“For me,” I growl. Can’t help it. My throat’s gone to gravel.
His eyelashes pulse, those pretty lips parting.