Chapter 20 #2
She moved the phallus, a slow, rolling motion that sent a wave of heat from her center outward, and the sound she made was louder this time, less controlled. Her free hand gripped the furs and then, in desperation, Rikard’s arm, drawing it over her. There, that was better. Safer.
“So lovely,” Rikard murmured, holding her.
Her back arched as she sank his gift into herself, only stopping when it met resistance.
She paused, waiting until her body learned how to translate pressure into pleasure, the pathways lighting up like lamps along a street that had always been dark.
She changed the angle and even more sparked to life.
“I didn’t know it could feel like this,” she confessed.
The purr reached a pitch that she felt in her teeth. His arm tightened around her.
“You’re squeezing me,” she said, a little breathless and panicky.
His grip loosened slightly. “My apologies. I just want to be close to you. As close as I can be. As close as you’ll allow.” In her peripheral vision, his eyes closed and his jaw clenched, the scars on his face stark in the lamplight. “I won’t hurt you, Hanna. I’ll never hurt you.”
“I know you won’t.” That knowledge was the bedrock beneath the pleasure, the foundation that made the rest possible. The discipline of his restraint was the safest thing she’d ever known. “That’s why I can do this. Because you won’t.”
She suddenly felt the freedom to move faster.
The pleasure built in earnest now, the steady accumulation of friction and heat and the sound of Rikard’s purr and the weight of his gaze and the knowledge that she was choosing this, every motion, every sound, every inch of skin she’d bared.
Nothing was being taken. Everything was being given freely.
From him to her. From herself to herself.
“I’m close,” she gasped.
He swallowed, and the sound was audible even over the purr. “Winds aid me, you’re the most beautiful thing in this Tower. The most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen. I have watched hundreds of sunrises, and none of them compare—” His voice broke and repaired itself. “None of them.”
She came apart in his arms. The pleasure rolled through her in waves that she could feel all the way to her fingertips, amplified by the sound of his purr and the knowledge of his eyes on her face.
She gasped his name. Her body clenched around his gift, the muscles contracting in rhythmic pulses that she rode until the last tremor subsided and she lay spent in the nest, her chest heaving and skin damp.
The baby had woken and was kicking Rikard’s arm with the disgruntled energy of a tenant disturbed by the landlord’s activities. She laughed, the sound was wet and edged with a sob.
“I can’t tell if I’m laughing or crying,” she managed.
“Mm. Only one way to tell.” She lifted a querying brow, and her husband gave her a sharp-toothed, crooked grin. “Try again and see what happens.”
She laughed harder. Pressed her face into the bolster and laughed until her ribs ached and the baby kicked again and the laughter turned into deep, steadying breaths that gradually slowed into quiet.
She withdrew the phallus, set it back in the basket to clean later, and pulled her shift down over her cooling skin. Then she sat up and looked at him.
Her husband was a ruin. His claws had shredded some of the furs, the remains of which were tangled with the membranes of his unbound wings.
His ragged purr still stormed, and his face wore an expression she’d never seen on him: raw and wanting.
He could not achieve satisfaction as she had. Her gift was his torment.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Don’t.” His chest still heaved, and he shut his eyes, trying to calm himself. She prodded his shoulder until he opened them again. “I only gave you that carving because of my own depravity, not for any altruistic reason.”
“Shhh. You deserve my thanks.” Her gratitude was larger than the moment, reaching backward through the years to the dark lane and the bite and the shuttered windows and the nights she’d spent rigid with dread. She wanted him to understand all of that.
“You gave me something tonight that you don’t know you gave.
Before you, every time a gargoyle touched my body, it was to take something from me.
My safety. My dignity. My ability to feel anything except fear.
He took all of it, piece by piece, the way you strip leaves from a vine.
And I let him because I thought it was the price my family had to pay for what my father did.
And eventually because I didn’t think there was anything left worth protecting. ”
Rikard was still. Completely still, listening.
“What you gave me tonight wasn’t pleasure,” she said.
“It was the chance to want something without having it forced on me. To feel something good in my body and know that I chose it. That I controlled it. That the person watching wanted me to have it.” Her voice cracked.
“You gave me back something I thought was gone forever. And I need you to know that. Your gift was much bigger than a carved piece of bone.”
“Hannalinde.” Her name in his mouth was a different sound than it had been months ago, when he’d spoken it across his desk while recording it in his ledger. Now it was rough-edged and careful. “I didn’t give you anything. I just…held the lamp so you could see the way. You did the rest.”
She smiled. The smile felt both new and old, a muscle memory she’d been relearning. As dawn bled through the window, she curled up in Rikard’s arms, letting her lids fall shut. For the first time, they would sleep together.