CHAPTER 23 #4
At 00:28 his hands come up from behind his head and his palms settle on my hipbones — resting only, the lightest possible contact, his thumbs at the front of my hips.
I work my pace tighter. The orgasm begins to build at the small of my back again at 00:29 and I lift up off him a fraction and grind down at the angle that has been getting me there since the night of December the second, and at 00:30 I come for the fourth time tonight as he comes inside me.
The fourth orgasm is a clean bright one — sharper than the third, shorter than the first, the one that says we have finished this together. He says, low, eyes locked on mine through it: "Quinn. " Once. The thumbs on my hipbones flex one fraction and then go still.
I stay on him for a long moment. I sit on him at full depth with him still inside me and his hands at my hipbones, and the wood in the iron grate snaps once at the far wall.
Then I lift off.
I lie down on my side beside him. He turns onto his side facing me. He reaches up and brushes the hair back from my forehead. He says: "I will lick the bite closed again. To be sure."
"All right."
He moves down the bed. He runs his tongue once over the small line at the inside of my right thigh. The seal is solid. He returns to me. He lies on his side facing me.
He reaches across to the bedside table.
The silver-tipped fixed blade on the dressing table — small, folded, a four-inch blade with a horn handle, the council protocol blade that the Tessellate keeps in each guest suite for the ritual cut — has been set out on the bedside since 19:00 when the Tessellate's house-staff laid the room.
I had seen him notice it when we came in.
I had said nothing. He had said nothing. I had known what it was for.
He unfolds the blade. He lays his right wrist palm-up against the white linen between us.
"Three drops," he says. He says it the way the bible would say it if the bible had been written by a man who counted everything.
"It is a taste, Quinn. It is not the bond.
You will feel a copper-iron warmth in your mouth.
You will feel a slight clarity at the back of the throat.
You will not feel the pheromonal click of the bond.
The bond is reserved. Do you want this?"
"Yes."
"Why."
"Because I want to know what your blood tastes like before I bond with you. Because I want to choose the taste once before I choose the bond. Because tonight is the public claim, and tonight is mine, and the taste is mine."
He looks at me for one long beat. He says: "Quinn."
"Yes."
He presses the silver tip of the small blade against the inside of his right wrist, two inches up from the heel of his hand, on the soft place above the radial. He draws the blade a quarter inch — a small clean cut, no more. Three drops of dark blood well up at the cut.
He lifts his wrist to my mouth.
I close my mouth over the cut. I take the three drops on the flat of my tongue.
The taste is what he said it would be. Copper, iron, warm; a faint salt; a slight metallic clarity at the back of my throat that arrives a second after I have swallowed.
It stays at the level of taste. The clasp at the sternum that Helene has described to me as the sensation of the full bond stays sealed.
The air in the room holds steady. His pupils hold steady too, wide as they already were.
We breathe through it together, quiet. The taste is a taste. The taste is mine to have had once before I have it forever.
I lift my mouth from his wrist.
He licks the small cut once. The saliva enzyme on a mortal-vampire pairing seals less neatly than on mortal skin, but on his own wrist the seal is immediate; the cut closes in fifteen seconds; a small pale line remains where the cut was, and will fade by morning.
He pulls me into his chest. He puts his left forearm across my back; the silver brand settles between my shoulder blades; the brand has taken on his warmth.
It is the temperature of his skin. The temperature of his skin is the temperature of a man who has fed live an hour ago — 98.
6, mortal-warm, the warmth of a body that is borrowing its heat from mine and giving its borrowed warmth back to me.
"Quinn," he says against the crown of my head.
"Vance."
"I love you."
I do not say it back. The last time the word was in my mouth was the threshold of the master bedroom on the sixth of December when he told me he would not take more than a cup and would leave me able to walk and that I love you and I said I heard the third thing.
The silence since then has been mine to keep. I will say it back.
I will say it back when I am ready to use the word the way I use units when I am frightened — precise, named, mine. Tonight is the night before that night. He knows. He waits.
I close my eyes against his sternum.
The corridor outside the door is silent.
The cold-blue prisms of the smaller Waterford chandelier outside the suite are still walking across the white marble of the corridor floor; the door hides them from me now, and the image of them holds behind my eyes from the hour I stood and counted them — two hundred small cold-blue points moving on the marble in the rhythm of the candle-flames the Tessellate's staff lit at 18:00 and will let burn until 04:00 when they extinguish them.
The chandelier ticks once in the corridor as a single drop of wax falls from one of its arms; the sound is small and cold; it is the sound of the council's century in its own architecture.
He breathes against my hair.
I sleep at 01:34.
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I wake at 05:00.
I know the time without looking; my body has kept time since I was nine years old and started waking at 05:00 to read my mother's nursing-school flashcards before school.
I lift my head from his sternum. He is asleep, breathing slow and even, the brand against my shoulder blade, his hand at the small of my back, his other hand loose on the linen at his hip.
The fire in the iron grate is out; only the bed of coals at the bottom, faint dark-orange. The bedroom is cold.
I slide out from under his arm. He sleeps on. He is the deepest sleeper in the household when he has fed; I have learned this; I move with the ease of a woman who has learned the rhythm of a body she has lived beside for twenty-four nights.
I find the dove-gray silk gown on the dressing-room bench. I lift it. I drape it across my shoulders only.
I walk to the window of the corner suite.