7 Kaia #2
Clumsy. Coming up too hard against the corner of his mouth before I found it, my hands in fists around his shirt, and the small sound that left me against his lips was nothing I had ever made before—low and fractured and nakedly honest, the sound of something that had been held underwater for twenty-six years finally breaking the surface.
For one suspended breath he was still as stone.
Then he broke open over me.
His hands came off the foam and one of his hands drove into my hair and fisted there at the back of my skull and angled me up into him, and the other spread wide across the small of my back and hauled me off my feet and flush against the whole long hard length of him, and his mouth opened over mine and took.
The relief of it.
Oh, the relief of it.
After all these days of holding the line—of the catechism and the pulse-check and the posture, days of pressing the chained thing flat with my hand over its mouth and whispering stay down, stay quiet, I am keeping us alive—and it all let go at once, every latch and bolt and nail snapping free in sequence, and the thing under my ribs flooded up through the breach and out into every cemented joint in my body and roared.
His tongue swept into my mouth.
I opened for it. Completely. Soft and starving, and the taste of him hit the back of my throat—warm, a little smoky, like good wood burning in clean air—and went down into me and set the molten ache between my legs into something that had a pulse.
Its own pulse. Something that had been waiting in me since before I had words for waiting.
Chosen, something in me said.
A question, barely. Is this what chosen feels like?
I had no doctrine for the question. I let it go unanswered and I kissed him back.
His teeth caught my lower lip. Tugged. The shock of it went straight through me, a bright wire from my mouth to the deep wet ache, and I made a sound against him—a helpless, embarrassing sound of a body that had been starved past the point of pretending—and his grip in my hair tightened in answer, pulling until my scalp sang, until my neck arched back and I was open to him, and I understood that he had been holding himself back and had decided to stop.
The verse came up the way it always came up, automatic, a bell ringing in a room where no one lived—
A true servant—
This time I did not even pretend to listen.
My hands were already moving—off his shirt, up under the hem of it, my palms spreading flat against the bare hot skin of his stomach, and the muscle there leapt under my fingers and contracted, hard and involuntary, his whole abdomen pulling tight as I traced the ridge of it.
The knowledge of what I was doing to him with my hands alone made me dizzy.
He growled.
A guttural rising noise from deep in his chest, and it went down my spine like a brand and pooled exactly where the heat was worst, and my knees went soft and I stopped caring that they had, because his arm was already there—locked around my waist, taking my weight like it weighed nothing, like he had been built for exactly this and was only now getting to do the thing he was made for.
His mouth left mine.
The loss of it made me chase him—actually lean forward, reaching for the contact—before his lips found the side of my throat instead, and then I stopped thinking.
Open and slow and hot, his mouth dragging down the line of my neck, and when he found my pulse he paused.
I felt his breath there. The deliberate stillness of him.
And then his teeth—just the pressure of them against the hammering vein, the promise of it, and I made a sound that had no name in any catechism I had ever learned.
My head went back against the foam.
Chosen. Louder now. Closer to an answer.
“You’re—” His voice came out rough, close to my ear, barely above breath. “Goddess, you’re—” He didn’t finish it.
His mouth pressed once, hard, at the pulse under my jaw, reverent and urgent at once, and the incompleteness of what he’d said landed in me more fully than anything else could have, because it meant he was as wrecked as I was
His hand moved. Up my side, over the stiff gray linen of my tunic, slow and thorough, mapping the taper of my waist and the flare above it, and I understood from the steadiness of his touch that this was attention, the complete and undivided kind.
The grief of it arrived quiet, at the back of the heat, threading through: I have never had this. I have been here my entire life and no one has ever touched me like I was something they intended to learn by heart.
His thumb found the underside of my breast.
The calibration check. The Saint— some ledger-keeper tried, very far away, barely a voice anymore.
Then his thumb found the peak of my nipple, drawn tight and aching through two layers of cloth, and he circled once—slowly, deliberately, like he knew exactly what he was doing to me—and the bolt of sensation that shot down through my belly and into the wet, clenching heat between my thighs was so complete that my knees buckled, simply folded, and I would have gone down if his arm hadn’t been there, if he hadn’t caught my whole weight against him and held it without breaking the contact, without hurrying, without anything that suggested this was an accident or something he was sorry for.
He held me up and kept going.
His mouth returned to mine—slower this time, deeper, the urgency underneath it instead of on top of it, and I kissed him back with everything I had, both hands under his shirt now, traveling up the planes of his back, cataloguing the landscape of muscle and the warmth of skin.
I was filing all of it, storing all of it, filling every empty room I had ever had inside me as fast as I could, because some part of me knew even now that this was borrowed, that the clock on it was already running.
Chosen, the thing said. Certain now. Absolute.