Chapter 13 #3
I notice the heat of him before anything else. The way his body has gone carefully, deliberately still while mine is still humming. He thinks this is over. He thinks he gets to fold himself back into something controlled and ask nothing for himself in return.
All that careful smallness. All that practiced distance. And he’s going to do it right now, right here, if I let him.
I’m not going to let him.
“What about you?” I ask, reaching toward him.
He catches my wrist. His hand swallows mine completely, and I feel the slight tremor in his grip, the thing he’s working to suppress. “Riona.”
Just my name. Low and strained. A warning wearing the costume of restraint.
“You gave me everything,” I tell him. “Let me give you something back.” I uncurl my fingers, opening my hand inside his grip—not pulling away, just turning toward him. An offering. Not a demand. “Please.”
The sound that escapes him at that word—small, involuntary, undone—tells me everything I needed to know. He lets go of my wrist.
His hands aren’t quite steady when he reaches for his belt.
Something inside me tightens at that, not tenderness exactly, though that’s part of it.
More like recognition. He is choosing to be seen like this.
By me. That’s not vulnerability forced on him.
That’s a gift, handed over deliberately, and I understand the weight of it.
When he frees himself, the breath leaves my body.
He’s… I knew there would be differences.
I had prepared myself, intellectually, for significant differences.
But knowing and seeing are entirely separate experiences, and I feel the heat rise in my face and chest…
and lower as I take him in. The color of him, deep green shading.
The sheer scale of him against my hands when I reach for him.
“I know I’m—” he starts.
“Don’t.” I wrap both hands around him and his whole body shudders, just once, immediate and total and barely contained. “Don’t apologize for a single thing about yourself.”
He goes quiet. That’s how I know it landed.
I move, slow and exploratory, wanting to learn him the way he learned me tonight—carefully, attentively, like I have all the time in the world and he is worth every second of it.
Because he is. Because this male who has spent years shrinking himself to fit into spaces built for humans is coming apart under my hands, and I want to be the person who gives him this.
I want to be the person who sees him at full size.
The sound he makes undoes something in my chest. Nothing like his usual voice, that deep, measured register he uses with the world. This is raw and low and completely unguarded.
I stroke him the same way again, just to hear it.
His head falls back, jaw tightening as his fingers curl hard around the arm of the couch—not touching me, not directing me, just anchoring himself in place while I take my time with him. His restraint undoes me. I love what it’s costing him. Most of all, I love that he trusts me with it.
“Tell me,” I murmur. “What you want.”
“Your hands.” His voice has dropped into something I’ve never heard from him. Thick and open and stripped of everything careful. “Tighter. Yes… there.” A ragged exhale that’s almost my name. “Exactly like that.”
There. That’s the sound I wanted. That’s him, fully present, fully mine.
I find a rhythm. I learn the weight of him, the heat of him. His breathing goes ragged and then rougher than that. The room smells like him and like what we did earlier and I am completely, helplessly drunk on all of it.
“Is this good?” I ask, though I can read the answer in the white-knuckle grip on the arm of the couch, in the working of his jaw, in the way he’s breathing like he’s been running.
“Good.” He laughs, and it comes out fractured. “You are ruining me, little teacher. Completely. Thoroughly. Ruining me.”
“Good,” I echo.
“I won’t last.” It’s not an apology. It’s honesty, the specific, trusting honesty of someone handing you something fragile. He is telling me the truth about how much he wants this. Of how little control he has left. He’s giving me that.
“I know,” I tell him. “I want to watch you.”
One of his hands leaves the couch and comes to rest over mine—not controlling, not redirecting. Just present. His fingers slide over mine and he shows me, gently, the small adjustments that undo him. Teaching me the same way I taught him tonight. Patient. Unhurried. Without shame.
This male.
“Riona,” he says, and my name in his mouth sounds like something he’s been holding for a long time. “I’m—”
“Yes.” I tighten my grip. “Let go, Vraag. Let me have this.”
His release tears through him. His whole body goes rigid, a sound wrenched from somewhere beneath his chest—the warrior’s rumble split open, unguarded, enormous, magnificent.
I stay with him through every shudder, reading his body, gentling my grip as he comes back to himself, until he reaches up and wraps his hands around my wrists to still me.
For a long moment, neither of us speaks.
He pulls me up against his chest and kisses me with devastating thoroughness. When he finally pulls back, his eyes are still dark amber but clearer, more focused.
“Let me take care of us,” he says quietly, and disappears briefly into the bathroom.
When he returns with a warm cloth, he tends to me first—cleaning my hands with the same careful, unhurried attention he gives everything that matters to him.
There’s an intimacy to it that catches me off guard, more tender somehow than everything that came before.
When he’s done, he settles back beside me, and I tuck myself against his side.
He speaks without being asked—describing the mountains of his homeworld, the way light filtered through crystalline peaks, the sound of wind through stone corridors, the taste of water from underground springs.
His voice gradually returns to its usual register, the tension easing from his body as he shares memories he rarely voices.
I listen, occasionally asking questions, letting the intimacy shift and deepen. This too is connection, I realize. This sharing of worlds, this bridge we’re building word by word.
Eventually, the hour grows late. I dress quietly while he buttons his shirt—handing me my sweater without being asked, the small domestic ease of it landing somewhere in my chest. Then we’re both upright and clothed, and the evening is ending.
At my door, he cups my face one last time. “Thank you,” he says simply.
“For what?”
“For trusting me. For letting me give you pleasure. For being patient with my need to do this right.” His thumb brushes my cheek. “For wanting me as much as I want you.”
I rise on tiptoe for one last kiss—gentle this time, a promise rather than an ignition.
“Soon,” I whisper against his lips.
“Soon,” he agrees, the word a vow.
After he leaves, I lean against the closed door. Two nights ago, I kissed him for the first time under a sky full of stars. Tonight was this. It's fast. I know it's fast.
I can't make myself regret a single second of it.