Chapter 34 #2
I lift my eyes to his, and he understands the question without my having to ask.
“It’s still there if you look closely,” he says.
I raise his arm and see that he’s right.
It’s faded, but buried under layers of healed skin is the faintest outline of an orange blossom tattoo that matches mine.
“I had it lasered a few months after the article came out, when my self-loathing was at its peak. I changed my mind after a couple of sessions, though. Decided to write us a different ending.”
I nod, the riot of emotion in my chest making it hard to speak.
“Anything else you want to know?” he asks, and I know that if I decide to ignore the heat simmering in my blood, West will sit with me on the couch and answer my questions until the sun comes up.
But the tension between us is nearly at a tipping point, and West’s hands are wandering, and our collective patience is a rubber band stretched beyond its limit.
I shake my head. “Is there anything you want to know?”
He traps my lips with another long, slow drag, worrying my bottom lip between his teeth. He releases it and then soothes the tender spot with a swipe of his tongue. “Can I take you to my room?” His voice is a low rumble that makes me want to press my hand against his chest and feel it.
“Please,” I beg.
His hands slide up my sides as he walks me backward down the hall and into his bedroom. I lift my arms, and he pulls his sweater over my head and throws it to the side. “Your dress, too,” he says.
If possible, I flush even hotter as I slip my dress down my shoulders and let it puddle at my feet. West’s eyes darken as his gaze wanders over me. I feel his attention everywhere, the weight of it dancing over my skin like popping firecrackers. A spike of heat here, a crackle of energy there.
He curses softly as he drinks me in, and it occurs to me a beat too late that perhaps I have a reason to feel self-conscious.
He’s seen me like this before, only now there are added years and pounds and scars on my frame, telling stories that he doesn’t yet know.
I hear the whisper of a learned instinct to hide my body, but it’s quickly smothered by the dark heat in West’s eyes.
His face creases with longing that I’d recognize anywhere; it’s the same sensation that lances through me every time I see him.
It’s hot and demanding and unrelenting, and when he looks at me like that, I feel like tissue paper held over a fire.
Like he’s singeing me from the inside out, burning me up until I’m ash.
“I can’t stop looking at you,” he breathes.
“Let me look at you.” I’m in nothing but scraps of lace, and he’s fully dressed, which won’t do at all. I cross the scant space between us and undo the first button on his shirt.
He lifts a brow as he watches my hands move lower. With each button, I press a kiss into the hollow of his neck.
“Careful.” His voice is a low warning that makes me want to do dangerous things just to hear him say it again. “A man could get used to being undressed like this.”
“That’s the point. I never want you to undo a button again without thinking of me,” I say, pulling a bark of surprised laughter from him.
I push his shirt over his shoulders and press a soft kiss right over his heart.
Lips still against his skin, I tip my head up and lock eyes with him.
I snake my tongue out and lick up his chest in a slow drag, and West decides in that moment that he’s had enough.
I gasp as he lifts me and sets me on the edge of the mattress.
“On your knees,” he rasps, looking drugged and desperate. He puts his hands under my elbows and pulls me up to my knees, a move that brings us eye to eye again.
I rake my fingers through his perfect curls, reveling in his unraveling. “Did you know I had a sex dream about you in this bed last night?” I screw my eyes shut tight as his teeth find my earlobe.
He exhales a sharp curse near my ear. “Did you know that I touched myself thinking of you last night?”
I press my hand to my mouth to trap the mortifying sound I feel coming.
He pulls it away. “Let me hear you,” he demands as his lips work their way south.
He presses an open-mouthed kiss to my ribs. The inch of skin beneath my bra. With each kiss, I feel starbursts in my bloodstream.
“How many first kisses have we had?” I wonder aloud, partially to keep myself from fully giving in to the breathy whimpers clawing up my throat.
“Too many and not enough,” he says at last, his attention narrowing to the fabric between my legs.
He drops to his knees and peppers a trail of kisses up my thigh to the triangle of lace, pauses, then leans in and presses a hot kiss against the fabric.
My fingers tighten desperately in his hair.
I would do anything to keep his mouth where it is, but after that torment disguised as a kiss, he diverts his teasing attention to my breasts.
I’m already writhing in wonderful misery when he pinches my nipple through my bra.
My head falls back as a lightning bolt cracks through me.
We meet for another long kiss, and then his eyes light with renewed intensity and astonishment as he brushes his thumb over my lips and across my mole.
“You have no idea, Mars, how long I’ve thought about this.
How much I—” He cuts himself off, pained.
“I want you anywhere, for as much time as you’ll give me,” he vows.
“Prove it.”
West’s pupils flare, and I have one second to drink in the breathtaking, restrained sight of him before the bars on his self-made cage well and truly break.
“Mars, darling. Bra off. On your back.” His voice is a low rumble that threatens to topple my foundation.
I comply, and West curses roughly under his breath as he watches.
He lowers his mouth to my chest, and when he flicks his tongue over my nipple, my back arches to meet his mouth.
When he flattens his tongue and starts to suck, I nearly black out.
The inkwell of our long-suffering patience has officially run dry. He whispers incantations into my skin as I undo his belt and his jeans with eager, clumsy hands.
His words are interchangeably filthy and sweet, murmured spells that make promises and demands, and it’s the single most arousing moment of my life. It’s so hot it’s almost worth the decade without his mouth on me; he never used to talk like this.
He pulls off my underwear and utters “Look at you” in a way that makes me painfully, achingly aware of the pulse between my thighs.
He settles between them and moves my leg over his shoulder, pressing a single kiss to my calf.
My breath stutters, and when he gently rests his whiskered jaw against my inner thigh, I stop breathing completely.
When our eyes connect, I nod, and I can’t quite make out the string of words that roll off his silver tongue in the seconds before he presses it against me.
I fling my forearm over my eyes and pant as he drags his tongue slowly over me in life-ruining licks.
When I tilt my hips to expedite the process, he reaches up and presses a large palm across my lower stomach, pinning me to the bed.
My breaths become shallow as he finds a blinding rhythm, and I dig my heels into his back, wondering if he’ll bruise.
“West.” His name falls out of my mouth without intention, but he hears meaning in my voice anyway.
He lifts his head, looking at me with glassy eyes. “Tell me,” he insists.
“More pressure.”
Like any good writer, he takes notes like a pro, dipping his head and sucking my clit firmly into his mouth.
Before long, the pressure sliding up my spine is hurtling toward the brink, dragging me with it.
My fractured breaths alert him to my unraveling, and he releases his strong grip on my leg to find my hand and thread our fingers together while I fall apart on his tongue.
He wipes his chin on his wrist as he sits back on his heels, hair utterly destroyed, eyes bright, smile wicked. “You taste fucking perfect. I fear you’ve just given me another decade of inspiration.”
“You’re good at that,” I say hoarsely, my throat dry, my head dizzy.
“That’s because you inspire art, Mars Darling.” He winks, and I sink my head into a pillow and laugh.
“Did you just call yourself an artist at going down on me?”
He grins at me like he can’t believe his luck as he moves up my body, coming to rest with his hands braced on either side of me.
“Is it unjustified?” A cocky tilt of his chin has me laughing again.
I lace my fingers around the back of his head and pull him toward me, pouring the words I’m not saying into a long, searing kiss.
I love you and I love you and I love you.
Everything after that is a perfect, frenzied blur of strong hands and quick kisses and hushed exclamations, broken prose spilled from his lungs into my hair, my lips, the crook of my neck.
When he finally pushes into me, his eyes screw shut, and his features melt into an expression that rides the line between pleasure and pain, his mouth a tight grimace.
We hold perfectly still for an unbearable length of time until his eyelids flutter open and we look at each other in shock.
Curls falling around his face and arms corded with tension, he doesn’t have to say the next words aloud.
There you are, his body says.
What took us so long? mine replies.
It is a returning and a discovery. As we move together, West finds my gaze and holds on, hardly daring to blink.
I trace his lips with my finger, mesmerized by his slow undoing.
He slides his hand between our hips, his thumb tracing circles that quickly pull another sob from my throat.
He swallows my cries with his mouth, chasing my release with his own before falling onto me, crushing the very last of the air from my lungs with a desperate huff.
He flips us, his arms snaked tightly around my back as he pulls me in to his side. I settle my head on his chest and listen to his runaway heart as he drags my leg over him.
“I’m never leaving this bed,” I promise.
His deep laugh vibrates against my ear. “Convenient, because I wasn’t planning on letting you.”
Spellbound and spent, I watch West trace his fingers over the soft slope of my hip and down my side. I shiver under his touch, my mind already dashing away with the moment. I want to save it, hide it, tuck it in a place I’ll never forget.
“How did you do that?” I breathe.
West lifts my hands and twines our fingers together. “How’d we do that?”
“Fluency in a dead language,” I whisper.
He kisses the back of my hand. “Never dead, just lost for a while.”