It Was Nothing
Chapter thirteen
Ione
We're kissing. Athanasius is kissing me.
His hands are rough on my body, touching, rubbing.
Slowly his grip loosens and he holds me close to him.
My hands are on his face. Kissing him is like…
I'm not sure, his split tongue moves and caresses the inside of my mouth, it's a sensory overload that quickly has my pussy dripping.
His lower arms envelop my waist and his upper arms touch all over my body.
He's moaning softly, lifting me up and my legs circle around his waist.
He's moving me against him, I can feel the head of his cocks brushing against my clothed pussy, and I'm getting needier by the second. I want to impale myself on him, I want to feel him inside of me. Then he stops. Athanasius stops kissing me, he sets me down on the floor, and takes a step back.
"I apologize," He clears his throat. "I moved without permission and I should have asked."
"It's fine," I'm breathing heavily. "I didn't tell you to stop, and for me, that means yes."
He nods his head. "I apologize." He's avoiding my eyes. "I was…you can't…I'll return shortly."
Then he's gone. He's saturated in darkness and gone.
It's nearly three a.m. when he returns, slipping into bed behind me.
He doesn't wrap his arms around me. I feel his fingers slip down my spine, tracing the points of my vertebrae before he turns over.
I stay awake listening until his breathing evens out.
Turning over, I open and close my mouth several times.
What do I want to say? What do I want to ask for?
I don't fucking know, this is all so confusing, and the only thing I can think about is how he moaned when we were kissing.
How his hands touched every inch of my skin and I was being held like his life depended on it.
I think about the darker elements. The way he told Kenneth that I was not for him. The tone of his voice, dark, brooding, powerful, when he said that his life would be forfeit. It makes me tremble–with desire. Something is wrong with me.
Slowly, I reach out and touch his back. His flesh jumps under my hand, and Athy rolls onto his back. "Why are you awake?"
"Why are you?"
"Do not answer my inquiry with another." He breathes heavily. "Why are you awake, rabbit?"
"I was thinking about earlier." I admit. "The kiss."
"Get it off your mind." He turns his back to me. "We should not have done that. I crossed a line, this is a tether between us and not what was before I lost my autonomy." He takes a deep breath. "Rest woman, you'll be sleeping long into the day and I hate that."
I can't help it. Grabbing his shoulder, my attempt to turn him is easily done. Athanasius turns on his back. "Did you want to kiss me?" Sitting up, my left hand touches his chest. His skin is soft and smooth, hard like silk laid over iron. "Did you?"
"What I wanted to do doesn't matter." He groans. He's not looking at me, all of his eyes are closed. "There is a line, I crossed it, and it will not happen again."
"I thought a primordial could do what they wanted?" Since he loves to say that so often.
Now he opens his top eyes, the ones enclosed in black so dark and full of shine. Almost like lacquer. "I would never force you. I would not take what you did not offer in truth. I've learned what happens when humans obey out of necessity, Ione. Now sleep."
What does that mean? He turns over once more. I turn over and for some strange reason, I'm resisting the urge to cry.
Athanasius
She sleeps.
At last.
The quiet of it wraps around my senses like a balm—one I dare not admit I crave.
Her breath, gentle and measured, stirs the air between us.
I lie with my back to her, a coward's position, some might say.
But I am no coward. I am old. Older than the suns that crown the cosmos.
I have seen empires bloom and burn. I have laid waste to gods and whispered life into stars.
And yet—here I am, undone by the memory of a kiss.
Her kiss.
Ione, my tether. My avatar. My mortal coil wrapped in fire and bone and fragility.
I can be poetic and romantic just like her books, I bet she doesn't know that!
Last night, her lips touched mine, and it meant something.
That is the crux of it. It meant something.
Not the perfunctory brushing of mouths that preludes desire—no, not that.
It was longing. It was want meeting want, need answering need.
I could have had her. The way my cocks brushed against her slit.
She was hot, wet, and wanting. She had me moaning into her mouth.
Why didn't I pull her panties to the side, and plunge into her hot depths?
She would have ridden me, her legs are strong.
I would have laid on the couch and watched in awe as she bounced up and down, pleasuring herself.
I know why.
It was dangerous.
The last time I kissed a mortal and felt the world shift, I bled for it.
Not in the flesh, no—I am not so easily marred—but in the soul, where it festers deeper.
Maybe I read her wrong. She had wanted me, once.
Just as Ione wants me now. And when she had taken what she needed, she lied.
As they all do. Humans lie. It's in the marrow of their making.
They take. They want. And when the want is sated, they wither away, leaving behind ruin.
I will not fall again. I will not fall prey to a feeling, an emotion, I am a primordial!
I should know better.
I do know better.
And still... still... guilt coils in my chest like a serpent, because Ione is not like the others.
She is not her. She has not lied. Not once.
And the scent of her lingers—vanilla and sandalwood, soft and warm, like something out of a dream I was never allowed to keep.
Dreams…a mix of mine and Destiny's realm.
If I dream of her tonight, Destiny will see her and I wonder what my sibling will say.
Ione had smiled last night. Smiled at another man, laughed as they danced.
And something in me, old and sharp and ugly, burned.
Jealousy. I had not tasted this before, but I knew its form, and I hated the way it fed on me.
But when we returned home—when she reached for me—when she kissed me... all else fell away.
She had pulled me closer. Bold, unafraid, as if she knew I would never harm her. As if she trusted me. Foolish woman.
She tasted of wine and warmth, of something sacred. She wanted me. Not for power. Not for legend. For me.
And I—gods, I cannot have her. I cannot keep her. Can't I?
If not for the spell, if not for the cursed bond the mages crafted, I would have sent her away. I would have walked every realm and waited for time to claim her body and her name, until memory smoothed her face into myth. I would have forgotten.
I'm a liar. No, I wouldn't have. I would race through the cosmos, picking every piece of stardust connected to her just to form her again. See? Better than her novel. But I cannot.
I turn onto my back, eyes fixed on the shadowed ceiling.
Her breath continues—steady, present. Alive.
She exists in this moment with me. That knowledge, that fragile fact, is unbearable and glorious.
I hate this feeling. So close and yet so far away, and who the hell is she to do this to me?
She knows who and what I am! How dare she!
I turn toward her, unable to resist the pull.
Her chest rises and falls, a rhythm older than language. Her eyelids flutter, deep in dream. What does she see? Who does she hold in that realm of visions? Is it me?
I reach out, my fingers hovering over a visage I did not know before and would have never thought about, now, I cannot be without.
A touch so light it could be mistaken for air.
My fingers find her lips, soft and familiar.
The shape of them has etched itself into the temple of my mind.
I will never forget. Not even if I wished to.
I trace her neck, her collarbone—such delicate architecture, carved in mortal grace. I ache to feel her again, to lose myself in her heat. But I can’t. The wound inside me is too deep. The pain, too old.
So instead, I let my hand fall to hers. I fold my fingers around her palm, grounding myself in this fleeting truth—she is here.
I close my eyes.
Perhaps sleep will take me. Perhaps in dream I shall wander a place where time does not bind us, where betrayal never found me, and where she can be mine, not by spell, not by fate...
…but by choice.