Chapter 31 Where the Sea Meets the Sky #2
He lets out a huffing sound, half chuckle, half sigh, as though he’s resigned to this fate.
Resigned to me. And perhaps I am splashing in a treacherous current.
Caught in a ruinous wake that can not be followed back to shore, but I know this all has to end somewhere, someplace.
I know that time will be leaden with pain, with betrayal, maybe hatred in the end.
My palm flattens against his strong chest. I push him onto his back and move to sit astride him but he flips me so that I'm once again pinned to the scrubbed obsidian deck. The muscles threading his arms stand out vividly when he hovers above me so I'm not crushed beneath his weight.
My breath abandons me.
He's striking. Warm. Solid. His full lips glisten some when he runs his tongue along them. Such a wicked tongue.
“Avalon.” There's a rasping edge to his voice, but a low quiver of something else woven under it.
The words he wants to say are trapped there, buoyed beneath an aching desire I know he feels too.
“I don't care.” It's a harsh, almost ragged whisper borne of need. Borne of lost carefree and tender ignorance. My hands slip to his waist to free what’s beneath, long and waiting. Velvet skin meets my fingers when they stroke the length of it, once, twice, a third time.
His whole body shudders.
“Please,” I add.
This breaks him. Any restraint he'd hoped to have wisps away into the dead wind. I unabashedly feast my eyes over him, remembering the night of our wedding, how I'd burned with quiet want as he bathed me in oils. Now he’s mine to touch, to feel and to savor.
I lift my hand, ghosting my fingers over the hard lines and crevices, running them along the scars, the rippling muscle.
He melts into my touch, closing his eyes as I explore him.
My hands finally move their way up to his face, cupping either side so I can draw him down to me.
He kisses me with no hesitation. It’s slow, and soft, and beautiful, and when I open my eyes I find he’s glowing with faint sunlight, the runes their sharp, insistent blue.
I smile against his mouth and deepen the kiss.
His hands find my hips and he pulls me into him.
He moves forward, strokes that tender tongue over mine. Breathless, dizzy, I guide him inside to find he's larger than I expected—not that I have anything to judge him against. The pressure that builds at my entrance is foreign but still delicious in its stinging quality.
Impatient, I lift my hips to his, feel the bite of lost innocence, and the luxurious full sensation that follows.
One of his hands moves down my body to clutch my thigh, opening me so that when he pulls back he can press in deeper.
I gasp, rake my nails along the slick skin of his back to elicit a string of soft moans.
His breath moves to my ear, heavy with need.
“You are mine, Nymph.”
“I'm yours,” I say back, holding so tight my fingers ache as he thrusts inside.
I feel the moment he unravels and gives himself over to me completely, sweat spooled along our joined bodies. The quiet gasps. The arches of pleasure that pass between us when we move together in perfect harmony. It’s otherworldly, this feeling. For a moment I wonder if we’ll ever be able to stop.
I don’t want to. I could do this forever.
His blissful sighs become a sharp hiss of pleasure and he relinquishes whatever careful control he had left.
His pace quickens to something ravaging.
My breath comes fast as all of the pain is replaced with new, pleasurable sensations.
His hand moves off my hip and he uses it to cup my breast, kneading it and then rolling the sensitive nipple between his calloused fingers.
I feel cracked open—once hollowed and now filled with him. With this growing pressure, I'm building and building until I reach the peak I know I’m going to fall off. This time it’s rooted deep inside of me, as far as he goes, hitting a place that yearns to explode around him.
His name slips from my lips as I fall. I’m aware that he’s still bucking into me but everything else fades into bliss. I am a symphony of pleasure, composed and directed by his hands. His body.
He lets out a sharp groan. I feel his grip slip from my breast to lightly squeeze just below my jaw.
He thrusts forward so he’s buried as deep as he can go before abruptly withdrawing when a pulsing warmth seeps over my stomach.
The pleasure that paints his face threatens to send me over that edge again.
I want to memorize it. To hold it somewhere deep inside of me and save it for when this is all over. For when he's gone.
He rises and the world takes shape around us again. I wait for the regret to pool in, to simmer and flood my veins like a slow working poison, but it doesn't come.
After a few more moments of quiet deliberation, I stand on shaky legs. He turns, offering out his discarded shirt to me as means to wipe away the evidence of what we've done, when he pauses, eyes cast toward the deck, face rapt with a look of sheer horror.
I'm not sure what to expect when I follow his gaze down. Maybe a gruesome, twisted monster. A serpent that promises death. Instead, I'm met with a small smear of blood staining the wood where I'd been laying.
His horrified gaze travels to my legs, to the trickling crimson trailed across white skin like paint on a canvas.
Gods. My cheeks burn. I don't know what to say. Perhaps he wasn't expecting…that.
I open my mouth, but what is there to say?
Did I forget to mention you would be the first? No. No, not that. Mehr’s harp, it feels like I've done something deeply wrong here.
“Pirate,” I say slowly and step towards him, but he doesn't move. Doesn't flinch, doesn't even seem to register my voice.
Now he's just being ridiculous. Did he assume I'd slept my way across Helgate? That I would risk my careful disguise as a boy, my life, to fuck the best that Ethirya had to offer?
My mouth falls open, prepared to ask, when a playful breeze rustles some of my loosened hair. I freeze for the briefest moment before clambering for my trousers and ruined shirt.
Rhyland still doesn't move, just stares at the blood as though trapped in some awful dream.
What had been briefly amusing starts to feel vaguely offensive.
I jerk clothing back on the best I can, wincing at the soft ache between my thighs, and then take him by the shoulders as another gust of air races by us.
“Pirate? Pirate!” I shake him and he blinks down at me two slow times.
“Yes, Nymph?”
“The wind, it's returned.”