Chapter 20 #4
He pulls back, gasps, drives back down. The rhythm is his.
He is setting it, he is controlling it, and the control is intoxicating in a way that is new and terrifying and freeing all at once.
He has never controlled this act before.
He has always been the one controlled, hands in his hair directing his speed, his depth, his pace.
Bastian's hand is in his hair but the hand is not directing.
It is resting. Touching. Holding something precious that is doing something extraordinary, and the hold is light enough that Emery could pull away at any time and the pulling-away would be allowed.
He does not pull away. He takes Bastian deeper, hollows his cheeks, works his tongue against the underside where the flesh is softest and most sensitive, and the sound Bastian makes, low, broken, resonant with the subsonic power that lives in everything he does with his throat, sends a vibration through Emery's body that reaches his cock and his fingers and the arches of his bare feet and the base of his spine, and the vibration pushes him closer, closer, impossibly close.
Bastian's voice is fraying. The composure that holds him together, the silk-dangerous control, the measured precision, the mastery he has spent his life maintaining in every room he enters, is coming apart, word by word, sound by sound, under the pressure of Emery's mouth.
He tells Emery he is going to come. He says it as warning and as prayer, his hand tightening in Emery's hair, not pulling, never pulling, but gripping, the reflexive clench of control lost and a hand reaching for the nearest solid thing, and Emery does not pull back.
He goes deeper. He takes all of him, and the taking is a choice, and the choice is an answer to every version of this act that was not a choice, every mouth-opened-on-command, every forced and purchased and endured moment that came before this one.
Bastian comes with a sound that Emery feels in his teeth.
The sound is low and vast and carrying the subsonic resonance of something that is not entirely human, something that lives in the deep register where a Vesper's power originates, and the resonance moves through Emery's body, not painful, not harmful, but profound, a vibration that reaches into the marrow of his bones and rearranges something at the molecular level.
Bastian spills into his mouth, hot and thick, and Emery swallows and the swallowing is not a performance but a desire, the desire to take all of him, everything, to leave nothing undone and nothing unsaid between them.
He pulls back. His lips are swollen, his jaw aching, his eyes bright with tears that are not from pain but from the intensity of the act and the emotion beneath it and the devastating experience of giving something freely that has only ever been taken.
He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and the gesture is graceless and honest and he does not care.
Bastian reaches for him. His hands close around Emery's arms and pull him up and forward, and Emery goes, lets himself be gathered, lets Bastian pull him against his chest, lets the heat of him surround him.
Bastian's arms wrap around his waist and his mouth finds Emery's throat, the side of it, the place where the pulse beats, the vulnerable column of skin that Emery has learned to offer without flinching, and he presses his lips there.
And hums.
The sound is not a word. It is not a song.
It is something between and beyond both, a vibration, a resonance, a single sustained note that originates in Bastian's chest and travels through his lips and into the skin of Emery's throat and from there into his blood.
The note moves through him completely, from the bottom up, filling every space it touches, leaving nothing untouched.
The vibration finds his cock. That is the only way Emery can describe it.
The sound travels down from his throat, through his chest, through his stomach, and reaches the place where he is aching and hard and straining against his trousers, and the reaching is specific and deliberate and carrying a precision that tells him Bastian knows exactly what he is doing.
The Vesper's hum is not an accident. It is a weapon deployed as a gift, the same power that can shatter bone and boil blood turned to a purpose that is the opposite of destruction.
Emery comes untouched.
The orgasm hits him sudden and total, originating at the point where Bastian's mouth meets his throat and radiating outward through every nerve in his body.
He cries out, a sound that is raw and broken and carrying the intensity of experiencing something he did not know was possible, and his body arcs against Bastian's, his hands fisting in white hair, his hips jerking forward against nothing, the orgasm spilling from him in long, shuddering pulses that soak through his trousers and leave him gasping.
He shakes apart in Bastian's arms.
The shaking is complete: hands, arms, legs, the muscles of his stomach, the tendons in his neck.
His whole body trembles with the aftershocks, each one smaller than the last, each one pulling another sound from his throat that he is too far gone to suppress or care about suppressing.
Bastian holds him through it, arms tight, mouth still pressed to his throat, the hum fading into silence that is not silence but the echo of what came before, a resonance that lives in Emery's body now and will not leave.
They are on the rug before the fire, tangled together, Emery in Bastian's lap with his face pressed into the crook of Bastian's neck and his hands still twisted in white hair and his breathing ragged and his body utterly, thoroughly, completely undone.
He has never come without being touched.
He did not know it was possible, and the knowing now that it is, that Bastian's voice alone, the vibration alone, the hum of a Vesper pressed against his pulse can pull an orgasm from him without a single hand, is a piece of knowledge that he is going to have to live with, and the living-with is going to be complicated.
He does not care. He does not care about complicated. He cares about the arms around him and the warmth beneath him and the man who just took him apart with a sound and who is now holding him together with his hands.
He breathes. Bastian breathes. The fire crackles.
The Depths hum. And in the warm dark of their room, in the aftermath of something that was not just sex but a reckoning, a settling of accounts, a balancing of the books, the final, irreversible exchange of the last thing Emery had been holding back, the silence is full, and the fullness is enough.