16. Rhys #2
I set the head of my cock against her entrance, and just that, the promise of it, drew a low sound out of the both of us.
She was soaked and open and ready for me, and still I went slow.
I pushed into her by degrees, watching every one of them land in her face, the part of her lips, the flutter of the lashes she fought to keep open because I'd asked her to.
The slow stretch of her taking me was the sweetest work my body has ever been put to.
Her back arched off the wool. Her hands found my forearms and held on.
The grip of her closed round me hot and slick and I had to stop dead halfway just to stay a man who could last the night.
Nothing in this life, not the sea, not the spring, not ten years of wanting, had readied me for being seated inside Freya Bevan while she looked back at me.
I sank the rest of the way home, and her spine bowed and her breath left her in a rush as she took the last of me.
Filled, and full, her whole body settling round mine like a boat taking her lines.
We made the same sound at the meeting of it, low and wrecked, the both of us.
Her scent and mine braided in the warm air over the nest, sage and butter, until I couldn't have said where one of us ended. Home, the braid said. Home, home, home.
"Good," she breathed. "Good alpha. There you are."
The words went through me like current through wire. I dropped my head to her throat and groaned, and felt her smile against my temple, the witch, she'd found the lever first try.
"Oh, that lands, does it." Her nails drew down my back. "Good. Because you are. Ten years you waited and never once crowded me. Best alpha on this whole coast and the only one who doesn't know it. Now move."
I moved. We found the rhythm the way we'd found it stacking trays, working side by side in her kitchen, two bodies falling into step like it was the oldest dance either one of us knew.
Slow first. Deep and slow and whole, every drag of me out of her and every push back of me into her pulling a sound from one or other of us.
Then slow stopped being possible. She took the careful off me the way I'd taken it off her.
Her legs locked round my back and her heels drove me on, her hands everywhere, her mouth at my ear with its orders.
I ran a palm the whole warm length of her thigh just to feel her, smooth and fever-hot under a boatwright's hand, mine to touch at last after ten years of not.
Harder. There. Don't you stop. I'd sooner have stopped my own heart.
The rumble came up out of my chest unstoppable now, the alpha-sound, gone ragged on every thrust, and I felt her whole body answer it, the slick clutch of her round me going tighter and greedier with each one.
"Knot." I got the word out at the edge of it. Half a warning and half a question, because my body had started in on the old demand, the base of me beginning to thicken with the want of it, and a first night is no night for that.
"Not tonight," she gasped. "Next time. Stay with me, just stay.
" And the word next went through me brighter than anything her hands were doing.
Next time. A future, said on a gasp like a promise.
So I held the line. The knot was coming up whether I willed it or not, the base of my cock thickening, catching at her on every stroke, and holding it back cost me everything I had that wasn't already hers.
I stayed shallow of it, by main strength, and got my hand down between us instead, my thumb to her clit, right where she'd shown me, working her the way she'd taught me not five minutes since.
She broke first, a flutter and then the deep clench of her round my cock, my name and God's in the one breath, and the grip of her hauled me clean over the edge behind her.
I spilled into her deep and shaking, her cry and my groan and the lamp and the rain and ten years, answered, all at once, in a nest that smelled like both of us and always would now.
After, I did what I'd waited a decade to do, which was nothing, slowly.
I tucked her into my side in the warm wreck of the bedding and pulled the eiderdown over us.
I let the rumble idle in my chest, because it made her boneless.
I could feel it work. Her whole body going heavier with each breath.
I got up once, for water and a cloth, and tended to her with both, and she let me, sleepy-eyed, watching me move round her flat like she was memorising it.
I found crackers and the good cheese, because she'd cooked all evening and eaten nothing.
The bin habit. I fed her in the nest by lamplight, small bites, until she laughed at me.
"You're provisioning me."
"Aye."
"This is the pack courting manual, isn't it. Food off your own boat."
"It's cheese off your own shelf. The manual allows improvisation.
" I tucked a strand of hair off her face.
The words were coming easy, for once, for the first time in my life.
Turns out they were only ever waiting on this.
"Freya. The lean. I'd have waited another ten years for it.
I want you to know that. There was no clock on you. There's still none."
"I know." Her hand spread flat over my heart. "That's why I could finish it."
She slept first. I lay in the lamplight with the weight of her on my arm and her scent in my chest. For one hour I let myself be a man who had everything. I knew it, for whatever that's worth. Whatever else comes, I knew it that night, every minute.
Which is how I felt it turn.
It was near two when she came half awake, the way you do, and I felt her surface and settle.
Then I felt her not settle. A stillness came into her that wasn't sleep.
A holding. Her scent changed at the edges, the warm butter going faintly sharp.
The way a pan starts to catch. I know that smell now. I'd give a great deal not to.
She didn't move away. She lay exactly where she was.
In the circle of my arm, in the nest, in the held dark.
And somewhere behind her closed eyes, a clerk had come back on shift and was opening the books.
I could all but hear the columns being ruled.
What was taken tonight. What is now owed.
What does it cost, being loved like that, and what will be collected, and when.
I did the only thing I know. I didn't fix it.
I didn't say I could feel it, because the feeling of it was hers and she hadn't offered it.
I just let the rumble come up again. Low.
Steady. The sound that means the watch is kept and the boat is safe.
I tightened my arm one notch, and pressed my mouth once to her hair.
Her breath shook, and went out long, and after a while she slept again.
I didn't. I lay in the dark of the best night of my life and listened to the rain and thought about tides. How they come all the way in, the whole sea arriving like it means to stay forever.
And how the turn starts so quietly that the water itself is the last to know.