Chapter Forty-One #3
His speech was steady and smooth, rolling over me with a melodic storyteller’s cadence.
Listening to him, I felt my eyelids grow heavier, the weight of the past hours compressing and settling atop my limbs like sand.
My muscles ached from the strain I’d put on them, my mind, too, and the sofa was so comfortable, and the leather still warm from his body…
Giving in, I curled up on the cushions, laying my head on the armrest. He had not finished the first chapter before I fell asleep.
—
A soft laugh in a dark room. A great pressure, like a hand crushing me from above. There was someone just behind me—a girl, I thought—but when I went to look over my shoulder at her, I found my limbs were frozen. All I could make out was the sound of her breathing, low and eager, like a predator’s.
I almost recognized it—
I woke to a scream and the weight of a presence above me. Around me, the library was dark—or was it the turret room? Perhaps I was still there; perhaps I’d never left—
“Tamerlane.”
A hand cupped my cheek, coaxing my chin upward: Noé’s.
It was he who was hovering over me, his eyes blown wide, our bodies braced against the sofa.
Gingerly, his thumb brushed over my mouth; in reaction, I closed my lips, and the bodiless shriek cut off, withering like a plucked stem.
I flushed when I realized it had been my own voice crying out, raw and terrified, a plea flung into the blackness.
Together, we breathed in the silence. Bent over me as he was, our chests were almost touching; I could feel him inhale through the place where the fabric of his undershirt brushed against my shift, and I shivered at the contact.
Unthinking, I lifted a palm and laid it against his chest, searching out his heartbeat.
It was quick, thumping urgently against his ribs; though I had no way of confirming it, I was certain the speed of his pulse was identical to my own.
A memory surfaced, another bed, another night: Match your breaths to mine.
His stare deepened. Shifting, he pressed the tip of his finger to the corner of my lips, his nail dragging along the curve of my mouth as if to trace its lines.
There was a faint scent clinging to him, remnants of the cigarette he’d smoked at dinner; tilting my head back, I parted my lips and breathed it in.
His thumb slipped, skimming over my teeth.
Suddenly, I could taste him—the salt-tinged sharpness of his skin, the bitterness, like an unripe seed cracked between my molars—and that single sensation overwhelmed all others, like sun through a window, drowning the room in light.
He was cold, clean water drawn straight from the well, searing my bones and creeping into the marrow; I made a small animal noise, somewhere between a mewl and a groan, as I felt his legs tense.
He swallowed. “Are you…?”
That was as far as he got before I dug my fingers into his shirt and pulled him closer.
Our first kiss was fevered and desperate.
Strangely, I recognized the feel of it, as though I’d experienced it before—as though it had already happened, once, perhaps a thousand times, and this was only an acknowledgment of some ethereal connection which had always existed between us, like a prophecy, beyond the bounds of thought and time.
Both his hands came around my face, the pads of his thumbs digging into my cheekbones and his body curled over me, and it felt so wickedly good to give in to him.
So delicious, like a sin I’d long thirsted for but never before indulged.
All of him was familiar and different. It was like studying a painting and then being presented with the site which had inspired it—he was exactly as I’d expected and somehow more, somehow richer.
His touch, as smooth and confident as I’d imagined it, and yet coarser than I ever could have guessed, with a rough gentleness like that of a whittler, bending his knife into a piece of wood.
His mouth, quick and clever, there and gone and there again; his fingers, weaving with mine, tangling in my hair and brushing along my jaw.
Despite their urgency, his movements were intentional, as if he’d planned them—like he’d been awaiting this moment for a long while and knew exactly what he would do now that it had come.
I couldn’t breathe. It terrified me, how wholly I wanted this. My desire was like a grave gradually being uncovered; every time he kissed me, a little more of it was revealed, and I shuddered to think of how deep the hole extended. Of what I would do when I got to the bottom.
His cheek on my cheek. I felt the graze of his stubble—I hadn’t realized he had any, but now I turned my head into him, savoring the bristled quality of his skin.
My thoughts were wild, so reckless they frightened me.
I had always crossed my own boundaries; now my worst tendencies were increased tenfold.
I was illogical and uncivilized; I wanted and I took.
Eventually, he drew back. His eyes were hooded, his pale skin flushed and lively. A hundred emotions seemed to ghost over his features as he reached down, tucking a strand of hair behind my ear.
“You utter sorceress.”
I laughed, then pulled him closer and kissed him again.