Chapter Twenty-Five #2
out of my body. All of this conversation does. I should have stopped you when you started talking about still finding me attractive,
and suggesting that you might want to hear me say that I still find you attractive, too, but god after all those years of
being without you and months of being so close and yet so far, of thinking I could never express to you how out of my mind
a single hint of your pleasure made me . . . I don’t know how to say no. I don’t know how to say turn back,” he said, words
stumbling over each other and fighting to get out, until everything was there.
All their cards on the table.
No need to ask anymore.
“Good. Because I don’t want to.”
“But we—but you—you haven’t had time to really—”
“I think almost forty years is enough, Bram. Just make me feel again what I have only faded memories of. Show me what it was
like. Show me all of it, before I die of longing for something I have missed all my life,” she said, every bit of it so easy,
now. Like riding a bike, for the first time in years.
Then getting to a perfect downward slope.
They didn’t even have to pedal.
Though he didn’t exactly do what she expected. She imagined him starting at what she could most clearly recall: him lifting
her off the ground, his hand under her skirt. And instead, he leaned forward, slowly, hesitantly. Those dark eyes searching
her face, as he did. Breathing rapid, faint, like he had forgotten how.
Then he got to within an inch of her, and she realized.
He meant to kiss her. This was going to be a kiss. Her mortal enemy, her immortal beloved—he intended to do something that
tender, that innocent. He even reached up, and gently touched the side of her face, as he closed the gap. Still torturously
slow, and yet somehow it seemed so fast now, at the same time.
Her whole body tensed.
She came close to telling him she hadn’t prepared for this part.
And finally he pressed his lips against hers, as chaste as she could imagine anything being. It was barely contact. A breeze
against her there might have felt as physical. Yet the moment it happened, everything in her seemed to stop. She couldn’t
breathe or hear her heartbeat or think of a single thing.
All she knew was the lightning strike of sensation that went through her.
And the desperate need to know it a second time. If he had done this at any point while pretending to hate me, I would have lost myself to him without a word of protest, she thought. And she knew it was true, because she didn’t wait for him to do it again. She saw him draw back, gaze full
of caution and questions.
Was that all right, she could almost hear him saying.
And she answered by darting forward, to capture his mouth again. She kissed him, and not with the same timidity he had extended
to her. She couldn’t extend it. He had filled her with desperate electricity, and now all she could do was push against him, part her lips, persuade
him to part his.
Though it surprised her when he did.
Almost immediately, and with a sound that she felt to the roots of her hair. It spilled out of him and into her, rough with
relief and desperation and something else, something she understood more between her legs, than in her head. He made it, and
her cunt seemed to bloom. It grew heavy with arousal, in sympathy with that same feeling in him. She could feel her own slickness,
over a moan and a kiss.
And she suspected he knew it, too.
His eyes flashed wide the second it happened. Then his hand went to the nape of her neck. So he could hold her there, she
suspected, while he kissed her the way he always used to. Shivering with restraint but losing it anyway. Mouth helplessly
greedy, rocking and rocking over hers, all hot and open and oh god.
That flicker of his tongue.
Barely anything, but so intense all the same.
It was all she could focus on—the way it sparked her desire, and then stopped short of satisfying it. The slide of it, the heat of it, the lewdness. It made her think of the things he had said, when she’d been pressed against that wall. How easy it had been to imagine
his mouth between her legs.
Hell, she didn’t even need to imagine, anymore.
She knew what it was like, to have him lick her in all the places she ached the most. How quickly he could make her come;
how hard she used to go over for him. Once I cried out so loudly he thought he had hurt me somehow, she thought, and god, that made her frantic. Everything that had led to this made her frantic. The thought of then, the idea of what it would be like to experience it in this body
now. Familiar longing, all the new layers to what he had done to her throughout their lessons.
He had turned the screws for months now.
And so she couldn’t blame herself for being the one who pushed things further. For touching what she had thought she shouldn’t
want to. She slid her hands into his hair, down the back of his sweater, over his shoulders. Got closer, pushed harder, until
he was almost on his side of the table again.
While she found herself nowhere close to her own.
She half-stood without knowing it. Her knee was almost on that smooth surface. Like a little more temptation might make her
actually climb over it, to get at him. Mortifying, she tried to tell herself. Desperate, she tried to tell herself. Greedy,
she tried to tell herself. But just as she did, he seemed to register where she was.
And the sound that came out of him.
The shock in it, the sheer heavy heat of helpless arousal.
There was no way to doubt what he meant.
Though even if she could have, his hands told the rest of the tale.
They ran down over her body, immediately.
They followed the line of everything they could now reach, from her throat to her waist and the curve of her hips.
Further, in fact.
Oh, she didn’t know what to do when he went further.
When those big hands slid over the curve of her ass, all purposeful, and so obviously greedy about it she had to wonder how
close he’d come to this before now. Had he almost at the ball? While between her legs? Was there a moment when she’d bent
over, and he had looked without meaning to?
It certainly felt possible now.
He didn’t seem to want to stop. She could see him watching himself getting great handfuls of her there, around her body. Then
before she could catch her breath over that, he started ruffling her skirt up. Right up, in the fucking library, with someone
talking about magical legislation, five sections away.
She heard them droning on, just as he bared her cotton underwear to the air. Another person hissed shush to them, when he
slid his fingers underneath the elastic and over her plump curves. And then he suddenly looked up at her, eyes as black as
she’d ever seen them, face almost slack with desire. Only the barest hint of question there, amid the sense that he was too
far gone to even form one.
All she had to do was nod, and she knew what would happen.
Yet still it thrilled her to feel it, the second he started sliding them down. He just did it so feverishly, hands making
as much contact with skin as he could. Half of him still wanting to see, and the other half so beside himself that for a moment
he pressed his face into her body. He moaned into the soft curve of her breasts, as if he was losing his mind.
But all that did was make everything more intense.
Her legs were trembling before he even did a thing. She found herself sagging, barely standing, as he finished tugging her underwear down and started sliding a hand over her inner thigh. He had to hold her up with the other, and when that wasn’t enough, he hauled her.
All in one go, right over the table and into his lap.
Breathtaking, impossible seeming. As if he no longer had to hide exactly how strong he was. But he was right about that—he
didn’t. The move made her thrill so hard that she gasped with delicious abandon. She said his name, like a prayer for something
more, something sweeter.
And he gave it.
“Ohhhh god, do that again,” he moaned—as if she was the one who had done something hot. She was spread around him, bare pussy pressed
so tight to his groin she was sure she could feel something stiff, there.
Though she understood, once she realized what he meant.
His name tasted good on her lips, too.
She did it again as she rubbed at whatever she could feel, between her legs.
“Bram,” she said. “Bram, Bram, Bram.” And in response he sagged back against his seat. Eyes stuttering closed, teeth sunk
deep into his lip. Body now almost shaking with desire and excitement.
And maybe also with some pleasure.
Every time she circled her hips, he shuddered harder.
Like he had that time in the kitchen. After everyone had gone to bed, at the place her brain called the summerhouse. That tension in the air, simmering away. His eyes all over the thin dress she’d worn, then trying to pretend that wasn’t
the case. I should go to bed, he had said.
But he hadn’t gotten up.
He couldn’t.
He had known that his hard cock would have been instantly visible, if he had. It had been anyway, the moment she got close.
She remembered her heart pounding at the sight, him blushing to the roots of his hair. And then blushing even harder when
his apology had prompted her to whisper, into his hair.
We don’t have to take off our clothes; you don’t have to touch me, she had said. We can just make each other feel good. I can make you feel good. Make you come the way I know you must need to. All this time
spent worrying about what would happen if you were close to someone. It must be agony.
And then he had simply crumpled.
He had let her do what she was doing now.
Rutting against him until he looked like this: flushed, breathless, unable to stop himself running a hand over her body. In
fact, he pushed her back against the table, so he could do it better. He spread her out in front of him like a feast, and
stroked over her throat, her collarbone, her breasts.
Then couldn’t seem to stay away.
He cupped those soft curves.
Let himself squeeze gently.