13. The Ring
Chapter thirteen
The Ring
The sky through the window was the gray that exists between night ending and morning beginning.
Skip was still asleep.
I was draped over his chest, my new favorite place in the world. Dense muscle, furnace heat, the steady drum of his heart under my cheek.
I looked at the ring on his left hand. Plain steel.
Then I looked further down.
The sheet concealed nothing. His cock strained beneath it, thick and fully hard, lifting the fabric in a way that made looking away feel impossible.
By the time I dragged my eyes back to his face, I was already wet.
Skip’s body had apparently reached its own conclusion about the morning. Mine had reached the same conclusion.
Skip’s eyes opened.
“Skip,” I said.
“I was not going to my quarters that night. I was coming to find you.”
I made myself hold his gaze.
“I have thought about the claiming.”
I looked at him without the analytical buffer and without the filing system running underneath. I looked directly, the way you look at someone when you have decided to stop managing what they see.
“I want it,” I said. “I want you to claim me.”
His composure broke on a single breath. Then his gaze dropped to the ring.
“That pleases me,” he said.
“I knew,” he said. “I have known that you would accept. I was waiting for you to finish knowing.”
He looked at the ring on his left hand for a moment.
He removed it with care. Its importance was visible in the way he held it.
“I want you as mine. For life. If you will have me.”
My mind stopped, briefly, and left me with the unmediated experience of what was actually happening.
My heart slammed against my ribs. “I will have you,” I breathed. “I love you.”
He smiled.
I looked at the ring in his hand. The circumference of it, the weight of it, the heft of a ring worn by a large man for a long time. It had been built for his fingers. I looked at my own hand, and the practical mathematician in me raised a brief objection.
There was no possible way that ring was going to fit me.
He placed it on my finger. It was loose.
Then the metal moved. The band contracted against my skin, slow and deliberate. It was reshaping itself around my finger as if it had been waiting for the correct dimensions all along. The weight changed. The balance changed. The impossible circumference became exact.
I stared at it.
I had seen magic in this world. I had watched pendants glow and wounds close and dead things move that should not have moved.
I had accepted, intellectually, that Mytharo operated according to principles Earth had failed to include in its curriculum.
But there is a difference between accepting magic as a variable and watching a ring resize itself on your hand.
“Oh,” I said, because apparently my entire vocabulary had chosen that moment to evacuate.
The warmth arrived at the same moment. The ring settling into its permanent address. It was like it had been waiting for this finger specifically and had been keeping the other hand warm in the interim.
Then the bond formed. I felt his desire for me. I felt it from the inside. As a living thing, present and specific. His desire deepened mine. My desire deepened his.
My mind’s filing system did not break gradually. It stopped. There was nothing to manage. There was nothing to file. There was only this. His hands and his mouth and the bond transmitting everything we felt for each other simultaneously.
Every feeling I had been holding back flooded into him at once. And what came roaring back from him was raw, unrelenting need. The recursion hit like lightning. His desire ignited mine hotter. My desire poured fuel on his.
He smiled against my mouth.
His hand moved. Mine found him in return. I looked into his eyes while I did it, and neither of us looked away.
“The claiming is not complete,” he said.
“I am aware of that,” I said.
I worked him slowly.
He was heavy in my hand. Hot. My fingers closed around him, but there was no overlap—only the barest meeting of fingertips.
His hips shifted beneath my hand. A rough sound left him, low in his chest, and I felt the pleasure behind it as clearly as if it had begun in my own body. I adjusted my grip, learning the pressure he wanted, the pace that made his breath catch, the exact point where his control began to fray.
There was no guesswork anymore. I knew what he felt the moment he felt it.
The sight of my hand moving over him sent a fresh rush of heat between my thighs. I was slick before I consciously registered how badly I wanted him, and growing wetter with every stroke.
I tightened my grip by a fraction. The reaction was immediate.
His hand found my hair.
I kissed my way down his powerful body, dragging my tongue over every ridge of muscle until I reached his cock. I wrapped my hand around the base and felt him throb against my palm.
I took him into my mouth and felt his pleasure arrive simultaneously. Sharp and immediate. Unmanaged. No performance. No wondering. Just the direct transmission of what this was doing to him.
I licked him slowly from base to tip, savoring the taste of him, then swirled my tongue around the swollen head.
Skip groaned, low and rough, his hand sliding into my hair.
I took him deeper, lips stretching wide around his girth. The bond let me feel exactly what he felt—the wet heat of my mouth, the swirl of my tongue, the tight suction as I hollowed my cheeks.
His pleasure poured straight into me, making my pussy ache and drip.
I moaned around his cock, the vibration pulling another deep groan from him.
I started moving faster, fucking him with my mouth—taking him as deep as I could, then pulling back to suck hard on the head before sliding down again.
Spit ran down his shaft. I used my hand on the base, twisting and stroking in time with my mouth.
“I’m going to taste you,” he growled suddenly.
He pulled me off his cock with a wet pop and flipped me onto my back. Before I could catch my breath, his mouth was on my soaked pussy, devouring me with long, filthy strokes of his tongue. He groaned at my taste.
I could feel that he loved this, loved the sounds I was making, and loved the effect he was having on me. I could feel it all with precision in real time.
There was no uncertainty. There was no performance. There was only the direct, unmediated transmission of two people climbing toward pleasure together.
“Don’t fucking stop,” I gasped.
He did not stop.
He brought me relentlessly toward release. I was shaking and crying out, but he didn’t stop—licking me through every shudder until I was trembling.
The orgasm arrived the way the best ones do: as the fulfillment of something that had been building steadily. It was a slow gathering that I felt first as a warmth low in my abdomen, then as a tightening that had nowhere to go. I was entirely unable to do anything except let it happen.
It was a warm unraveling of everything I had been holding.
I could feel his satisfaction.
I lay there afterward, boneless from the thorough resolution of tension.
When the last of it eased, he pressed one soft, deliberate kiss to the place he had just dismantled and looked up at me.
“Fuck me,” I gasped.
He rose over me—broad shoulders, the full weight of him above me.
Finally.
The head of his cock nudged my entrance, and I felt his restraint.
Then he began.
I made the sound again. The sound I had previously only made alone. As it exited my lips, I felt a surge of possessive satisfaction from him.
“You feel enormous inside me,” I said.
I could feel his pride. Justifiable.
“I want every inch of you.”
He paused when the bond carried the intensity of the pressure to him.
“Keep going,” I told him. “The sensations change. I know what comes next.”
He did. Slowly. Letting me adjust. The bond transmitted everything in both directions simultaneously—my body acclimating, his restraint costing him something real.
The bond lit up between us. I felt it like crossing a threshold I had already chosen. Nothing in me felt trapped; every part of me recognized the conclusion.
The connection was gathering itself around us. His eyes were on mine. I felt everything in that moment. Fierce love, intense pleasure, relief pouring through him.
I felt it in my bones. In the part that had always known.
He started moving. Long, slow, powerful strokes that dragged against every sensitive spot inside me. The wet sound of his thick cock sliding in and out of my soaked pussy filled the room. He gradually increased the pace, fucking me harder, deeper, hips snapping forward until the bed creaked.
I could feel what he felt.
He could feel what I felt.
“Fuck me harder,” I begged.
The request came out with less composure than I would typically bring to a direct request.
He felt the need beneath the words—and responded accordingly.
He gave it to me. Hard, relentless strokes. Skin slapped loudly against skin. The bond turned it into pure fire—his pleasure flooding me, mine flooding him, spiraling higher and hotter.
I stopped trying to think. I held on.
He slowed.
The fierce rhythm eased into something else entirely. Long, deliberate strokes that were not building toward anything, but were present.
“I am going to learn every sound you make,” he said against my skin. “We have time.”
He was savoring.
He buried himself and stayed there, deep and still, and kissed me. Slowly—the kind of kiss that has nowhere to be, that exists entirely for its own sake. His cock throbbed inside me while he kissed me.
When he broke the kiss, his mouth moved to my breast. The wanting rose in me before I had consciously named it, and the bond carried it to him. His mouth closed over my nipple, warm and deliberate, and the pleasure shot through me.
“Fuck yes,” I yelled.
He groaned against my skin. The vibration traveled through me and transmitted back to him.
The recursion was at work even here, even in this slow, deliberate, unhurried place he had brought us to.
He began to move again. Those long, rolling strokes, deep and thorough.
His mouth moved between my breasts with devotion. He was not dividing his attention among separate acts.
He was doing one thing: me.
Satisfaction moved through the connection as he looked down at me. The flushing, the trembling, the absence of any remaining analytical distance.
Our eyes held through everything that followed. The bond between us was transmitting without filter or management.
“Look at me when you cum,” I gasped. “Fill me. Claim me. I want every drop of your cum deep inside me.”
The hunger beneath the words struck him. I felt it hit him. I felt the last thread of his restraint snap.
His need struck me hard enough to pull a cry from me—the raw certainty that he wanted every part of me and intended to hold nothing back.
His control snapped. He fucked me harder, hips slamming down, cock driving into me with raw need.
When he came, I felt it through the bond before I felt it physically. I felt the moment his control finally broke. I felt the wave of release crashing through the connection and into my chest like a second heartbeat.
And then I felt it physically. The first pulse of him filling me, hot and deep, the sensation of being claimed in the most literal possible sense. Then another. Then another. Each pulse was transmitted at the same moment I felt it physically.
My own orgasm arrived not as a separate event but as a consequence of his. The bond was carrying his release directly into my chest, his pleasure becoming mine, and then my body catching up all at once.
It started deep. It was a slow, impossible tightening that had nowhere to go. Warmth blooming outward. I felt it in my thighs, my spine, the backs of my knees. I felt it in places that had no business being involved and were involved anyway.
I clenched around him involuntarily. I milked his cock rhythmically, drawing out pulse after pulse while I shook and cried out beneath him.
There was no separate experience. There was only the loop. His pleasure and mine. His response to mine and my response to his, spiraling until I could not have said where I ended and he began.
I could feel the sheer volume of his release. Hot, thick, and excessive. A slow, warm trickle of his cum escaped around his cock, sliding out of me and between my thighs before soaking into the sheet beneath my hips.
Skip groaned low at the sensation, grinding slowly into me, pushing his seed deeper before more leaked out around him.
We stayed locked together, foreheads pressed, breathing each other’s air as the last tremors faded. His cock was still buried deep inside me, twitching with aftershocks.
He leaned down and kissed me, deep and possessive, his cock still hard as his cum continued to leak slowly between our joined bodies.
When he finally withdrew, he collapsed beside me, and I laid my head on his chest. Neither of us said anything because nothing adequate was available.
We drifted back to sleep.
The ring glowed warm gold on my finger.