Chapter 7 #3
“That’s the provocation.” She turns in my arms. The water runs between us. Her face is flushed and her eyes are dark and her hands come up to my jaw, her face holding the misery and the want in the same expression, and she’s stopped caring which is which. “You came in here to help.”
“I did.”
“This isn’t help.” She rises on her toes.
Her mouth finds the hinge of my jaw, her lips fever-hot against the cool of my neck, and the shudder that goes through me is the one I never learned to control, the one her heat has pulled out of me since the first night she ran warm.
“This is the opposite of help. You’re making it significantly worse. ”
“I could leave.”
Her hand fists in my hair. She pulls my mouth down to hers. “You could try.”
The water runs cold over both of us and neither of us feels it anymore.
The shadows respond before I can think about keeping them.
They slide off my shoulders and down her arms, dark against the flush of her skin, and the contact makes her gasp into my mouth because the shadows run cooler than my hands and they find the places where the heat burns loudest, the small of her back, the curve of her hips, and they grip, reflexive, my body past the point of distinguishing between desire and instinct.
She arches into the cold of them and the sound she makes is the one that strips every rational process I own.
Her back meets the tile. My hands find the curve of her hips, the new fullness the pregnancy has put there, and the marks blaze crimson between us, the glow scattering through the water and the steam until the whole stall is lit red.
She pulls my mouth down to hers and the kiss is fierce, fury and want in the same breath, and I take both. Her skin burns under my hands. Mine cools under hers. Everywhere we touch, the two temperatures trade, and she makes a low sound into my mouth that has nothing left of misery in it.
I kiss her throat. The mark over her heart, and it flares under my lips, and the flare runs through her and rebounds into me doubled.
Her fingers dig into my shoulders. I go lower, her ribs, the curve of her stomach where the heat concentrates and the skin is taut and new, and I press my mouth there once, brief, a fact confirmed, and then I kneel in the spray.
She catches her breath above me. The water runs over my back and my shoulders and her hands are in my hair and I part her thighs with my palms and lower my mouth to her.
The first stroke of my tongue is slow and deliberate, and the sound she makes echoes off the tile and fills the stall.
I read her responses before she can voice them, every spike and shift arriving in my own chest a half second ahead, the sharp flare of wanting when I press closer, the gasp when my tongue finds her clit and holds, the restless shift of her hips when I ease back.
The shadows wrap her thighs and keep her braced against the tile while I work her open with my mouth, because her legs are starting to shake and the water is slick underfoot and what I’m doing to her requires precision.
Her grip in my hair goes sharp. I seal my lips around her and suck, and her hips buck against my face, and the bond floods with sensation that doubles back into me until I feel the pleasure building in her body as clearly as I feel the cold water on my spine.
I press my tongue flat and drag it up in a stroke that has her nails scoring my scalp, and then I’m inside her with two fingers and the angle that makes her voice break, curling forward, thumb circling where my mouth just was, and she cries out and the crescent blazes and the shadows grip tighter and the bond pours the building wave back and forth between us until her voice goes ragged and her body tightens around my fingers and the peak hits her in a rush I feel in my own chest.
“Up.” Her hand pulls in my hair. Her voice is wrecked. “Now. I need you now.”
I stand. I lift her, and her legs wrap around me, and the shadows anchor her hips to mine while I press into her slow, watching her face while her body takes me in, the heat of her so intense around me it registers like a separate element, something beyond temperature, something the bond picks up and feeds straight into the base of my skull.
When I’m deep her head falls back against the tile and her breath leaves her in a rush and her hands grip my shoulders hard enough to bruise and neither of us moves.
Two heartbeats hammering. Two smaller ones running fast beneath them. The marks burning crimson in the steam.
“Don’t you dare be careful,” she says against my mouth.
“I’m not.”
I move, and she meets me, and the last of the measured man is gone.
Her nails score my back. The marks pour red light through the steam.
Every stroke lands twice, hers through the bond into me and mine into her, the want compounding on every pass, and the fury at her own body burns off somewhere in the middle of it and leaves only the want, only us, only the temperature we make between us that has never existed before this and exists nowhere else.
The shadows grip her hips where my hands can’t reach and the bond carries every point of contact between us in both directions at once, amplified, doubled, until I can feel what she feels when I drive into her, the stretch and the fullness and the ache of wanting more, and the sensation layered over my own nearly takes my knees.
When she breaks, the bond takes me with her.
Neither of us goes alone. It has never once let us.
The peak pours back and forth between us until I can’t tell whose it was to begin with, and the water runs cold over two bodies that have stopped being entirely separate things, and the sound she makes against my neck when she stops fighting any of it is the sound I’d burn this compound to the ground to hear again.
After, I carry her back to bed. She protests, as she always protests, a verbal objection delivered against my shoulder while her body has already accepted the arrangement.
“I can walk.”
“You can. You’re not going to.”
“This is demeaning.”
“This is efficient.” I kick the bathroom door wider with my foot. “Your legs gave out twice. The floor is wet. And you’re carrying passengers.”
“The passengers are fine.”
“The passengers are asleep.” I can feel the deep settled quiet of the two of them. “They burned through whatever they had and they’re out.”
“Good for them. One of us should get some rest around here.”
She’s too warm and too heavy-limbed to sustain the argument, and I set her down on the dry side of the mattress and pull the sheet to her waist and lie behind her, my chest to her spine again, the familiar position, and she’s cooled to something bearable, the flash burned off, her skin damp and warm and settling.
“You could have warned me,” she says into the pillow.
“That the cold water would make it worse?”
“That you’d make it worse.” But her fingers close over mine where my hand rests, and there’s no anger in it and no accusation. Just a body that put her through a war tonight and a man whose temperature happened to be the answer to both halves of it.
Above us, the dark thread in the plaster runs toward the window. Dawn is three hours away and I could rest and I won’t.
The steam clears. The shower drips behind us, the faucet not fully closed.
I press my mouth to the nape of her neck, where her hair is damp and her pulse is finally slowing, and I taste clean water and salt and the warm new scent of her that has no name yet, and the heat banks and the night settles.
The woman in the medical wing. The woman in my arms. The two small lives under my palm, asleep, with everything still ahead of them.
And outside the window, where the shutters stay open, the dark stays quiet.