Chapter 20 #3
My hand slides down. Over the curve of her stomach, past it, between her thighs, and when my fingers find her she’s already wet and the sound she makes against my mouth goes through me like current.
I stroke her with two fingers, slow, firm, pressing against the place that makes her breath stutter, and she reaches back and grips my hip and pulls me tighter against her and the wanting between us is a two-way flood, hers pouring into mine and mine into hers.
The shadows don’t pour off me tonight. They don’t rise or slide or fall.
They darken the glass in front of us until the window becomes a mirror, until I can see both of us in it, her body against mine, the crimson glow of the marks reflected back, two people lit red in the dark.
The shadows made us a mirror on purpose and I watch myself touch her in the reflection while the estate sits in the dark behind the glass, and the defiance of it burns hotter than the wanting.
My fingers press harder. She gasps, her hips rolling against my hand, and I feel her climbing, the urgency spiking, and I don’t let her crest. I slow.
I hold her at the edge while my other hand grips her hip and my mouth traces the line of her neck, and the restraint costs me as much as it costs her because I can feel what I’m doing to her in my own body, the strain transfer running the sensation between us until my fingers shake with what she’s feeling.
“Don’t you dare stop,” she says. The voice she uses when she’s past negotiation.
I don’t stop. I give her what she’s asking for, my fingers moving fast and precise, and the peak takes her in a rush I feel in my own chest, and the cry she makes echoes off the glass, and the shadows in the window ripple with it.
She turns in my arms. The turn is fast, decisive, a woman choosing to face me instead of the dark, and her mouth is on mine before the turn finishes, fierce, her hands pulling at my belt, my shirt already gone though I don’t remember losing it.
She backs me toward the bed and the backs of my knees hit the mattress and I go down and she follows.
She doesn’t climb on top. She pulls me over her.
The gravity is different tonight. She wants my weight.
She wants the full measure of me pressed against her, cool on hot, the contact total, and when I settle over her, careful of the swell, she hooks her leg around my hip and pulls me closer and the careful stops mattering.
I push into her and the sound she makes is raw. A sound with the war in it, the fear and the want fused into one thing that has no name. I still, deep, my forehead against hers, and her hands grip my arms and her eyes find mine and neither of us breathes.
Her eyes hold mine. No command needed. Neither of us has ever closed our eyes for this, and tonight the looking is its own language, and the language says everything the war won’t let us put into words.
I move. Hard. Present. Every stroke a statement that we are here and alive and the war doesn’t get this.
The bond carries the sensation in both directions and the doubling makes the room blur, her pleasure arriving in my body as mine arrives in hers, the feedback climbing without ceiling.
Her legs lock around me. Her hands grip my back, not nails scoring but palms flat, holding on, the grip of someone who is not trying to leave marks but trying to keep the person she’s holding from being taken.
The marks blaze between us. The gift hums in the air, not vibrating the room this time but pressing inward, compressing the space between us until it feels like the air itself is holding us together. The shadows darken the bed around us, a dark frame, and the crimson of the marks is the only light.
I feel her climbing. I feel myself climbing. The bond makes it simultaneous, each feeding the other, the defiance and the fear burning off together until what’s left is just this, just us, the four-count running under everything, all of them present, all of them accounted for.
When it crests it takes us both. The sound she makes against my neck when she stops fighting any of it has the war in it and the house in it and the yard in it and the two loud children in it, and I hold her through all of it, and the marks burn at their brightest, and the room goes crimson and warm and the rest of the world stops existing for the length of one shared breath.
After, we lie tangled in sheets that smell like both of us, her back against my front, the old position, cool chest and warm wife, and the count runs in the dark, and dawn is coming, and the estate is waiting, and the worst night of our lives is twelve hours away.
She laces her fingers through mine.
One breath. The last quiet breath before everything. Her hand in mine. The crescent marks glowing soft. The four hearts running their count, two large, two small, the count that has replaced every other metric I ever used to measure whether the world was in order.
I hold the four of us in the dark.
Then the sun crosses the sky, and dusk comes, and the war begins.