Vadh
Ihave been careful with her. Every time. Measured. I have held still and let her come to me and let her set the pace and I have kept myself in check.
I am done.
I do not stop. The teal on her skin is bright in the dark, my color answering from inside her body.
I take her hips in both hands, and I drive into her with a rhythm my body has wanted since I first entered her, using the full length of my coils and the full weight of my lower body, nothing held in reserve.
Her back arches. Her hands claw at the coils beneath her. Both shafts driving together, harder than they’ve ever been. The compression of my coils follow the thrust. She tries to speak, but is past language.
I pull her up from the coils. I crave her against me.
I desire her face. I lift her with one arm and pin her against my chest, both shafts still buried deep.
Her legs wrap around the narrowing where my torso meets the serpentine.
I hold her there. Face to face. Her mouth open. Her eyes barely focused.
“Bryn.”
She grips the scales behind my jaw. Her fingers dig in. Her body clenches around both shafts in contractions that fire down the nerve line. I lose the ability to think in straight lines.
I lay her down. My coils form a bed beneath her. She is on her back, and I pin her wrists with one hand and drive with the other gripping her hip and the angle hits something that makes her voice crack and her body lock. She screams.
The primitive shriek makes me push deeper and feel every muscle inside her.
Her hand finds the back of my neck. She pulls my face down.
“Stay with me,” she says against my mouth.
Her breath is on my lips. Half an inch of air, and even now, even inside her, I hold it.
I hold it.
For a single moment, the world melts away into the single point where I’m inside her. My muscles tremble as I delay the inevitable.
“Do it,” she orders. “Give it to me.”
I come.
My coils lock. Every muscle fires. The release comes from somewhere I did not know existed, deeper than the glands, deeper than the nerve line. Both shafts pulse and the flood moves through her and her cry breaks against my mouth and the bond seals.
The coils lock and release and lock again. My face against her throat. Her hands on my neck. Both of us gripped around each other.
The green spreading on the walls.
I hold her. She shifts into the curve of my body.
I try to speak but I can’t form the words. I can only kiss the top of her head in gratitude as I catch my breath.
I don’t know how much time has passed. The hall is dark. We haven’t moved. The lamps have burned low. She lies against my coils, her head resting in the bend of the nearest loop, her body flushed teal in the low light.
“My body is in love with you,” she says to the ceiling. Quiet. “So is the rest of me.”
A pause. My coils shift around her. The loop at her back tightens a fraction.
“Yes,” I say. I have a word in my mother’s language that would be enough, but I am not ready to say it. “Yes” is what I can hold in my mouth tonight.
She closes her eyes. Her breathing slows. She sleeps against me.
The temple is quiet. The deep vibration below the floor is still tonight. The seal is holding. The green on the walls is darker in the low light. New growth on old stone.
I do not sleep. I hold her and watch the green.