Chapter 6
BIRDIE
His mouth moved to mine, and it was as hot and wet as it had been on my neck and jaw, but there was so much more now. The sensation of his tongue on my lips made me gasp, and I realized my own lips tasted sweet. The entire kiss tasted like the pomegranate now smashed on the floor.
The scent of him, elusive until now, crystalized in my mind.
Oud—agarwood—a lignaloe tree infected with a certain kind of mold.
The tree’s immune response is to saturate itself with resin, and that creates the deep, complex fragrance of oud.
Woody and haunting. The ancient Egyptians burned it during their funerals.
Trade routes flourished because of it. People use it as incense still.
There was something under the oud too—spice and heat. I wasn’t as good with nonwood scents…but cardamom, maybe, and black pepper. If I had to describe how sin smelled, it would be like this. A veil of incense wreathed around violent indulgence.
The first time his tongue touched mine, my knees buckled. It was only his hand in my hair and his hard thigh between mine that kept me upright, and then the sudden pressure on the inflamed nerves there punched my breath right out of me.
“Oh, Birdie,” he whispered into the kiss. That pitying voice again. “You poor thing.”
He pressed his thigh harder against me, and I still couldn’t breathe. I could barely see. It was just gold hair and glacier-blue eyes and cheekbones that usually exist solely in the mind of someone holding a chisel.
My hands had found his neck somehow, and when I tentatively slid my fingertips into his curls, he groaned into my mouth.
The silk of his hair, the velvet flicker of his tongue. The urgent, clenching response in my belly as he pressed his thigh into me…
The way it felt.
The way it felt.
I hadn’t let myself want anything like this, not ever, and all this at once was beyond terrifying.
A beautiful person in front of me, touching me, wanting me, and what if I liked it too much?
What if I let myself enjoy it too much and it never happened again and having it ripped away was more painful than never having it at all?
It didn’t matter, though. It was too late. I liked it. I was enjoying it—if this combination of primal arousal and pining ache and terror could be called enjoyment.
It would be so, so painful when it was ripped away.
His hand dropped from my breast to my hip, where he squeezed.
His hand wrapped around my hip as easily as if I were a doll…
but I was not doll-size. How? I’d been around those hands for months.
I’d watched them holding pencils and sketchbooks and kittens.
They’d seemed like any other hands then.
But in front of me—on me—they were so impossibly big.
“Do you think of me?” he breathed into my ear. His hand moved to my waist, and his mouth moved back over to mine. “Do you think of me as often as I think of you?”
I should have lied. A lie would have been safer—for the both of us probably. But once again, my thoughts moved too slowly for dishonesty. There was no need to lie to the wood or to God, and I was out of practice.
“Yes,” I admitted in a small voice. “I think of you.”
His forehead pressed against mine, lips hovering close, his breath a hot shiver over my mouth. “Good.”
His hands came to my waist—the loose T-shirt I wore was rucked up around his fingers—I was spun to face the chalkboard.
If there was a part of me that had felt like this was romantic, that this was about hearts and feelings and love, then that part learned the truth in a single instant as Bell’s massive hand pressed my face against the chalkboard.
Not…harshly…and it was my cheek smashed against the cool surface, not anything painful like my forehead or my nose.
I could still see and I could still breathe. But I couldn’t move.
And there was a trembling in his hand, a roughness to his exhales as he pressed against me that told me he was holding back. This was him being a gentleman.
It was my own reaction that terrified me in that moment.
With that rich incense smell all around me, with that hand shoving my face against the chalkboard, and then with his other hand moving from my waist to my stomach to the stretchy waistband of my skirt, with his chest covering my back and his breath in my ear, I was whimpering; I was completely unwound.
It might have started as gratification—a novel thrill at witnessing the destabilizing effect I apparently had on his control—but it was something deeper than that now, something worse.
God help me, it was so much worse.
I moved my feet apart before his hand even slid between my stomach and the waistband of my skirt. And when he wasted no time finding the line of my cotton underwear and slipping his fingers inside, my hips moved to meet him.
It wasn’t in spite of the barely leashed brutality keeping my face smashed to the wall as he searched out a part of me no one else had ever touched but because of it.
It wasn’t as if lust overrode the panic of Bell’s hand on my face.
It was that the panic was the lust. His hand on my face felt like his lips had felt moving on my neck. It made me as dizzy as his kisses had.
“Oh, Birdie,” he said when his fingers finally reached their goal. Damp silk curls and slick, swollen skin. His voice was too rough to be a tut, but it was close. I should be ashamed of what he’d just found, that voice said. “Really?”
“I—”
What could I say? I had the vague sense that it was probably pathetic to be this aroused from kissing…
that it was pathetic and perverse to be this aroused when he was handling me like that pomegranate earlier, in bruising, splitting violation.
But I had no idea what was normal or even what was normal for me, and I had no defense.
No coy rejoinder. And certainly no protest.
“I don’t know,” I finally mumbled.
“That’s okay,” he murmured. “I do.”
He worked my underwear off my hips and then my legs, and they were stuffed into his pocket to rest alongside his watch.
His fingertips traced over parts of me that I’d never thought about.
The place where my thighs joined my groin, the delicate skin between my vulva and my anus, the swirls of short hair on the delta between my legs.
When he finally pressed his fingers to my clitoris, I was shaking all over.
And the moan I made when he started gently circling the swollen bud was unholy.
“No one else has done this before, have they?” he asked.
I couldn’t shake my head, not with his hand against it, so I whispered my answer. “No one.”
“I’m the first.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yes.”
“How many other people have you kissed?” There was an edge to his words, as if the mere idea of me having kissed anyone else enraged him.
“This is—this is it. My first kiss.”
A groan. “Jesus.”
His hand lifted from my head, but the reprieve was brief because then he found my neck instead.
He didn’t choke me; he didn’t compress my windpipe or impede blood flow.
But the way he cupped my throat in his palm, the way his splayed thumb and fingers stretched around the sides of my neck…
he didn’t need to. My life—and the blood and air that sustained it—was cradled in one large hand.
“You’re mine,” he said with his mouth next to my ear. “Say it. You’re all mine. I get to have you.”
“Bell…” His fingers were moving between my thighs all this while, and the pleasure was building like a storm. I was scared of it. I couldn’t get enough of it.
“It’s okay. You’ll say it soon. Because it’s true and you’re a good girl, and good girls tell the truth.
You’re so wet, Birdie. I would slide right into you, you know that?
If you weren’t a virgin, it wouldn’t take anything at all.
But since you are, I’ll have to shove. It might hurt. You might cry.”
At that moment, the distance between thinking Bell had come in here about a grade and him talking about shoving into me was nowhere in my thoughts. All I could think, all I could see, was what he’d just described. My hands scrabbled at the chalkboard. My hips tried in vain to move. I had to—
Something was—
I couldn’t stop—
“Fuck, sweetheart. Yes.” Bell’s voice was triumphant as I let out a shuddering moan that keened up into a cry, and for the first time in my conscious life, the pleasure that came to me in dreams crashed into my waking body.
It was turbulent, tumbling, gasping. A wave, and I was already drowned before it began.
The wave built again and crashed and built again, the rolls and crests surging from where Bell was touching me, rushing out to my fingertips and the pads of my toes—tidal, eternal, all over.
And as much as I could think anything in that moment, I thought, I want this forever.
I wanted the euphoria coaxed by his fingers, the warm collar of his hand against my throat, the growled encouragement in my ear as I quivered in a cage made of chalkboard and Bell.
But when the tides receded, I didn’t feel washed clean.
I felt wrecked. Like a flood had come for real, and it had left only ruined things behind, debris everywhere, mud like a plague.
And now all Heaven had gone to wrack, with ruin overspread.
And at that moment, I knew a terrible thing, and it was that I would let ruin spread over me over and over again…
just so long as he was the ruin. I would be mud-smeared and choked with branches and window glass, and I would linger in shivering ecstasy still.
He didn’t let me fall. He kept me upright even as he pulled his hand free and sucked his own fingers clean. He liked whatever he tasted, I thought, because he gave a satisfied grunt and shoved his hips into me in a hard, grinding motion as he kept his fingers in his mouth.