Chapter 46 #2
And as hard as I try to stop it, as much as I want to get lost in this moment until the end of time, tension knots low in my belly.
Warmth extends to my hands and feet, and I can’t fight the urgency.
I roll his head from side to side, my fingers caught in his mussed-up curls.
My hips jerk into his face, slamming against him, no semblance of control.
But he maintains it. The lazy licks. The curling of his fingers. Even with all my thrashing. Only his volume changes, his groans louder, longer.
Until I let go, tightening and pulsing around him in rhythmic waves, heat exploding from the contact of his mouth and outward. Straight into my chest. Pleasure burns through me. The trees flash white, one after another.
I lose strength in my legs, but he wraps his arm around my waist and holds me up, refusing to release me until the last jerk of my hips.
He slides his fingers out slowly and rides them up toward my clit.
I try to close my legs on him at the sensation.
His other hand grabs a fistful of my ass cheek and squeezes, then he pulls away, admiring his work before licking the newly escaped wetness from each of my thighs.
Then his fingers. Then either side of my raw lips. And straight up my center.
Even my brain is hot. I can’t feel my legs at all.
He pulls himself from his pants, a primal hunger in his whirling eyes.
He tugs me downward, my knees bending until I’m right over his lap.
And as if waiting a single second longer would be his end, he slides me down on top of him, filling me slowly, ensuring every inch gets to enjoy the entrance, the lingering pulsing of my walls like tiny hugs all the way down.
And his moan speaks for him. I swear if there were any way to kill this man, it’d be with pleasure.
But now, face to face, his intensity is inescapable.
He grabs my arms with his actual hands and forces them behind my back, his touch rough, the squeeze of my wrists painful.
And when he lets me go, I’m trapped by his control over me.
He lifts my hips up and down, hard, but unhurried, every slide down his length like a long inhale of teva, unwinding my body, fogging my mind.
But even the slow fuck can’t clear his head. Nothing could, I imagine.
His hold on my hips is bruising, irresistable—because I’m the one he holds on to, the one he won’t let go.
Death lurks in his eyes… and life, blending with the pain and pleasure.
He’s black and white. Light and dark. And everything in between.
And stuck, stuck in a nightmare all by himself—yet never alone.
But he feels more solid than anything I’ve tried to hold on to, sturdier, safer.
He breathes heavily now, moving me up and down in that slow rhythm with more force in every slam down, yet controlled. Then he rolls me onto my back and follows, leaning over me and reinserting himself with a deep strike. My fists dig into my back, my wrists still bound, controlled by him.
I arch my back and cry out, not from the poke of branches or the indentation of stones on my back, not from my own knuckles, but from the depth he reaches, the aching pleasure of it. The ground rolls in waves beneath us, adding to the rhythm.
He lifts my shirt roughly, taking me in with glassy, lust-drunk eyes. Even now, he doesn’t speed up, doesn’t rush his plunge into rapture.
I glance down at my chest, my exposed impression. “This doesn’t matter,” I whisper. “Not between us.”
He falls over me, lips a breath away. Curls hanging freely.
He stays like that, taking me deep, his hips rolling with the earth, hot breath on my face.
Every in and out puts pressure in all the right places, and all I can manage is to lie here and take it, the intimacy.
Even though it’s not allowed. This isn’t love.
Then he kisses me. And somehow I have to balance the ecstasy of his expert tongue with the filling sensation of him inside me, gliding along nerves that rouse every cell in my body to burst with bliss.
He pulls my wrists closer together, smashing the bones into one another, tightening the invisible cuffs as if he wants to make sure I’ll never slip free.
The kiss must last forever because I lose track of time.
It could be going backward for all I know.
And the sweeping of his tongue against mine lasts all the way through his loss of control, his groans transforming into demanding grunts, all lost in my mouth.
And only then does he drive into me faster, his strength savage, his kiss violent.
He doesn’t even free my lips when his whole body goes rigid, when he pounds into me with spastic thrusts, when the ground cracks open, not when his own yell is muffled by our kiss.
Then he collapses on top of me, smashing me beneath his heaving chest.
And when he rolls off me and turns his head to the side, eyes on mine, the death is gone, the threat. They’re dark brown again, sucking me in.
Purple puffs of smoke linger in the air.
We lie on our backs in the woods, dressed again and side by side, my treasures safely stowed.
Another vision subsides. It’s one of those rare nights that rain doesn’t endlessly pour down, as if it finally accepted a break.
I take my final toke on the teva roll, savoring it, then pass it back to Eli.
His fingers brush mine. He inhales the last of the roll and holds it for unreasonably long before he lets out a deep, slow purple breath that disperses into the foliage above us.
I pat the necklace now back on my chest in a slow beat.
I don’t know what triggered the turmoil I saw in Eli’s eyes or why nature seems to have bound itself to my emotions, but the teva allows me to hold onto the thoughts without spiraling, to calmly accept that if I don’t learn to control it, I’ll be the disaster I’m trying to avoid.
I attempt to understand how Eli was willing to give up teva forever simply because I wanted to save the Hollows from the effect of the elixir, from death.
But I can’t comprehend it, not when everything points to him doing it purely for me.
I let my mind pass through the days, dragging up details and letting them go again. Except one.
“What did the note say?”
“What note?”
I rest my hand on top of his between us. “The one you were holding when I woke up in Milo’s room, the one Kelter saw. He said it was cruel.”
I expect him to refuse to tell me, but he doesn’t. “It said, I’d do it again.”
“Do what again?” I ask.
His hand tenses under mine. But maybe it was the perfect time to ask, his mind and heart padded with the tranquility of teva, his defenses down, because he actually answers. “I’d live every single lifetime and die every single death again to get to this life. With you.”
I don’t have a response, but even if I did, I’d be too distracted by the way my heart is instantly caged. Unfeeling. I let go of his hand to hold my chest. A thousand locks click into place.
“I shouldn’t have said that,” he says quickly.
Maybe if my heart were free, it’d hurt more.
“But I don’t want you to hate me anymore,” he adds.
And that does hurt. Because I don’t need to feel love to know I’m missing it. A heavy cloud rolls over us. I grasp my shirt to have something to hold onto as I let the most difficult words pass through my lips. “I haven’t in a long time.”
He twists to the side and leans on his elbow, staring down at me with a smile. “I know. You can’t get enough of me.”
I laugh, and the cloud breaks into dozens more. “You egotistical bastard. It’s your fault. You were terrible at making me hate you.”
“I noticed. Which means I need to have the tightest control over your heart.”
My smile vanishes. The sky darkens. “I know.”
“And maybe the rest of you too.” He pulls his knife from his pocket, unsheathes it with his teeth and pokes my belly with the blade, an amused smile owning his cheeks.
“Why’s that?”
“I’m not sure I can trust you to take on Zandrite without me controlling you. You’ll stab yourself. You wave my knife around like you’re battling your own shadow.”
I work my fingers up his forearm, following the veins. “That bad?”
“Yes.”
He’s so brutally honest that I laugh again. “Then show me.”
He gives me a look that reveals how hopeless he believes the endeavor to be, then transforms his face with a roguish grin. “You want to fight me?”
I release his fist and throw both my arms behind my head, blowing out a noisy breath. “Well, we already did the fucking thing.”
He taps my stomach with the flat of the knife. “We could do it again.”
As tempting as it is to lose myself endlessly with this man, I turn him down with a shake of my head. “That probably won’t help with the Zandrite situation.”
He rolls the rest of the way over and straddles my hips, knife tip pressed into my shirt, right over the birthmark between my ribs. “I want something in return.”
“I have to barter with my body to get your help?”
“Not your body—that’s already mine.” He looks at me as if another word will send him tumbling down a mountainside he can’t climb back up. “What else are you willing to give me?”