20. Chapter 20 #2
But it’s hard to focus on that because she’s riding me harder now. I rise up to meet her, our hips crashing together rough enough to bruise.
Her pace shortens. Her free hand comes down on my chest and her nails set into my skin, almost through it. The heat coming off her climbs. I feel it climb, degree by degree, against my stomach and my thighs. Her breathing loses its evenness.
“Yes…yes… Oh, God!” Her voice is rising.
I get my hand between us and my thumb on her clit.
“Fuck!” Her walls spasm around my shaft. Then she stops making words at all.
She goes rigid with her eyes open on mine. They blaze like fire, her hair wild about her shoulders. Gold scales ripple up her arms and chest.
“Kalli,” I choke out, not quite sure what I’m looking at.
She’s not listening to me. Her whole body clamps down hard enough to hold me pinned inside her. A shudder runs up through her from her hips to her shoulders.
She’s quiet through the first half of it. Then, “Ahh—” and it comes out of her rough and long. Watching it nearly finishes me. I dig my fingers into her hip and hold on and don’t let myself go. I want to watch it again someday, and some part of me is already wondering how to make that happen.
She comes down slow, breathing hard, hair stuck to her face.
I sit up under her. I get an arm across her back and bring us chest to chest, her knees still bracketing my hips, all that heat pressed against me from stomach to shoulder. She loops her arms around my neck.
Then she takes a fistful of my hair and pulls my face down to the side of her throat.
“Now.”
“Kalli—”
“Drink.”
My mouth is an inch off her skin. I can smell her blood through it.
I can’t do it.
They drew her twice a week for over a year. I’ve read the log sheets. I’ve put men in the ground for less than what’s written in them.
“No,” I say into her neck.
Her hand tightens in my hair. “It’s yours. Take it.”
“I’ve seen what they took out of you.”
“They took it. I am giving it.” Her hand doesn’t move. “Those are not the same, and you know they are not the same.”
She’s right. That’s the trouble with her. My fangs are already down. I’ve been drinking cold bagged blood out of an icebox with her asleep three feet away.
“Say it again.”
“Take it.”
I set my mouth against her throat. Her pulse is right there under the skin, hard and quick.
I bite.
Her blood comes into my mouth, and it’s hot enough to burn. Not pain—heat. It floods my mouth. It goes down my throat, and then it keeps going, out from my chest into my arms, into my hands, into my face. My skin comes alive along its whole surface.
I can feel the stove on my bare back. I can feel it.
I haven’t felt heat as anything but information since 1965.
Now the room has a temperature in it. Her body against mine is putting out warmth I can measure on my own skin.
My hands on her back are warming, actually warming.
She locks her legs around my hips and starts rocking against me, and something sparks in me that’s been deep for sixty years.
I bury myself in her lush heat, rocking up to meet her, the friction almost unbearable.
“Come,” she says into my hair. “Come for me.”
It’s impossible not to. I finish inside her with her blood still moving through me. Her arms lock around my head. She holds my mouth against her throat through all of it.
“Hnn—” It comes out of me into her skin, muffled, and goes on too long, and I’ve never heard it before.
I stop drinking. I make myself stop.
The punctures don’t close. I lift my head, and they’re still there, two of them, dark and welling slow. A year of bad food and worse handling and her body doesn’t seal fast anymore. And I’m not an ancient. I can’t heal the bites I make.
I get my thumb under the lower puncture and catch it before it runs.
She takes my wrist and moves my hand away. Then she puts her own hand flat over the bite and holds it there and looks at me.
“I’m in you now,” she says.
I don’t answer. She doesn’t wait for one.
She pushes me back down onto the wrecked bed and stretches out along my side, one leg over mine, her head on my shoulder, her hair spread across half my chest. Her hand stays where it is on her throat. The other rests over me and closes over my hip.
Outside, the wind gets up and drops a load of snow off the roof with a soft collapse. The stove ticks. The room smells of her sweat and of sex and the copper of her blood, and under all of it, still, warm stone.
For weeks I’ve had the same picture. Her teeth. My throat. My blood.
Tonight went the other way, and the picture hasn’t moved.
I don’t know what that means.
Her breathing evens out. She doesn’t drift down into it. One minute she’s awake against my shoulder. The next she’s decided to sleep, and she’s asleep, all at once, complete.
I stay awake. It’s hours before the sky starts changing, and I wouldn’t sleep anyway.
Her heat soaks into my side. My skin is already cooling, giving back what her blood put into it, going back to being what it is.
I lift her hand off her throat to check the bite.
Her fingers come away wet. The punctures are still open and still going, slow, and the blood has run down under her jaw and pooled in the hollow at the base of her neck. She doesn’t stir when I touch it, or even when I kiss it away. The Kalli I know wakes up when the truck changes gears.
“Kalli?”
Nothing. The firelight moves on her face, and she doesn’t move at all.
“Kallista.”
Her lashes flicker, and her lip curls up. Scales shimmer along her cheekbone, and she pulls me closer. “Mmmm.”
I put two fingers back into the hollow of her throat, into her own blood, and hold them there.
And I realize that I don’t know who is sleeping against me.