34. Chapter 34 #2
“Say something,” I tell him, because the way his eyes are moving is doing more to me than his hands were.
“No.”
He puts his palm flat against my ankle and runs it all the way up the inside of my leg, calf, knee, the soft skin of my inner thigh, and stops with his thumb an inch short of where I’m already wet for him. His hand is warm. That is the thing I keep catching on. He has never once been warm.
Then he leans in and puts his mouth where his thumb stopped, one slow open kiss high on my inner thigh, close enough that I feel his cheek graze against my center, and my hand closes hard in his hair.
“Your turn,” I say, before I lose the ability to say anything.
He brushes his lips against my mound before he stands, and I go for his shirt.
My hands aren’t steady, and I don’t care.
I get the buttons open from the top down and push it back off his shoulders.
He shrugs out of it and lets me do the rest myself.
Belt. Button. Zip. I put my hand inside and curl my fingers around his shaft, hot and hard and heavy in my palm.
I stroke him once, root to tip, and he shudders, and that is how I know I have him.
“Kalli.” His voice is tight.
“You took your time. I’m taking mine.”
I push his pants down, and he steps out of them, and then he’s standing in front of me, tall and pale and beautiful, his cock standing thick against his stomach.
I run my hands down his shoulders and his arms and the planes of his chest. His stomach muscles jump under my fingertips, and when I wrap my fist around him again and work him slow, tightening at the head, he makes a sound low in his throat that I want to hear for the rest of my life.
His hands close over my upper arms, and he takes me back down onto the bed, and there’s no more looking at anything after that.
He goes over me with his fingertips first. Shoulders, arms, the whole length of my sides, palms flat against me, like he wants to have touched all of it before he does anything else.
His mouth follows. My throat, wide of the punctures.
The dip between my collarbones. He takes a breast in his mouth and works the nipple with his tongue, pulls it against his teeth until my back comes up off the bed, and then he does the other one, slower, sucking until I’m arching for it, while his palm goes flat down my stomach.
When he finally cups his hand between my thighs, the noise that comes out of me isn’t language. His fingers slide through my wet folds, parting me, and his fingertip finds my clit and circles it once, light.
“There,” he says, against my skin. Not asking.
“There,” I choke the word out.
He is not in a hurry about that either. One long finger slides inside me, then a second, curling forward while his thumb works my clit, slow and steady and exactly right.
I can hear how wet I am, and so can he. Every time I get close—thighs tightening, everything in me pulling toward the edge—he eases off, gentles his thumb to nothing, and starts again.
By the third time I have a fistful of the blanket in one hand and a fistful of him in the other, and I’m riding his hand without any shame about it.
“Gideon!”
“I know.”
“Then stop doing that.”
“No.”
He kisses me through the fourth time, and I come with his mouth on mine and his fingers buried in me, clenching around them hard enough that he groans into my mouth. He works me all the way through it, and he swallows every sound I make.
I get my hand around his shaft again before I’ve stopped shaking. He’s slick at the tip and iron-hard, and he twitches in my grip.
“Now,” I tell him.
He moves over me, and I put my legs around him and lift my hips, and I feel the blunt head of him line up against my entrance.
He pushes into me slowly, stretching me open around him inch by inch, as far as he can go, until his hips are flush against mine and I’m full of him, and then we both stop dead.
He’s above me on his elbows with his face right over mine. Eyes locked. I can feel him pulsing inside me. It’s almost too intense.
“All right?” he says.
“God, yes.”
He moves. Slow, at first, drawing back until he’s nearly out of me and sinking home again, the whole length of him.
I feel every hard inch of it dragging inside me on each stroke.
He keeps his face where it is the entire time, so close I can’t focus on him properly, and that’s better than looking.
His hand comes up under my head and holds it.
My dragon is awake and completely still. She isn’t taking anything tonight. She’s letting me have it, but she’s enjoying every minute.
It builds slowly because he lets it. He goes faster, deep grinding strokes that hit something inside me that makes my vision blur. Then makes himself slow down again, and does it a second time. By the third, I’ve got my heels dug into the backs of his thighs, and I’m holding on to his shoulders.
“Please, Gideon! God…I need…need…”
This time he doesn’t stop. He drives into me and keeps driving, and the wet sound of it and the sound of me fill the room.
My chest starts to burn, the same burn I get right before a shift, and it spreads down through me and out into my arms. The room warms up around us. It warms up because of me, and I can’t do anything about it, and I don’t want to.
“You’re hot,” he says, ragged.
“I know.”
“Don’t stop.”
“That’s my line.”
He gets an arm under my lower back and lifts me into his thrusts, changing the angle so every stroke hits deeper, and after that I stop keeping any kind of order to what’s happening.
The bed hits the wall. My nails rake down his back and dig into his shoulders, and I know they won’t leave a mark, and I do it anyway.
“Kalli…” He keeps saying my name into my open mouth, low, over and over, and there’s no question anywhere in it.
I come apart the second time with him inside me, everything in me seizing tight around him, and it takes him with it.
He buries his cock to the hilt and goes rigid and holds himself there.
I feel him spill inside me, feel it go through him, all of it, in long shaking pulses.
I hold on with my legs and my arms and don’t let him move away.
Afterward, he doesn’t get off me. He stays inside me, softening slowly, and puts his mouth against my jaw and stays there while both of us come back.
“You’re warm,” I say.
“That’s you.”
“I know it’s me.”
I end up lying half across his chest with my ear against it. There’s no heartbeat under there. There never has been, and it doesn’t trouble me anymore. His arm is under my neck. His other hand moves slowly in my hair and doesn’t stop.
“Sleep,” he says.
I close my eyes.
“Kalli.”
“Mm.”
He leaves it so long I’m nearly gone.
“Nothing,” he says. “Go to sleep.”
He didn’t finish it, and I don’t make him. It’ll keep.
It has to keep, because tomorrow night I’ll be standing inside the mountain I walked away from, in front of four hundred people who watched them bury me.