Chapter 6 #3
We undress each other the rest of the way slowly.
She unbuttons my jeans. I run my hand up under the undershirt before I take it off.
Slowly. I want to know her by touch before I know her by sight.
The soft skin of her stomach. The dip of her waist. The cage of her ribs.
I find her breast in the half-dark under the cotton — small in my palm, warm, the nipple already drawn tight against my thumb — and she makes a sound and her hand tightens at the back of my neck.
I rub my thumb across her, slowly. Then again.
Her hips lift off the quilt. The wolf in me makes a sound at the back of my throat.
I peel the cotton undershirt up over her head.
I drop it on the floor. I come back down.
I take her in my mouth — the wet warm closing of my lips around her, the small drawn peak between my tongue and the roof of my mouth — and she gasps and her hand goes into my hair and she pulls.
I draw on her. Slowly at first, then harder.
I learn her. I learn that the right one is more sensitive than the left.
I learn that the light scrape of teeth — careful, careful — makes her thighs press against my hips.
I learn the exact angle of suction that takes the sound in her throat from oh to Kael.
I move my mouth to the other one. I do it again. I take my time. I am the man who waits.
She has a small scar on her left shoulder — a burn, from an engine in Maine, she will tell me later — and when I have learned her chest I kiss it.
She has a tattoo I did not know about on her ribs, on the right side, a single small word in handwriting I recognize.
Ronan's handwriting. Stay, it says. He must have done it for her in their first year. She watches my face when I find it.
I kiss it.
I kiss the word stay on her ribs and I press my mouth against it and I think — somewhere far back in my head — brother, I am here, I am staying, I am doing what you asked, and I do not say it out loud because she does not need to hear it and Ronan does not need to hear it because he already knows, and I keep going.
I kiss down her stomach. I kiss the soft curve of it.
I kiss the white stretch marks at her hips that came from carrying Callum.
I kiss her thighs — the inside, where the skin is soft, where her pulse runs close to the surface.
I kiss higher up the inside of her thighs.
I press my mouth against the warm hollow at the crease where her hip meets her thigh and she gasps and her hand fists in the quilt at her side.
I take my time. I take so much time. She is shaking a little — small fine tremors, not from cold, from the holding still — and her hand is in my hair and her breath is fast and her thighs have fallen open under my hands and I can smell her, the warm wet pulled-thread smell of her, and the wolf in me has gone very still and very attentive.
I am not in a hurry. I am the man who waits.
I am the man who has been waiting on a porch for two weeks and seventeen years before that, and I am going to take my time, and she is going to let me.
I put my mouth on her.
I do it slowly. I find her with my tongue first — flat, broad, a long slow drag from low to high that ends at the small swollen knot at the top, and she arches off the bed and a sound comes out of her that I have never heard her make and the hand in my hair tightens to the point of pain.
I do it again. The same long drag. Then a third time.
Then I narrow my tongue and I find her exactly where she needs me and I work her there in slow careful circles, learning the rhythm her body responds to — slow, then slower, then a quick flick at the right beat that makes her hips jerk up off the quilt against my mouth.
Her hand is in my hair. Her other hand has come down and grabbed the quilt and is fisted in it so hard her knuckles are white.
She is making sounds. The sounds are getting louder.
I slide one finger inside her.
She is wet — God, she is so wet, she is slick down the inside of her own thigh — and I sink the finger into her to the second knuckle and she clenches around it and a sound comes out of her throat that is mostly air.
I crook the finger. I find the place inside her that makes her arch.
I press there, slowly, in rhythm with my mouth, and her body bucks against me and her thigh tightens against the side of my face and her hand pulls my hair so hard my eyes water and I do not stop.
I add a second finger. I keep the rhythm.
Mouth and fingers, working together, learning her — the small spiraling pressure at the top of her and the long slow press inside, two things at once, the way she needs to be touched — and she is unraveling, she is unraveling under me, and the wolf in me is watching it with the focused attention of an animal at a kill, and I am riding the line between man and wolf and neither of us is in any hurry.
She comes.
She comes hard. Her thighs lock against the sides of my head and her back arches off the quilt and her hand in my hair holds me exactly where I am, and she comes around my fingers in long slow pulses I can feel against the pads of my fingertips, and the sound she makes is a sound I am going to remember on my deathbed.
I do not stop. I work her through it. Slower.
Slower. I keep my mouth on her until her thighs go soft against my face and her hand loosens in my hair and her body sinks back into the quilt with her breath coming in long broken gasps.
I ease my fingers out of her. I lift my mouth.
I press one last kiss to the soft skin at the crease of her thigh, gently, and I crawl back up her body.
I kiss her stomach. Her ribs. The word stay. Her throat. Her mouth.
She is wet-eyed and flushed and her hair is everywhere and she pulls me down against her and she says, "Kael. Now. Come here. Come here now."
I come there.
I take off the rest of my jeans. She helps.
Her hands are unsteady. I am unsteady. We are unsteady together and we manage.
I settle between her thighs. I look down at her.
I want to ask. I want to be sure. She sees me about to ask and she puts her hand against my mouth and she says, "Don't ask me. I have already answered."
I do not ask.
I press myself against her first. I let her feel the length of me at her entrance — the blunt heat, the wet from her body, the press without the push — and her breath catches and her hand at my shoulder grips harder and she rocks her hips up to meet me.
I push in. Slowly. Just the head, the first inch, the slow stretch of her body opening around me, and her mouth falls open against the side of my throat and a long shaking sound comes out of her.
I hold there. I let her adjust. Then I push in again.
Another inch. She is — she is tight, she is impossibly tight, she has not been touched like this in seventeen years and her body has to remember how to take me, and I am — I am being patient, I am being patient, I am the man who waits even now, especially now, with my forearms braced beside her head and my hips trembling with the effort of going slow.
I sink into her by inches.
It takes a long minute. Maybe longer. She is gripping my shoulder with one hand and the back of my neck with the other and her mouth is open against my throat and she is making small involuntary sounds with every push.
When I am all the way in — when my hips press against the soft give of hers and there is no more of me to give — I hold still.
I let her have me. I let her body work itself around me, the slow squeezing pulses that have nothing to do with orgasm and everything to do with a body remembering how to hold a man.
The wolf in me — the wolf who has been beside her wolf-mind in some other room for a week — makes a sound I am never going to forget.
She is warm. She is wet and tight and slick and her legs come up and wrap around my waist and lock at the small of my back and her heels press into my lower spine and her hand on the back of my neck slides up into my hair and I am — I am inside her, I am thirty-nine years old and I am inside the woman I have wanted without permission for half my life and I cannot — I cannot let myself look at it directly because if I look at it I am going to come apart, so I do not look at it, I look at her, I look at her face.
She is crying.
I see it and I stop moving.
I say, "Willa. Willa. Do you want me to stop."
She says, "No, God, no, don't stop, don't stop, don't —"
I do not stop.