Chapter Eleven #2
The words are quiet. They aren't a question. They're the simple statement of a thing she wants.
I lift my face from hers.
I look at her in the dim light from the window. Her hair dark and loose around her face. The line of her throat. The line of her collarbone above the neck of the tank top she's worn for me tonight. The soft curve of her arm where it lies against her side.
I bring my hand to her throat.
I lay my palm flat against the front of it, as I laid it against her sternum last night. The warm hollow of her throat fills my hand. Her pulse is in my palm. Steady and quick and alive.
I lower my mouth.
I set my closed lips against the soft place at the side of her throat, below her ear, where the pulse is closest to the surface.
The warmth of her skin against my mouth is the warmth of a living thing, and it floods through me as the warmth of her wrist did last night, only this is more.
There's more skin. There's more warmth. The smell of her — her shampoo, the clean smell of her own body — fills my senses.
I don't put my teeth against her.
I move my mouth. I press it to the corner of her jaw, to the soft place under her ear, to the warm dip above her collarbone where the bone rises beneath the skin. I move slow. I let her feel my mouth against the warmth of her skin everywhere it lands.
She tilts her head back into the pillow.
A soft sound leaves her. A breathy thing, half a sigh, the sound of a body opening up.
My hand moves.
I bring it down from her throat to the strap of the black tank top at her shoulder. The strap is thin. The cloth is soft beneath my finger. I look at her face. Her eyes are half-closed. She's watching me through her lashes.
She nods. Once. Small.
I draw the strap down her shoulder.
The cloth slides. The black fabric peels away from the soft skin of her shoulder, the soft swell of her chest. I draw it down past the curve of her breast. The cold air of the room finds her, and her nipple tightens immediately in the chill, a dark pink against the pale of her skin.
She doesn't cover herself.
She watches my face. She watches what I do to her body. She's decided to let me see her, and she's letting me see her, and she isn't flinching from any part of it.
I lower my mouth to her.
My closed lips find the warm soft skin of her breast and she gasps. Her hand tightens in my hair. The hand on my wrist tightens. Her whole body goes taut beneath me for a moment and then it softens, all at once, giving itself over.
I take her nipple between my lips. Carefully. I can't use my teeth — I won't use my teeth — and so I use the soft inside of my mouth, the flat of my tongue, the gentle suction of a closed mouth on warm skin. She makes a sound. A soft cry into the dark room.
Her hips move.
She doesn't mean to. The movement is slight. Her hips press up off the bed in a slight involuntary lift and I see what her body is asking for, even if she doesn't know how to ask for it in words.
I move my free hand.
It travels down her side, over the curve of her waist where the tank top has bunched, to the soft cotton of the pants she's worn tonight. I lay my palm flat against her hipbone through the cloth.
She lifts her hips again.
I push the cotton down.
I don't rush. I slide the soft fabric down her hips, her thighs, slow, like a glove eased off a hand you didn't want to bruise. She lifts her hips to help me. Her hand stays in my hair. Her other hand stays on my wrist. The pants pool at her ankles and she kicks them away.
She's in only the black tank top now, the strap of which is still down off her shoulder.
I sit back on my heels for a moment and I look at her.
The pale length of her body in the dim light from the window. The spread of her hair beneath her. The curve of her breast where it has come free of the cloth. The flat plane of her stomach. The dark thatch at the center of her, where the heat of her is greatest. The pale soft skin of her thighs.
She's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.
I've seen the great cities. I've seen the snow on mountain ranges in the dawn light. I've seen things no one alive remembers. None of them are this.
"Farkas." Her voice is faint.
I move.
I lower myself between her thighs and she opens for me without thinking. The heat of her against my face is overwhelming. The smell of her — the deeper smell, the smell of her arousal, the clean wet sweet smell of a body that wants what's about to be given to it — fills my senses.
I lower my mouth to her.
The first contact of my cold mouth against the warm soft heat of her tears a cry out of her, louder than any sound she's made.
She claps her own hand over her mouth a half-second too late to catch it.
Her hips lift toward me, chasing the cold, and under my palms the long muscles of her thighs have begun to tremble.
I use only the soft parts of my mouth. The flat of my tongue. My lips. Not my teeth. Never that. I taste her. The salt and the sweet and the warm wet heat of her against my mouth, the faint drumbeat of her pulse beneath the skin at the inside of her thigh where my long fingers are pressed.
She comes apart faster than I expect.
It happens in waves. The first one is slight.
Her body tightens beneath my mouth, her breath catches, her hips jerk.
I don't stop. The second is larger. Her hand in my hair tightens until it's almost pain, and her thighs press together briefly against my shoulders.
She makes a high, pretty sound. Wanting.
I don't stop.
Her body opens beneath me — her hips lift up, her back arches off the mattress, her hand comes off my wrist for the first time since she grabbed it and rises into the air above her head and falls onto the pillow beside her face.
She's making sounds I've never heard. She's taking what I'm giving her.
She's giving herself in return, fully, without anything held back.
When she goes still it's sudden. The body that was tight beneath my mouth softens all at once and the sound she was making fades into a long soft exhale and her hand in my hair loosens.
I lift my face from her.
She's looking at me.
Her face is flushed and her hair is damp at the temples. She's breathing like she's been run to ground, her chest heaving, her pulse still loud enough that I can hear it from here. Her eyes are dark and fixed on me, full of something I don't have a name for.
"Come here," she says.
I go.
I rise from between her thighs and I move up the bed. She turns toward me, her warm body curling around mine. She lays her hand against my chest, over the thin cloth of the coat I haven't taken off, and she closes her eyes.
I put my arm around her.
I don't know how to do this. I haven't held a body to mine in a millennium. But she fits against me as if she's been made for it, and her warmth presses into my side. After a moment of stillness, I lower my face into her hair and close my eyes.
She's asleep within minutes.
I don't move. I lie beside her with her warm body against mine, her breath against the cloth of my coat, her hand on my chest. I listen to her heart slow.
I listen to the rhythm of her breathing change from the post-sleep waking of a woman who's just been brought through what I've brought her through to the deeper softer breath of sleep.
I stay.
I stay for hours. The wind is up outside the window and the curtain moves slightly in the draft, and the streetlight throws its pale strip across the floor and partway up the wall.
I don't move. I don't want to move. I've been waiting for this for two weeks, for centuries before that, for a thing I didn't know to wait for, and now it's here.
Her body is against mine. Her name is in her mouth in her sleep — she murmurs something I can't make out and I think for a moment it might be my name, but I can't be sure.
The dark begins to thin in the east.
I don't want to leave.
I have to leave. She doesn't know what the day will do to me.
She doesn't need to see it. I want her to wake up alone and to lie in the bed for a moment touching the warm impression I've left in the sheet beside her, and to know that I was here and that I was real and that what happened was real, and to want me back.
I lift my arm gently from around her. I lift my body away from hers, slow, careful not to wake her. She murmurs something and shifts in her sleep and curls further into the warm place where my body was.
I look at her.
I look for a long time.
I lower my mouth to her forehead. I lay my closed lips against her skin. The warmth of her against my mouth one last time before I have to go.
I rise.
I cross to the window and open the latch.
The curtain is still open the way she left it. The dim morning light is finding the room now, just beginning. She's sleeping with her hair loose on the pillow and her hand curled where my body used to be.
I step out onto the ledge.
I close the window behind me.
I climb down.
I drive home through the gray of dawn. The sun is rising as I let myself into the farmhouse. I don't care. I sit on the floor of the room with no windows and I close my eyes and the smell of her is still on my mouth and the warmth of her is still in my chest and I don't know what I'm anymore.
I know what I'll be tonight.
I'll be hers.