Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
FLORENCE
This time I don’t need to feel his heart beating through his chest. Not with my hands, anyway.
This time his pulse is beating a rhythm that resonates through his entire body.
I feel it like a symphony: the quickening of his breath, the rumble of a low groan deep in his throat, the scrape of his fingernails in the hair at the nape of my neck.
And that frantic beat of his heart, underscoring it all.
He’s playing it cool with his ‘you-and-me thing’ line, but his body lays every truth bare, right out in front of me.
He wants this.
He wants me.
And I have to stop telling myself that I don’t feel it too. Even if it’s not the right time. Even if I’m scared to death by just how mortal he could be.
I thought I was drawn to him because he looked so much like Josiah, and maybe at the beginning that was true, but the more time we spend together, the more I see him for who he is. Not a second chance with Josiah, but something else entirely – something special in his own right.
And right now, I need him like I need blood.
So, when his hands skim down the sides of my body and come to rest on my thighs, I don’t pull away.
I’ve already given him consent with my words, but now I offer it with my body, too, hooking my fingers around his waistband and pulling him flush against me, so close I can feel that racing pulse in every place we connect.
He makes a small noise, something somewhere between a sigh and a grunt, and the grip of his hands tightens, pulling us even closer together.
And then he ducks down and his lips meet mine.
The start of our last kiss was slow and tender, but this one is frantic from the off, all heaving breaths and grasping hands, the almost-bruising pressure of his fingers, the warm slide of his tongue in my mouth.
He’s not afraid of how vivid his feelings are.
He doesn’t try to temper his need at all, and he’s so honest with it, so raw, that it makes me want to meet him with the same.
I’ve spent a lifetime – more than one – holding on so tightly to my emotions that it’s taken years for people to really see me, yet a few weeks with him have stripped down every last wall.
There’s a loneliness that comes with this life – a dark, clawing beast of a thing that curls itself around my breastbone and squeezes tightly. It holds me there, a silent reminder to never drop my guard, to keep my secret buried deeply, so far down that no one could ever dig it up.
But it isn’t like that with Quinn. I don’t have to worry about him finding out my secret because he knows. He’s known from the start, and it hasn’t changed a thing. And now we’re here, entwined in each other in his tiny kitchen and there’s no place on Earth I’d rather be.
Except, perhaps, for his bed.
He pulls away with a gasp as my fingers find their way underneath his shirt, trailing over warm skin, feeling the ripple of muscle under my fingertips.
His eyes track my hands, watching them work his buttons open, bottom to top, pushing the shirt open and off his shoulders. He shakes it free without a word.
After that I don’t see where he’s looking because I’m transfixed, marvelling at the expanse of chest I’ve uncovered, broad and toned and dusted with light brown hair.
I was right not to look earlier; I would never have been able to stop.
I feel hypnotised – brought to a standstill by this spell he’s cast on me.
Part of me worries I’ll be stuck here for eternity.
He clears his throat and when I tear my eyes away from his body and look back up at him, he’s watching me with an expression of such wonder that it knocks me off kilter, just a little bit.
What are the chances that, in all the years of my life I’ve spent moving around, I’d be in just the right place at just the right time to meet this man?
It feels equal parts impossible and inevitable, a twist of fate, perhaps, or maybe something more than that.
‘Florence,’ he says, his brows tugging together, his voice rough. ‘We don’t…’ He gulps a breath and tries his best to steady himself on the exhale. ‘If you don’t want… We don’t have to…’
I shake my head and keep my eyes on his as I work the buttons of my dress and let it gape open, caught between us only where my legs are wrapped around his hips. He drags his eyes down over the curves of my body before he looks back up with an audible swallow.
‘You—’
‘Does it look like I don’t want to?’ I interrupt, smiling as steadily as I can past the roar of feeling pulsing through me.
He doesn’t say anything, but after a moment or two, his mouth crashes back into mine, and I find my answer in the way he kisses me – deep and hungry, like he’s just barely holding himself back. But I want everything he’s got.
I break the kiss to trail my mouth across his jaw, over the soft bristle of stubble there and down the column of his neck, where I can feel his pulse racing.
It’s addictive, the feeling of his body working beneath his skin, intimate in a way I’ve never experienced before.
I can’t help extending my fangs a little as I drag my mouth back up his neck.
It’ll probably leave a mark, I realise, and the idea of it fills me with a disproportionate amount of pride.
‘Touch me, Quinn,’ I plead, testing my teeth on his earlobe.
I don’t know if it’s the teeth or my words that pull an answering groan out of him and send goosebumps scattering across his skin.
Either way, he does what he’s told, skimming warm hands up my sides, thumbs pausing at the band of my bra before they continue their path up and over the black satin of the cups.
When I feel the friction against my nipples I almost combust. It’s been decades since I slept with anyone, but even accounting for that, I can state with absolute certainty that nobody’s ever made me feel like this.
I feel incandescent, a solar flare licking out into the darkness, so bright that my light could travel for a million years in any direction.
Quinn’s mouth joins his hands, nipping at my skin through the thin fabric, winding me tightly. I’m practically wrestling him to push the fabric down, and the sudden contact of his mouth on my bare skin when I manage it makes me cry out. I feel him smile against my skin when he hears it.
‘You’re perfect,’ he breathes out between kisses, labouring over the syllables like it’s the most important thing he’s ever said. I feel like I should return the sentiment, but the truth is that what’s happening here is better than perfect. It’s real.
It’s real and it’s honest and it’s so much more because of that. I want to memorise it all: the faint traces of salt and chlorine on his skin, the calloused parts of his hands that scratch against me, the rough little noise he makes when I arch into his touch, urging him on.
I want him, and it seems like he’s finally beginning to believe it. All at once he gathers me up, pulling my legs tightly around him and lifting me off the breakfast bar.
‘You have to tell me,’ he murmurs into my ear as he walks. ‘Tell me if you want to stop this, because I don’t know if I’ll be able to.’
‘Don’t stop,’ I whisper urgently. I can hear the whine in my voice at the very idea. ‘I want everything.’
His laugh isn’t more than a breath out, a rush of warm air on my face. ‘Florence,’ he says carefully, grit in his voice. ‘I would give you anything.’
I feel the drop as he sits on the edge of the bed, pulling me with him so that I’m straddling his lap, my knees digging into the soft fabric of his bedspread.
He’s hard – I can feel the ridge of him against my thigh.
The thought of it sends a fresh wave of sensation rippling through my belly, and I rock against him to relieve some of the pressure that’s started to build behind my hips.
The movement makes him throw his head back, a muttered curse falling from his lips before they find mine again.
His hands slip around my back, flicking open my bra strap in one fluid movement. I try not to think about how often he’s done that for the action to be so smooth, but as soon as I feel his hands close around my bare skin it wipes the thought from my mind entirely.
The important thing is that we’re here now, with these versions of ourselves, and it’s perfect.
‘Let me touch you,’ I murmur, lips brushing his, but we lose the contact as he shakes his head.
‘You first.’
I don’t argue.
He lifts me off his lap and throws me up the bed with what could be mistaken for superhuman strength and honestly, I think I could get off from that alone.
But I don’t need to, because when I look down the bed, I’m treated to the sight of him crawling up between my legs.
He trails a finger lightly over the fabric of my underwear and I nearly hit the ceiling.
I could write poems about the smirk that curves his lips then.
It’s a little surprised, a little delighted, maybe a tiny bit smug.
It adds to the look he’s already got going on: the blown-out pupils and mussed hair and the faint flush that spans his cheeks and the top of his chest. I’m a big fan of all the versions of him I’ve seen so far, but this one is something else.
I hold the eye contact as he slips off my underwear, but my eyelids flutter shut as his fingers find me, followed by his mouth, setting a pace and a rhythm that has me seeing stars in minutes.
I starfish out on the bed for a minute or two afterwards, eyes screwed shut, totally incapable of speech or movement. When I open my eyes, I find Quinn sitting back on his heels, watching me with an expression I can’t decipher on his face.
‘What?’ I ask softly, but he doesn’t reply, just shakes his head and carries on looking at me.
I frown and clamber to my knees. It doesn’t occur to me to be self-conscious about my nakedness, even though no one’s seen me like this in almost a century.
I’m drunk on pleasure, the aftershocks of it still rippling through my body, and the only thing I can think about is making Quinn feel like this, too.
‘That was…’
‘Fine?’ he offers, a grate to his voice, the slightest of smiles on his face.
‘Fine, yeah.’ I pull him into a kiss, relishing the scratch of denim against my thighs. ‘Just average, you know?’
He knows I’m lying.
My hands go to his waist, fumbling buttons open until I can slip my hand inside the front of his boxers.
The sound he makes as I close my fingers around him is unholy.
I wish I could memorise it, play it back to myself over and over.
I feel like I could do that for a lifetime and never get bored of it.
‘Fuck, Florence,’ he mutters, as I start to move, long, slow strokes punctuated by half-formed affirmations, abandoned words murmured into my neck, and the subtle roll of his hips into my hand.
He’s a live wire against me – his muscles quivering, a sheen of sweat starting to form on his chest. His heart is pounding so hard I can almost hear it, blood surging through his veins and pulsing under his skin.
I knew that sex with a human would be good, but this is glorious. I don’t know why any of them ever do anything else.
‘Stop,’ he cries all of a sudden, pulling my hand away. For a moment I worry I’ve done something wrong, but then he wriggles out of the rest of his clothes and pulls me against him, peppering my face and neck with hot, open-mouthed kisses as we sink down onto the bed together.
‘S’too good,’ he grits out, exhaling an unsteady breath. ‘You can’t keep… I’ll…’
He’s talking in fragments of sentences, pupils dilated, eyelids heavy. He’s losing control and knowing that it’s because of me is the most beautiful thing I can imagine.
For a moment, just a split second, I’m overwhelmed by it all, and he notices.
Of course he notices.
‘You ok?’ He pulls back a little so he can look me in the eye, his hands stilling on my body.
I nod. I truly believe he would stop right now if I asked him to, and that’s the thing that shakes me back to reality.
His brow furrows. ‘You sure?’
‘Very sure,’ I say, and then as if to illustrate my point, I pull him into a kiss, deep and dirty. His whole body shudders with relief.
‘Thankfuckforthat,’ he breathes, in one continuous exhale, lining up our naked bodies. But just before he’s about to push into me, he pauses.
‘Do we need, you know…?’
I almost laugh. ‘A condom?’
His nod is so serious that this time I actually do laugh. ‘I don’t think that’s something we have to worry about.’
He exhales again, resting his head against mine as if he needs to steady himself. ‘It happened in Twilight.’
Ah yes, Twilight – that paragon of truth and accuracy.
‘That was fiction.’ I snake my hand around the back of his neck, my fingertips burrowing into his hair. ‘I promise you, my ovaries are as dead as the rest of me.’
‘Ok,’ he says a little unsteadily, and then he eases into me and almost immediately freezes. ‘God,’ he says, a ripple of tension travelling through his body. ‘You feel … fuck.’
I don’t have the words for it either. It’s everything, all at once.
His body in my arms, more alive than he’s ever felt.
Every heartbeat, every tremor in his limbs, every low groan vibrating through his chest. The smell of him, surrounding me – spearmint and spices and salt – that same scent of desire, and then something completely new beneath it all.
It’s evocative, addictive – the kind of fragrance that feels like it reaches a whole hand into your chest and grabs your heart hard enough to leave a scar.
When Quinn tightens his grip on me and begins to move, the fist around my heart squeezes. Immortal or not, there’s no way I’m getting out of this unscathed.
But right at this moment, with his fingers dimpling my thighs and his mouth nipping at my throat, I just can’t find it in me to care.