Chapter 7 #2
He laid me back against the pillows. The linens were cool for about four seconds before my skin ruined them.
I stared up at the pale ceiling and its plaster molding, no harsh overhead light anywhere in the room, only the low gold of the lamps, and tried to reassemble something like composure while Miner settled between my legs.
"Spread for me," he said.
I did. There was no version of me left that was going to pretend otherwise, and the small clinical part of me that would normally have had an opinion about it had gone quiet hours ago.
His fingers came first. Two, sliding into the slick mess Isak had left, curling up into the swollen oversensitive place that made my legs shake against his shoulders.
He watched my face while he did it, reading closely with intent to remember.
The assessment I kept bracing for never came.
Then he lowered his head and replaced his fingers with his mouth, and that was the end of the composure.
He licked into me without hesitation or performance, gathering Isak's release with his tongue before his lips found my clit.
He used the broad rhythm Denil had taught him, pressure spreading instead of sparking.
The doubled sensation of being cleaned and pleasured at once sent white behind my eyes.
My hips came off the mattress. His hands hooked under my thighs and held me open, patient even when I shook.
Applied to this, his patience was devastating.
The first orgasm broke fast, the climb from Isak's lap finally cresting as my heel dug into Miner's back.
He never lifted his head. He gentled me through the aftershocks, mouth still working while two fingers slid inside and curled into the swollen ridge Denil had told him about on the first pass.
The angle turned everything liquid. He set a rhythm between mouth and hand, tongue flat and broad on my clit, fingers stroking that one place in slow, deliberate pulls.
The second climb came from deeper and took its time.
I could hear the wet sound of his mouth on me, my own breath breaking apart, the small involuntary noises he made when my fingers tightened in his hair.
When it broke, it rolled through me long and deep, leaving me shaking against his mouth with my hands wrecking his neat blond hair.
He worked me through every aftershock before he finally lifted his head.
His mouth was wet, his eyes darker than their usual blue-gray, and the mint and sea salt of him had shifted warmer against my skin.
He stayed between my thighs, breathing rough through parted lips, wanting no longer hidden by composure.
"Do you want to taste me," he asked.
I nodded. I didn't have a voice for it.
"Words, Nitsa."
"Yes." It came out rough. "Yes. Taste you."
He shifted without ceremony, hips settling near my face as his mouth returned between my thighs.
One hand filled the gaps his tongue left, and I took him into my mouth.
He was hard, hot, heavier than his composure had suggested.
The groan he made against me vibrated straight through my whole body.
We moved together like that, his rhythm steady, mine less so, each sensation feeding the next until the loop tightened.
I could taste the salt of him and smell my honeysuckle everywhere, on him, on all of them.
Somewhere inside that loop, his loss of composure became one of my favorite things about the last two days.
Every hitch of his hips, every roughened breath, felt like something I'd earned off a man who gave nothing away.
His rhythm broke first. His hips stuttered against my lips, once, twice, and his hand pressed flat to my thigh.
"Nitsa. I'm close. Your call."
I kept him in my mouth. He came with a sound he couldn't hold back, and I swallowed everything. Afterward he pressed his forehead to my thigh and stayed there for a full breath, shaking. Miner, shaking. I left my hand in his ruined hair and stared at the ceiling until my throat eased.
"You took him apart." Denil's voice, closer than before.
He'd moved down the bed while I wasn't tracking him, and his scent had gone thick enough to taste, pine and citrus and the resin under it.
"That's not easy. He's the strongest one of us.
" A pause, then rougher: "You did that. I want you facing me this time. "
Miner lifted his head, pressed one absurdly gentle kiss to the inside of my knee, and then his hands were under my arms and at my hip again, helping me up and across the bed with the same steadiness, steadier than his own breathing right then.
He guided me over Denil's lap, my knees settling either side of those heavy thighs, and Denil caught my face in both hands and kissed me.
Slow. Deep. Nothing like the pace I knew was coming, and the contrast was the whole point. I understood that even through the haze. He kissed me like he meant something by it, and then his hands went to my hips and pressed me down onto him.
My body recognized him. We’d had sex half a dozen times already, but never like this. I hadn’t been able to face him before.
My hips lost their rhythm the moment I tried to hold his gaze. Denil caught it. With one solid, easy movement, he turned us until I was on my back.
He drove into me hard, adjusting the angle by degrees as he watched my face. He stopped short of the last inch and waited. I rolled my hips forward twice, taking more of him on my own terms. Only then did he give me all of it. When he bottomed out, I went so full the room blurred at the edges.
His knot was already swelling. I felt it catch at my entrance, thick and insistent, and his forehead dropped to mine.
"Ready to lock," he said. Gravel. Though I didn’t know if he was asking or telling.
I pressed my forehead harder to his. "Yes."
He pushed the last of it in and swelled hard inside me, sudden and full, the answer my body had been begging for since the first cramp hit.
He held my hips still while the knot seated, one hand firm on my flesh and the other braced beside my head.
His breath came rough against my mouth. When the lock settled, he exhaled like a man setting down something he'd carried a long way.
His thumbs moved in slow circles on my hipbones.
The gentleness of it, against the blunt fact of his knot inside me, went straight through whatever I had left.
For a moment, nothing existed beyond his knot, his thumbs, the rough warmth of his breath. Then Miner's voice pulled the rest of the room back. He'd settled beside us while I tracked nothing but Denil.
"Isak's out," he murmured. He waited until my eyes found his before continuing. "Heat exhaustion. In all the time I've done this with him, I've never once seen him hit it." His eyes held mine. "You're the first."
I turned my head. Isak was sprawled where I'd left him, dark hair a wreck, breathing already gone slow and deep, one arm curled toward the space I'd occupied.
He looked younger asleep. Less like the man who turned everything into a joke, more like someone who had spent two days paying close attention and finally run the tank dry on me.
You're the first. The words went in through the haze, and I let them land.
First answered the question I'd been too proud to ask since the door opened: whether I was a person to them, or a protocol with my name penciled in.
Two days in, I'd started to wonder if I was just this week's omega.
Whether the water and the check-ins and the hands that waited for my answers were a routine they ran for whoever pinged the app, practiced smooth and handed to me like it was mine.
But no one else had done this to Isak. First meant singular.
It meant I had reached something in him no one else had.
I let myself have that. I told the part of me that distrusted every soft thing on principle to be quiet, and for once, it listened.
Then Miner eased up off the bed. I hadn't heard him rise, his beta quiet apparently extending to how he crossed a floor.
He went to the black duffel slumped open on the dresser, its zipper no longer as strained, and I watched him dig through it, come up with a powder packet, and mix it into a bottle of water with small, precise motions.
"The magical nanny bag," I managed. My voice had gone to gravel too. "The one that has everything."
"Isak's," Miner said, not looking up, twisting the cap and shaking the bottle.
"He built it. Packs it himself, restocks it after every heat.
We all just use it." He said it with fond certainty, and the warmth of it slipped under my ribs.
This was their life, already built, already stocked, already shared.
He crossed back to Isak's side of the bed, slid a hand under Isak's head, lifted it, and held the bottle to his lips.
Isak drank in his sleep, only small sips.
Miner tilted the bottle by fractions and waited between each swallow.
No one was watching him do it, or so he thought.
He kept one hand under Isak's head until the bottle was mostly empty, set it on the nightstand, then adjusted the pillow before easing him down.
Watching that quiet, habitual care felt more intimate than having his cock in my mouth.
The gentleness tightened my throat. I looked away before my face could give me up.
Then Miner came back around the bed and stretched into the open space at my side, fitting himself against me where Denil didn't reach. He set his mouth to the side of my throat. I stopped thinking about anything at all.
Somewhere in the last two days the math had stopped working.