21. Chapter 21 #2
Then he isn't. His hand comes up into my hair and the other spreads flat across my back and he kisses me like a man who's been thinking about it since a dining hall in September of my first year.
And then he stops. Both hands on my face, his forehead against mine, breathing like he's been running.
"Say it properly," he says.
"What?"
"You've had a year of people deciding things about you." His thumb moves once along my cheekbone. "Say it, so neither of us ever wonders."
So I put both hands flat on his chest and look up at him.
"I want you, Soren." My hands aren't steady and I don't care. "Not the bond. You."
He kisses me thoroughly, and slowly, walking me backward until my shoulders find the wall — and then keeps me there, one hand braced beside my head, and takes his time about it.
"Bedroom," I manage.
"In a minute."
"Soren—"
"In a minute," he says against my jaw, and drags his mouth down my throat, and I lose the thread entirely.
He gets my shirt off standing there in my sitting room. Every button, slowly, and he watches my face the whole time — not my body, my face, checking each one — and it should be clinical and instead it takes the legs out from under me.
"You're staring."
"Yes."
"Is that—"
"I've had a very long time of not looking at you," Soren says. "I'm going to look at you."
Then his eyes go down, and stay down, and take their time, and I stand against my own wall in the lamplight and let him.
"God," he says, quietly. Almost annoyed about it.
I get my hands under the hem of his shirt and shove it up, and he lets go of the wall long enough to pull it off over his head, and when my palms go flat against his stomach he makes a noise I intend to think about for the rest of my life.
"Bedroom," I say again.
He picks me up.
One arm under me, my legs round his waist, and he carries me through and puts me down on the bed and follows me down.
And then he slows right down.
His mouth at my shoulder. My collarbone.
Down. The inside of my wrist, below three dark marks, for a long moment that makes my chest ache and which he does not explain.
The rest of my clothes come off one thing at a time, and by the time I'm bare underneath him I am shaking and he has not gone anywhere near where I want him.
"Soren."
"Mm."
"You're doing it on purpose."
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because you flinch when I do this," he says, and puts his mouth just under my ribs on the left, and I arch straight up off the mattress. "And I want to know how many of those there are."
He learns me the way he taught me to shift. He finds where something starts, and goes back to it, and does it again, and watches, and does it once more — and by the fourth time I have my fist in the sheet and I've stopped forming sentences.
Then he stops.
"Tell me," he says.
"What?"
"What you want." His hand is on my hip and it has not moved in ten seconds and I want to scream.
So I do.
I say it out loud, specifically, and I feel my whole face go hot doing it — and Soren doesn't smile, and doesn't tease me, and doesn't make me say it twice.
He just moves down the bed and does exactly what I asked for.
Both hands hold my hips down when I try to come off the bed, and after about ninety seconds I stop caring about anything.
"Soren—"
He doesn't stop. He doesn't slow. And when I say his name a second time in a voice I don't recognize he makes a low sound against me that I feel all the way up my spine, and that's what finishes it — I come apart with both hands in his hair and my heels dug into the mattress, and he stays exactly where he is until I've stopped.
Then he comes back up and kisses me, and I taste myself on him, and I get my hand between us and go for the front of his trousers.
"Jessica—"
"Do not," I say, "tell me in a minute ."
"I wasn't going to."
He gets rid of the rest of his clothes fast, which is the first thing he's done quickly all night, and then he's over me again with his forearms braced either side of my head and his whole body against mine and nothing in the way any more.
And he stops there.
"Look at me," he says.
I do.
"You know what this is."
"Yes."
"Once it's done, it's done. There isn't a version where either of us takes it back."
"I know exactly what it is." I get my hand round the back of his neck. "Soren. I'm not the one who needed all this time."
"No," he says. "You're not."
And then he's inside me, and it's slow, and it isn't careful and I hear the breath go out of him against my ear like something finally letting go.
I have a moment to think, damn he's big and then he moves.
Every stroke makes me see stars. He keeps his weight on one forearm and gets his other hand under my thigh and adjusts the angle by about an inch, watching my face, and when I make a noise about it he stays exactly there and doesn't move again.
"There," he says.
I get my ankles locked behind him and pull, and he goes deeper and his forehead drops to my shoulder, and after that it stops being deliberate for either of us.
It builds and builds. His hand slides up to fold around mine against the pillow and stays there. My whole world narrows to the weight of him, the sound he makes every time I say his name — and I feel it coming a long way out, gathering, low and hot and enormous.
"Soren—"
And I come, hard, with him still moving, my hand crushed in his — and he follows me with my name against my throat.
And then the seal takes.
It goes through the middle of me like a struck note, it's every part of me that has been straining toward this man arriving at once and settling.
He drops his weight onto his forearms and stays there, over me, shaking, with his face in my hair.
"Hey," I say.
"Give me a moment."
"Take two."
Afterwards, I lie there staring at the ceiling and feeling him through our bond. He's here. In the way Luke is there and Torres is there.
Soren's thumb moves once, slowly, on my hip, and I drift off.