Chapter 29
Now
Bea
The devotion in Silas’s face sends a flash of lightning to my heart and migrates to thunder in my bones. I feel entirely raw, something stripped beyond naked. I want him in the most acute, limb-suffusing way, and I want him to feel wanted more.
I kiss my way over every scar, replaying the day in my mind. Replaying the years. Wishing I could imbue him with everything I feel through each touch. Gratitude, desire, hope, and other things I could put a name to but won’t just yet. I reach his lips again, and he lets out a hungry rasp.
“How can I have you?” I ask, the hard tip of him grazing my belly. “With my hands?” I kiss the seam of his mouth, the closed lids of his eyes. “With my mouth?”
His gaze rakes over me, and his breathing calms. Something solidifies in his expression, like he’s given himself over. “I want your mouth,” he says, resolute, now. He stretches behind him and grabs a pillow in one swift move. “For your knees.”
I shift back onto my heels and tuck it underneath me, return my lips to a particularly deep scar on one of his kneecaps.
I painstakingly roam over every brutal, beautiful part of him.
Both of his thick, strong thighs, one hairy, the other smooth and scarred.
Always two things at once. I tease over across his lap enough times until he finally says, low and gritty with need, “Your mouth, Bea. Take me inside.” I smile up at him through my lashes and press a light kiss to his base, taking him in hand and giving him one slow pump.
His jaw works, but he doesn’t blink when I slide him into my mouth, taking him as deeply as I can.
My eyes drift closed while I savor every bit of the act.
His salty taste, the swipe of his thumb over my cheek where he stretches me, the way he sweeps and holds my hair to the side to clear his view, the flex of his thighs beneath my palms and the noises he bites off whenever I hit my limit and gag around him, his harsher sounds whenever I manage to swallow him deeper.
“Dreamed about this so many times,” he murmurs.
“Wished for it, too. I’m a filthy, selfish bastard.
Wished for this so many fucking times. Been wanting this mouth since I was fifteen and felt like a deviant for it—ah, fuck.
Mouth is so hot and wet, Bea. God, you feel so good.
Too beautiful to be real. Unbelievable.”
Noisy. I love it. I come off him an inch when he says this last thing and ask, “Another nickname?”
His stare goes molten, his smile dazed. “Just a truth.”
He gathers all my hair at one point a while later and pulls me away from him, just the right amount of rough.
I love that he knows I can take it. We’re both panting and sweat-beaded, tears running from the corners of my eyes.
He holds my chin and pins my mouth open with his thumb over my tongue. “Can I come here, too?”
“Yes.”
I bow my head back onto him, and he tilts beneath me, matching my rhythm, stuffing himself deeper each time I descend and urging me faster by my hair.
Using me for what he needs. This—this is the most selfish he’s been with me, and I love it.
The hand I’m not using digs into his hip.
I don’t think about whether this is pretty or not, don’t care about whether the sounds we make are sexy or not.
Not if he’s taking what he wants. Not when every muscle of him goes rigid and he comes with a deep, relieved groan.
“Show me,” he gravels. “Let me see.”
I open my mouth so he can see before I swallow. He blows out a gruff curse and urges me up and over so we’re both half-laid atop the bed, him catching his breath against my hairline, me catching mine against his neck.
Time blurs until he’s rearranged us diagonally across the mattress, kissing down my throat and along my collarbone, lifting a nipple to his mouth and giving me a long, languid suck.
He makes his way down the line of my stomach, his stubble scratching a path, his tongue dipping into my navel before he treks back up.
He teases me until I’m writhing, letting out whiny, strangled gasps.
“We don’t have to do anything else,” I breathe. “That was enough for me.” It is so transparent that I’m fishing for more. My mind is blacked out with need.
He hums a laugh and bites my nipple. “Fat chance.” His fingertips travel up my inner thigh and brush across my center before he clutches at my hip.
“You forget it’s my birthday?” Another brush.
A whine from me. “You’re gonna give me what I want the most—now.
” He kisses the spot where my hip meets my thigh, and another animal sound slips through my gritted teeth.
“How do I get to have you, Bea? With my good hands? With my bad, noisy mouth?”
“Both,” I plead.
He presses himself up to his knees and takes mine in his palms, parting them until I’m spread out on display to his specifications.
He seems to like looking, watching. Taking in every curve and corner of me.
I reach down to touch myself, and he snatches my wrist, licks my own wetness off my finger like an afterthought, like I belong to him, so that does, too.
His fingers replace mine, circling my clit, finding a pattern between this and toggling, twisting his palm to slip two big fingers inside me, his thumb keeping a rhythm.
The fingers inside me don’t move other than hooking and keeping pressure where I want it, until instinct and desperation start to take over and I reach down with both hands to clasp his forearm, rock myself in little arches, grinding myself sloppily against the heel of his palm.
My eyes roll open and find him watching my face now, placing an open-mouthed kiss to the inside of my knee.
Watching my face while I use him, fucking myself with his hand.
He twists again, and I bite off a gasp when he slides his wet fingers out of me and circles the ring of muscle a few inches lower.
Circles and circles, just with the blunt tip of his finger, two others dipping back into my cunt, his thumb still attending my clit.
Until I’m pressing myself back into it, hips tilting, resistance giving way until he’s sliding into me, down to the knuckle.
He rumbles out an appreciative curse, and I let out a sharp gasp.
I’m so unbelievably full, so tethered to him.
Feel so good I want to hold off coming just to make it last longer and tell him as much.
“Give me it, Bea. I’ll just make you come again.”
I do, in a blistering wave that sends a cry from my lips and more of my slick over him.
Before I can settle, he’s scooping his hands beneath my ass, dragging a wet path around my thigh and holding me open, bringing me to his face.
I’m overstimulated and weakly tug at his hair, but I’m tripping into another orgasm before I can do anything about it.
I distantly hear my own cursing, guttural, unpracticed sounds blending with his enthusiastic, hungry ones.
He does it to me again, keeps on eating me until I’m reduced to nothing but rushing blood beneath skin and mumbling, whining, “Pleasepleaseplease,” and “I can’t, I can’t,” and “Yeah I love that I love your mouth it’s so good oh god I love your shoulders I love your hands.
” When I’m completely out of my mind, buzzing so frenetically it borders numbness, I drunkenly cry out, “I want you inside me, just put it in, just the tip,” and feel him growl into my slit before he straightens, takes himself in hand, and, with two hard pumps, comes across my belly and chest.
We look at each other like we’re spellbound. He looks over the mess he made of me, and I drink in the wreck he’s become. His eyes slam shut like he’s in agony.
“What’s wrong?” I whisper. Insane, given how loud I’ve just been.
“Want it branded into my memory,” he says grimly. Like this might be the only time we see each other this way, and shit, maybe it is. That’s the risk of acting on impulse without ironing out expectations, first. I still wouldn’t regret it.
He kisses me briefly on the lips and chin before he rises from the bed, crossing the room to his dresser. I know what he’s getting before he does it, and it still makes my heart pinball in my chest.
He uses my underwear, my lacy black thong he’s held on to for eight years, to clean me up.
“This probably shouldn’t turn me on as much as it does,” he says, a huffed laugh lifting it at the end. “I’ll wash them for you.” He disappears into his closet and comes out in a fresh pair of sweats, a long-sleeved fire department shirt in his hands. “Will you stay? Sleep in here with me?”
“Yeah, I’ll stay.” I move to take the shirt he’s offering, but he proceeds to dress me himself.
When my head emerges, he’s wearing a shy smile, bordering on nervous.
He towers over me, one knuckle lingering under my chin, gaze going soft and intent at once.
He kisses me again, just a single press, hesitating like he might say something, before he flicks off the lamp and climbs into the bed.
He slides me into his chest, my back to his front.
I can feel the drum of his heartbeat belying his outward calm.
It sends a weighty inevitability through me, like accepting the tickle in your throat is the precursor for a cold.
We’ve thoroughly ruined our friendship, without a doubt.
At least, we’ve stretched it into something else that it can’t spring back from. Not this time.
Now that my body is more than sated, my head starts kicking into overdrive.
“Si?”
He rubs his chin along the top of my head. “Yeah?”
“What are we going to do about this?” I turn in his arms to face him, and he instantly hugs me closer. My mouth lands against his throat, and it’s automatic, the way I kiss him here.