Chapter 12 #2
The second time was the opposite of the first.
Slow. Deliberate. His mouth mapping her body as if he were memorizing the geography of her, tracing topographic lines from her throat to her collarbone to the valley between her breasts, his lips raising goosebumps in their wake.
Frost-art formed everywhere his lips touched.
Delicate crystalline patterns laced across her collarbone in silver-white filigrees, branching and spreading in real time against her dark skin. She looked down and her breath caught.
There was visible proof on her own body of what he had done to her.
The patterns kept spreading as his mouth moved lower.
Frost-lace across her ribs, intricate as old needlework, each design different.
Spirals near her hip, branching structures along the inside of her arm, and something that looked almost like vines trailing across the soft curve of her stomach.
His cold lips pressed to the inside of her thigh and the frost bloomed outward from the contact, white on dark, ice on warmth, and the sight of herself marked by him, claimed in frost and cold and decorated with the visible evidence of his lost control, made something twist deep in her chest.
His truth-sense meant he found exactly where she needed him before she asked.
The hitch in her breathing led his mouth to the spot three inches above her knee that she hadn't known was sensitive until his cold lips closed over it and the sensation shot straight up her thigh.
The tension in her hips guided his hands.
One braced her thigh open, one slid between her legs, his cool fingers finding her with a precision that should have been impossible and wasn't, because he wasn't guessing.
He was reading her the way he read everything with that quiet, devastating accuracy that left no room for pretense.
For the first time in her life, she was in bed with someone and could not fake a single second.
The realization landed somewhere between his mouth on her breast and his fingers curling inside her.
She couldn't perform for him. Not here. Not with his truth-sense open on her body, catching every sound she made that was real and ignoring every sound she might have manufactured, responding only to the genuine article.
The polish was useless. The craft was useless.
The years of learning to be what people wanted was useless, and all that was left was the raw, unedited Phoebe.
The one who gasped and grabbed fistfuls of sheets and said his name in a voice that wasn't modulated or projected or pitched for anyone's consumption.
Instead of feeling exposed, she felt found.
He slid inside her with aching slowness.
She felt every inch. Cool and deliberate and deep, the ridges of him catching at her with each unhurried push, and her body arched off the mattress to meet him, and his forehead dropped to hers, and they breathed the same air.
Her exhale warmed his cold mouth while his cooled her flushed skin.
The rhythm they found was nothing like the wall.
This was a conversation. Call and response.
Her hips rising to meet his, his hands adjusting the angle, both of them learning the specific language of the other's body in real time.
She wrapped her legs around him, and pulled him deeper and the low, broken sound he made against her mouth was the rawest thing she had ever heard from him.
It was worth every second of the weeks of waiting.
She came the second time with her face pressed to the cold curve of his shoulder, breathing him in.
Peppermint and frost and clean skin. His arms were around her.
The Pine's glow shifted through the window.
And the frost on her body sparkled in the pale light like something from a fairy tale she didn't believe in and was living anyway.
After was quiet and tangled.
His body curved around hers under the wool blanket she'd pulled from the foot of the bed, cold chest against her warm back, his arm heavy across her waist, his breath slow and steady against the nape of her neck.
The Pine's glow pulsed gently through the wide window, silver-blue, warm gold, then back again.
Its shifting light cast across the bedroom and across the frost-art still fading on her skin.
She traced the patterns on her forearm with her fingertips.
Lacework crystals, intricate and strange, melting slowly against her warmth.
Each one was different. Some branching like winter trees.
Some spiraling like the inside of a shell.
One, just above the crook of her elbow, that looked almost organic in its symmetry like fronds radiating from a central point, curling at the tips.
"Did you mean to make that one look like a fern?"
Silence. His breath steady against her neck.