21. Chapter 21
Chapter twenty-one
Fen
I want her.
My hands are shifted. It comes up with the wanting now, the same as it comes up with a threat, and there is no threat in this house.
Only her, down the hall, with the door left unlatched.
Crull is on the porch. His line is low and steady and closing. Thaw has the drives. The house is asleep.
Nothing is coming tonight.
There is a light under Madison's door. She is up. She is always up now.
I go past.
I stand outside Jen's door and my hands will not open.
I have wanted her at every wrong hour there was. On a road. In a truck. Three rooms off a bleeding brother. Every time, I put it away, because there was somewhere to be.
Tonight there is nowhere to be.
I open the door.
She is against the headboard. The lamp is low. My shirt. Her hair down.
She looks up.
The line goes so tight my hands close.
She sees them close.
She does not move back. She sets the book on the nightstand and holds out her hand, palm up.
The dark lines come up at my throat.
Everyone who has ever seen me like this was about to be hurt.
She is looking right at me with her hand out.
I close the door.
Her shoulders come down.
I put one knee on the bed.
Then a hand.
I come up over her and she goes back into the pillows and lets me. Her eyes stay on mine the whole way.
I get my hand in her hair and kiss her and it is not soft. She makes a sound into my mouth. Her hands go under my shirt, flat on my back, and her slate comes up under her skin where her body is against mine.
I take the shirt off her. Mine. She lifts her arms for it.
I put my mouth on my mark at her sternum.
Her breath changes under it.
Her body under my hands is warm and dense and not human and it is hers. I want all of it.
"Fen —"
She arches up with my name in her throat.
I go down her.
Her stomach. Her hip. The inside of her thigh, where the slate goes thin and the skin jumps.
I put her legs over my shoulders. She is already moving. I lay my arm across her stomach and hold her down and put my mouth on her.
She is wet and open and hot and she goes off in under a minute. Both hands in my hair. Her heels driving into my back. A sound out of her that is not the voice and is not words.
I do not stop.
I take her through it. My tongue on her. Two fingers in her, curled, and I find the place that takes her hips off the bed and I stay there.
She grinds up into my mouth and swears at me.
I hold her down and let her.
She comes the second time with my name and her thighs shaking around my head, and she is still going when I come up her body and pin her wrists to the pillow.
She keeps her eyes on mine.
"Fen." Her own voice. Wrecked.
"Have me," she says.
I set my teeth to her skin. Mine. I bite to the edge of breaking and no further.
She rears up and bites me back. Her teeth at my sternum, over the seal she put there the first night. Hard. Hers, found again.
I growl into her mouth.
She growls back.
I push into her.
She opens and takes all of me and I hold still. All the way in. Her wrists in my hands. Both marks full and hot between us. The bond so loud.
She could put me through the wall. She is lying under me with her hands in mine, letting me.
I move.
I do not hold back.
I take her hard into the mattress and she takes it and asks for more with her hips. Her legs come up around my back. Her wrists stay where I put them.
My mouth drops to her throat and stops.
Daron. Dean. Their teeth are already there.
Tonight, everywhere else on her is mine.
I take her breast in my mouth and bite. Not the edge. Teeth. She screams and her back comes off the bed and she clamps down on me so hard I lose a stroke.
She likes it.
I do it again, lower, under the curve, and she says something that is not a word.
I drag my mouth down to the patch on her sternum and put my teeth in it.
My mark. The one I made. I bite it the way I have wanted to bite it since it set, and she goes off around me with her hands fisted in the pillow and her whole body arched up into my mouth.
I am not finished with her.
I pull out of her. She makes a sound like I took something out of her chest.
"Fen — don't —"
I get my hands under her thighs and drag her flat down the bed and open her up and put my mouth on her again.
She is soaked. She is swollen. She tastes like her and like me and I want it in my mouth more than I have wanted anything in my life. I lick into her and take everything that is in there and she comes on my tongue in seconds, shaking, one hand slapping down on the bed.
I do not stop for that either.
I put my teeth in the inside of her thigh where the slate goes thin. She screams. I hold her open and lick her through it and bite the other side and hold her down while she thrashes and she is still saying my name.
Bruises. Mine. She will have them for a week and every one of them is from my mouth.
I come back up her and bite her shoulder and shove into her again, all the way, and she takes it and swears at me and pulls me down.
The bed goes into the wall. I hear it and I do not stop and neither does she.
"Look at me," I say. Not the voice. Want.
She does.
She is close. I feel it building before she does.
"Give it to me."
And she does.
All of it.
She comes around me looking at me and she is screaming and I am growling into her throat, and that is what ends me. The look.
I go.
I do not soften.
She feels it. Her eyes come open.
"Fen."
I am not going to stop.
She reaches up and puts her hand flat on my face.
"Don’t stop" she says.
I get my hands under her and flip her.
She goes. She puts her knees under herself and her forearms down and her hair falls off her neck, and every mark on her is showing.
I get a hand flat on her stomach and haul her back onto me.
There are no words left.
Heat. Hers.
Mine.
I drive into her with my chest down over her back and my hand spread on her stomach and my other hand fisted in the sheet beside her head, because the claws are all the way out and they are not going in her. They go through the mattress. I do not let go of it.
She reaches and finds my wrist. The one in the sheet.
She holds on to it.
She has my hand in hers with the claws out and buried in her bed and she does not let go.
I bite the back of her shoulder and she screams into the sheet and shoves back onto me for more.
I give it to her.
Her back arches and she puts her forehead down on her arms and takes it, and her whole body is going, and she says my name into the sheet until it is not a name anymore.
"Fen. Fen —"
I cannot answer her.
I put my mouth on the back of her neck. The one place on her nobody has ever marked.
I do not bite it.
Not tonight.
She breaks under me a third time and I go with her, all the way down, growling into her neck with my hand still spread on her stomach and hers still around my wrist, and everything I have ever held comes out of me and there is nothing left in me at all.
We come down.
My hands are open. The claws are gone.
There is not a mark on her I did not mean.
I stay inside her through the after. My face in her neck. Both of us breathing like we ran something.
I gave her all of it and I am still here.
Her hand comes over mine.
Both marks are cool.
First time since the seal.
Cool. Not gone.
And then, without deciding to, without checking the dark, I sleep.
I half-wake once. The dark. Her breathing on my chest. I reach for the threat.
There is not one. I go under.
The next time, the window is gray, and the whole night has closed over me with no break in it, and I lie still and feel how strange it is, and sleep again.
The room is full of morning and she is gone from the bed.
The field is at peace. Six lines. All settled.
The sheet is in pieces. There are four holes in the mattress on her side. I find my shirt and go.
She is at the counter with a mug. Her hair up. My shirt. The mark showing where the collar opens. She sees me. She does not say anything.
I cross to her and put my hand on the side of her face and she leans into it.
"I slept," I say.
She goes still.
She sets the cup down. Her eyes go over my face and go wet, and she does not do anything about it. She turns her face into my palm.
"I have not been afraid since you claimed me."
She waits.
"Last night I was not afraid asleep either."
Her breath goes out against my hand.
Down the hall a door opens. Madison, up, on her feet, one hand at the small of her back, moving at the speed she moves now. Only a couple of days left.