Chapter 18 #2
I kissed her throat. Then her collarbone, and I stayed there, because I'd been staring at this exact line of bone for weeks, memorizing it across conference tables and in corridors and through car windows, and now my mouth was on it and she was breathing my name and I couldn't move on until I'd learned it properly.
I kissed the space between her breasts where her heart was pounding, felt the rhythm of it against my lips, and worked my way lower, slow, mapping every inch of skin I'd spent months imagining.
When my mouth found her breast, she arched off the bed and the sound she made rewired something in my brain permanently.
I stayed there. Tasted her. Traced slow circles with my tongue that made her fingers twist in my hair, her breathing fragment into pieces.
I moved to the other side, gave it the same attention.
Symmetry mattered. Thoroughness mattered.
The sounds she made mattered more than anything I’d heard in thirty-two years.
My mouth moved lower. Her stomach, where the muscles jumped under my lips. Her hip bone, where I bit gently and her whole body jolted. The inside of her thigh, where her skin was impossibly soft, her breathing closer to whimpering now.
I looked up at her from between her thighs.
She was looking down at me, eyes dark and glazed, chest heaving, lips parted around a breath she hadn't finished letting go of.
I had spent years building worlds obsessed with getting light and shadow right, and nothing I'd ever rendered came close to the way she looked right now.
"Tell me what you want." I said it against her inner thigh and watched goosebumps spread across her skin.
"You know what I want."
"I want to hear you say it."
"Jace. Please."
"Say it, Anna."
"I want your mouth on me." The sound of those words in her voice made me groan against her thigh. I gave her what she asked for.
I was thorough. Paid attention to every response, every shift of her hips, every change in her breathing.
Data mattered, and it told me exactly what she liked.
Slow circles. Pressure. My tongue flat and steady.
The place that made her legs shake. I gave her all of it, relentless, my hands gripping her thighs, holding her open, holding her still.
She came with my name on her lips. Her back bowed off the bed, her thighs clamped around my head. The sound she made was raw, beautiful. I felt it in my entire body, the vibration of her pleasure moving through me like music through piano strings.
I kissed my way back up. Her stomach. Her ribs. The valley between her breasts. Her throat. Her jaw. Her mouth. She kissed me back. She could taste herself on my lips. The intimacy of it, the closeness, the complete absence of disgust, was staggering.
She reached for my shirt. I let her take it.
Her fingers worked the buttons, her knuckles brushing my chest with each one.
Every point of contact was clean fire. She pushed the shirt off my shoulders, put her hands on my bare chest. The feeling of her palms against my skin was overwhelming and perfect.
Nothing in my body flagged it as contamination. Nothing. Not a whisper.
Her hand trailed lower. Down my stomach.
Across the waistband of my jeans. I stopped breathing.
She looked at me, asking permission with her eyes.
I nodded because I didn’t trust my voice.
Her hand found me through the denim. The pressure of her palm against me made my forehead drop to her shoulder.
A sound came out of me that was barely human.
She unbuttoned my jeans and slid her hand inside. When her fingers wrapped around me, bare skin against bare skin, I groaned her name into her neck. My hips rocked forward into her grip. I was leaking against her fingers, wet and hot, the physical evidence of what she did to me.
My brain did what it always did. Classified.
Assessed. Every bodily fluid I'd ever encountered had been filed under threat, every natural human response cataloged as something to manage, to clean, to control.
But this was her. This was my body responding to her, and for the first time in my life, the alarm didn't sound.
No revulsion. No flinch. No desperate inventory of what needed to be sanitized.
Just warmth, and want, and the stunning, disorienting silence of a mind that had been screaming for twenty-four years finally going quiet.
My eyes stung. I didn't wipe them.
"You’re shaking," she whispered against my temple.
"I know." My voice was wrecked. "I can’t stop."
"You don’t have to stop." She stroked me slowly, her thumb tracing the tip where I was wet. The pleasure was so intense my vision blurred. "You don’t have to control anything right now."
Her hand moved again. Learning me the way I’d learned her.
My breathing fractured. My hips rocked into her grip.
Every stroke pulled me closer to an edge I wasn’t ready to fall over because I didn’t want it to end like this.
Not in her hand. Not when she was lying underneath me, warm and open, her body still trembling from what I’d done to her.
I caught her wrist. Stopped her.
She looked at me, confused, lips swollen, eyes so dark I could barely find the brown.
"I need to be inside you." The words came out rough, stripped of everything but the truth. "Right now, Anna. I need to be inside you."