Chapter Eighteen #2
The climax rolls through me in long waves I had stopped believing my body was capable of.
My spine bows off the bed. Some sound leaves me, unguarded and loud in the small room, and for once in five years, no one hears it but the man responsible.
He works me through every second. When my hands finally push weakly at his shoulders, he presses one last kiss to my hip and comes back up my body, slowly, letting me feel every inch of the journey.
His eyes have gone dark, ringed thin with blue, and he’s shaking. Faintly, everywhere, a man holding a flood behind a door.
“Now,” I tell him.
“Lily.”
“Now.”
Still, he pauses, poised at my entrance, forehead dropping to mine. Whatever prayer he says, he says it into my skin, wordless. Then he pushes into me, one slow, unbroken stroke, and both of us stop breathing.
The stretch of him borders on too much. Five years of solitude live in my body, and he fills every one of them.
He stills, buried deep, giving me time I didn’t ask for but need anyway.
His breath pulses against my temple, and beneath my palms, the muscles of his back stand rigid with the effort of not moving.
“You feel,” he starts, but can’t finish it.
“I know.”
“There are no words for this, in any language. I checked them all.”
“Then stop looking.” My hips roll up against him, and his control breaks.
He moves. The first strokes are deep and slow, dragging sounds out of me I don’t recognize.
He keeps them slow past the point where slow should be possible.
One hand cradles the back of my head, protecting it from nothing, but protecting it anyway.
His mouth moves over my face between strokes.
My brow, the corner of my eye... he is making love to me in the oldest and most literal sense, and it is unbearable.
Hunger I was ready for. A body can brace against being wanted, but nothing braces against being cherished.
Wetness slips from the corner of my eye, and he catches it with his thumb.
“Don’t,” I warn.
“Too late. It’s mine now.”
“Prophet.”
“You held everything for five years.” His hips keep their devastating rhythm. “Hold nothing tonight. There’s no one here but me.”
The last wall in me gives way without ceremony.
My arms lock around his neck, and my face presses into his throat, and if there are tears, he says nothing about them, only gathers me closer and keeps moving.
Being taken apart gently turns out to be far more thorough than the other kind.
He does it with unbearable patience, murmuring my name into my hair, until the tenderness becomes the friction, and the friction becomes need again.
“More,” I tell his throat.
“Say it again.”
“More. All of it. Now.”
Need takes over for both of us. His rhythm turns urgent, driving inside me, and I meet him at every stroke, my nails scoring his shoulders and his name breaking out of me in pieces.
The bed frame knocks against the log wall, and neither of us cares.
Sweat slicks the space between our bodies.
Outside, the coldest night of the year presses against the glass and finds nothing in here it can touch.
He shifts his angle, tilting my hips with one broad hand, and white sparks scatter behind my eyes.
“There,” I gasp. “Right there. Don’t you dare—”
“Never,” he growls, a promise dragged up from somewhere subterranean, and he gives me exactly what I asked for until the coil in me pulls taut.
Before it snaps, I press a hand flat to his chest.
He stops instantly. Even now, even shaking, the obedience in it undoes me almost as much as the rest.
“My turn,” I say.
Understanding moves across his face. He rolls us without leaving my body, settling onto his back, his hands finding my hips as I rise over him. From here, the lamplight falls on us. From here, he has to watch, and I have to let him.
And his expression nearly ends me.
Awe is the clinical term.
Riding him slowly, I take back a rhythm of my own, and his head presses into the furs, throat working.
His hands tighten against my hips, but he doesn’t try to take control.
He lets me set the pace. Lamplight slides over the sweat on his chest, over every scar my palms have already memorized.
Beneath me, he doesn’t look diminished. Whatever Heaven stripped from him, it didn’t take this.
Heat builds again, faster now, stoked by the sight of this ancient creature coming apart beneath me with my name in his mouth. My palms brace against his chest. His heart hammers under them, mortal and racing... mine.
“Lily.” Broken now. “L-Lily, I can’t...”
“Then don’t.”
He surges up to meet me. The rhythm shatters into something raw and entirely human.
His arm wraps across my back, crushing me to his chest, and we drive each other over the edge together.
My cry lands on his shoulder. His release pulses deep with a groan pulled from the bottom of him, and for one suspended moment, the lamplight seems to brighten.
Maybe it is only my vision.
Maybe it is the last of what Heaven left in him, rising to the surface to look at me.
Then there is only him and me, tangled. His heartbeat slams against my breastbone before he starts to shift me off him, careful of my weight, careful of everything.
My arms tighten. “Stay.”
“I don’t want you getting cold.”
“You’re warm. Stay.”
We stay, joined together on top of the furs, blankets, and sheets.
My cheek rests on his chest. His heartbeat moves under my ear, steady and almost human. Almost is close enough. Almost is more real than anything I owned before him. After a long while, I shift, and we move under the covers.
Beneath the furs, my hand finds his and resumes its work, thumb pressing slow circles into the swollen joints. A month ago, he would have told me the ache didn’t matter. Tonight, he turns his hand over and offers me the other side.
“Was it worth it?” I ask his chest. “Trading eternity for a body with bad joints.”
He considers the question with his usual unhurried honesty. “The joints, no. The rest of it...” His hand tightens around mine. “I’d fall again tomorrow, and slower, to enjoy the view on the way down.” His arms come around me with excessive care, the hold of a man convinced I might dissolve.
Over by the stove, Bear heaves himself upright. Nails clicking across the boards, he crosses the room and collapses over our feet with a sigh of profound personal sacrifice.
“He approves,” Prophet says.
“He approved of you before I did. Traitor took one look at you and defected.”
“He has excellent judgment.”
“He eats snow and argues with ravens.”
“Excellent judgment,” Prophet repeats, and the smile moves through his chest where my ear is pressed against.
Silence for a while. The good kind, the kind this cabin never held before him.
Outside, boots crunch past on the perimeter, unhurried.
Somewhere above the ridge, an animal cries once and goes quiet, and I would put money on it wearing a cut.
The mountain leans over all of us, ancient and indifferent, keeping no opinions.
“They heard us,” I say, without much regret.
“Vex certainly did. Ranger too.”
“Wonderful.”
“Rooster will tease us endlessly, more me than you. Hollywood will have started a betting pool.” His fingers trail down my spine. “Someone is collecting tonight.”
Strangely, the thought doesn’t bother me. Five years of guarding every sound I made, and now seven supernatural men on my perimeter know exactly how I sound when I come undone.
My fingers trace the tattoos along his ribs. His hand moves through my hair with the slow patience of a man who has finally been given something to be patient about.
Tomorrow holds fanatics, an ancient angel older and a ritual with my name written into it.
Tonight, there is only one question worth asking...
“What happens after this?”
His hand keeps moving through my hair. Prophet doesn’t pretend to misunderstand, and he doesn’t reach for comfort either, because he knows what comfort costs with me.
“I don’t know,” he says. “But it involves you.”
“Don’t make promises.”
“I’m not making a promise. I’m stating a fact.”
He learned my language months ago, somewhere between the sutures and the snares, and now he speaks it back to me fluently. Promises broke me once. Facts I understand. Facts can be tested.
“Okay,” I say.
The word settles into the room and stays.
Sleep starts pulling at me the way it hasn’t in five years, with another heartbeat for company.
Beyond the frost-furred window, the night stands clear and enormous, stars strewn thick across a sky with nothing left to throw at me.
Alaska has settled into her deepest stillness, the kind she saves for the coldest nights, when even the wind gives up its arguments.
Out there, the temperature could kill a person in an hour.
Out there, believers dream of a broken god.
In here, the stove burns and the furs hold our shared heat. A man who fell out of Heaven breathes slowly and evenly beneath my cheek.
Out there, the temperature could kill a person in an hour.
Neither of us knows what to call this. Nothing in my medical vocabulary covers it, and apparently nothing in his ancient one does either. But right now, under my hands in the dark, it doesn’t need a name.
Whatever tomorrow asks of me, this is what I will be defending.