Chapter 12 #3
I pull his face to mine and kiss him hard, reaching for his belt as he makes a sound into my mouth that's pure need when my hand finds him through his jeans.
He's hard and straining against the denim and when I press my palm against him he drops his forehead to my shoulder and exhales like I've wounded him.
"Freddie—"
"I want to feel you inside of me.”
He lifts his head. Looks at me. For a moment he's completely still, the way he was when he first saw the shell on the bar, that raw, desperate, barely-controlled expression. But this time it's not about the shell.
"Are you sure?"
“I want you to fuck me, Liam,” I say, none of my clever lines coming to mind.
He doesn’t take a moment longer to settle between my thighs and I feel the weight of him, the heat of him, and the length of him pressed against me, my breath catching.
"Look at me," he says.
His eyes are wide open, completely unshielded, as I connect my gaze with his.
He pushes into me slowly. So slowly. His jaw clenches and his eyes roll when he’s fully inside of me. "Fuck," he breathes, and the word is half prayer and half destruction. “You’re so wet and tight, beautiful.”
I wrap my legs around him and pull him deeper, his head dropping so his silver hair curtains around us and for a moment neither of us moves.
Just breathes as he presses as deep as he can go, the both of us feeling the enormity of two people who couldn't feel anything, now feeling everything, in a glowing cove at the edge of the world.
Then he moves.
And I understand immediately why this man was dangerous before the curse.
Because the way he moves is not careful, not tentative, not the self-conscious rhythm of someone trying to impress.
He fucks with intention, gripping my hip with one hand, and my hair with the other, as he sets a pace that's slow enough to feel every inch and hard enough that I can't keep quiet.
"Don't hold back," he says against my mouth. "I want to hear you."
I don't hold back.
The sounds I make echo off the cove walls and mix with the waves and I don't care.
He responds to every one; adjusting, deepening, chasing whatever draws the loudest gasp, the hardest grip on his shoulders.
His mouth finds my ear and he says my name like he's breaking it apart and putting it back together. Fred-die.
My nails drag down his back and he hisses, driving into me as I cry out while he does it again and again, finding the angle that makes my vision blur.
“Open your eyes,” he says again, and I obey. His face is above mine, and he's watching me like I'm the only real thing in the world.
"I can feel you," he says, and his voice breaks on the last word. "I can feel everything."
That's what sends me over. Not the angle or the depth or the rhythm, but the look on his face and the crack in his voice that make me believe, for a moment, that the shell is actually right…
I come undone with his name on my tongue and my hand on his chest where his heart should be, and he follows me with a groan that vibrates through both of us, his whole body shuddering, his forehead pressed to mine, his breath ragged and raw and alive.
We stay like that, the glow of the water pulsing softly around us like a heartbeat. Like the way his is locked inside of the blabbering shell that’s uniquely quiet…
Eventually he shifts, rolling onto his back beside me, and we lie on the sand staring at the cavern ceiling while the bioluminescent tide breathes in and out.
"So," I say with a slight pant, because someone has to speak first and it's not going to be the man who's been emotionally vacant for six years. "That happened."
He turns his head to look at me with sand on his jaw, his eyes soft in a way I've never seen. "That happened."
I roll onto my side to face him, tracing a line down his chest with one finger, over the tattoos, down to the place where his heartbeat should be.
He catches my hand against his chest and holds it there, looking at me sideways with sand in his hair and something fragile in his expression.
“You should consider not leaving once the Luminary is done.”
I grin without thought. “Oh, really?”
He leans in to kiss me, flooding my body with pure limerence and infatuation.
“I mean it.”
We stay like that for a while longer, tangled and naked. At some point my head finds his shoulder, and at another point his arm wraps around me, and then I realize that this is the quietest my mind has been in over a year.
When we finally walk back in our dressed, sandy clothes, holding hands without discussion, the house is dark except for the faint glow from the living room.
At the bottom of the loft stairs, he stops me to cup my face in both hands, kissing slow, thorough, the kind of kiss that says he isn't going anywhere.
“Sleep in my bed?”
A shiver rushes through me, as if it’s something scandalous and like we didn’t just have sex on a beach.
“I’m self-conscious about morning breath,” I blurt out, blushing almost right away. “Mine, not yours.”
He laughs again, and I can’t deny that it’s magnetic. “Get your stuff and then meet me in the shower. We’ll sleep down here.”
As if floating on a cloud, I do exactly that.