34. Avoidable Things #3
We stand apart for several moments, and then he steps deeper into the den, removing his shoulder fur and tossing it aside.
He sinks to the bed and takes off his arm guards, one after the other.
I watch for a moment and then I join him, moving forward carefully until I’m bending to remove one of his boots, tugging it off and then reaching for the next.
He holds still, watching me as I do this for him with a burning intensity I feel like the sun.
He whispers my name. “Arden.”
I look up at him, one hand on his knee and the other on his calf as I wait for him to say whatever it is he’s going to say. His gaze holds fast to me, the violet-black pools of his eyes fathomlessly deep. I feel like a stone sinking into a deep well.
I wait as long as I can, falling into his gaze, and then lift up onto my knees, my palms skimming, traveling over his legs.
I scoot between his splayed thighs. “Tage,” I breathe over his lips, conveying everything in the sound of his name: my longing, my hunger, my gratitude for the arrival of him in my life, an answer to the loneliness. And under all of that . . . it’s good-bye.
His hand descends toward my face slowly, like he’s moving underwater.
I brace myself for the touch, but it never comes. Instead, he seizes a strand of dark hair, holding it between his forefinger and thumb like he’s testing its texture.
“I could lose myself in your eyes.” He releases my hair and grazes my cheekbone beneath one eye with his thumb.
Butterflies spin through my belly.
His lips curve in a slow smile and my heart squeezes. It’s too much . . . and yet not enough. I crave his touch, contact. I need it in a way I need air. Need it in a way I needed to be seen for years.
His touch gentles, sliding lower to brush the cut left from Cyphus’s signet ring. His expression clouds for a moment, and I know he’s thinking about this wound . . . about how I was hurt and how he wasn’t there for me. “Never again,” he growls.
I push up on my knees, closing the last bit of distance between us and crush my lips over his with far more skill than our first kiss—was that just last night?
Since then, I’ve become quite proficient at loving him. Can an expert be made in so short a time? It feels so right, so natural between us. Even if we are the furthest thing from natural.
I feel an aching pinch in my chest knowing I will be gone from this place hours from now. Part of me longs to put off my escape just a few more days. What would it hurt?
What are days when I’m staring at years—more years than what I’d already endured—of solitude?
The worst kind of solitude, too, surrounded by others, by loved ones, and yet concealed to them.
I have that waiting for me. Again. Could it not wait a little longer?
I’ve had so little pleasure, could I not take this for myself?
Logic, ever reasonable, noses its head through the dirt. Except it would only get harder the longer I wait, the longer I stay, the longer I have this . . . him.
I tear my lips away from his with a gasp.
He chases after them, but I press my fingertips to his lips, needing to say it, needing to get this out between us because later, when I am gone and he thinks back, when he remembers this moment, it will give him some peace.
At least that’s my hope.
Just as I hope it will give me peace.
“I would never expose you.” I’ve said it before, but this time I pledge it with an earnestness and fervor I long him to feel and believe in the marrow of himself. “Any of you.”
“I know,” he says lightly, quickly, too quickly, as though he doesn’t have time or patience to hear this when the only thing he wants is my lips. He dives for my mouth again, but I need more acknowledgment than that from him.
“Tage,” I say insistently, my fingers pressing over his lips with renewed force. I wait for him to look into my eyes again. “I would never do anything to hurt you,” I promise.
He studies me and nods slowly, speaking this time with more gravity, his lips moving against my fingers. “I know.”
A weight lifts from me at this acknowledgment, and then my fingers melt away from him and we’re kissing again.
Deep, endless kisses.
He wraps the thick bands of his arms around me and lifts me up. He falls onto his back, taking me with him. Sprawled over his bigger body, we kiss and kiss and kiss, our heads turning and angling as our mouths devour and deepen every which way in a desperate quest to consume each other.
Still. It’s not enough.
Not even close.
Our hands fumble and tear at our clothes, shedding garments, mine, his . . . like hated fetters keeping us from each other. Until flesh singes flesh. Merges.
I’m achingly aware of the transience of this moment, our fleeting time together, and I wonder if he has some sense of it, too. Or is my urgency merely feeding his?
I sink down onto him, his cock filling me, sending out eddying waves of pleasure, growing and expanding, hitting fresh nerves with every movement.
We rock, surge, thrust, push and pull, drag and soar.
It’s a feverish mating, nothing soft or gentle, and I wonder if it would ever be that way between us or only ever this—a wild, shattering coupling.
I’ll never know.