Chapter 12 #2
Her cry tears through the quiet morning. I add a second finger, stretching her carefully while my mouth stays on her clit. Her thighs start to shake. Her body tightens around my hand, every muscle drawing taut, and I know she's there.
"That's it," I breathe against her. "Give it to me."
She comes with her back arched off the wool and my name breaking out of her.
And she lights up. Not just a shimmer. The whole of her.
A clean blue-white flare turns her skin luminous beneath my hands.
Her inner muscles pulse hard around my fingers. I keep my mouth on her and work her through every last contraction until the tension leaves her thighs and her fingers loosen in my hair.
The light fades slowly. I press one last soft kiss against her before moving up her body.
Her chest is still heaving when I settle beside her. Her face is flushed. Her eyes are unfocused.
She’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever laid eyes on. I lean down and I kiss her.
She tastes herself on my mouth and licks into the kiss with a low, satisfied sound that makes my cock jerk against her thigh.
When she finally pulls back, she's breathing hard.
"I need you inside me.”
Nothing in me is capable of pretending that doesn't destroy me. Her hand slides down between us and closes around my cock. Her fingertips skim the underside of my cock, and my breath comes out rough through my teeth.
"Neri."
She strokes me once, slowly, from base to tip. My hips follow her hand before I can stop them.
Again.
Her thumb circles the head and smears the wetness there, and my forehead drops against hers.
"Neri." I repeat her name since my brain can’t conjure up anything else.
Her mouth brushes mine.
"What?"
"I'm trying very hard not to embarrass myself."
The smallest smile touches her lips. She strokes me again.
"Then you'd better hurry and fuck me already.”
That is not a problem. For a second we simply look at each other. I settle over her parted thighs. Her knees open around my hips without hesitation. I take my cock in my hand and drag the head through her, once, twice, slick and hot.
Her eyes close.
"Neri."
They open again.
"Look at me."
She does. I kiss her as I push inside, slow.
Her body welcomes me inch by inch, impossibly hot and tight, and every bit of her I enter drags a little more control out of me.
Her mouth falls open against mine when I'm buried completely inside her, hips pressed to hers, and for several seconds I can't do anything but feel her.
She's fluttering around me.
Wet. Tight. Still contracting faintly from the orgasm I just gave her.
Her eyes shine in the dim blue light. I brush my thumb along her cheek. Then I start to move.
Slow at first.
I pull almost all the way out and press back in, letting myself feel the full drag of her around me. Her breath catches.
Again. Her hips rise to meet mine.
By the third stroke she's moving with me, and whatever control I thought I had slips.
I find my rhythm. Deep. Steady. Every thrust drives a soft sound out of her. Every one of those sounds gets under my skin.
Her hands move over my back like she can't decide where she wants them. Finally they lock around my shoulders and pull me closer. She pulls me down until there's no space left between our bodies.
I kiss her while I move inside her, hearing the hitch of her breath each time I fill her. Her thighs tighten around my hips.
The pearl light begins to build again beneath her skin.
I slide one hand between us.
Her breath catches the instant my thumb finds her clit.
"Rafe."
I circle it slowly in time with my thrusts.
Her forehead presses to mine.
"Don't stop."
I don't.
Her body starts tightening around me again. I feel each little contraction before she does, the way she pulls at me from the inside.
"I'm close."
Her voice fractures on the words.
I kiss her.
"Come for me."
And she does. Her entire body locks around mine, and the blue-white light erupts across her skin.
She cries out into my mouth. Her walls clench around me in hard, rhythmic pulses, gripping me so tightly I lose the last of my control.
I thrust through the first few contractions.
One. Two. Three.
Then I bury myself as deep as I can and come. Pleasure rips through me hard enough to blank everything else out. My hips jerk against hers. My arms shake. Her name leaves my mouth against the side of her throat, rough and helpless.
For several seconds there is only heat, pleasure and Neri. The entire universe and its wonders become utterly and completely irrelevant.
I stay there until I can trust my own brain to recognize reality again.
For a while neither of us speaks. The silence doesn't feel empty, it feels full.
"So." Her voice is muffled against me. "The muffins. The wilderness survival. And that. What else are you hiding? Can you weld?"
I smile into her hair. She really is amazing.
"I can paint a house. I can make empanadas for forty. And I know where every navigable star in the northern sky is right now."
"Show-off."
I kiss the top of her head. She burrows closer.
Then the night catches up with her. She goes heavy all at once, every muscle finally giving up the fight, and her voice slurs into my chest.
"I'm not sleepy."
"No. Obviously not."
"Mm."
She’s almost gone now. Then, from the bottom of somewhere, small and true:
"Don't let go yet."
My arm tightens around her.
"Wasn't planning to."
I hold her until the fire is down to muttering coals and the sun is up over the water and our shadow lies long across the sand. I get one arm under her knees and one under her shoulders, and I stand.
She blinks at me.
“I can walk.” But her words are slurred.
I shift her higher against my chest.
"I want to carry you. Let me."
Something in her expression softens. She puts her arm around my neck.
I carry her across the meadow, through the door, past the cold hearth, and lay her in the nest of wool on the iron bed.
The light through the deep-set window is thick and gold as syrup. Her hair is drying in spirals in every direction.
I pull the blankets to her chin and allow myself one kiss on her forehead.
I'm straightening up when her hand comes out of the wool and catches my sleeve.
"Hey."
Her eyes are closed shut but her grip is strong. She tugs my sleeve once, toward the bed.
"There's room for two."
She fits herself back against my chest, cold feet claiming my shins without apology, my arm gathered up in both her hands and tucked tight against her sternum.
Between one breath and the next she's gone, all the way under, in the syrup light.
I won't sleep for a while.
I don't mind.
Outside, the tide is coming back in. In a few hours we'll wake up hungry on a rock nobody's searching, with one net to mend and a hundred problems, and I'll care about every one of them then.
Right now she's warm and heavy against me and breathing slow.