Chapter 9 #4
His laugh is soft and disbelieving and then it’s not laughter at all because I am kissing him and he is kissing me back.
It’s tender first, careful, like we both know what we almost lost and we want to taste gratitude more than hunger.
The cut at my mouth stings; his thumb catches the sting and smooths it away; the world narrows to warm breath and the scrape of his lower lip and the unreliable rhythm of two people who’ve been holding their breath since they were born.
“Tell me to stop,” he says against my mouth, even as his hands slide to my waist and greed loses its shyness.
“I will never say that,” I answer, and it’s oath and blasphemy.
Clothes are a bad joke. I don’t catalog what goes where, who helps whom; I only know the relief in skin, the shock of heat where skin meets skin, the soft sound he makes when my fingers find the back of his neck and tangle there, the way his breath staggers when I whisper his name like a word I found under a floorboard and finally dared to say out loud.
He is scars and heat and restraint coming undone; I am bruises and need and a laugh that turns into a gasp when he lifts me like I weigh nothing and sets me down on the ridiculous ceremonial bed as if it was built for this moment and not for pomp.
“Are you sure,” he asks, capable even now of that last check, that last offer of a door.
“I’m not a door,” I say, smiling through tears because my body can’t pick one emotion; it wants them all. “I’m a fuse, and you’re the match.”
He exhales something rough that might be my name and then there’s no more talking for a while.
It’s not elegant and it’s not polite; it’s the relief of finding each other in the only language the ship can’t overhear.
We move slow, then we don’t; we learn the map of scars, the places where breath catches, the ways to be gentle without being careful.
My world collapses to the press of his chest, the steadying weight of his hand around mine, the sweet ache of being wanted the way I want.
Fear is still here; it’s just quiet, sitting in the corner like a scolded dog.
When I fall apart, it’s with his mouth at my throat and his name disassembled on my tongue.
When he follows, it’s with a sound he tries to bury in my shoulder and can’t.
After, the dim breathes around us; the ship hums to itself; the universe stops trying to set us on fire for one thin slice of time.
—
But thin slices aren’t enough. Not anymore.
Not when he’s here, seven feet of black-scaled gravity and golden-eyed devotion, not when every scar on his body reads like a sentence I have always wanted to finish.
I lean back on my elbows and look him over like I’m memorizing a constellation.
“Come here,” I whisper, and then, rougher, “No—closer.”
He lowers himself over me, a living eclipse, heat rolling off him, silver striations catching the low cabin light like moonlight trapped in obsidian.
His weight doesn’t crush; it anchors. His palm spreads over my ribs, big enough to claim and careful enough to ask.
“Talk to me,” he says, voice already raw. “Tell me what it feels like.”
“Like I stole fire,” I breathe, hooking a leg around his hip, dragging him into the cradle of my body so he can feel exactly what the truth looks like on my skin. “Like my bones are learning a new alphabet and every letter is your name.”
He shudders. His mouth finds my breast, slow, reverent, tongue hot and deliberate against a nipple that tightens for him like it was waiting for instruction.
I fist my fingers in the short ridge of scales at his nape, and he groans into my skin, the sound low and desperate, like prayer forced through gritted teeth.
“Tell me if you need me to stop,” he says again, stubborn boy scout even as his hand slides down my stomach, across my hip, into the wet heat he knows is his.
His touch is careful, then not; two thick fingers stroke through slick that’s been there since he said I love you, and I gasp so hard the ship’s air feels thin.
“Don’t stop,” I manage, my voice a wrecked violin.
“Gods, Rayek—right there. Right—yes.” He circles my clit with the edge of his thumb, not shy, not tentative anymore.
He watches my face like he’s reading a star map, learning which look is north, which gasp is a coastline, which swear word means more.
His fingers slide inside me—one, then two, then two curling just a little—and I swear like a sailor and a saint, clenching around him, my pussy greedy, grateful, impossibly alive.
“You’re so hot,” he rasps, and the rough scrape of his voice against my nerves is almost as good as his hand. “So wet for me. Star—look at you.” He crooks his fingers again and everything tightens; I arch, I swear, I laugh helplessly because joy feels like a crime and somehow I got away with it.
“You feel how I want you?” I pant, covering his hand with mine like I can pin time. “You feel how much?”
“Every pulse,” he says, kissing my sternum, my throat, the soft place below my ear that makes me say nonsense. “I’m listening.”
“Then listen to this,” I say, sliding my own hands down the hard planes of his abdomen, marveling at the heat and the stubborn muscle and the places where scales give way to skin.
I grip him, finally—him, all of him—wrap my fingers around the thick length of his cock and feel his whole body shiver.
He’s big, hot like forged metal, veins a subtle relief under my palm.
His ember-gold eyes slam shut, then open again, barely leashed.
I stroke him slow, slicking him with my own mess, savoring the way his breath fractures and reforms.
“Star.” My name in his mouth is a broken command. “If you keep—”
“I’m going to,” I say, refusing to be meek, thumbing over the head until his hips jerk against my fist. “I want you to feel how pretty you are when you come undone.”
He laughs once—ruined sound—and then he’s kissing me again, swallowing the shameless noise I make when I slide my fist down him one more time and feel him leak against my palm. “I need—” he grinds out.
“Me,” I finish, shameless. “Inside.”
“Say it again,” he begs, forehead to mine, the tips of his sharp canines flashing.
“Inside me,” I whisper, guiding him down, the head of his cock nudging at my entrance, everything in me opening for him like a door I built with my own hands. “I want your cock. I want you filling me. I want all of it, Rayek.”
He curses in Vakutan, low and reverent, and pushes in, slow, steady, watching my face while I take him.
The stretch is gorgeous, a sweet ache blooming into heat, into fullness, into the astounding rightness of him seated inside me, the deep pressure making my vision spark.
I breathe through it, clutching his shoulders, loving the way the silvered scars frame that jagged line over his left eye, loving the way he holds himself so still, trembling with the effort not to hurt, not to rush.
“Tell me,” he murmurs, voice shredded. “Tell me when.”
“Now,” I breathe, and then, mean because love lets me be, “Coward.”
His answering growl vibrates through my spine. He sinks the rest of the way in and I stop making human sounds for a beat, the fullness a shock and a cure, his cock hitting places that haven’t been named because I didn’t know they existed. “Oh—Rayek—”
“I know,” he grits, and he does. He braces his weight on one forearm, fingers lacing with mine on the sheets, and starts to move.
Slow at first, careful, his hips rolling in a rhythm my body learns in two strokes and starts to crave like air.
I lift to meet him, choosing my own angle, and when the head of his cock drags across that spot inside, bright and deep, I make a noise I will never live down.
“There?” he asks, half-broken.
“There,” I gasp. “Do that—yes—do that again.” He does; of course he does; he obeys like a sinner at a revival, and the bed creaks a satisfied little creak, and the ship’s hum seems to thread into the friction where our bodies meet.
He leans down and licks into my mouth like he’s thirsty, his tongue hot and sure, and my hands go everywhere—his jaw, the brutal scar under his eye, the thick column of his neck where pulse thunders, the fan of black scales over his shoulders that feels like living armor I’m allowed to touch.
“You’re perfect,” he says into my mouth, and I laugh because I’m sweating and swearing and needy, and still, somehow, pretty for him.
“So are you,” I throw back, grabbing his ass, dragging him deeper. “So huge—Gods, Rayek, you feel—”
“Say it,” he orders, hips snapping, a little less saint, a little more sinner.
“Good,” I cry, abandoning dignity. “You feel so good in my pussy, like you were made to live there. Like you belong to me.”
His eyes flare molten. “I do,” he says, ragged and devout. “I do.”
He shifts, pulling my thighs higher, opening me wider, and the next stroke knocks a shocked moan out of me.
We find a pace that isn’t frantic and isn’t gentle; it’s ours—insistent, hungry, rhythmic, a tide we both push and yield to.
Heat builds, bright and golden, coiling low and then everywhere.
He presses his forehead to mine, and we look at each other like no one has ever looked at anyone: furious with tenderness, wild with certainty.
“Tell me what it feels like now,” he asks, because he’s a sadist and a scholar.
“Like I’m a cathedral and you’re ringing every bell,” I say, half crying, half laughing, clutching him so I don’t fly apart. “Like I could light the whole sky. Like I’m not afraid of anything if you don’t let go.”