Chapter 51 Eliana #2
Still, I hesitate. But you can only push off fate for so long. Eventually, it has its way with you.
“Okay. Yeah. Yes.”
His mouth finds mine in the darkness, and the city disappears completely.
Bastian knows exactly what he wants. His lips are soft but insistent as they part mine. His hand slides from the back of my neck up into my hair, fingers tangling in the copper mess of it. My hands go to his chest, palms flat against the rumpled cotton of his shirt.
His heart is a constant; mine is going haywire; but I guess that’s how it’s been from the start, hasn’t it?
He tilts his head, deepening the kiss, and I taste wintergreen. His other hand grabs me by my waist and pulls me closer until there’s no space left between us. My fingers curl into fists around his collar.
He breaks away just long enough to inhale, his forehead pressed to mine, before diving back in. This time, it’s a little messier, like the seams that keep us both stitched up and proper are starting to fray. When his teeth catch my bottom lip, I whimper.
His palms slide down my sides to the hem of my shirt. He separates just enough to tug it over my head, and I lift my arms to help him. The fabric catches on my hair before coming free, and then I’m in my bra and jeans in the darkness.
His fingers trace the line of my collarbone, then lower, following the curve of my ribs. When he reaches the clasp of my bra, he pauses, his breath hot against my neck.
“Yes,” I whisper to answer the question he didn’t have to ask.
The clasp gives way. He peels the straps down my arms, and then that’s gone, too.
His mouth finds my throat, my shoulder, lower. I press into him as his hands cup my breasts and knead. My fingers fumble with the buttons of his shirt, clumsy and urgent now. I get three undone before giving up and just yanking the thing over his head.
Skin on skin. His chest against mine. The cool air of the empty building raises goosebumps along my arms, but everywhere he touches burns.
His hands move to my jeans, working the button free, dragging down the zipper. I kick off my shoes and help him wriggle the denim down my hips.
I’m huddled on the floor in my underwear in the dark, with a man who’s already seen me naked and kissed me from head to toe—but suddenly, I’m embarrassed.
I’m acutely aware of every imperfection.
The softness of my stomach. My thighs touching.
Stretch marks I’ve had since I was sixteen.
I haven’t shaved in almost a week, for God’s sake.
“Hey.” His voice cuts through my downward shame spiral. “Where’d you go?”
“I’m right here.”
“No, you’re not.” His hands palm my waist. “You disappeared on me.”
I open my mouth to deny it, but he speaks first. “You’re perfect,” he says simply. It’s a fact when he says it. Water is wet, two and two is four, Eliana Hunter is perfect.
His mouth finds the curve of my shoulder. “This is.” A kiss to my collarbone. “This is.” His palm spreads across my ribs. “All of this is perfect. And mine.”
That’s enough to talk me off the ledge. I settle back into the heady rush of lust and love. “Yours,” I whisper.
“Damn right.” His fingers hook into the waistband of my underwear. “Now, let me show you what I do with things that belong to me.”
He tugs my underwear down my legs and tosses it somewhere in the dark. Then his mouth is on my hip bone, my inner thigh, everywhere except where I need him most.
“Bastian—”
“Shh. Patience. I’m getting there.”
His breath ghosts over me. Then his tongue, flat and slow. I coil off the floor.
He takes his time, though. His fingers join in, one sliding inside me while his mouth works. The tension winds tighter. My breath comes shorter. My fingers clutch at his hair.
“That’s it,” he murmurs against me as he feels me arching and bucking. “Let go.”
I do. The orgasm rolls through me slow and sweet, nothing like the sharp, desperate ones he’s given me before. This is honey, not lightning. This is being held, not taken.
When I finally come back to myself, he’s kissing his way back up my body. He settles beside me on the floor, pulling me against his chest.
“Okay?” he asks.
I nod, still catching my breath. “More than okay.”
“Good. Because we’re not done yet.”
“No,” I say with a cheeky grin that he may or may not be able to see. “We’re not.”
I rise up onto my heels and push him flat onto his back. My hands on his bare chest, the way this all started, all those days and weeks ago. I find his belt and rid him of it, then take care of the button of his jeans. The zipper comes down with a rasp of metal teeth.
“Eliana—”
“Shut up, Bastian.”
I shove the denim down his hips. He lifts to help me. His boxers follow.
I take him in my hand first. He’s hard, hot, thick, but soft to the touch. His breath catches as my fingers close around his girth. Then I lower my mouth.
The taste of him is salt and skin. I work slowly, following the shape of him with my tongue. His hand goes to the roots of my hair. “Fuck,” he breathes.
I take him deeper. I flatten my tongue, hollow my cheeks, and move from one rhythm to the next until I find one that makes his fingers tighten on my scalp.
His breathing goes ragged. I feel the strain building in his thighs, his stomach. When he tries to pull me away, I don’t let him.
“Eliana, I’m—”
“I know,” I gasp as I let him fall out of my mouth with a wet pop. “I want it. I—”
“No.”
I should’ve known he wouldn’t let me take the reins for long. With a snarl, he throws me onto my back, though he’s sure to cradle my head against the hard floor. His hands pry my thighs apart, his grip firm on the soft flesh there.
“I want to be inside you when I come,” he tells me.
I’m simmering with need in every single pore and nerve ending, and yet I still hesitate.
We haven’t done this yet. We haven’t really spoken about that, either—it was like we just came to this silent agreement that we wouldn’t go there until the time was right.
How would we know when it was right? No clue.
Until now.
Now, it feels right.
He positions himself at my entrance. The blunt pressure of him there makes my breath hitch and stutter.
“F-fuck,” I gasp.
His forehead drops to mine. “Still okay?”
“Yes. God, yes. Please, just… do it. I need it so bad, Bastian. I need you so, so badly.”
He nods and his face screws up with concentration. Then, as we both hold our breath, he pushes in slowly, inch by inch, filling me completely.
When he’s all the way inside me, sealed hip to hip, he pauses. He bends down and claims my mouth in a tender kiss. A brush of lips on lips. Slowly, slowly, he drags himself out. The friction is almost overwhelming, but the absence of him is even worse.
Then, without ever breaking the kiss, he reverses direction and—just as slowly, slowly—he fills me up again.
It’s like that for a dozen, maybe more, long, agonizing, exquisite strokes. In, until I’m so full of him I can’t think—
Out, until I want him back so badly I can hardly breathe—
In and full—
Out and desperate—
In—
Out—
In—
Out—
Until, before I know it, we’re coupling like wild animals on the floor of his office-to-be, fourteen stories above the only city I’ve ever called home.
The tenderness burns away. His hips snap harder and faster. My nails carve into his shoulders and rake down the muscle of his back. He hisses but doesn’t slow.
“Mark me,” he growls. “I want to feel it tomorrow.”
So I score him again, deeper this time. He drives into me so hard I slide across the floor. His hands clamp my hips, holding me in place as he pounds into me.
His thumb finds my clit. The pressure of that is almost too much on top of everything else. I’m going to break apart.
“Come for me,” he demands as he reads the spasms crossing my face. “Let me feel it.”
The orgasm tears through me. I clench around him, fingernails breaking skin now, hot blood shining there.
But it’s not over yet. Growling again, he yanks me to my feet. I’m still stuttering as the orgasm makes my legs quiver, but his hands on my hips spin me around until I’m facing the window.
“Hands on the glass.”
I obey. The surface is cold against my palms. He kicks my feet wider apart. His fingers blanket mine, pinning my hands in place. Then he’s inside me again, one brutal thrust that makes me cry out and moan so hard that my breath fogs the window.
“Look at it,” he says into my ear. “Look out at what’s ours.”
The lights go fuzzy as his hips slam against me. My cheek and breasts flatten against the glass with each impact. The building is vacant and the streets are far below, but I feel exposed anyway, displayed.
He keeps thrusting, chasing his own release, using me. We’re fucking so fast and hard now that my body isn’t mine anymore—it’s his, all his, only his. Until his rhythm stutters. His grip bruises my hips.
“Fuck, Eliana—”
And he comes with a strangled groan, buried deep inside me.
When we’re both spent, we collapse. The floor is hard and frigid beneath us, but it actually feels kinda nice after the feverish intensity of what we just did.
Bastian pulls out slowly. The absence of him makes me wince.
Something wet runs down my inner thigh. When he rolls to my side, our arms touch, just enough to reassure me that he’s here and he isn’t going anywhere.
Our breathing fills the office, ragged and uneven.
The sweat on my skin turns cold in the air.
After a minute, maybe two, his hand finds mine. Our fingers fold together, sticky and clumsy. “All good?” he asks the ceiling.
I turn my head to look at him. In the darkness, he’s just a shape. A shadow. Real only because I can feel the warmth of his palm, the roughness of his calluses.
“Yeah,” I whisper back. “Never been better.”
Then I start giggling. I can feel Bastian looking at me curiously, but as the giggles consume me, I can’t find a break or enough breath to answer. I laugh and laugh and laugh and he lets me, until finally, the giggle fit settles down.
When it does, I look at him. “This was the second-to-last item on my list,” I explain with a flushed grin. “‘See the city lights from somewhere high up’: check.”