Chapter 13 Violet #2
His shirt goes first. My hands are on the buttons, clumsy and impatient.
I get so frustrated he chuckles, helping me, before he finally shrugs out of it and tosses it somewhere behind the desk.
Then it's mine. His. The one I stole. He pulls it over my head, the cool study air hitting my heated skin. His hungry gaze drops and—
He stops.
His eyes focused on the bruise along my collarbone.
Yellow-green now, spreading toward my shoulder.
His mouth traces it lightly, his whole body going rigid under me, as a tremor runs through his chest that has nothing to do with want and everything to do with fury so compressed it could crack the marble floors.
I cup his face and pull his face up.
"Hey."
His eyes meet mine.
"This isn't about that. This is about this."
Something breaks open behind his expression.
Something gives way. And then his mouth is on my neck, my throat, the space below my ear that makes my breath stutter, and lower.
Collarbone. Sternum. The curve of my breast. And when his mouth finds my nipple, I arch off his lap so hard I nearly crack my skull on the lamp.
"Fuck."
The sensation is. What the hell. Everything is sharper than I remember.
Amplified. Like someone rewired my nerve endings while I wasn't looking and turned the dial past ten.
His tongue against my nipple sends a current down my spine so intense my nails dig into his shoulders hard enough to leave marks, and the sound I make surprises us both.
His mouth stills.
"More," I manage. "Don't you dare stop."
He doesn't stop.
He lifts me onto the desk. Papers scatter, something falls off the edge and hits the floor, and I don't care and he doesn't care because his mouth is on my other breast now and the same thing happens.
This insane sensitivity that turns a touch into a live wire.
My back arches against files and folders and whatever intelligence report I'm crumpling beneath me.
Sorry to his paperwork. It died in service.
His palm slides up my inner thigh, and just for one second I hesitate, the ghost that's been squatting in the corner of my mind for ten days rearing its head.
Is this real? Am I choosing him or choosing the man who controls the air I breathe?
I look at him, his palm on my thigh, his eyes on my face. Not my body. My face. Watching me with an expression so open, so utterly stripped of pretense, that it's almost worse than the desire. More dangerous than anything he could do with those hands.
He offered to let me go. He opened the door. I'm on this desk because I walked back through it.
The ghost dissolves.
I pull him closer by his belt. The leather is warm. The buckle is cold. My fingers work it open.
His fingers find me, and my hips buck off the desk.
"Jesus Christ."
Everything is too much. Too sensitive. Like every nerve ending regenerated overnight and came back twice as responsive, and his fingers… God, his fingers. Slow, careful at first, reading my body the way he reads a room. Finding a rhythm that makes my vision blur.
"Look at me," he says.
I do. And the way he watches me, the way his eyes track every reaction while his fingers move, steady and devastating. This is not a man who takes. This is a man who studies. Who learns. Who gives you what you need before you've finished forming the sentence.
He slides one finger inside me, and my palm slams flat against the desk.
"You're shaking," he murmurs.
"Good shaking." My voice doesn't sound like mine. "Don't confuse it."
The corner of his mouth lifts, just barely.
And he adds a second finger, curling against a spot that makes my spine leave the desk entirely.
My grip finds his hair, pulling at the strands, and the sound he makes against my neck.
God. I want to record that sound and play it every night before sleep for the rest of my life.
"I need you," I say, and the words aren't careful or measured. "I need. Elio, I need."
He understands. He always understands.
He pulls me off the desk and we don't make it far.
We don't even try.
The rug on his study floor barely covers cold tile, but neither of us cares because caring about comfort is a luxury for people who aren't this desperate, and I am desperate. I am starving, and the hunger isn't the compound kind. This hunger is mine. Chosen. Wanted.
I push him onto his back. Straddle him. Put myself on top because I need to be the one who decides how this goes. He lets me. The hands that hovered, that shook, that asked my body for permission with their hesitation. They settle on my thighs as I reach between us and wrap my hand around him.
He's so hard, and the sound he makes when I stroke him once, slow, base to tip, is a sound I'm going to keep in a locked box in my memory forever.
I rise up on my knees. Line him up. And sink down.
Slow.
The stretch is, fuck, it's been weeks and my body has to remember how to do this, how to open, how to take him again.
I forgot how big he is, and my lack of patience isn't helping matters.
I just want him inside me, want to feel him stretch me, fill me up.
For hours and hours. I'm crazed with need, and I'm not even halfway down.
Every nerve ending is lit up and screaming, that same insane sensitivity from his mouth on my breasts. But now it's magnified by a thousand.
"Fuck." His grip tightens on my thighs. His jaw is clenched so hard I can see the muscle jumping, and his eyes…
They're focused on me like I'm the only thing that exists, like the rest of the room dissolved and there's just this.
Just me on top of him with his cock inside me and my thighs shaking and tears already tracking down my cheeks because the sensation is too big to hold without leaking.
"Move," he says. Low. Wrecked. Not a command. A surrender disguised as one. "Violet. Please."
I move.
Slow at first, testing, lifting my hips and sinking back down, finding the rhythm that makes the angle hit right, and when I find it. Oh, when I find it. The sound that comes out of me is not a word. His hips flex up to meet mine, involuntary, and the depth of it punches the air from my lungs.
"There," I manage. "Right there..."
He meets me stroke for stroke, letting me set the pace, letting me control the depth, but his hips know exactly what mine need and the coordination between us is obscene. Like his body learned mine in those few days before I was taken from him and filed the information somewhere permanent.
My movements become faster. My thighs burning, my rib protesting, my brain officially offline except for the animal part.
The one that chases one thing only. I'm drowning in the sensation of him inside me, in how my clit grinds against him every time I roll my hips forward.
In the wet, obscene sound of us together that should be embarrassing and is actually the hottest thing I've ever heard.
"Mine," he rumbles with my nipple between his teeth. His grip on my thighs will bruise, and I welcome it. I want the marks, I want proof on my skin that comes from wanting, not from hurting. "You're mine, Violet."
"Yours." The word falls out without permission. "Yours, yours, I'm..."
His hand moves between us. Finds my clit. And the first press of his thumb, circling, timed perfectly to the rhythm I've set, nearly sends me through the ceiling.
"Oh god. Oh fuck. Elio..."
"That's it." His voice is raw gravel. "Take what you need."
I'm taking it. I'm taking everything. Riding him harder now, chasing the thing that's building at the base of my spine, and his thumb doesn't stop, doesn't falter, while his free hand comes up to cup the back of my neck and pulls my forehead down to his so we're breathing the same air, sharing the same oxygen.
His eyes are open as are mine, and it's the most naked I've ever been with another human being.
His hips stutter. His breathing fractures. "I can't. Violet, I'm going to..."
"Don't stop. Come with m-aaaaah." I explode as the orgasm rips through me from the clit outward, radiating up my spine and down my thighs and into places I didn't know could hold sensation.
I clench around him so hard he groans, a sound ripped from somewhere deep, and I feel him let go.
Feel him pulse inside me, his hips driving up in three hard, desperate thrusts that push me over a second edge I didn't know was there, and I break apart on top of him.
Sobbing, shaking, coming so hard the world ceases to exist. His arms come around me as I collapse against his chest, and he holds me through all of it.
Doesn't pull away. Doesn't ask if I'm okay.
Just holds me and says my name. Over and over into my hair while his own heartbeat slams against my ear.
"Violet. Violet. Violet."
Just my name. Like it's the only word he has left.
My skin erupts in goosebumps as the chill of the room finally catches up to me. Still inside me Elio reaches to the side and pulls his shirt over me. Not the one I stole, the one he was wearing earlier.
I'm still shaking, but it's not from the cold.
It's from everything. From the enormity of still being alive and still being capable of this and still wanting him so much my teeth ache with it.
Three weeks of that compound. Ten days of careful distance.
And then this. This floor. This man. Every nerve apparently deciding to feel everything at once, no moderation, no dimmer switch, just all the lights on full.
Tomorrow I'll have rug burn on my knees. I'll wear it like a goddamn badge of honor.
Elio pulls me tighter into his chest, arm around my waist, as my ear finds his heartbeat.
Steady. Even. Unhurried.
Mine is a five-alarm disaster.
He doesn't say anything for a long time. Neither do I.
"I've got you, tesoro." Not a promise. A fact.
I press closer, tuck my face into his neck. Breathe him in. Citrus, wood and leather under the salt and sweat, the smell I tried to reconstruct from nothing in a concrete cell.
His arm tightens around me. Not possessive. Present.
There's a difference. I couldn't have articulated it a month ago. Couldn't have told you what separates the grip that says mine from the grip that says I'm here. Now it's the clearest thing in the world.
I don't know if this is love. I don't know if I trust the word yet, or if it fits the shape of what lives between us.
This jagged, violent, tender, impossible thing that survived a kidnapping and a compound and a man sleeping in a chair for ten nights because he couldn't bring himself to leave and couldn't bring himself to come closer.
But I know I'm not leaving this floor.
And I know that when he offered me the door, I didn't even look at it.
That has to count for something.
His cock gets harder inside me as my body hums with sensation I can't even begin to explain. Everything is amplified, too much, not enough. I start moving again, already feeling like I'm close to the edge.