14. The Last Honest Night #2
He went slowly—slowly enough that it turned to a kind of cruelty—his mouth moving down the length of me, learning the places that made me arch and the places that emptied my head of every word in it, until I had both hands knotted in the dark mane at the nape of his neck and was saying things in the plain unguarded language I had never once allowed myself across fifteen years of weighing each word I spoke.
When he settled lower and put his mouth to the heat of me, the sound I made was one I didn’t know I owned, and I felt the answering rumble of him low enough to move in my own bones.
He pinned me open with one huge hand splayed across my belly—the whole span of me held, effortless, exactly where he wanted me—and the helpless luxury of it, of being held still and savoured by something that strong being that careful, ran through me hotter than the fire.
He unmade me without hurry, with that same terrible patience, until I came apart entirely—wordless, wall-less, nothing of the Emissary left anywhere in the room—and it went through me end to end and lifted my spine clean off the furs.
He drew himself up the length of me while the last of it was still moving through me, and for a moment did nothing but look down at me, and what was in his face was too large to have a name in either of our tongues.
“Sera.” Only that. The short name, the private one, the one he had no leave to use and used anyway, because tonight there was no leave for any of it and we were doing all of it regardless.
I pulled him down. I wanted the impossible weight of him, the furnace of him, the whole leashed enormity of him settled over me at last—and when he moved against me I felt the size of him there too, blunt and heavy and a great deal more than I’d braced for, and a flicker of plain, human doubt went through me at the sheer scale of what I was reaching for.
He felt it. He felt everything. He went still. “Slowly,” he said against my temple, and it was less a promise than a vow.
He took me by degrees, unhurried even then, easing into me a fraction at a time and stopping each time until my body left off bracing and began, helplessly, to want again—until the stretch of him that edged toward too much tipped over into a fullness I had no word for and wouldn’t have spent one on if I had.
Every careful inch of him was a thing I had to be opened to and then, at once, craved the rest of.
By the time he was fully seated I had both arms locked around the great dark span of his shoulders and was shaking and well past speech, stretched around the size of him, stunned by the care of it, feeling him in places I hadn’t known were mine to feel.
He held there, buried and trembling with the work of his own restraint, and gave me a moment only to take in the scale of what I’d let inside me.
Then the wanting outgrew the awe, and I moved against him first—greedy, graceless, fifteen years of appetite arriving all at once—and the sound that tore out of him at that was the most gratifying thing I have ever caused.
“All right?” he managed. The words barely words.
“Don’t you dare stop,” I said—and felt the laugh and the groan tangle together in his chest, and then he began to move, and the size of him turned every slow drag and return of him into something that emptied my head and filled all the rest of me.
He learned me even in that—found the angle that made me sob against his shoulder and returned to it, deliberate, relentless, a patient man with a single purpose—and when I broke again it was with the whole impossible weight of him wrapped in my arms and my name breaking apart in his chest.
I wound myself around the one thing every wall in both our worlds had ever been raised to keep apart, and I held on, and for once in my life I let a true thing simply be true.
There is a word in his tongue for what I am to him.
It can’t be said across the line between our peoples without bringing the line down in fire.
He didn’t say it. I felt it the whole time, lodged behind his teeth, held back with the same impossible care he held the rest of himself—the one thing he wouldn’t give me even now, because the cost of it would fall on more than us—and the great withheld weight of the unsaid word was nearer and more naked than anything his body did.
He said my name instead. Into my hair, against the pulse at my throat, again and again, as though he could pour everything the forbidden word carried into the one small permitted sound he was allowed—and when the end took us it took us together, and he let the held weight of himself down over me at last as it broke through him, the whole shaking dark mass of him pressing me down into the furs, and I felt his breath go ragged at my neck, and somewhere past the last edge of thought, in the place where I had finally stopped keeping the count, I understood that I would pay tomorrow’s whole price twice over for this and reckon it cheap.
? ? ?
We lay after in the deep furs with the fire fallen to embers and the bells still hours off, the long heavy heat of him curved around the whole of me, one arm a dark weight across my waist that I had not the smallest wish to move.
We didn’t speak of the morning. There was nothing to say that the morning wouldn’t say louder.
At first light he would stand before the inner council and swear on his blood-standing that I had never once reached for him.
At second bell I would stand before the Second Seal and refuse, in front of all of them, to call him the mistake that would have saved me.
Two lies, told in opposite directions, each of us spending ourselves to buy the other free—and we’d stolen this one true hour out of the seam between them, and it would have to last whatever was left of either of our lives.
My hand drifted, out of fifteen years of habit, toward the inside of my own wrist.
His closed over it in the dark before I reached the pulse, and drew my fingers away, and held them, and said nothing.
I let him. I left the careful thing where I’d dropped it, somewhere on the warm stone floor of a room a kind woman had given us so we wouldn’t have to be ashamed.
And for the few hours left to me before the bells, I lay in the dark beside the thing I had chosen—with my eyes open and my mind clear and no moon anywhere to answer for it—and felt, for the first time in fifteen years, no wall at all between what I was and what I wanted.
It was the most dangerous thing I had ever done.
I have never once been sorry.