Chapter 35
The Bed
Whatever restraint he had left breaks.
"I need to see you," he says. His voice is already rough.
He pulls the nightgown off and drops it. I am bare, and his breath catches and he goes completely still. Six months. I watch it move through him in the way his jaw tightens, his chest rises, and his hands press into my thighs like he needs the contact to stay upright.
His hands slide down my sides. Slow. The warmth of his palms is almost unbearable after so long without them. The calluses catch lightly against my skin as he moves, like he is memorizing me again, like he needs to confirm that every part of me is still here.
He leans down and presses his lips to my stomach and stays there, forehead resting against me.
The stubble of his jaw grazes my skin. "So damn perfect.
" His voice is muffled, rough with something he won't name.
"Carrying my children." He exhales slowly and I feel the warmth of his breath spread across my skin. "I'd do anything for you."
My throat tightens.
He straightens and meets my eyes and whatever was soft in him has already shifted into something else. "Spread for me." His voice drops. "Show me you're mine."
My hands are trembling when I part my thighs wider. He stands at the edge of the bed and drops the towel and I stop breathing. The sight of him is almost unfair. I watch him wrap his hand around himself, slow and unhurried, his eyes fixed on my face like my reaction is the only thing that matters.
"See what you do to me?"
He doesn't look away. Not once. He watches me watching him and his grip tightens and his pace builds and he finishes in his hand, raw and unrestrained, a low groan in his chest that he doesn't bother to suppress.
I pull him closer with a thread of lightcraft and he lets me. His breath shudders as I take his fingers into my mouth and drag my tongue slowly over them, tasting the salt of him. His eyes go dark in a way that has nothing to do with patience.
"Fuck, Asha." He says it like I've done something to him. Like I've broken something he was trying to hold together. "You're wrecking me."
He kneels between my thighs and cups my face in his hands.
His voice is gruff but gentle. “We can stop. I’ll hold you all night if that’s what you need.
But if we keep going—” his thumb traces my jaw, “—I will be relentless.” His voice lowers.
“I have gone six months without you.” A pause.
“Do you understand what that means?” His grip tightens slightly.
“It means I will not be careful with you tonight, Asha Bear. "
"I never want careful, husband," I say.
Something shifts in his expression. Then his hands drop to my thighs and hold them open.
"Touch yourself," he says. "Let me watch."
I slide my hand down my stomach and the air between us changes immediately.
He goes completely still. The crackle of the fire, the distant creak of the palace settling, the faint smell of cedar and smoke and him filling the room.
All of it intensifies as his eyes lock onto my hand.
He is barely breathing. His jaw is tight.
He looks at me like a man who has been surviving on the idea of this and is only now allowing himself to believe it's real.
I can see the effort it costs him to stay where he is, the war between the part of him that wants to watch and the part that cannot stand anything touching me that isn't him.
The second part wins.
His hand closes around my wrist before I have barely started.
"No." He pins my wrist to the bed and leans over me, his mouth at my ear, his breath warm and uneven against my skin.
"Don't touch what's mine." His free hand slides down my inner thigh, close enough that I feel the heat of his palm but not where I need him.
"This belongs to me. Only me. Six months and it is still only mine. "
"Colsar—"
"I know what you need." He does not hurry. "I know."
He guides his fingers inside me and I gasp at the stretch, the heel of his hand pressing where I ache.
My hips start moving before I can stop them.
He watches my face the entire time, cataloguing every sound, every shift of breath, the wet sounds of his hand working against me filling the quiet room.
My fingers grip the sheets. My hips rock harder and the pressure builds fast and hot and my whole body pulls toward the edge—
A knock sounds at the door.
His fingers do not stop.
"Tell them to come back," he says. Calm, utterly unbothered.
I try. I genuinely try. "Please, come ba—"
The words dissolve. The wave breaks and I stop being able to form sentences, his name tearing out of me loud and unguarded, the slick sound of his hand against me, obscene and perfect as my hips jerk through it.
He watches every second of it.
When I come back down his fingers slow but don't leave. He looks at the soaked sheets beneath me and something moves across his face, dark and deeply satisfied.
"Look at that mess." He looks back up at me. "All of that is because of me."
"Yes," I manage.
"Good." He leans down, his mouth at my temple. "And we are just getting started, wife."
He moves up over me. "I love you," he murmurs. "And I am going to spend the rest of tonight reminding you who you belong to."
He turns me and before I can catch my breath he drags me up over his face, his grip on my hips absolute, the roughness of his hands grounding me.
"Do not move," he says against me. The vibration of his voice sends a shiver down my spine.
I last about four seconds before my hips buck.
He pulls back immediately. “I told you to stay still." His voice is quiet in the way it gets when it doesn't need to be loud. "No moving until I say. Say you understand."
"I understand," I gasp.
"Good."
He takes his time in a way that should be illegal.
The heat of his mouth, the slow drag of his tongue, the soft wet sounds filling the room as he works me higher and then pulls back before I can finish.
He holds me right at the edge and keeps me there until I am shaking and my knuckles are white on the headboard and I am entirely past the point of pride.
"Please." My voice breaks. "Please, Colsar, I need you—"
"I hear you." He does not speed up. "But I'm not done."
"I'll be good, I swear, just please—"
He drives his tongue deep inside me and holds it there, unmoving, his grip on my hips turning to iron, refusing me even the smallest shift.
The heat of his breath. The slick warmth of his mouth.
The muffled sound of him groaning against me like he is the one being undone.
He is drenched in me and I feel it everywhere: on his skin, down his jaw, his cheeks, his throat.
And still he doesn’t stop. He presses deeper.
Then his voice comes, rough and wrecked and wanting.
"I want to drown in you."
Only then does he pull back and replace his tongue with his fingers. He blows lightly against the sensitive place just above, where I ache the most for him. His teeth graze me lightly and my whole body trembles.
"Beg," he says calmly, slowly pumping his fingers.
"Please, Colsar—"
"Be specific."
He presses deeper, his mouth hovering just above where I want him.
"Please let me come on your face."
He continues to pump as I throw my head back into a moan.
"Do you belong to Teorin?"
"No."
"Hurstinal?"
"No."
"Sevrin?"
"Never."
"Not good enough," he says, and stills his hand.
"You," I gasp. "I am yours. Only yours. I will never be anyone else's." I lean back, gripping his thighs, grinding myself on his fingers, desperate for relief.
"Fuck," he mutters. He adds a third finger and begins pumping his hand again, this time deeper than before, though still his mouth is not where I need him.
Just as I think I cannot bear it any longer, his mouth closes in on my center, sucking relentlessly.
The sound that tears out of me is not quiet.
He keeps going until I am trembling, until my thighs are shaking against his grip, until a second one rips through me before I have finished with the first. The sounds I make, the slick sounds of him against me, the creak of the headboard under my hands, the low rough noises he makes like he is consuming something he has been denied for far too long, all of it fills the room and I stop caring about any of it.
Only then does he ease me onto my back.
He hovers above me, his face soaked, his jaw and cheeks and throat glistening with me, and he looks at me like he has no intention of wiping any of it away.
His eyes drag over me slowly, taking in my swollen belly, my full breasts. “You thought I wouldn't want you like this," he says. His voice is wrecked. "And yet I have never wanted you more."
He kisses my belly. Then he drives into me in one hard thrust and the breath leaves my body entirely. “The way you grip me." His voice is rough, barely holding together. "You feel even better than our first time."
That undoes me. He was my first, and he will be my last and I feel that truth in my chest, raw and unguarded, in a way I was not prepared for.
My back arches off the bed. He groans, eyes closing briefly like the feeling of it is too much, like six months of absence is trying to leave his body all at once.
Then they open and find mine and stay there as I tremble underneath him.
"Look at you," he rasps. "Breaking for me."
He doesn't slow. He doesn't give me time to recover or think or do anything except feel him, the slap of skin against skin, the warmth of his chest against mine, the smell of cedar and sweat and both of us together filling the room. His name keeps coming out of me. I stop trying to hold it back.
"It's been six months," he says roughly against my throat. “Six months without you. It can never happen again, Asha. I love you in a way I cannot explain. I—” His voice cracks. "I could do this for days. I'm never letting you go again."
He pulls back and looks at me and what I see is not the controlled man who never shows too much. It is a man who crossed mountains and frozen seas and an army of undead for the woman beneath him, and he is completely undone by having found her.
"Tell me you will only ever love me," he says. Low. Rough. Almost a plea beneath the command.
"You," I say. "Only you. You are my family, Colsar. There is nothing else."
Something in him breaks open.
A sound tears out of him, loud and raw, as he finishes, his whole body shaking with it, hips still moving through every aftershock. He stays buried deep, unwilling to move, forehead pressed to mine, breath ragged against my lips.
For a long moment neither of us speaks.
"I missed you," he says finally. The words sound like they have been held for a very long time. His hand comes to my face, holding me there, making sure I do not look away. "I missed you. I missed you."
He says it three times because once is not enough for six months.
"I know," I whisper. My hand finds his chest. "I missed you too."
He rolls onto his back and pulls me toward him, his hand sliding through the slick evidence of us, rubbing it slowly across his cheeks, his eyes never leaving mine.
"Be good," he says, voice low.
I wrap my arms around his neck and drag my tongue along his cheek, his jaw, the corner of his mouth, tasting both of us together. I pull back and look at him.
"More," I whisper.
I lick the other side of his face, the bridge of his nose.
He moans. I mean to stop, to kiss him, to bury my face in his chest the way we normally would afterward, and yet I cannot.
I reach down and wrap my hand around him, feeling him firm as I stroke slowly, still licking, still lapping, the noise of it and my own sounds filling the room as he groans beneath me.
I slide my fingers inside myself, then bring them to his mouth. He takes them without hesitation, the sound he makes low and desperate, my other hand still working him as I continue across his face. His chest flushes. His jaw tightens.
"Fuck, Asha."
I bend to his ear. “I am yours. I have only ever wanted to kneel for you, that will never change. The only reason I have not is because I carry your children."
A pause.
"When they are born," I whisper, "remind me."
The growl that comes out of him is not quiet.
He pulls me into a bruising kiss like he cannot take it anymore.
When he pulls back his voice is raw. "I need you covered in me." He pulls back slightly, his eyes finding mine. "And then I want you to sleep between my legs so I can hold you. So that when our children move they can feel me. They can know that I’m here now. That I’m not going anywhere.”
My chest aches.
I look at him, my face inches from his. "Cover me," I whisper.
He kneels over me and with a roar he releases across my face, my throat, my breasts, his hand working through every last moment of it, his eyes on me the entire time like I am the only thing that has ever mattered.
He leans over me, his brow glistening with sweat. "Manners," he rasps.
I look up at him. I trace the mess slowly, gathering it with my fingers before bringing them to my mouth.
"Thank you," I say.
He looks undone. He bends down and kisses me, unbothered by what is on my face. "Nothing that happens," he says against my mouth, "will ever make me love you less."
He pulls me into him, settling me between his legs, his hand spreading warm and certain over my belly.
I close my eyes.
For the first time in six months, sleep comes easily.