Chapter 47 Blood & Sweat #2
I wondered if he felt the same deep, primal pull I did.
His kiss was certainly hungry enough for me to believe he did.
The slow shuffle of our feet, moving us back toward the bed, made me believe he did.
And the fact that he loved me did too. I knew it now, beyond a shadow of a doubt, and I also knew what I wanted.
The pressure inside my body became increasingly unbearable as I grew more and more certain: I wanted it to be him.
Right or wrong, reckless or not, it was supposed to be him.
I broke our kiss suddenly and gasped, “Devil…I need you.”
“Need?” he chuckled against my mouth. “What exactly do you need, May?”
My frustration swelled and I opened my eyes to glare at him. “You know what I mean.”
“Tell me,” Devil whispered, his hands roaming over my body, bringing spikes of desperate heat with them. “Show me.”
I held my glare a moment longer, debating how best to wipe the smirk from his face, then put my hands on his stomach and pushed.
He fell backwards onto the foot of the bed, still grinning, as I began to unbuckle the belt around my waist. Once it was on the floor, I pulled at the ties of my ruined dress and let it fall open.
Beneath, I still wore a pair of woolen leggings and a soft bodice around my chest, but Devil leaned forward and propped his elbows on his knees, licking his lips.
When I tried to pull the dress off over my shoulders, however, it caught on my folded wings, which had apparently punctured holes in the fabric when they’d appeared.
Devil let out a faint laugh and gestured for me to spin around.
“We shall have to get Arachne to alter your clothes,” he said as he eased the garment down carefully and let it fall to the floor.
“I could glamour them away…couldn’t I?”
“Don’t you dare,” Devil murmured. I hardly noticed when he reached around me and began unlacing the bodice, because his lip brushed over one of my wing joints.
Desire fluttered up from my stomach, racing along my limbs like quicksilver and dripping down into my core, where it pooled.
I waited until he had also worked my leggings and undergarments off before turning to face him, wearing nothing but my wings and the cool moonlight.
He had seen me without clothes—gods, he had actually tasted me—but I felt far more exposed and vulnerable than ever before.
Every wall I’d built to keep him out was crumbling at my feet, and not only was I allowing it, I was pulling the bricks away myself.
I will build them back up later, I thought, to shield both of us from the merciless world.
“Move back,” I whispered, pressing on his chest. He pushed himself to sit up against the wall at the top of the bed, spreading his great wings out either side of him, then I waved at his trousers. “Take them off.”
His smirk returned. “Is that a command, princess?”
“Yes.” I dropped onto the bed and crawled toward him slowly, letting my own wings trail beside me. “One I suggest you obey.”
Once I was within arm’s reach, he traced his thumb over my mouth, but his other hand drifted up to undo the buttons at his waist. The rate at which he undid them was painfully slow, but I held his gaze the entire time, biting down gently on his thumb when it ventured past my lips.
He seemed reluctant to break the contact, but managed to remove his trousers without breaking our eye contact, and discarded them on the floor.
“Come here,” he said, reaching for me again.
I crawled forward and we entered into a long, heady kiss as I straddled his legs.
On top of him, skin-against-skin, I could hardly breathe.
His hands were suddenly everywhere, as were mine, covering every dip and channel between his muscles, every scar, every curl of red-gold hair.
But my need for closeness would not be satiated no matter how many inches of me pressed against him.
As much as I wanted to give myself over to his searing touch, to let him explore every delicious, sensitive spot on my body, I cleared my throat and pulled back.
Not enough to look him in the eye—I was far too apprehensive for that—but enough to speak quietly in his ear.
“I-I should…I should tell you…that I’ve never done…this.”
Devil shifted, moving his face so I could see his quizzical expression. “But I thought…Will?”
“It was not worth the risk,” I muttered.
“But I am worth the risk?” he asked, mouth twisting into a self-satisfied grin.
“Do not make me answer that.” I paused to take a deep breath. “I am just…out of my element, and I know you’ve probably done—”
He stopped me with a sweet, sudden kiss, then shook his head. “I haven’t either…”
All I could do was let out a disbelieving snort and sit back on top of his thighs, certain he was taunting me. “You lie!”
“I cannot!” he cried, eyes wide and incredulous.
“Well, then you grossly exaggerate, at least…” The nerves and shakiness spilled out of me in a weak laugh. “At the revelry, you said citizens of the Arden are ‘notoriously promiscuous’, and you being the most notorious of all…I thought…”
He tucked a curl behind my ear. A tender, honest gesture, to match the tender, honest expression on his face.
“They are, but I…I was created for you, May.” He said it simply.
Innocently. As if it were a foregone conclusion that he had waited all this time just for me.
“I have loved you since I was stone blind and knew only the sound of your voice, calling to me through the darkness. Before I even knew what I was, I knew I loved you. How could I ever want another, when you have always been the embodiment of all that is holy and perfect in my world?”
My breath caught in my throat as I took in the earnest devotion painted across his features. He meant every word. Not just in the way that he couldn’t lie, but in the way that he wanted me to have the full truth of himself, and his heart—however new it might be.
“Surely, those words are blasphemous to any gods you see fit to worship,” I whispered. His forehead pressed into my breastbone and his arms encircled my waist, pulling me back into him.
“Well, I will continue to speak them…unless you stop me.” He began to punctuate his sentences with a series of soft kisses over my chest and neck.
“You are no mere faerie princess, nor even are you a queen. You are the Arden herself, a goddess, a living divinity like the Huntress, who does not—” I kissed him hard and he fell silent, save for the groan of longing that echoed through his mouth and into mine.
I smiled faintly at the sound. “You will offend all our gods.”
“Then let me offend them with my entire body,” he replied, “for I am not a creature of half measures.” His expression shifted from hungry to ferocious, and his lips returned to my neck, then moved to my collarbone, then went further, his teeth grazing across the peak of my breasts.
With one hand tangled through my hair, he slipped the other between my legs.
“I think you enjoy my blasphemy more than you care to admit,” he growled, tilting his head back as his fingers slid inside me. “Why else would you be this fucking wet when I’ve barely touched you?”
The only response I could give was a tiny moan.
My body was taut and heavy, overwhelmed with desperate need that could only be relieved one way.
I tightened the grip I had on his hair, then lifted my hips and pushed them forward.
His jaw went slack as he withdrew his hand from me and touched himself, ensuring he was just as wet as I was.
“You do…know where everything goes, don’t you?” I asked with a small smirk of my own.
He just grinned, nipped at my bottom lip, and whispered, “Show me.”
As I lowered myself, slowly stretching around him, his eyes rolled back and he let out a loud, harsh moan, but his grip on me did not falter for a moment.
I held my own breath against the dull spikes of pain and buried my face into his hair with a shivering gasp once he was fully inside me.
One of his hands slid up to hold my jaw, gently pushing it back.
“May, look at me.” He brushed his thumb over the bridge of my nose, intercepting a single tear. “Does it hurt?”
“A little,” I whispered.
“Do you want to stop?”
“No…do you?”
“Absolutely not,” he assured me. After another long, tender kiss, I began to roll my hips, and thought my chest might burst open when he looked up at me again.
His eyes shone bright as the stars, full of what I could only describe as adoration, or worship.
The magyk beneath my skin crawled and sparked, causing the tiny freckles on my arms, and his snakeskin patterns, to glow again.
He stretched out his wings, wrapping them around my back to create a tiny world where only we two existed—a world I never wanted to leave, where a million unspoken vows passed between us with every shaky breath and every brush of skin against skin.
A world illuminated by nothing but the strange, transcendent connection between us.
The pain subsided, leaving behind a blindingly euphoric, molten ache of pleasure that spread through my entire body.
I locked my fingers around his upper arm and through his hair, while one of his hands slid down to grip my buttocks, and the other held the back of my neck.
I controlled our pace, while he tasted every inch of me his tongue and lips could reach.
“Gods above, Devil, you feel so fucking good,” I moaned, and responded by slipping his thumb back into my mouth, then pulling so I was forced to meet his gaze. I clamped my teeth down hard, but he barely even reacted.
“You are so fucking beautiful, and perfect,” he breathed, “and you’re mine…”
“Yours,” I affirmed, my voice fading into a high, breathy note as I let myself move faster. “I am yours.”
He leaned in, eyes glinting dangerously and fingers digging into the soft flesh of my hips as he slid my hair aside.
His pointed teeth sank into the skin and muscle of my neck, just below my ear, and I let out a loud, gasping yelp.
But something animalistic took over and I jerked on his hair too, pulling his head to the side.
“And you are mine,” I rasped before marking him in return and watching a few crimson drops of blood skate down his pale skin.
The sight of it only pushed me further into whatever hedonistic fog we had both found ourselves in, and I rode him harder, letting my ragged cries drift up between the branches of the oak tree.
I could no longer bring myself to care whose ears they might find.
Devil threaded his fingers into my hair again and pulled, forcing my back to arch and sending a new surge of pleasure through me at the change in angle.
My wings flared out and he matched my sounds with his own as we both lost control.
The feeling of him inside me, the heat between our sweat-slick skin, the way he held my body against his—all of it pushed me over an edge I wasn’t sure existed before.
The voice I heard begging him not to stop hardly sounded like my own, and he replied in a whispered, commanding tone I couldn’t help but obey.
“Come for me, May.”
I only regained my presence of mind long enough to crush my lips against his before we both found release.
The noises he made were just as blasphemous as his words—shuddering, whimpering moans, mixed with my name—but I breathed them in, unwilling to let even a single piece of him out into the world.
He belonged to me now, as surely as the sun belonged to the sky, or the Fair Folk belonged to the Arden.
When his body collapsed beneath mine, he looked up with a wicked smile and teased, “I think they might have heard you clear over the mountains.”
I let out a harsh breath and dropped my head onto his shoulder. “Can you not ever just…be silent?”
“How can I be silent when my mandate is to constantly remind you how wonderful you are?” he asked, wrapping an arm around my waist and leaning forward suddenly.
I threw my arms around his neck with a soft squeal, but he merely flipped us, so that I was on my back, wings spread out wide on the bed.
I locked my ankles around his hips as he moved, thrusting slowly and gently, drowning me in ripples of shallow, residual delirium.
Almost lazily, he moved his mouth over mine, tracing delicate kisses across my chin and jaw and throat.
“I love you,” he whispered when his mouth stopped below my ear.
“I’ll love you until the stars take their leave of the night, and long after.
When there is nothing left for me in this life, I will gladly follow you into the darkness.
” I melted, pulling him down on top of me as our bodies relaxed together.
Slowly, I brushed my fingers along the feathered edge of his wing, unable to say what I wanted because the feelings overwhelmed me before I could even form a thought.
“Sweet words easily do your bidding,” I said after a few steadying breaths, “but they do not do mine, so forgive me if I cannot give you poetry. But what I do have is yours: a hardened heart and a sharp tongue, still capable of softness when…handled gently.”
Devil lifted his head and brushed hair from my eyes. “A kind heart and a clever tongue, which have both been mistreated by an undeserving world. I would do anything to be worthy of them, and of you, May.”
He pulled me into another kiss that felt like it might last forever, and when he dropped his head back onto my chest, I just smiled and murmured, “You already are, my demon.”