CHAPTER 17 #2
The room does not move. The fire does not move. The harbor does not move. The 1925 brass alarm clock on the bedside table does not move; he has not yet wound it. The wind at the glass is the only thing that has not stopped.
"Did you hear the third thing, Quinn? Tell me you heard the third thing."
I breathe. I plant my feet harder into the rug.
I look at him — at the wet-ink hair pushed back; at the two silver streaks at the right temple; at the brand under his shirt sleeve, the brand I have not yet been shown, the brand whose cold against my sternum I will know in two nights for the first time. I look at him.
"I heard the third thing."
He moves. Two steps, and he is at me. His hand at the back of my neck, his other hand at the small of my back, and he is kissing me — not the fault-line kiss of the library in Ch 7, not the negotiation kiss of the firelit Ch 13.
This is a kiss with no question in it. His mouth opens; mine opens; his tongue against mine; my hands fist at his lapel.
He walks me backward into the bedroom, three steps, then four, and we are at the foot of the bed.
He does not put me on the bed yet. He pulls back. His forehead rests against mine for the count of three. His skin is the cold of marble; the cold is dropping the room temperature by the degree his body always drops it; my fingers at his lapel feel the cold through the wool.
"Did you mean it," I ask, low.
"I have meant it for nine weeks."
"Say it again."
"After. I will say it again at the end. Look at me."
I look up. His pupils have eaten the gray to a hairline.
"Show me what you wore for me."
I step back. The black silk camisole is under the cashmere; the cashmere comes off over my head and falls to the floor.
The trousers — soft black wool, today, not the dove-gray of the war I have not yet finished — come off.
I am in the black silk camisole and the matching panties, the silk thin enough that he can see the small adhesive patch on the inside of my left rib cage where Helene's monitor sits.
He looks at the patch. He does not say anything. He has known about the patch since seventeen-thirty. He nods once.
He removes the camisole over my head. He folds it once and sets it on the bedside chair beside the clock — he is a tidy man; he does not throw clothes; he places them.
The panties he peels down more slowly, kneeling now, his mouth at my hipbone as the silk comes off my left thigh, my right, the silk pooling around my ankles. I step out of them.
I undress him. I unknot the silk tie at his throat; I slide it free; I fold it once and set it on the chair beside the camisole.
I unbutton the white shirt; he is in the thin cotton undershirt with three-quarter sleeves; I leave the undershirt on him because he has not yet given me the brand and I will not take it from him before he is ready.
The shirt comes off his shoulders; I set it on the chair.
The belt; the trousers; he steps out of them.
He is in the undershirt and nothing else.
I stand back. I look. His shoulders, his chest under the thin cotton, the long line of his thigh, the cock standing dark against his belly. I have had him in my mouth once before, and on me, and in me, and he is still the most startling thing I have ever seen with my clothes off.
"On the bed," he says. "On your back."
"In a moment. Get on the bed."
He stops.
"On your back," I say. "I want to put my mouth on you first."
He hears the first as the small precise word it is. He gets on the bed. He puts his shoulders against the pillows; his hands at his sides. He is watching me.
I climb up. I straddle his thigh; I work my way down. I put my tongue at the head of his cock — under it, where the ridge meets the crown — and I draw the flat of my tongue up along that ridge once, slow.
"Fuck, Quinn."
It is low; it is the one swear he uses, the only swear, and it is at my name.
The brand under his sleeve — even covered — pulses; I can see the small tick of cold along his left forearm under the cotton.
I take him in my mouth. I take him as deep as I can take him; I work him with my tongue against the underside; I hollow my cheeks.
His left hand goes to the back of my head; he does not grip; he rests; he lets me set the rhythm. I work him for two minutes. The cedar of the gas fire; the copper smell rising from his skin where his body has begun to warm under the want. Cedar and copper. The second of three.
I feel his thigh tense under my hand. He is close. I pull off. He says, low, "Quinn — Quinn —"
"Not yet," I say. "Later."
He breathes out. He pulls me up the body.
He kisses me — my mouth, my jaw, the freckle at the corner of my jaw he has wanted since the day I told him his logistics cost was a screaming red flag.
He kisses my sternum; my left breast; my right; my left ribs over the monitor patch; my right hipbone; my pubic bone.
He kisses my right inner thigh — slow, twice — and he comes back up the body.
He kisses the freckle again. He says, into the corner of my jaw, "Tell me you are with me. "
"I am with you."
"Look at me."
I look.
"I am going to bite at the carotid line."
I breathe.
"The bite will not hurt past the first second; the saliva enzyme is a topical local. You will feel the suction. You may come immediately; the bite triggers oxytocin and dopamine. If you need to stop, say basis-point and I will stop within two beats."
"Yes."
"I am going to enter you first. I will be inside you when I bite. Are you with me."
"Yes. Vance. Yes."
He kneels up between my thighs. He puts his right hand under my left knee and opens me; my right knee falls open against the linen.
He guides himself with his right hand and he enters me — slow, the slowest he has ever entered me.
The stretch is generous. I am wet from his mouth and from twelve days of waiting and from the words I love you still sitting in the air of the room like a clock that has been wound. He goes deep. He pauses at full depth.
"Look at me," he says.
I look.
"I love you, Quinn."
"I heard you the first time."
"Hear me again."
"I hear you. Vance."
He moves. He starts at a slow rhythm; long strokes, deep.
He turns my head with his left hand at my jaw; the right side of my throat is exposed; I feel the cold of his breath at the carotid line; I feel his upper canines drop, the unmistakable click of the fangs descending; I feel the cool brush of his lower lip at the skin under my ear.
He moves once more inside me, a long stroke, and on the upstroke he bites.
It is — the bite goes in, and there is a one-beat sting, and the sting dissolves the way a candle dissolves into wax under heat.
The puncture is not pain. It is a pulling-warm-pressure, the way you feel the inside of your wrist when someone takes your pulse with two fingers but a thousand times more — a warmth radiating from my throat into my collarbone and down my sternum and out along my arms and down between my legs where he is moving inside me.
My hips lift; my hands go up; my left hand goes to the back of his head and grips his hair without my intending to and I hold him to my throat.
The orgasm hits me — fast, immediate, with no build, the way a struck bell rings — and I come, hard, around his cock with his teeth in my throat and my own pulse pulling the warmth into him in waves.
I make a sound; I do not know what the sound is. I am pulsing around him.
He drinks. The pulling-warm-pressure deepens; my body responds; the orgasm does not stop; it rolls, settles, rolls again.
Twenty-two oh-nine; twenty-two ten. The monitor patch at my left rib cage gives one buzz against the bone, and then a second, and the second buzz is the threshold-warning, and the surprise of it — the surprise of how much, the surprise of having my body fill so completely with the sensation that I have lost the precise edges of where my skin ends — pulls a word out of me I had thought I would not need.
"Basis-point."
I say it once. My voice is low. My voice is steady. I have used my safeword once in my life and it is now, and what I am stopping is not pain — it is the intensity that has gone past my capacity to map.
Two beats. He releases his teeth. They draw out of my throat the way a knife draws out of bread that has closed back around the blade — slow, clean, no tear.
He stays inside me. His hands go to my face.
His pupils are the black of an unlit hallway.
His mouth — there is a small bead of my blood at the corner of his lower lip; he does not wipe it.
"You're safe. I have you. Tell me what you want."
I breathe. I breathe again. The bell of my pulse is settling.
The monitor has gone quiet at the second buzz; it has not gone to four.
I can feel the small pull at the puncture line where his saliva enzyme is already working at the skin — closing the edges, knitting.
He has not withdrawn. His cock is still in me, hard, still, waiting at the rhythm of my breath.
"More," I say.
His brow.
"More, but slow. The bite was — more, but slow."
He nods once, slow. He says, low, "I will lick it closed first."
He bends. He puts his tongue at the puncture line on the right side of my throat.
He licks, slow, in long strokes; the saliva enzyme works against my skin and I feel — under the warmth — the small click of the wound sealing.
He licks for two minutes. I lie under him with the cedar and the copper in the air and his cock still inside me; I do not move; I let him close me.
He lifts his head. He looks at the wound. He licks once more for finishing. He kisses the place where the bite was. He says, "It is closed."
"Then move," I say. "Slow. Like I said."