Chapter Twenty-Five The End of Time, the Start of Time #2
He raked his soapy hands through my hair, working my scalp until my eyes rolled shut for bliss. When he was done, he rinsed the suds away, and I took the cloth from his hands. “My turn.”
I washed charcoal and ash from his face, his hair—his neck and arms and chest. And while the water grew dirtier for every swipe of the cloth, I marveled at how soothing it was to sit atop him, he holding me and the bath holding him, our bodily strength entirely superfluous; all it took was water to keep us up.
I dipped Rory’s head back, washing away the final suds of soap from his hair. And because the moment was so kind, and he felt so good beneath my body, my hands, I leaned down. Pressed my lips against the column of his throat. Kissed him.
Rory’s lips parted and he sighed. It wasn’t a sound of lust, or relaxation, but something else. Something softer. Cheeks going red, like he hadn’t meant to—like it’d surprised him, the noise he’d made—Rory looked up at me.
“What?” I said.
His chest heaved, his pulse jumped, but his mouth stayed shut.
I ran my pointer finger past his lips, pressing it over the tops of his crowded bottom teeth. “What, Rory?”
Nothing still.
My heart fluttered. “Are you—”
“I’m in love with you.” He sat up, breath rushing out of him.
“I’ve been in love with you. I didn’t tell you before, because—because for a time I never had anything to fill my hands, and what I did get I gorged myself on before it could slip away.
And even when I might have been brave enough to tell you how I felt, I didn’t have the language.
The enormity of my affection… there’s no describing it. But I’ll break apart if I don’t try.”
He clasped my cheek, his voice thick. “I love you, Sybil Delling. More than anything. And whatever becomes of this world, I’ll spend the time I’m afforded without an ounce of pride or disdain or godlessness.
” His thumb brushed my lips, his gaze imploring.
“To know you is to forget all three. And I know that you think Traum has no need for its stone objects or false gods, but there is not a world that exists in which I have no need for you.”
My tears fell into the water, a fleet of tiny ripples answering. “I want you to know me.” Somehow, my hand ended up exactly where it should. Over Rory’s heart. “I’m in love with you, too.”
He reared up, catching me with the force of an anchor clasping to rocks.
We kissed each other, two heretics tasting worship. Water spilled from the tub, our movements turning reckless, and then Rory’s arms were under me, and he was pressing up to his feet and lifting me out of the water.
I wrapped my legs around him. “What are you—”
He kicked clothes out of the way. “I’ve needed this for too long.”
Hands flexing over my bottom, he brought us to the far side of the washroom by the hearth, setting us roughly down upon a sheepskin rug. Rory climbed over me, frantic that our mouths shouldn’t be apart, and assailed my lips with kisses, the taste of copper lingering on his split bottom lip.
I sucked it into my mouth, faint notes of spring water swimming in his blood. Rory moaned, then lowered himself, kissing my neck, my sternum, the undersides of each breast, trailing down my abdomen. He kissed my navel, my scar. “Tell me if it’s too much.”
I rolled my hips. “It’s not enough.”
Rory grinned against my skin. A breath later he had his shoulders between my legs. Taking hold of my hips, clasping firmly, he dropped his face over flesh and hair. Took in a long, deep breath.
And ran his tongue up my center.
An animal noise tore up my throat, even the nerve endings in my scalp sparking to life. Rory laughed, his low voice reverberating through my body. Then he did it again, this time with an arm slung over my pubis, adding pressure, weight, to the absolute shock of feeling between my legs.
Rory put his tongue on me like I was the world’s table and he a man starved, keeping his pace steady, noting what strokes made me quicken—repeating them until I was writhing and breathless.
I dug my hands into his hair, fingers curling like claws, mind scattering; I was everywhere and nowhere, laying on my back on the sheepskin rug and floating five feet above it. Voice strangled, I said, “If I can’t come like this—”
“You don’t have to come.” Rory raised himself onto his forearms. His cheeks were red, his hair in his face, his gaze as imploring as when he’d told me he loved me. “I just want you to feel good.”
He put his thumb in his mouth. Bit it. Then he lowered himself back down, where he sighed, dragging his bottom lip up my sex to that swollen bead above and covering it with his tongue.
And all while he lapped at me, his hand traveled up my body, over my stomach, clasping my breast before it trailed up to my neck and rested on my throat.
He didn’t apply pressure. He just slipped his thumb between my lips, past teeth and over my tongue, giving me the spring water in his blood—and my mouth something to do while he worked on me.
I ran my tongue over the calloused spiral of his thumbprint. Whatever vital thing I hungered for in his blood was there, the taste hot and floral. I licked it. Nipped it. Sucked on it.
Rory said my name, dragging out the l with a long, lazy stroke of his tongue. “Wrap your legs around me, Sybil.”
It took me a moment to remember how to speak. “I’ll crush you.”
Rory pressed his teeth along the inside of my thigh, biting, then kissing sensitive skin as he slipped his middle finger into me. “Good.”
I pressed my thighs to the sides of his head, holding him to me.
Rory consumed me, soft and persistent, lapping me up as he moved his finger in and out of me.
And a lifetime would have been too quick for all the things I wanted Rodrick Myndacious to do to my body, but it took only a few painfully short minutes before the muscles deep within my core began to clench.
Rory must have felt them, because he swore, his voice taking on even more gravel. “That’s it, sweetheart. Just like that.”
“I’m already there. I’m—” I didn’t know what I said, if it was profane or prayerful, only that the sounds coming from my throat were desperate and loud and entirely unrestrained. Rory kept his palm over my throat, a moan coming from his own when he felt the reverberations of my cries.
The soft hue of dawn outside the window was nothing to the blinding light behind my eyes. When my soul found its way back into my body, my thighs fell apart, and I sank into the rug. Rory kissed my sex and didn’t slip his finger out of me until all the rolling clenches had relaxed.
I was too soft, too languid to move. He picked me up off the sheepskin rug and carried me out of the washroom and into the corridor, kicking open his bedroom door, the two of us tangling in sheets as we fell onto his bed.
Rory pinned me against pillows, kissing up and down my neck. “I could do this forever.”
I brushed hair from his face and looked into his eyes. “Is that what you want?”
“To know you and kiss you and fuck you for lifetimes?” He cupped my cheeks, making my lips pucker. “What do you think?”
I pulled his hair.
Eyelids heavy, Rory looked down at me with such unwashed adulation my chest ached.
“Life is strange after death. But there is spring water, should we choose to go back to the tor. You and I will have a lot of time. That is not a bad thing,” he murmured.
“Because it will take time for things to get better in Traum. But they will, and we will help them get better.”
“Knight, knave, and now optimist.” I reached between us. Took him in my fist. “A man of many endowments.”
He smiled against my mouth and kissed me until I was thoughtless.
The sun rose in the window, and when Rory held me against him, pressing himself into me, I felt the obliteration of my hopelessness.
I was not a stone object, and I need not disappear so that the story might change.
I was still here, and I could rattle the world yet.
Rory gasped against my neck, our bodies perfect counterbalances, hips and hands and lips giving and taking. Cheeks burning, breath shuddering out of him, he looked into my eyes. “Tell me you’ll remain with me.”
I confessed, and didn’t lose a whit of strength for it. “I’ll remain with you always.” I kissed the bruises on his face. His cuts and scars and the rings in his ear. “Tell me you love me.”
“I’ll love you always.”
The exquisite oblivion of the little death found us, and we held each other and slept, ending as we’d begun.
Washed clean.