Chapter 34 #3
“And you’re thirsty for me, so I’m going to give you what you want and come harder on your tongue than I’ve ever come before.”
He smiles wickedly against my flesh. “Good, little fox. You get me. Now, close your eyes.”
He reaches up and runs soft fingers over my closed lids, then grips my breast possessively on his way down, his other arm curling around my thigh to keep it open.
Anticipation thickens my blood, the pulse between my legs taking on a life of its own.
The first touch of his tongue is so insanely well-placed that tears sting my eyes. He starts with low, careful caresses at my entrance and away from that sweet bundle of nerves that would explode if he so much as brushed it.
He hums, alternating blunt strokes with softer ones, eating me up and killing me with his tongue. The pressure radiating outward from my neglected, greedy core builds and builds, rising higher, pushing me further.
Unmoved by my nonsensical pleading noises, my ghost holds my thighs open without mercy, forcing me to suffer the brunt of his delicate laps until I’m so high, I can’t remember my own name.
There’s something about his confidence that strips me of my usual hesitation, my self-consciousness. I want to please my ghost, and if it pleases him to see me utterly and completely destroyed by his tongue, then that’s what he shall have. My back arches off the mattress.
He rubs, rubs, rubs that sweet spot, and it hurts so sweet it devours.
“Trust me. Don’t fight it.”
I come hard, fulfilling his fantasies and more, but somehow, I’m not soothed. I want more.
The sound of fabric shuffling causes my walls to clench around emptiness. E spreads me for him, the urgency giving way to a softer, more reverent side of him.
A pang of regret cramps my gut. I wish I could see him, in this moment, looking down at me.
“Penny for your thought?” I whisper.
A dark chuckle grates his throat. “It’s my first time. I want to commit it to memory.”
“Your first time that you remember,” I correct him playfully, tracing the sparse path of hair between his pecs.
He huffs. “Semantics. I can’t remember anyone else, and there won’t be anyone after you. You will be my first and last, Max.”
He lines himself up with my entrance, the tip of him right there.
“I love you, little fox,” he says, caressing the angle of my jaw.
I curl my fingers over his heart and open my mouth to answer, but he swallows my next breath with a kiss. He kisses me again and again, stealing my thoughts and not giving me an inch to spare as though he’s too scared that I won’t say it back. That I can’t.
But there are no more excuses left in me. I don’t want to explain him away, to hate myself for loving a dead man, because I’m desperately in love with him, and I want to shout it from the treetops.
I’m in love with a ghost, and I don’t care.
I bury my hands in his soft hair and give it a gentle tug, eager for the chance to take a breath and tell him I love him, too, but a strange sensation prickles the skin of my arms. When I open my eyes, he’s there, hovering above me.
Bright light. Long dark lashes. Golden-white hair. Chiseled abs. And a loving smile that borders on obsession.
I blink excess water out of my eyes and hold my breath, but the image never quite comes into focus. His shape refuses to fully materialize, and the room spins around me almost as violently as it did under the venom’s influence.
My mouth hangs open, and he mistakes my surprise for hesitation.
“You don’t have to say it back, yet. Just know I’d break the world for you, little fox. Every fucking piece.”
He enters me in one powerful thrust, and I cry out, my head falling to the mattress.
Tell me to stop, Max. Because I will destroy everything that keeps me from you. I will break the world, little fox. Every fucking piece.
I sink my nails into his scalp, the throaty words so similar to the ones he spoke in the Dreaming. It takes me back to that lonely marital bed.
The horror of what comes next is still imprinted in my memory, of drowning in a wedding night that felt more like a death sentence than happiness… Of the black waters that followed.
My dream-husband. It is him.
He curls a hand around my thigh, his fingers digging into my arse as he adjusts the angle before penetrating me deeper.
And deeper.
I’m feverish and mad, seeing two scenes at once, two versions of him above me, one brimming with love while the other…
stalks from the shadows. My ghost comes into focus, a golden light emanating from within, while his shadow—his double—swells with darkness and hunger.
The two images bleed into one another until I can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.
The two men fuck me as though they could be resurrected in sin.
“You’ve got us both, now, my lucky little fox,” my dream-husband slurs.
I remember drowning in the dream. I’m drowning now, in his arms, in this pleasure that reaps me against logic, every invasion of his cock like a scythe cutting me in two.
“Fuck. You’re the heaven I never knew,” E says huskily, oblivious to my fever dream.
“Look at him,” my dream-husband murmurs. “Poor fool, still pretending he’s gentle. Still pretending he doesn’t ruin everything he loves. Too lost to notice he invited me in himself. All that light, all that hope. Disgusting.”
A long ahh tears out of me, the size of him crashing through my entire body. A blinding orgasm explodes from that space between my legs with such violence, I stop breathing altogether.
And then I see it.
The dark sky behind the stars. That vast, inky nothingness beyond the light.
Spiraling.
And spiraling.
E’s shadow holds me under the surface of that wide, endless dark.
“Tell me, little fox, does he fuck you the way I do? Does he still ask for permission and hold you till morning? Ask him what he dreams about. Ask him what makes his chest ache for no reason. Deep down, he knows he’s not good enough.”
“Who are you?” I ask, my lips unmoving, this ocean of black buried deep in the cracks of my mind.
“I am every promise he failed to keep and every sin he committed. Every bridge he burned. Every heart he broke. I am the grief he couldn’t survive, and the awful choices he justified.
The monster he became one compromise at a time.
” His voice lowers beyond loathing, beyond hate.
“I am every part of him that he buried, and I find him lacking.”
The hand of my dream-husband closes around my throat.
“Bad news,” he murmurs. “I’m the one who gets you in the end, Max.”
His thumb tilts my chin higher. “Because you’re far too curious to ever give up on meeting me. And he’ll get curious, too. About the man haunting your dreams and satisfying your darkest fantasies. He’ll want answers and grow jealous.” A humorless smile curves his mouth. “Angry.”
I want to find my way back to the light, but my dream-husband is a black hole, and his gravity is inescapable.
“And then, you and I will be reunited.” He bites down on my neck, hard enough to taste my blood.“Enjoy this version of him. It doesn’t survive.”
“Max?” E’s voice echoes from impossibly far away. It cuts through the darkness, barely reaching me. “Max, are you alright? Max!”
E moves frantically beside me, but I can’t see him anymore. I can’t see anything. I rise. I fall. I break the surface of the waking nightmare, only to be dragged under again.
A gasp tears out of my throat, and my eyes fly open. The unbearable pressure of eons of time and space and galaxies delivers me.
The delirium snaps.
“Max!” E presses his palm to my heart, making sure it’s still beating. “What happened? Did I hurt you?”
Shiver after shiver rocks my body as it crashes down from the end-all orgasm. E is invisible again, and I’m not sure if his shadow was ever really in the room with us, or if I imagined the whole thing.
“Where did you go?” he asks.
“I-I don’t know,” I stammer, feeling so cold, my teeth chatter.
He kisses the top of my head, handling me like a precious, fragile thing. “Max, I’m so sorry. I’m here. You’re okay. We’re okay.”
I hide my face in his chest and grip his shoulders tightly. “Maybe that’s what loving a dead man does to a mortal. We should have known there would be consequences.”
E chokes. “You love me?”
I screw my eyes shut against the sting of incoming tears. “I do. I love you, and it terrifies me. The man in my dreams—”
I grip the roots of my curls and tug, the memories already slipping, already fading, but I remember enough.
My throat constricts.
Can I repeat his sinister prophecy?
Do I have the right to tell E about the man he might have been in life? About the version of himself that tried to drown me?
Our first time together, and it was…apocalyptic. Almost fatal.
He pats my back up and down. “Shh. I’m not going to let anyone hurt you, especially not that creepy dream-stalker. We’ll find out who he is and how he does it. And then, I’ll kill him myself.”
If only it could be so simple.
“Did you—” But I know he didn’t finish. “What am I saying? Of course you didn’t, I’m sorry,” I ramble.
He pecks my temple. “Don’t worry about that—never worry about that, alright? We’re alright now.” He brushes my hair away from my face. “Are you alright?”
I bite down on my lip.
No, I’m not alright, but what can I do?
I can’t bear the thought of losing E, of trading him in for the dark lover who plagues my thoughts. If mentioning the hold his past self has on me is the very thing that sets his fate in motion… I shouldn’t breathe another word about it. Never.
“Yes,” I whisper. “Perfectly alright.”
The tents outside have long since gone quiet, the campfires burned down to ash, the oil lanterns extinguished.
We breathe slowly in and out.
In and out.
Until a terribly discreet but intrusive knock cuts through the dark.