Chapter 16 #3
I keep sucking, licking, and teasing him until his cock is throbbing in my mouth. His knuckles go white as he grips the sheets, his thighs slightly shaking each time I take him deeper into my throat.
"Enough—" He drags me up by the shoulders before I can finish him, flips us so I'm under him again, and there's nothing measured left in his eyes. "Not like that. Not the first time I get to feel you."
Then he's moving down my body, hooking my legs over his shoulders, and he puts his mouth on on my most sensitive part.
I lose the thread of everything. His tongue drags through my folds slow and then finds the spot that makes my hips buck and stays there, relentless.
He pins my thigh with one forearm when I try to squirm from how much it is.
He eats like he's starving, like this is the thing he denied himself for two months and now that he's allowed he intends to ruin me with it.
One finger presses into me, curling, and the delicious stretch paired with his mouth still working me tears a sound out of me I don't recognize.
"Aamon—Aamon—I can't—"
He pulls back just as I hit the edge, his finger still buried in me, and the orgasm recedes just out of reach. I make a broken sound and he looks up the length of my body, mouth wet, eyes black.
"You taste like something I'm going to be starving for the rest of my life," he says, low and filthy, and it nearly finishes me on its own. "Not yet, Calypso. I want another minute of you like this."
"Aamon."
"I know." He drags his tongue across my clit, slow, cruel, holding me right at the edge without tipping me over, watching my face while I come apart at the seams. "But I've waited months for this. Let me have it."
My hips chase his mouth, shameless, past the point of caring. "Then stop torturing me."
He huffs a laugh against me, and I feel it everywhere.
Then he stops teasing. He seals his mouth over me and hums, low, and the vibration is the end. The coil that's been winding tighter and tighter snaps, and I come apart against his mouth, thighs shaking around his head, one hand fisted in his hair—
—and something tears open between us.
I can’t describe the feeling. It isn't the blood bond, the low steady hum I've come to know with Kage—this is something else entirely, something that has never happened before. Like a seam splitting open in a place I didn't know connected us at all.
At the peak, at the highest pitch of it, his want, his desire floods through the gap and into me alongside my own until I can't tell them apart.
His pleasure and mine, braided. His need—enormous, ancient, and under it something that isn't lust at all, something vast and tender and terrified—pours into me, and for one suspended second I genuinely cannot tell whose feeling is whose.
Cannot tell where I end and he begins. There's a held breath at the center of all that fever, an emotion filling me that isn’t mine, and it frightens me more than the magic ever has.
And he feels it too. He goes still against me for half a heartbeat and something in him locks up.
Then the connection between us folds itself away before I can hold it up to the light, and I'm coming down shaking, boneless, his mouth gentling me through the last of it.
He kisses his way back up my body, unhurried, and I can taste myself on his mouth when he kisses me. He settles his weight over me, the hard length of him pressing against my inner thigh, and I feel the shift in him—the intent, the way his body asks the question his mouth hasn't yet.
And a cold thread of nerves works up through all the heat.
"Wait," I say. "I have to—there's something you should know first."
He stills instantly. Lifts his head, eyes searching my face, and the want in them banks down into pure attention. "Tell me."
"I've never—" Heat floods my face, and I hate that after everything, this is the thing that makes me shy. "Any of it. I've never done any of this. You’d be the first."
For a moment he just looks at me. Something moves through his expression—surprise, and then a tenderness so total it aches to look at.
"The first," he repeats softly.
"If that changes—"
"It changes how careful I'm going to be with you." He lowers his forehead to mine, breathes out slow. And then, when I'd braced for him to keep going, he shifts his weight off me and gathers me in against his side instead. "Not tonight."
"Aamon—" My face is still burning. "You don't have to stop. I want—"
"I know." He presses his lips to my temple. "And you'll have it. All of it. Just not tonight—not at the end of the worst night you've had in weeks, half out of your mind." His hand strokes slow down my spine. "When I have you, you'll be certain. I've waited five hundred years. I can wait for that."
I should argue. Some stubborn part of me wants to.
But the truth is my body is finally, fully unclenching for the first time all night, going heavy and warm against his cold skin, and there's something in being held like this—chosen, not taken, wanted enough to be waited for—that undoes me more than anything his mouth did.
"Okay," I whisper.
"Okay." I feel him smile against my hair.
I curl into him, my leg thrown over his, my hand flat over the silent place where his heart should beat. He pulls the blankets up over us both and holds me, and the room settles into a deep quiet.
I'm half-asleep when he stirs. When his voice comes, quiet in the dark, it's unguarded in a way I've never heard it—every careful door off its hinges.
"Calypso. There's something I have to tell you. I should have told you weeks ago." He stops. "After tonight, you deserve to hear it before—"
And I don't know why I do it.
Maybe because I can hear in his voice that whatever it is, it's the kind of truth that will ruin this moment.
Maybe because I've had so few experiences that made me feel this good, still warm, still here.
Maybe because every truth anyone has ever handed me has cost me something I couldn't afford, and just this once I want to be selfish for a little longer.
I reach up and press my fingers to his mouth.
"Not tonight," I murmur, already halfway into sleep. "Whatever it is. Please. Just give me tonight without it."
He goes still under my fingers.
Then he turns his head, and presses a kiss to my palm instead.
"Tonight," he agrees, against my hand.
I fall asleep with his arm around me and my fingers curled against his jaw, and for the first time in longer than I can remember, I don't dream at all.