Chapter 31 #3
His hips moved unconsciously as I stroked him, reaching for a rhythm I longed to learn. I greedily absorbed every detail, the exact angle of his thick eyelashes over his cheeks, the color of the flush that stained his neck.
“What else?” I whispered, my voice sounding dry to my own ears.
I hadn’t realized how much want I could feel from this position on my knees, my hand around him, but I knew there was more.
I wanted more. I’d told him I wanted everything, but I sensed he was waiting for something.
“Should I—” I moved to suggest curling over him, putting my mouth on him like he had on me, but he stopped me with one hand on my shoulder, the other covering mine where it was still wrapped around his length.
“Not if you don’t want this to be over in the next thirty seconds,” he said, voice tight.
“What, then?”
With slitted eyes, Taran pulled me down next to him.
His hand swept in a long stroke down my body, curling under my backside to hitch my hip against his and pull my thigh over his leg.
I unthinkingly let go of him when his fingertips ghosted over my core, and he took my hand with his own to bring it back.
“Please don’t stop,” he said, nipping my lower lip in rebuke. “I think I might actually die if you stop, and you’d feel guilty about that later.”
He was hesitating for some reason, and I wasn’t distracted even when his fingers began to rub slick patterns between my thighs.
“You said everything,” I reminded him. “Did you change your mind?”
“Darling, I can’t change my mind, I’m Stoneborn.
And you are very naked and tempting and I’m trying hard to keep my head about this when all I want to do is fall on you like a ravenous beast.” His breath came faster when my hand moved more quickly, a reaction my scientific mind treasured and wanted to explore more completely.
“I don’t mind if you lose control,” I said, daintily biting into the large muscle of his shoulder. I thought I’d like that, actually, seeing Taran with no masks or pretense. Knowing that I had done that to him.
“You have no idea whether you would mind,” he said, body jerking when I bit down harder, and he pulled my legs apart enough to press one finger inside me, a frictionless glide that nearly had me forgetting my important goals again.
I twisted against the exquisite curl of his hand in my body, trying not to lose myself in it.
I could have more, and I wanted more. “Consider that it is very, very important to me that you like this, so that you want to do this again in a few hours, and again in the morning, and also every day for the rest of eternity.”
“Why are you worried?” I asked, firmly pushing aside the question of whether I’d get him for eternity or even one more night out of my mind.
Taran cast a skeptical glance down his body, where I did not quite have my hand closed all the way around him. “This might hurt a little.”
I had to stifle my giggle, because I didn’t want him to take it the wrong way, but that concern had been the furthest from my mind. With everything that he’d seen me survive, he was worried that I couldn’t muster the same courage any other woman would before her wedding night?
“I don’t think it will,” I told him honestly, because the only pain I’d felt so far was the ache of desire, and that was only growing for every moment that he didn’t touch me like I wanted him to. “But if it does, I expect you to be very brave about it.”
That made him laugh, and a smile that was nearly painful for its tenderness spread across his face. His green eyes were bright and loving as he finally rolled to kick off his trousers and cover my body with his own.
“We’ll both be brave, then,” he whispered into my ear before ducking his head to suck on the tender skin of my neck.
His knees parted my thighs, and he shifted his weight to one forearm so that he could pull one of my legs over his hip.
He lined himself up with me and held the position with taut muscles and his lip caught between his teeth until I wrapped my arms around his shoulders and lifted my hips to welcome him.
When we came together, I’d always imagined that there would be some moment of clear division.
Before and after. Like the note of a lyre’s plucked string where there’d been silence before.
And not just a physical sensation, but an emotional one too—I thought I’d be forever changed, after all, off Wesha’s path for good.
But as Taran exhaled and slid forward, fraction by fraction, until our hips were flush against each other, I realized it wasn’t the first note of a song, but the refrain in a melody we’d already been singing.
I’d wanted this for years. I’d started singing this song the first day Taran’s fingers brushed mine.
My heart had sung it the day I realized I was in love with him, the day he asked me to marry him, every evening I played his favorite ballad, every time he made an excuse to comb my hair, every hidden kiss, every longing look.
This hadn’t changed me; I already was this person who clutched her lover’s arms and urged him to make the bright sensation even sharper. There wasn’t such a distance between having something and wanting it, after all.
“Alright?” Taran asked, kissing my eyelids, my cheeks, the tip of my nose. I could tell that he was trembling from the effort of holding himself back, a fine sheen of sweat standing out on his cheekbones and shoulders, but he didn’t move.
“Perfect,” I breathed. It was perfect even if it was overwhelming, even the stretch of my body was caught just on the sweet edge between pain and pleasure.
I would stay in this moment forever, if I could, because there were infinite little details I wanted to capture and hold.
I experimentally lifted my hips against Taran’s to explore the sensation that budded in my core with every movement, and he hissed, dropping his forehead to mine as he struggled to hold still.
I moved again, finding my bearings, grounding myself in the raspy noise of Taran’s breathing.
He dipped his head to kiss me as though trying to distract me, but I sucked his lower lip into my mouth and gave a peremptory roll of my hips, moving past the faint ache toward glints of pleasure I could sense in the distance.
At last Taran moved, so carefully that my heart swelled in my chest at his painstaking gentleness.
It was instinct to press my fingers into his shoulders, deep knowledge to squeeze his hips with my thighs and urge him on.
This had been locked within me, waiting to be expressed, and it was nothing but relief to finally express it.
His breathing was more ragged than the slow rhythm he set, most of his attention locked on my face, vigilant for any sign of distress.
“My love, you’re not going to break me,” I said, trying to pull him in deeper with my heel against the back of his calf. I wanted to chase that thread of tension I’d found earlier, but more than that, I wanted to see that thread in him unravel. I wanted to see him undone.
“You are shockingly, terrifyingly breakable,” Taran said before kissing me again and doing something clever with his hips to roll against a spot that made me gasp into his mouth.
I tried to object to that statement, but he did it again, and I couldn’t say much with his tongue in my mouth and my heart fluttering in my chest. Still, I could dig my fingernails into his arms, hard enough that a mortal man would have worn crescent moon marks in his skin to gloat over the next day.
I thought I wouldn’t mind a few marks. A little burn when I walked. A violet constellation in the shape of his fingertips over my hips. I turned my face into Taran’s neck and let him feel the edge of my teeth against his skin.
He laughed in a shaky rush. “You are such a little demon. Fine, you know what you get?”
I was excited for whatever it was that I got, but I was still surprised when he wrapped his arms under my back and carefully rolled us over so that I straddled his hips, our bodies still joined together. I blinked with disorientation as Taran sprawled out on his back, smirking up at me.
“Go ahead, do your worst,” he said.
My laugh sent flutters of pleasure through the spread of my thighs, and while I wasn’t certain what, exactly, he thought I was going to do, every tiny movement was infinitely rewarding.
When I hesitated, Taran put his hands on my hips and pulled me toward him, a sweet, aching roll that made our breaths catch in unison.
I did it again, his hands still guiding me, and it was deeper, better.
I had it. This was the rhythm, this was the song. I knew this one.
I closed my eyes to focus on the building pressure that coiled tighter with every movement, but the tips of Taran’s fingers brushed my chin, startling me.
“No, look at me,” he said, voice strained. It took me a moment to get it—there was nothing better in the world to look at than beautiful, inhumanly perfect Taran with his cheeks flushed red and his neck corded with tension, but I didn’t immediately realize why he sounded so insistent.
Did he think I could imagine anyone else?
It never could have been anyone else but him, and it would always have been like this.
Even if it had been some stolen evening away from the campfire or on our wedding night, it still would have been just like this.
I wouldn’t have loved him any more or less.
And he loved me, I knew that for certain.
He loved me then and he loved me at this moment, with his eyes bright and fixed on my face while his fingers pressed bruises into my thighs.
I held myself up with one palm over his hammering heart as the knots of sensation in my body twisted and spun, drawing tighter and tighter until I felt that the sensation was all there was to me.
I was only dimly aware of the rasping noises I was making, little sounds drifting from my lips without effort.
I was losing track of the rhythm, suspended mostly by Taran’s hands and the primal momentum of my body.
Keeping my eyes open was the only conscious effort I could manage, and I found that I was begging Taran for help again, certain that I was going to fall or fail or perhaps die under the pressure building inside me as he moved.
He pressed his thumb between us, his other hand gripping the loose hair falling down my back.
Between these two points of tension, he drew me like a bow.
With one final snap of his hips, that tension broke, and I was undone.
Taken apart. Remade. I was too small to contain the wave of feeling and emotion that vibrated through me, washing from the points of my breasts to the tips of my toes with a force that felt sufficient to pull the walls down.
This part, I could never have imagined. I had asked my body to sing and to fight and to survive great disasters before, but I hadn’t known how it could ring with feeling.
It would have felt like too much to ask for, but Taran’s rapt eyes on my shaking lips said eloquently that this was what he’d wanted.
I would have fallen—to the floor, or perhaps the ceiling—but Taran’s hands kept me barely upright as his rhythm picked up for a handful of heartbeats before the line of his mouth tightened.
A long, low noise was stifled in his throat as he reached to cup one breast, my hair tangled around his fingers.
His hard green stare lost focus and was replaced by a softer expression, one that suffused his face with something like wonder as the muscles of his body went taut and still.
There was an echo of his pleasure in my body, one last throb of sensation that lingered before my breathing slowed and my heartbeat began to match the heaviness in my limbs.
I savored every second of it, my eyes determinedly open to catch the way Taran’s head fell back and his eyelids drooped in satisfaction.
He let out a whistling sigh and brushed my hair off my shoulders before thinking better of it, gathering the longest strands to fall around his face like a curtain when I slumped forward onto his chest.
“I first imagined this about ten minutes after I met you,” Taran murmured into my ear when I finally closed my eyes. “And it must have been the millionth time.”