Chapter 15 #2
She is staring at me with her mouth hanging open. The rain is running into it. She looks stunned. But then her eyes regain that wild look again, that restless energy, the prey-instinct still running in her blood. She thrashes, trying to slip out from under me.
I grab her thighs and drag her back.
“Enough,” I roar.
She stills.
“I have to taste you,” I tell her.
I lower my head between her thighs and I taste her directly from the source.
Her fingers dig into my braids and for a moment I think she is going to pull me off and then she realizes what my mouth is doing and she is holding me there instead. Her fingers tighten in my hair and she’s making a sound I’ve never heard before, low and desperate.
I take her clit between my lips and suck.
I’ve practiced this a thousand times in theory, on fruit, on shapes. I am careful now. I don’t break her skin. I use my tongue on the exact spot I’ve been taught is the one that ends them, flattening it and stroking.
She bucks against my face. Her thighs clamp around my head.
Her heels dig into my back. She is panting, and moaning, and making sounds that must be embarrassing to her because I can feel her shuddering with it, the overwhelm of her own response.
I don’t stop. I add my tongue into her wet entrance, then back to her clit, then back inside.
She is grinding against my mouth now, lost.
She shatters.
Her scream echoes through the jungle. Her body jerks. Her hands fist in my hair so hard it should hurt and I don’t feel it. Her thighs are shaking around my head.
“Stop,” she whimpers. “Stop, stop, it’s too much—”
I lift my head.
Her chest is heaving. Her eyes are closed. Rain is falling on her face. She looks ruined and perfect.
I crawl up her body and brace one arm in the moss beside her head. My other hand grips my cock and guides myself to her entrance.
She opens her eyes. Her hazel eyes meet mine in the moonlight and the rain.
“Wrap your legs around me,” I order.
She does. Her heels dig into my lower back. Her arms come up around my neck. She is trembling.
I pause. Just for a heartbeat. Just to look at her.
“I have waited my entire life for you, Ines of One.”
Her eyes fill. “I love you, Texon. I love you.”
The words hit me so hard I feel them in both of my hearts.
“I love you,” I rasp. “Until days run into time.”
I cover her mouth with mine.
And I plunge inside her.
She screams into my mouth.
I do not pause. I cannot. The heat and the tightness and the wet clutch of her body around mine it is beyond anything I imagined.
Forty rotations of dormancy erupting all at once.
I am snarling against her lips. She is crying out and I am driving into her with all the strength I’ve never been able to use.
Her body adjusts fast. By my third thrust she is no longer crying out in pain and by my fifth she is moving with me. Her legs tighten around my hips. Her nails dig into my shoulders. She meets every thrust.
I am making sounds I don’t recognize. Growls, low and deep, coming from somewhere in my chest that I didn’t know existed. She is moaning. The rain is falling on both of us. My braids are soaked. Her hair is tangled in the moss.
I lift her hips, change the angle. Her eyes fly open. “Oh — oh gods — Texon—”
I can feel her climbing again. Her body is tightening around me. The flush is spreading across her chest. She is about to come and I haven’t even touched her clit, she is going to come from nothing but me inside her.
I can feel my own release building. My spine is on fire. My claws are dig into the mud beside her head. “Come for me, Be’Ih,” I rasp. “Come for me.”
Her whole body arches under mine and she screams my name into the rain, my real name, Texon, and her core clamps down around me and it is too much.
My first orgasm in my entire life floods through me.
I throw my head back and let out a thunderous roar into the jungle.
I feel my seed jetting into her. There is so much of it.
Rotations of it. Every empty, lonely cycle of my adult life pouring out of me into my Bride.
I can feel her body taking it, her womb accepting it, and I know — I know — I have planted my offspring in her tonight.
I collapse forward. Catch myself on my forearms to keep from crushing her.
We are both shaking. I roll us to our sides, keeping myself inside her, not ready to lose that connection. My arms come around her. Her small hands press flat against my chest, right over my two hearts.
She is laughing softly. Or crying. I can’t tell.
I lean down and kiss her. Slower this time. Gentler.
Her fingers find the bite mark she left on my shoulder. The scratches she raked down my stomach. The split in my lip where she bit me. “I did this,” she whispers.
“You honored me.”
“You have blood all over you.”
“My brothers will be impressed. You bit me, scratched me, and cracked your hand on my jaw.”
She laughs, a real, startled laugh that makes her whole body shake against mine.
And I realize I am smiling. A real one, not the tight polite thing I do while at the mine. This smile uses muscles in my face I haven’t used since I was a boy.
She notices. Her hand comes up and touches the corner of my mouth. “I’ve never seen you smile like that.”
“I’ve never had a reason to.”
Her eyes fill again.
The rain softens around us. The warm Timbur night holds us in the clearing. I can hear the stream. I can hear her breathing slow. Her body is warm and solid against mine. My Bride. My Be’Ih. The female I waited forty rotations for. She looks tired now that the pheromones are receding.
“Sleep, Ines of One.”
“Mmm.” Her eyes are already closing. “Are we staying here?”
“Yes. Xylan always sleep where they claim. It is tradition.”
“Then tradition is good.”
I pull her tighter against my chest. Her breathing evens out within a minute. She is exhausted, the stabbing, the attack, the fever, the claiming. Her body has given me everything tonight.
I listen to the rain and look up at the canopy of flowers above us, at the sliver of moonlight through the leaves. At my Bride sleeping naked in my arms in the clearing I used to come to alone.
For forty rotations I waited for this.
She was always going to be worth it.