Chapter 7 #3
"Full." I can barely form the word. "Alive. You feel alive."
"I can feel how wet you are around me. Tell me again how objective you are."
"My objectivity is doing just fine." The words come out breathless, half a lie.
He rewards the defiance by gripping both my hips and dragging me to the edge of the mattress.
One hand tilts my pelvis up while the other keeps my shoulder pinned flat, and the new angle drives him so deep that the breath leaves my body in a rush.
I clench around him involuntarily, and the groan it pulls from him vibrates against my throat where his mouth has settled.
He pulls out slowly, almost all the way, until I feel nothing but the head of him pressing against my entrance. He holds there. Waits. Lets me feel the absence.
"Ask me," he says.
"No."
He pushes in one inch. Stops.
"Ask me."
"Severin."
"That isn't asking."
"Please."
He drives forward in a single stroke that fills me completely, and the sound I make isn't language.
He does it again. Again. Each withdrawal deliberate, each return harder than the last. The headboard knocks against the wall in a rhythm that matches his hips, and the obscenity of the sound should embarrass me, but it doesn't. Instead I revel in it.
His pace builds. Each thrust hits the spot his angle found, and the friction of it layers sensation on top of sensation until I can't separate pleasure from pressure from the simple overwhelming fact of him inside me.
He's watching my face while he fucks me, reading every response, adjusting his grip on my hip to keep me exactly where the angle works best. His jaw is tight.
His breathing is labored. The control that has defined him since the night I met him is costing him something visible with every stroke.
"You're losing control," I tell him.
His hand closes around the back of my neck. "No. I'm deciding how much of it you can survive."
"That sounds suspiciously like losing."
His next thrust drives the breath from me. "Say it again."
I open my mouth and nothing comes out. He's found the angle that turns language into something my brain can no longer produce. From the look on his face, he knows exactly what he's done.
"You'll come when I permit it," he says. "Not before."
The second orgasm builds against his explicit command, and fighting it is its own form of torture. I hold it back because he told me to, and the effort of obedience while his body drives into mine takes everything I have.
"Now," he says.
I break. The orgasm tears through me with a force that locks my legs around his hips. The contraction of my body around his is what finally does it.
The last restraint burns out of him. Control stops meaning restraint and becomes something harder: his pace, the force behind each thrust, the brutal focus with which he pins me to the bed.
His hand stays on my throat. The other locks my hip to the mattress.
The noise that tears from him is raw, savage, and entirely his.
His body shudders against mine, and the grip on my throat tightens for one breath before he releases it with the discipline of a man who will not let sensation make him careless, even now.
He stays buried inside me, one hand locked around the back of my neck.
"Do not mistake that for surrender," he says.
"I wouldn't dare."
"You would. That is becoming one of your more dangerous qualities."
He rolls to the side and pulls me against him. The gesture is so unconscious and so unlike him that it undoes me more thoroughly than anything his body just did. We drift into a light sleep as we wait for the night to end.
Dawn comes slowly. The sky pales outside the kitchen windows and I watch the transformation with my phone in my hand, stopwatch ready.
Severin stands at the door, dressed and composed, every trace of the night contained beneath the cold authority he carries into the Void.
Sunrise for October 26 is 7:19 a.m. I start the stopwatch at 7:19:00 and count.
The pull arrives at three minutes and four seconds. Severin grips the doorframe. The gouges from last night are still there, and this time he adds new ones beside them. He holds the frame for seven more seconds before the Void tears him away.
I document the new marks. I enter both numbers into the spreadsheet. Onset delay: three minutes four seconds. Active resistance: seven seconds. The delay is steepening. The resistance is growing. At the current rate, both will be measured in hours before the thirteenth dawn.
I should find that encouraging.
Instead, I remember the message wrapped around Eliza's ring. I am not dead. I cannot return.
My phone buzzes. Lena.
Call me. What’s going on?
I stare at the screen. I start typing: I need to tell you something. Delete it. Type:
Working on something big. Call you soon.
Send.
I press my fingers into the newest gouges in the wood and hold them there.
Severin may be breaking free. Or we may be holding the Gate open long enough for it to take me, or to let something other than Severin come through to the land of the living.