20. Helene
Helene
I’m buoyant.
Wren kisses with the control of someone who understands what it’s like to lose it all.
And he’s terrified of having it happen again.
The thought disappears when the kisses gain force, our tongues tangling, his shadows splaying over my skin.
Something easy to break, not dangerous. A touch but not.
I’ve never had a man hold me this way before. My entire fucking face is in his command.
Like he expects me to move when he wants. To perform on command.
Why do I like it?
There’s no panic when his hand wraps around my throat. He’s the one leading this exchange. His power messes with my head.
He squeezes lightly in a reminder I don’t need.
Hysteria refuses to settle when he pushes me further into the couch and angles himself on top of me between my legs.
His arm cages my head and black hair cascades round his face.
Through the strands the tips of his pale ears jut out like javelins.
The entire line of silver on the right one catches the gray light from outside.
He kisses the tip of my nose, still squeezing my throat, exerting enough pressure on my windpipe to force my breathing to go shallow.
“Hey. Wai—what are you doing?” My words grind together. “Get off.”
We never agreed on a safe word. Hysterical laughter traps itself beneath my sternum. Who needs a fucking safe word with a man you just met? Who lets a stranger who controls shade touch them this way?
Those slivers of darkness have snaked their way higher, dragging my knees open to further accommodate him.
Wren is built like a streetfighter. Lanky and tall, but athletic, muscled in ways people won’t see. Yet the girth of the hardness between his legs is impossible to ignore.
The shadows tug at my limbs until I’m splayed open, and he settles between them, his erection jutting up to my abdomen and contained only by our clothes.
I lift my palms to his chest and they catch in midair, more darkness coming out to play.
The struggle is real but not at the same time. I fight but not hard.
“What do you need?” he breathes. “What do you want?”
A part of me wants to lose to him. I want to let him take me to some kind of different place, one of quiet focus and intensity.
He kisses me again until my lips tingle. Shit, to be kissed with such hunger. There’s a difference to the way Forest devoured me. There were no pretenses with his touch. He wanted, he took. He plundered, rough and direct.
There is a varied level of eroticism with Wren.
On top of me, his shadows hook me into his grip. They lift my legs on either side of him while he kisses me hard. He chuckles at my groan and the way my fingers fight for purchase. I’m fumbling, hasty, but to do what?
What do I need?
“Such a good monster,” he rumbles against my lips. “I can’t believe you don’t remember this. It’s my pleasure to remind you.”
I don’t, unless I count the comfort in this stranger’s hands. It’s not quite familiarity but a sense of peace in the loss of control and heat of his lips. The growl of his excitement.
Shadows catch my legs to keep them wide open. And I gasp when those shadows slide over my pants, across my overheated core.
“In this life,” he says, “like every other, you are in my hands. Not the other way around.”
His shadows aren’t insubstantial the way I expect, not smoky and nebulous, half formed thoughts and dreams. They stroke and they caress, finding the exact right spot and brushing my clit until energy spikes through me.
The moment they slip beneath fabric, skimming my folds, my skin tightens and my jaw drops.
They nip and bite and lap, driving over the sensitive bud.
“Wren!”
“I’m a Fae lord,” he reminds me. “As such, I’ll tease you. I’ll play with you. I’ll own you as I see fit. You’ll come when I tell you to come, and you’ll love it.”
My body lights and tenses in preparation for the leap off the edge. How easily he manages it and without taking his hand off my neck.
He hasn’t even touched me yet. He hasn’t groped for my breast or anything. No fumble or starved foreplay. No wet kisses.
His hand has never made it lower than my hip bones.
But I breathe easier with him close to me.
“If you want a brutal, savage fuck against a wall, you have your bird.”
The lash of a warning closes my throat, but the energy builds. Shadows circle my clit repeatedly, the pressure right, throwing me toward the finish line.
Wren doesn’t move as I slowly lose myself to the sensations, bracing for the inevitable.
He looms over me with eyes hooded and hooked with mine, a piece of me fusing to him. An unsteady breath leaves me feeling, my hand braced on the couch at my side.
“If you want to be worshipped, with the threat of death in his fangs, then you have your devoted bloodsucker.”
I gasp. “Oh my god.”
“I’m done running around this. I know what I want and you know what the depraved little pieces of you demand, whether you admit it or not. So if you want to have me, you’ll learn how to beg.”
I come on his final word. His shadows toss me from the frying pan directly into the fire, and the orgasm rips through me.
Holy fuck.
He basically snapped his fingers and I did what he wanted. I’ve never come so quickly before. Spots dance in front of my eyes, and when I open them, Wren fills my vision. His eyes still haven’t let mine. My head swims.
The force of the crescendo leaves me dizzy and reeling.
Despite the feeling, my mouth forms the word my brain can’t process yet: never. I will never beg for sex. Or for anything.
It’s like we both enjoy torturing ourselves. There’s a level of pleasure in denial.
Wren grins down at me and then slides his hand between us. His fingers graze the top of my yoga pants as he sweeps beneath the elastic.
And I’m not wearing underwear.
His palm drags over my mound to cup me, his index finger over my throbbing clit.
An uneven breath rocks through me and my pulse races, my blood on fire. How easily he could crush me right now.
I don’t know this man. I don’t know if he’s a killer with a sweet smile and the ability to undo me with his words. Or not.
“I love the way you shake for me, pretty monster.”
He towers over me and his fingers rub tight little circles against my overly sensitive core. Sensation builds again, this time with a hint of pain to darken it. The pressure is light, but the attention is too much after so many years of doing it myself.
His cock presses to me and his gaze takes in whatever he sees on my face. His grin darkens.
Full of promises I know he’ll make good on with the chance.
“It’s too much,” I whisper. “I can’t...it’s—”
Yet my hips arch up toward him, and my pussy throbs. Traitor. I refuse to sink into the couch and disappear, to let him dominate me.
Not even when his mouth grazes across my chin, and I shiver. Not when his shadows rise again to torment me, ghosting over my nipples, over my lips, and down my spine.
His touch, magic and otherwise, shows me I’m alive.
Wren’s fingers haven’t penetrated me. I’m greedy. I want it all. I want the pressure on my clit to cease as my legs shake and my lungs shrink another size. He increases the speed of his circles but not the tension, my clit throbbing in time with the movement.
Stop this. Stop before you go too far.
It’s not something I can take back.
It’s also a bit late for that, dummy.
Rather than grab his shirt and kiss him stupid, I push him back, some shred of self-preservation doing the heavy lifting.
“Good girl.” He whispers in my ear as his fingers ramp me up to the next orgasm, whether I wanted it or not. “I love how you never give in easily. You always fight me.”
I’m coming apart. I’m splintering into a thousand pieces, and even his weight on top of me can’t keep me whole.
“But you will give in. Sooner or later.”
Wren releases my throat, and I come, the second orgasm harder than the first. My pussy clenches. I throw my head back, squeezing my eyes shut through wave on wave of sensation. My identity, my responsibilities, my fight—
Gone. All gone.
The force of the ecstatic peak splinters my vision and stars and shadows shoot. They grip tight to my breasts, my hips, holding me down.
When I manage to open my eyes. Wren is still there with our gazes fused together. He’s unsmiling now, a finger tracing patterns between my boobs.
And in the space among emotions, there’s clarity, if not sanity.
He pulls his hand free and lifts his fingers to his lips, cleaning them with his tongue.
Blood rushes to my cheeks and heats them.
“Mm. You taste as good as I remember.”
Those kinds of statements should embarrass me, right? Because normal people don’t talk like that. They don’t wake up in the morning like hmm, I’m hungry, what do I want to eat today. Oh yeah, pussy.
Or maybe they do. But no one I’ve ever met.
Wren’s shadows sink beneath his skin, and he wedges himself at my side, getting comfortable on the couch.
Wait. He’s not...he doesn’t want to fuck?
“There isn’t enough room,” I say.
He proves me wrong by settling on his back, hauling me to his chest in the same movement. “It’s perfect, monster.” He yawns widely. “Absolutely perfect.”
My attention falls to his throat and the hummingbird pulse there. My orgasm paints everything with a hazy film of lust, a strange combination of fulfillment and desire.
I glance along the protrusion of his collarbone and every visible inch of his skin. There’s safety in his touch. As though this was an aftercare I didn’t know I needed.
His fingers trail lazy circles through my hair to soothe me.
“It feels different this time,” he says. “We have no idea why. It scares me.”
I rest my cheek to the rise and fall of his chest. “You don’t strike me as the kind of man who flinches easily.”
“See? You do know me. You’re right. But things are progressing at a faster rate this cycle. I'm not sure why. I’m only grateful to be here to experience it.”
“Yes, it’s good to be alive.”
“It’s good to be here with you.”
There’s comfort in the familiar even if it’s an unhappy hellscape. I’ve told myself the same thing all my life.
Today, the bitterness lifting in the wake of those words fills my mouth with an awful but normal taste. “You don’t know me.”
Wren chuckles, and the sound rumbles through me. “I beg to differ.”
“You think because you got me off, that makes us buddies?”
“I think it makes us more than buddies. I think it’s my way of showing you how well I know the contours of your body. How well you respond to me.”
This is a man who hides his darkness deep inside of him, behind thick armor of jocular wit and a smile designed to captivate and win over anyone.
I don’t remember what he wants me to remember. Only the scent of drying, rotten flowers, old, stale coffee, and a cold feeling in my head I can’t shake free.
“That doesn’t mean you know me or what I’ve experienced. You don’t know how much I love Reese's peanut butter cups. Or how I failed my driver’s test twice before I actually passed,” I say.
He doesn’t know how many nights I waited for Audra to fall asleep before allowing myself to cry for our mother’s loss.
He’s silent for a long stretch of time. His hands have stopped moving over my skin, but his cock is still hard as stone. Wren seems content to ignore it, to hold me despite the pain of blue balls and no completion.
“Maybe I don’t,” he admits. “But I know how much it terrifies you.”
“What?” I bite out.
“To actually get what you want. To have someone take care of you for a change because truthfully, you don’t know if they are going to stay.”
My stomach has hollowed out.
My blood crying for coffee and something to fill the empty pit and my inner monologue is nothing but a bullshit monotony of thoughts convincing me this isn’t real.
People don’t stay in my life. They never have. Only Audra is here because she can’t leave. She has to have someone to take care of her, and I’m the person.
I’m always the one.
Then Wren resumes the soothing circles along my temple. “You don’t have to worry about it, monster. None of us are going anywhere. None of us are going to leave you again.”
I don’t answer him right away.
A stillness creeps over me, and I’m huddled in the shade of the couch, its back sending the scattered rays of light in dusty arcs across the living room floor ahead.
We’re a tangle of limbs, and I’m alone. Because my luck holds. It’s the one constant I can count on. For my part, I accept it.
“Are all Fae mind readers?” I ask instead.
A muffled sound rumbles his chest. “The more lives you spend as a human, the more of its condition you take on. I understand the pattern of your worries. You are used to being abandoned by everyone except the soul who resides in your sister. And us. It’s hard to trust, I know, but you will,” he insists. “In time.”
“No.” I push against him. “You don’t get it.”
“Do you want to enlighten me?”
HIs tone is curated playfulness.
“My own mother left us. She went mad. We moved ten times by the time I was eighteen. I didn’t understand why until too late.
She was running from this creature. Some old woman with white hair and spindly fingers.
She didn’t want to eat, or sleep, or take care of Audra. Until Mom took the exit ramp herself.”
His eyes remain locked on mine like he’s peeling back every layer of protection I’ve erected, exposing the depths of heartbreak in the silence.
“She probably felt she had no choice,” he says.
There’s no usual sentiment or empty apology. Wren only sighs.
Talk of suicide makes everyone uncomfortable.
“Your mother wasn’t crazy.”
“No? So her locking herself in her room for three days before she slit her wrists wasn’t crazy? It sure felt like it at the time.”
He places his hand on my racing heart. “The creature you’re describing? The one she saw? It exists. It was real. She tried to run but she never stood a chance.”
My passion fades. “What?”
“The beast. It’s called a Mare.”
It was in her head. Of course it was. All the running and the constant moving—Mom was nuts. So I held the line, kept the boat steady.
“I saw a therapist once,” I admit. “When I couldn't sleep for a week. The guy said it was a manifestation of my grief, a way my mind could understand it.”
“Monster, trust me on this if nothing else.” Wren pushes harder against my heart. “I’m certain about one thing. Your mother loved you. She wouldn’t have willingly left you or Audra. Okay?”
A Mare.
His small smile twists before he releases me to sag against him.
It’s true? No, it’s not. Not yet. It might never be real. It took me years to reconcile with Mom’s suicide and stop remembering how she looked when I found her. How I blocked my sister with my body, so she wouldn’t have to see the congealed pools of blood.
I’m the only one with it etched into memory.
What is a Mare?
When words are too hard, when the emotion is impossible to fight anymore, I burrow my head against Wren’s neck and sob. He sure feels like enough when he holds me.
But for how long? There are no assurances.
Not in this life.