Chapter 15
Marco
Icame up out of sleep the way a man comes up out of deep water—slow, confused about which way was the surface, aware first of warmth and then of pressure and then, all at once, of a mouth.
Her mouth.
Under the sheet. On me.
My brain assembled the facts in the wrong order.
The light at the window was the grey-gold of six-something, the bedroom was quiet, the sheet was a soft white ceiling over the lower half of my body, and underneath it Serafina Scordato was working me with a patience that told me she had been at this for a minute or more before I had enough consciousness to notice.
Christ.
I was already hard. I had been hard, apparently, through whatever dream I had been having, and she had found me that way and gone down without waking me, and the soft hot slide of her tongue along the underside of me was the first thing I registered as a thing happening to a person, and the person was me.
I did not move. I did not want to spook her. I did not want to do anything that would make her stop.
My hand came up under the sheet on its own—slow, sleep-clumsy—and found the shape of her head.
Her hair was loose. Not the pencil-twist, not the pinned coil, just the long dark weight of it warm and tangled, the end of it spread across my thigh like a spill of ink on the sheet.
I slid my fingers into it at the nape. I did not grip.
I rested the weight of my hand there the way you rest a hand on the back of something you want to know is real.
She felt the weight. She hummed around me.
The vibration went up through the length of me and lodged somewhere behind my sternum and I swore into the ceiling without meaning to.
“Sera.”
It came out rough. It came out like a man’s voice at six-something in the morning who had not used his throat yet.
She hummed again. On purpose this time. I knew it was on purpose because she had paused first, a breath’s worth of stillness, and then done it slower and deeper so I would feel every frequency of it, and my hips lifted off the mattress before my brain gave them permission.
I fisted my hand in her hair.
Not to guide. To hold. To have a point of contact that was not the point she was making, to remind the rest of my body that there were other nerve endings available, because if the only thing I could feel was her mouth I was going to finish in her in the next sixty seconds and I was not, on principle, going to let that happen yet.
She took me deeper.
The sheet lifted with the motion—a small white tent rising and falling over her shoulders—and I could see the shape of her under it, the curve of her back, the working of her jaw, the wrist of her hand where it had wrapped around the base of me to hold me steady for her mouth.
Her thumb was stroking the skin there in a small absent circle.
She was not hurrying. She was taking her time.
She was taking her time the way I had taught her to take her time, the way I had taken my time with her last night, and she had been paying attention.
Of course she had been paying attention. She was Serafina. She paid attention to everything.
My hips lifted again. I set my jaw. I pressed the back of my head into the pillow and let my fist in her hair be the thing that held the line.
“Baby girl.”
She did not stop.
“Baby girl—where the fuck did you learn that.”
She lifted her mouth off me.
Slowly. Her lips left the head of me with a sound so soft and so wet that I felt the hair on my arms stand up.
The sheet slid back off her shoulder when she raised her head, and her face came into the low light—cheeks flushed, hair tangled across one side of her face, mouth swollen, her eyes bright and black and fully awake in a way that told me she had been awake for a while, that she had lain next to me planning this, that she had stayed very still in my arms this morning waiting for the exact moment that my breathing told her I had turned the corner from sleep toward surfacing, so she could meet me there.
Strategic. Even in this.
I nearly came just from her face.
“From thinking about you,” she said. Her voice was low. Sleep still in it, and underneath the sleep, the floor-of-her voice, the one that arrived when she had stopped performing.
“Thinking about me?”
“The shape of you. How you might feel when I take you into me. Thinking about your cock, your body, all of you.”
She went back down.
I made a sound I was not prepared to make. It left my chest without me controlling it, and my fist tightened in her hair and she moaned around me and the moan was the second vibration of the morning and I felt the first hot pull of the edge begin to gather at the base of my spine.
She had been thinking about me.
Studying my shape. My body. All of me.
I laughed. Once. Short. Broken.
“Sera,” I said. “Jesus. Sera.”
She took me deeper than she had taken me yet.
Her hand slid up my belly and spread flat over my ribs—an anchor, the point-of-contact trick, the one I had taught her—and she pressed me down into the mattress with her palm and worked me with her mouth, and the edge gathered, and I let her hold me there for one long second longer, and then I said her name again, low, warning, and I tugged her hair, and she understood.
She did not stop. She slowed.
She brought me to the edge a second time.
I let her. I told myself I was testing something—my discipline, hers, the shape of what she had decided to do to me this morning—but the truth was simpler and less flattering.
The truth was that I wanted to know what she would do if I gave her a second pass at the cliff, and what she did was take me there faster and hold me there longer and back me off with a small deliberate slowing of her jaw that was, I realized with what was left of my brain, entirely mine.
She had studied me. She was using the lesson.
I lasted eight seconds into the third approach.
Not because she was better at it—though she was—but because I made a decision.
“Stop.”
She did not stop. She slowed.
“Baby girl. Stop.”
She lifted her mouth off me.
I reached down under the sheet and got both my hands under her arms and I pulled her up the length of my body in one motion.
Her hair fell forward across my face. Her mouth was slick.
Her breasts dragged up the center of my chest and settled against me, soft and warm and the nipples hard, and the length of her slid over the length of me and she gasped into my throat.
I rolled her.
I put my weight on my left arm and turned us, and she went onto her back underneath me with a small startled sound, and the sheet tangled around her hips and I kicked it off the bed with one foot and then she was under me, bare, her hair across the pillow, her knees falling apart because my knees were already between them spreading her open.
I looked at her.
I took a second. I made myself take it. Her ribs rising fast, the small hollow at the base of her throat where the gold chain sat, the flush coming up her chest, the shine of her mouth, the dark between her legs where she was already wet, already open, already so ready for me that the insides of her thighs were slick with it.
She had been doing that to herself while she was doing the other thing to me.
The knowledge of that nearly finished what her mouth had started.
I took myself in my hand.
I dragged the head of me along her. Slow. Through the wet. Up to the small swollen knot at the top of her and back down, and she made a sound and tried to lift her hips to meet me and I pressed her back down with my palm on her stomach.
“Easy.”
“Marco.”
“Easy, baby girl. Let me.”
I lined myself up.
I pushed in.
Oh, God.
There is no honest way to describe what it felt like to be inside her that does not sound like something I read once in a book and dismissed.
She was hot. She was tight. She was wet enough that there was no friction, only grip—a slow slick yielding that closed around me inch by inch and held, and I could feel every ridge of her, every small involuntary contraction of the muscle at her entrance, the deeper softer place past it, the warm resistance where her body had to decide, breath by breath, to let me in farther.
She took me the way she took everything—with attention, with a small pause to register, and then with a slow deliberate opening.
Halfway in I had to stop. I had to stop because if I kept going at that pace I was going to come inside her before I was fully seated, and I was not going to do that. I bent my head. I pressed my forehead to the hollow of her throat. I breathed.
She put her hand on the back of my neck.
“Keep going.”
“Give me a second.”
“Marco. Keep going.”
I pushed the rest of the way in.
She arched. Her nails bit into my shoulder hard enough that I knew, without having to look, that she had left marks. Four small crescents above my collarbone. A receipt. Evidence.
I stayed still when I was fully in her. I had to.
I could feel her body working around me, the slow settling, the way she was adjusting to the shape of me, and I could feel my own pulse in places I did not usually have a pulse, and I pressed my mouth into the skin at her throat and I said it before I could think it through.
“Mine.”
She did not hesitate.
“Yours.”
One word. Flat. Certain.
I took my time.
I was not going to hurry this. I had hurried nothing with her yet and I was not going to start now.
I drew back slow and pushed in slow and watched her face.
It was open, flushed, her mouth parted, her eyes on mine and not looking away, and every time I rolled my hips forward her breath caught and her lips shaped a word she did not say out loud.
I said things I had never said to anyone.