He puts his thumb on my mouth again, tugging the skin of my bottom lip. Focused there, he says softly, “I want—”
He anchors his forehead to mine.
After a second, another, he tells me like each word is wrapped in velvet, “I want to touch you.”
I used to be made of something other than nerve endings. But suddenly, that’s all I am.
“And I want you to touch me,” he says.
I note how tight my grip is on him and force my fingers to relax. “Okay.” It squeezes out of me. “Okay. I—”
He kisses me again, and nothing much changes about his posture, but the way he’s sitting on my lap is suddenly like it’s a throne. And though we technically have the same title, no, in this moment I feel more than ever just how princely he is, the irresistible command he can emanate. Without words or a look or even a gesture of his hands, he is elegance and confidence, a spill of pure authority poured across my thighs, licking at my mouth.
He reaches down, working between his body and mine, and rests his palm on me through my pajama pants.
Holy fuck, holy shit, holy—
I jolt, rock-solid rigidity launching out to every muscle.
Hex echoes my abrupt rigidity. “Is this all right?”
I laugh, high and pealing, and cant my hips up into his touch, intending that to be my response—but it briefly makes everything so much more intense and I claw my way through a full breath.
“I think you have the answer to that question literally in the palm of your hand,” I say.
Any concern eases away, a coy smile, a bite of his lip. Good god, his teeth on his lip, the puncture—I feel it echoed on my neck, electricity zapping off sensitive points in a wild winding-up.
His fingers climb. He exhales, and I taste it, tea and toothpaste, and the pad of his thumb slips beneath fabric, strokes along the skin at my waist.
In any other situation, with any other person, I’d be rattling off a stream of jokes to lighten the mood but there is nothing, nothing funny about this, any of this. He’s all darkness arched over me, hair and eyes, a juxtaposition because he’s shadows that emit light, golden, a candle glow on a clouded night. I want to burn up in him.
The elastic band of my sweatpants stretches, and there’s something unabashedly graceful about the arch of his shoulder as his arm twists, a dancer-like move and lunge.
His long fingers close around me and my body shakes with another jolt of rigidity and I suck in a lungful of air and hold it, hold it.
Hex whimpers. It trills in his chest.He’sthe one who whimpers, his hand around me, and my brain whites out.
“Fuck, you’re beautiful,” I say too fast, too breathy, but I have to talk, have to get out all these words that keep building up around him. “It’s destructive how much I want you. You’re going to pull me apart.”
“Maybe you could do with being pulled apart,” he whispers.
I kiss him so fast I can feel the reverberations of those words on his lips, tremors that kick into my mouth.
His hand moves. One stroke, slow, teasing, and I fist his hair and he makes thisnoisewhen it snags in my fingers—goddamn it, hisshivers and hisfucking noises.I twist my grip and watch, enthralled, as his eyes roll shut, I’m not sure he knows he’s doing it, but god I do. I do, and that ripple of pleasure is a new center, a new purpose. I want more. I want to know what makes him look like that, every single thing that causes his face to unravel with satisfaction.
I keep my grip tight in his hair as I crawl my other hand up his thigh, across his waist.
Another pull of his long fingers wrapped around me, and I lock my lips to his as I reach in for him. I want to taste the changes in him. I want, and want, justwant,and I barely get oriented in touching him when his hips start pitching rhythmically, these hips that have completely destroyed me every second of every day since he got here, and this is their final judgment on me, the unendurable collision of shudders building up through his body as he thrusts into my hand.
Forehead to forehead, we fall into that movement, or maybe I don’t move at all and let him take what he wants from me, give what he wants to me. I’m too consumed in memorizing the reactions he has—the hitch of his breath and the furrow between his closed eyes and the growing spots of pink on his cheeks. It’s how I note the change, the push towards the edge, a deepening of that furrow, that pink darkening to crimson.
My grip tightens. On him. On his hair. I’m desperate and stripped, want and need.
“Coal—” His closed eyes pinch shut more and a rolling tremor forces his mouth open in a breathy cry, swollen lips and a sheen on his skin.
“Oh my god.” I lap up the retreating quakes of that cry, pressing into him to soak up every last twitch. It’s all I need—I get out a mumbled warning, but he makes that noise again, affirmation now, and I’m fucking lost.
Heat and a sparking cry and rupturing fireworks, a shuddering thrust and those eyes above me the whole time.
