“Start here,” he says into my mouth.
His back collides with the wall and I box my body around him.
“And then?”
He touches my neck. “Here.”
“And then?”
His fingers walk to the edge of my shoulder. He hesitates.
“And then,” he echoes, a quake in the hollow of his throat.
His hand slides down my arm, over my elbow, and he wraps his fingers around my forearm and holds on in a suddenly relentlessgrip, like he’s bracing himself. My forehead touches his and we gasp into the concave space we create and I almost tell him, again, that he’s in control of this, but those words well up and it wouldn’t be him that I’m reassuring—it’s me. Me and my anxiety and the fissure of desire cracking apart my body, this brief pause letting me feel that we’rehere,oh god I’mhere,and I can’t get a full breath.
Then Hex angles up and kisses me again andoh god I’m herebecomes a long, drawn-out whimper against the feel of his rough tongue running along the seam of my lips. I open my mouth and kiss him with all the last fleeting remnants of disbelief and anxiety, hands bearing down on his hips, his fingers iron-gripped around my forearms.
The map he’d drawn, of his body by touching mine, replays through my head—lips, neck, shoulder, arms; lips, neck, shoulder—
I move, mouth working across his jaw, needing the taste of his neck again, that warm skin, the spiced citrus sweetness of him, and the moment my tongue collides with that space, I groan.
“Fuck, Hex, the way you taste.” I suck on his skin and earn a shiver in response. “Even your shivers taste good.”
“Coal,” my name pops out of his mouth, a startled burst so swollen with need that my whole body whittles to the singular point of his desperation.
I nuzzle into his neck, thumbs dragging circles on his hips. “I want to make you feel good.” Do I sound begging? God, I am, I am begging.
He whines.Writhes,his body arching up into mine, and he’s biting my neck, the spot below my ear. The sensation of his teeth on me is transcendent, and I think I must black out, coming to when we’re nothing but panting and the pop of lips on skin.
The top buttons of his shirt come apart under my fingers and I loop a hand around his neck, making a feast of his collarbone, teeth pushing lightly on skin, scraping. Finally,finally,he makes that noise again, that syrupy moan and his legs part so my thigh drags between his. He rocks, and I can feel him against me, a hard grind on my hip that sets off hemorrhagic fireworks in my veins.
I say it again. A prayer tumbling out of me into the hot, hot air as I push back against his movement. “I want to make you feel good, Hex.”
“You are,” he tells me, each word a little desperate huff. “All of this—feels—very, very good.” A pause, a sudden tension, his eyes are shut but the skin tightens there. “Do—is this—for you, I mean—”
He’s babbling. All his proprieties, all his rigid formality—I broke it down, brought him to single syllables and incomplete questions.
That’s the remaining thread. I can feel it strung taut, one more shift of his hips against my leg and it’d snap, radiance and ether.
I kiss his cheekbone, that tension next to his eye, but I make it reverent, dragging a brake on the riot.
His eyes are shut still, lips parted, and I close around him, bracing one arm on the wall next to his head, my other hand molded to the curve of his hip, his fingers holding me there, viselike, and if I looked I know his knuckles would be white. But I can’t look anywhere other than his face.
“God yes, it’s good for me,” I say, jaw thrust forward. “But I’m going to go back to my room.”
His thumb hooks into my belt, and the way those eyes flare open and look up at me screams confusion.
“I’m going to go back to my room,” I say again, “because I want to take my time with you. Because you deserve that.”
I really don’t mean it to come out all gritty. But I feel the reverberating tremor that shudders up through Hex’s body in response.
And all he says is a strained, needy, “All right.”
I am leaving.I am leaving.
Hands off the wall.
Feet taking a full step back.
