This was not right.
He knew the sting that came with riding Silas, the sense of being overwhelmed by the ankou’s size, but it was lacking here.
It did nothurt.He was notfilled.
There was a hollowness where there should be lip-biting, wincing, and squirming.
Pitch wanted to truly ache, to burn, to gasp as he sought to take in all of this man. He wanted to hear Silas soothe and murmur and caress as he eased in deeper and touched the heart of a heartless creature.
Pitch’s whimper vanished into Silas’s chest, and the ankou whispered his name. Moved it across his lips like a prayer. Silas cupped his arse and guided Pitch up and down, easing him along the length of his cock.
Having the ankou inside him was lovely, in the way sunshine was to a December day, but the dulled edges were undeniable. Pitch heard the pitiful sound he made, the longing it held.
He worked his hips harder. Searching along the length of Silas’s shaft for what he could not find. ‘It’s not the same.’ He upset the flowing rhythm Silas had set, and the ankou stilled. It occurred to Pitch he had no idea if Silas was standing or perched on the edge of some strange dream-seat. His presence was close but not immediate. Silas was there, but in the oddness of a dream, not there either.
‘Should I stop?’
Pitch shook his head, wrapping his arms around Silas’s neck and burrowing his face into the deep crux of his shoulder. ‘I want this to be real. But I know how it should feel, and it is not this.’
Slow, sure hands moved over him. ‘It will be real, darling. It will be. Just hold on for me, a little while longer.’
Silas found his lips, took them over with his own, sent his tongue to find the wet, hidden heat in Pitch’s mouth. The ankou’s prick swelled inside him, reached into places that should have been painful, too much to bear, but here there was nowhere deep enough the ankou could go. Pitch’s moan held a hint of pain, but not one borne from bodily aches. This was desire of a different kind. Marrow-deep want. The likes of which he did not recall experiencing in four hundred years of insatiable desire.
Pitch fell into the motion, letting the ankou guide him, clinging to hope that fulfilment might come. He rode harder, spread wider. Urged Silas deeper. They worked themselves into what should have been a frenzy, should have seen climax thundering in, taking them over like a giant ocean wave and dumping them hard upon the sand, spent and damp and sated.
The dreamstate was a spiteful tease.
Release hung nearby in the blackness, just out of reach. Pitch’s prick was rigid against his belly, he knew it so, but no matter how tight the ankou’s hand was upon the shaft, how quickly he worked to bring Pitch off, neither of them could spill. They fucked desperately, with a pace that grew more frantic, a depth that bordered on ludicrous, and still they were pent up, seams fit to burst.
Pitch shouted his frustration to the bleak, quiet abyss. Silas moaned into his hair, the ankou’s fingers tight against the back of his head as they both hung upon a precipice that this bastard place would not allow them to topple over.
‘It is not real.’ Pitch slumped against the broadness of the ankou.
Silas pressed a kiss to the top of his head. ‘Not yet. Not yet. Soon.’
Time slipped between them, sense of place blurring and then refocusing. And they were clothed once more. Pitch was empty.
And it was a profoundly sad thing. He wanted to burst. He wanted to be gone from here.
He wanted Silas.
The press of the velvet shifted, a subtle movement, like a breeze stirring a curtain.
Pitch breathed in, and faltered. ‘I can’t smell the earth…there’s no hint of you.’
He’d not realised until that precise moment how important scent was to the completeness of a person. To what made Silas so discernible.
‘Well, that may be a saving grace,’ the ankou said lightly. ‘Tyvain tells me I’m in need of a bath.’
‘The hag is with you?’ Never in a thousand years would Pitch have expected the notion to fill him with such inescapable loneliness.
‘She is.’ Silas enveloped him, a hand to the back of his neck, his arm firm around the small of Pitch’s back. ‘And the wisp? Sybilla thought Scarlet with you?’
‘Yes. It is. Foolish creature, should have left when it had the chance.’
‘I’m very glad it did not.’ The brush of Silas’s fingers was not quite so definitive now, a faintness where there had been surety before.
‘It has wielded the bandalore, Silas,’ Pitch rushed, the creep of uncertainty urging him on. ‘Not as you do, of course, but I was free for a moment…I thought I was free…Scarlet had us free…then Sybilla was there.’ He flinched in the dark. ‘I was too fucking weak, Silas.’
