And then, he was on me, his fingers and thumbs pressing into the flesh of my thighs, his head buried between them. I shuddered when he pressed his nose into my curls,inhaling desperately, like someone had been holding his head underwater until this moment, and now he could finally breathe.
Then, it wasn’t just his nose, but his tongues,plural. Three hot, writhing tendrils that devoured and staked their claim. The slow deliberation of his earlier touches was gone now. His tongues and mouth moved with rapid, feasting purpose. Like he was starving and needed to sate himself, and by God, he was going to do it.
But even in the mania of his need, he still somehow had the presence of mind to pay close attention to mine. When I trembled and whimpered at contact with my clit, he went back to it, circling it in a mind-numbing, demanding rhythm. He left his two outer tongues there, driving me to the brink of insanity, while the centre tongue plunged lower, lower,right fucking there.
And then it was inside me. Surging forward and fucking hungrily. I was convulsing, my hands gripping his head so hard that, if he’d been a human male, I likely would have hurt him.
“Thaleo,God, please, I can’t… I need… Ah!” My voice disintegrated, my words falling apart at the same moment I did. Pleasure reached such a pinnacle that it nearly felt like a crisis. My lungs burned. Stars shot through my pulsing gaze.
In the midst of this fever pitch, I noticed him grow entirely still again. Even his tongues went rigid. A vibrating groan built inside me, reached me in my deepest places, making my flesh quicken deliciously. Dazedly, blissfully, I realized that he was coming again, spurting onto the stone between my legs.
Gasping and boneless, I watched him as he raised his head. His eyes were heavy-lidded with dark satisfaction. That, and something else. A primal sort of possessiveness that lodged in me sure is a hook. Pulled me towards him. Made me softly draw my hand along his jaw.
He suffered through a frisson of indecision. Then leaned into my touch.
“I guess we should probably clean up a bit,” I murmured after a long moment. People did eat here, after all.
I stifled a yawn. Sleepiness that had deserted me earlier in the evening had finally found its way back. Gahn Thaleo was on his feet at once, fetching a pitcher of water and a few spare squares of hides and bringing them to me. As I freshened up and pulled my clothing back on, he dutifully cleaned the floor of our mixed fluids. Which was a bizarrely attractive thing to me. To see that, even as a Gahn, he didn’t consider himself above scrubbing a floor. He didn’t even seem to expect me to help, either, as he polished the gleaming stone.
“What are you thinking about?” I ventured. He’d gotten so quiet.
“I was thinking,” he said, swiping his rag along the floor, “how pleasant a task it might be to clean your fluids from this floor with my tongues.”
I choked on my own spit, hacking and wheezing at the blunt and slightly gross nature of his reply.
“I’m fine,” I coughed weakly as he stood, frowning at me. “You just caught me off-guard with that answer.”
He seemed to catch me off guard more often than not.
Once all evidence of our tryst had been erased and the soiled rags disposed of, we walked together through the halls, back towards the sleeping caves. We moved languorously, neither of us apparently in any hurry. More questions for him hovered on the tip of my tongue – questions about what we were to each other now and what this all meant.
But I didn’t ask them. Because what would he even say? I obviously wasn’t his mate. And it wasn’t like I was even looking for that kind of commitment from him.
We were just… working through something together, he and I. I didn’t know where it could possibly lead us. But that didn’t scare me enough to make me back away. At least, not yet.
When he left me at the entrance to our caves, I rose up on the balls of my feet and kissed him goodnight.
15
THALEO
Ifell into Nazreen like a man from the back of his braxilk. Terrifying, exhilarating. I had the distinct feeling that I should try to halt my freefall, or at the very least, slow it down.
But I did not. I did not think myself capable of it. It made me think of what she’d once said to me. That human phrase.Falling in love.
I sought her every free moment I had, and in the most wondrously gratifying turn of events I ever could have imagined, she seemed to welcome my company, bestowing smiles upon me that seemed to dim the very sun in comparison. Sometimes, we simply talked, walking together while I showed her some new facet of my mountain.
Other times, we collided in a desperate tangle of limbs and tongues. I thought of the luscious perfection of her body constantly. Dreamed of the taste of her cunt, the way the slick, supple flesh fluttered around my tongues or fingers. I brought myself to the point of terrible hardness wondering what that clenching flesh would feel like on my cock.
In the background, I was constantly aware of her return to Gahn Errok’s mountain, getting closer day by day. It made my claws twitch with the need to keep her.
But the Vrika did not come to me.
She was not mine to keep.
In the quiet moments, the moments where I lay alone in my bed and wished she were beside me, always beside me, I found myself bargaining with fate, with the Vrika, with anyone who would listen. I would promise things, make claims about what I would sacrifice to have her.Make her my mate, I said to no one but the bleak inside of my own head,and I will do anything.
I tried to be the best and strongest Gahn I could be, as if to prove to the Vrika that I deserved her. Even while I knew that the desperation of my own wanting, and all this pathetic begging, meant I was not a good, strong Gahn at all. I was descending into a frantic sort of selfishness that made me alien to myself.
