Every thought from the past months, the plans, strategies, and cold calculations about portals and timelines, evaporates. Elle is here, warm and alive, looking at me like I'm the only thing that matters. I can't remember why I was supposed to be doing anything else.
I hear myself chuckle, low and rough with sleep. “What is my little gem doing down there?”
She doesn’t answer. Just holds my gaze, then slowly takes me into her mouth.
The sound I make is not dignified. It’s been months. Months of empty beds, cold nights, and the phantom ache of her absence. Now she’s here, warm and impossibly skilled, and I nearly finish right there like an untrained adolescent. I feel both his reaction and mine overlapping, the sensation doubled and staggering.
She works me with deliberate patience, bringing me to the edge and holding me there, her eyes never leaving mine. Just when my vision starts to blur and every muscle tightens, she pulls back.
She hops off the bed.
"Where are you going?"
I try to move, to go after her, and discover that my wrists are bound to the headboard with vines. The iteration of Kaelren apparently didn’t realize what was happening while she distracted us, and I have never been more grateful to an alternate version of myself.
I chuckle again; his laugh, warm and amused, completely at ease with being restrained. "I see. My queen wants to play games."
She turns. Her body is a landscape I've memorized across lifetimes. The curve of her waist, the freckles across her shoulders, the way she carries herself with the confidence of someone who knows exactly the effect she has and enjoys every second.
She picks up the captain's hat from the hook by the door and places it on her head. It's too big, tilting slightly to one side, and she looks ridiculous and devastating in equal measure.
She walks back to the bed, climbs over me, and slowly lowers herself down.
"I thought maybe I could steer the ship this time," she says.
The world narrows to her. To this. To the rhythm she sets. Slow at first, rolling her hips in long, dragging strokes that make me strain against the ropes. She bends forward and captures my nipple between her teeth, biting down just hard enough to send a jolt through me that has nothing to do with pain and everything to do with the fact that this woman knows my body better than I do.
She rides me harder. Her breathing changes. I feel her tighten around me, feel the tremor that starts in her thighs and spreads through her whole body as the first climax takes her. She loses focus, her grip on the headboard slips, her rhythm falters, and it's enough.
I wrench free of the restraints.
Before she can react, she's in my arms. She twists, tries to break loose, laughing breathlessly, and the sound of it, that laugh, her laugh, the one I've been chasing across seventeen iterations, fills the cabin.
"Oh no," I growl against her neck. "You want to be captain? We have to get you to open waters."
I carry her to the balcony. The night air hits us both, salt and wind and the vast dark expanse of the Starblush Sea stretching to the horizon. I bend her over the rail, and she grips it with both hands, arching back against me.
I push into her in one long stroke, and she cries out loud enough that whoever's on night watch just got an earful, and I don't care. Not even slightly.
"Which way, Captain?" I press the words against her shoulder, teeth grazing her skin. "Where are we going? Because surely you have an entire realm that will follow you. But I am the only one who gets to ride in behind you."
She moans something that isn't a word, and I increase the pace. She's close. I can feel it in the way she pushes back against me, in the small desperate sounds she makes, in thetension building between us like a wave gathering height before it breaks.
I reach around her, find the bundle of nerves between her legs, and give it a light slap.
She shatters. The sound she makes is raw and open and perfect, and it pulls me over the edge with her. I bury myself as deep as I can and let it take me. The release, the connection, the unbearable rightness of being inside her, with her, part of her.
For a long moment, we just breathe. The ship rocks gently beneath us. The sea stretches out, endless and dark, and the sky above is thick with stars.
She turns in my arms. Her face is flushed, her eyes bright, the captain's hat somehow still on her head. She takes it off, places it back on mine, and winds her arms around my neck.
"That was quite the ride, Captain." She grins up at me. "I thought for a minute we were going to take a leap of faith into the water and be at the mercy of the depths of the ocean."
I freeze.
"What did you just say?"
She laughs and kisses me. It's a slow kiss, unhurried, the kind that people who have all the time in the world give each other.
