My marks begin to glow down my arms and across my chest, pulsing in time with my heartbeat. His corruption marks respond in kind. Dark veins flicker along his forearms where his hands grip my thighs. Where our skin touches, the light and the dark meet in a thin line of heat that hums between us.
The room responds too.
The Verdance is alive, and apparently it has opinions about what is happening inside it. The flowering vines along the window begin to bloom. Pale blue blossoms open one after another, releasing a warm, sweet scent that is faintly intoxicating. The moss on the walls brightens, shifting from green-gold to a deeper amber that softens the entire room.
The bed itself adjusts beneath me. The living wood subtly reshapes its surface, becoming softer.
“The room is—” I begin.
Then he does something with his tongue that erases the concept of rooms entirely.
He slides two fingers inside me and curls them. I grab the edge of the bed so hard the living wood flexes beneath my grip. The moss along the walls pulses brighter. The vines bloom faster. New buds open across the window and trail up the wall and onto the ceiling.
Petals begin to fall.
Small and pale, they drift down through the amber light like quiet snow.
“Kaelren.” His name comes out broken. “Please.”
He does not speed up. He keeps the same deliberate pace, building the pressure inside me until it feels like a tide that refuses to stop rising. He knows exactly how close I am. I can see it in the set of his shoulders and the focus in his eyes.
He is keeping me there on purpose.
“Please,” I say again. I have never begged for anything in my life, and apparently that line has finally moved. “Kaelren, I need—”
“I know what you need.”
His voice is rough and certain. He presses his fingers deeper, finds the exact place that makes my vision go white, and seals his mouth over me with relentless precision.
The release hits like a breaking wave.
My whole body arches off the bed. My marks flare, flooding the room with bright light. I feel him groan against me as the sensation crashes through both of us. The bond sends the pleasure back through him, echoing hard enough to keep the waves rolling.
The petals fall faster. The vines climb higher. The moss blazes amber-gold.
The room itself seems to breathe out.
He works me through the aftermath with careful touches until I finally push his head away with shaking hands.
He presses one last kiss against the inside of my thigh. The gesture is soft and almost reverent. Then he rises and settles onto the bed beside me.
I am trembling. The trembling that comes after your body has detonated and is trying to remember how to exist again.
He pulls me against his chest and wraps both arms around me. His heartbeat pounds against my shoulder blade. I can feel how tightly wound he still is. The tension in his arms. The uneven rhythm of his breathing.
I reach for the hem of his shirt.
“Your turn.”
He catches my hand before I can lift it further. He brings it to his mouth and presses his lips to my knuckles one by one.
“No,” he says.
“No?”
“Not tonight.” He keeps my hand against his mouth. “Tonight I needed to know you are real. That you are here. That your body still answers mine the way it did before the void took you.”
He kisses my wrist, right over the pulse point.
