“I think almost forty years is enough, Bram. Just make me feel again what I have only faded memories of. Show me what it was like. Show me all of it, before I die of longing for something I have missed all my life,” she said, every bit of it so easy, now. Like riding a bike, for the first time in years.
Then getting to a perfect downward slope.
They didn’t even have to pedal.
Though he didn’t exactly do what she expected. She imagined him starting at what she could most clearly recall: him lifting her off the ground, his hand under her skirt. And instead, he leaned forward, slowly, hesitantly. Those dark eyes searching her face, as he did. Breathing rapid, faint, like he had forgotten how.
Then he got to within an inch of her, and she realized.
He meant to kiss her. This was going to be a kiss. Her mortal enemy, her immortal beloved—he intended to do something that tender, that innocent. He even reached up, and gently touched the side of her face, as he closed the gap. Still torturously slow, and yet somehow it seemed so fast now, at the same time.
Her whole body tensed.
She came close to telling him she hadn’t prepared for this part.
And finally he pressed his lips against hers, as chaste as she could imagine anything being. It was barely contact. A breeze against her there might have felt as physical. Yet the moment it happened, everything in her seemed to stop. She couldn’t breathe or hear her heartbeat or think of a single thing.
All she knew was the lightning strike of sensation that went through her.
And the desperate need to know it a second time.If he had done this at any point while pretending to hate me, I would have lost myself to him without a word of protest, she thought. And she knew it was true, because she didn’t wait for him to do it again. She saw him draw back, gaze full of caution and questions.
Was that all right, she could almost hear him saying.
And she answered by darting forward, to capture his mouth again. She kissed him, and not with the same timidity he had extended to her. Shecouldn’textend it. He had filled her with desperate electricity, and now all she could do was push against him, part her lips, persuade him to part his.
Though it surprised her when he did.
Almost immediately, and with a sound that she felt to the roots of her hair. It spilled out of him and into her, rough with relief and desperation and something else, something she understood more between her legs, than in her head. He made it, and her cunt seemed to bloom. It grew heavy with arousal, in sympathy with that same feeling in him. She could feel her own slickness, over a moan and a kiss.
And she suspected he knew it, too.
His eyes flashed wide the second it happened. Then his hand went to the nape of her neck. So he could hold her there, she suspected, while he kissed her the way he always used to. Shivering with restraint but losing it anyway. Mouth helplessly greedy, rocking and rocking over hers, all hot and open and ohgod.
That flicker of his tongue.
Barely anything, but so intense all the same.
It was all she could focus on—the way it sparked her desire, and then stopped short of satisfying it. The slide of it, the heat ofit, thelewdness. It made her think of the things he had said, when she’d been pressed against that wall. How easy it had been to imagine his mouth between her legs.
Hell, she didn’t even need to imagine, anymore.
She knew what it was like, to have him lick her in all the places she ached the most. How quickly he could make her come; how hard she used to go over for him.Once I cried out so loudly he thought he had hurt me somehow, she thought, and god, that made her frantic.Everythingthat had led to this made her frantic. The thought of then, the idea of what it would be like to experience it in this body now. Familiar longing, all the new layers to what he had done to her throughout their lessons.
He had turned the screws for months now.
And so she couldn’t blame herself for being the one who pushed things further. For touching what she had thought she shouldn’t want to. She slid her hands into his hair, down the back of his sweater, over his shoulders. Got closer, pushed harder, until he was almost on his side of the table again.
While she found herself nowhere close to her own.
She half-stood without knowing it. Her knee was almost on that smooth surface. Like a little more temptation might make her actually climb over it, to get at him. Mortifying, she tried to tell herself. Desperate, she tried to tell herself. Greedy, she tried to tell herself. But just as she did, he seemed to register where she was.
And thesoundthat came out of him.
The shock in it, the sheer heavy heat of helpless arousal. There was no way to doubt what he meant. Though even if she could have, his hands told the rest of the tale. They ran down over her body, immediately. They followed the line of everything theycould now reach, from her throat to her waist and the curve of her hips.
Further, in fact.
Oh, she didn’t know what to do when he went further.
