Warm, wetness laps over my exposed hole. I yell as I see stars. Holy fuck.
I try to suck in a breath, but Dis attacks with his tongue again. Eating my ass like a man starved.
My toes curl and my eyes roll back. This is my favourite activity, and Dis is doing it with profound enthusiasm. And I’m pretty sure his tongue is longer than a human’s.
This is heaven.
Chapter 18
Feelings Suck
Iwakeupgradually,whichis not how I usually wake up. Normally consciousness arrives all at once, sharp and immediate, like a switch being flipped. This morning it comes in layers, slow and reluctant, like something being dragged up from deep water.
Last night was something.
We didn’t technically fuck, he ate my ass for hours until I pretty much passed out. Physically, it was a lot. Emotionally even more so. I’ve bottomed for guys and not felt anywhere near…
I roll onto my back and stare at the ceiling and I am absolutely not thinking about it. I’m not thinking about any of it. Not the way the feeding was different this time, softer and more complicated and charged with things neither of us said out loud. Not the way Dis looked at me afterwards. Not the specific quality of the silence that followed, which was nothing like the silences we had in the beginning.
Nope. Not thinking about it. Moving on. Not thinking about anything until I’ve had my morning cup of tea.
I sit up. My whole body has the heavy, wrung-out feeling of someone who has used more of themselves than they intended to, which is physically accurate and emotionally accurate in ways I’m not prepared to examine before tea. I find some clothes. I scrape my hair back into a loose bun, and pad to the kitchen.
The kettle is the most important relationship in my life, and I will not hear otherwise. I stand in the kitchen while it works, then I breathe in the smell of freshly brewed tea and I let my brain do its slow, sluggish morning startup sequence without rushing it. Outside the kitchen window, Bristol is getting on with its day. Pigeons. A delivery van. Someone arguing on the phone. Normal things happening in the normal world outside my extremely abnormal flat.
I pour milk into the mug and wrap both hands around it and take the first sip with the reverence it deserves.
Right. Okay. I can do this.
I carry the mug into the living room.
Dis is standing in the circle.
Not sitting on the futon. Not watching television. Standing, in the middle of the circle, and the shadows around him are doing something I haven’t seen before. They’re moving, slow and restless, curling and uncurling like smoke in a wind that isn’t there. His form is present but slightly unstable at the edges, like he’s having trouble holding it together. Those burning blue eyes are fixed on the middle distance, seeing something I can’t see, somewhere far from my living room.
I stop in the doorway.
I’ve seen Dis angry. I’ve seen him cold and proud and imperious and quietly amused and carefully gentle. I’veseen him completely absorbed in Bake Off and gravely formal about a second-hand futon and honestly rather sweet about meerkats.
I haven’t seen him like this.
He hasn’t noticed me yet, which is unusual in itself. Dis always notices me. He tracks me across the flat with the automatic awareness of someone for whom monitoring their environment is a deeply ingrained reflex.
I take a sip of tea. Lean against the doorframe.
“Something vexes you?” I say.
He focuses. His gaze finds me, and for a moment the shadows still, and there’s a quality to the way he looks at me that I don’t have a name for. Something raw underneath the composure, something he hasn’t quite managed to put away.
“It has become apparent,” Dis says, with the careful deliberateness of someone choosing each word as though the wrong one might detonate, “that I do not totally despise you.”
I open my mouth. Close it. Look at him.
“Wow,” I say. “Thanks.”
“You are welcome,” he says, which would be funny except his voice has something in it that stops me short. Something that isn’t quite steadiness. Something that is steadiness’s exhausted, struggling cousin.
I look at him properly. The shadows are still moving at his edges. Those blue eyes are doing something complicated that has nothing to do with the mildly sarcastic exchange we just had, which likely went right over his head. The air in the flat feels different, thick and heavy, the way it sometimes gets before a storm.
