Page 116 of Bonetide

His hand has moved down between my breasts, the backs of his fingers grazing me through the cotton of my shirt, down the center of me to my stomach, where his palm goes flat. I feel the cold of him through the fabric.

“Lift,” he murmurs.

I don’t ask what he means. My body has its own agenda. My arms come up on their own accord, and he takes the hem in both hands, drawing the shirt up my body, the cotton dragging over my hips and breasts and collarbone. Once it’s over my head, he lets it drop off the side of the bed.

I’m naked under him, the cold blowing over me, making my skin tight and goosefleshed.

He looks at me. It’s too dark to read his face well, but I can read the rest, the way he goes still over me, the way his weight settles, the way his breath catches.

“You’re mine now,” he rasps. “You always have been.”

I don’t speak; I can’t.

He puts his mouth on me, starting at my collarbone and working down my breast, my ribs, my stomach, the inside of my hip, then the soft place between my hipbones, an open kiss there, long, his tongue in it, and I can’t help but groan. His hands push my thighs apart, slow, unhurried, and then he goes down on me like he has all the time in the world, like he’s made time stand still for as long as he’s in this room. Who knows, maybe he has? At this point I’ll believe anything.

The first stroke of his tongue is flat and slow and I moan loudly in response. As his mouth works, he places a hand under me to lift my hips, his other arm hooked around my thigh to hold me open. The cold of him shocks my skin, and somehow it isn’t unwelcome, somehow it’s exactly the temperature I want him, because I’m rising fast and hot—faster than I should—all the waiting and all the dread coming out of me at once.

Then my breathe catches.

I can feel his teeth.

They’re at my inner thigh, and they’re not the teeth he had before, not the teeth any man has—longer at the canines, narrower—and when he closes them on the soft skin there, they catch.

He doesn’t quite break the skin though, he stops just before, holds his teeth there, lets me feel it.

I feel it. Oh, I fucking feel it.

And I’ve never been so turned on and terrified in all my life.

He lifts his mouth and looks up the length of me, his mouth wet, his face shadowed so I can’t see his teeth now, can’t tell if they’ve changed. He says nothing, just stares with an intensity that makes the back of my neck prickle, that makes my clit throb, my fight-or-flight fully activated, except it’s more like fuck-or-flight.

He puts his mouth back on me, his teeth are blunt again. Or I imagine they are. Or I’m past the point of telling what I imagine and what’s real.

I come with one hand fisted in his thick, damp hair and the other at my own mouth, biting my knuckle against the sound trying to get out of me, because everything feels too quiet, like the sound might wake me up from this beautiful nightmare. My orgasm crashes through me long and hard, leaving me wrecked under him.

He moves up my body the way he came down it—hipbone, stomach, ribs, breast, collarbone—and kisses my mouth. His tongue tastes of me and something with the faintest metal in it, like water that’s sat too long in old pipes. I don’t pull back. He kisses me long, and open, and wet, with his hand between my legs again—two fingers in me now—working me slowly where I’m nearly too sensitive.

He pulls back to look at me.

His eyes are fully black again.

The iris gone, swallowed, no center to them anymore, just the wet, lightless black of deep water with no sun to give it a color, and he doesn’t blink it away this time.

I look at him. He looks back.

It’s like staring into a cosmic abyss, into an eldritch void, and the vertigo is real. I feel like at any moment I’ll tip over and fall into them forever and ever.

“There’s my girl,” he murmurs softly, that low voice that sinks somewhere deep in my chest. The voice pulls me back, gives me my balance even as I lie here on this bed.

Then he pushes into me. Slow, slower than he ever has, one long inevitable slide that doesn’t stop until he’s to the hilt, and the angle’s different, deeper, like he’s reached a place in me that’s been waiting for him, and the cold of him is inside my body now making a home.

He doesn’t move. He stays in me with his forehead to mine, and his hand at the side of my face, and his black eyes on me, breathing against my mouth, not moving for a long, long moment.

Then he fucks me. With deliberation and control. Like he’s decided to be inside me for the next hour, the rhythm steady and deep, the angle finding the place that undoes the rest of me that I thought just came undone, his thumb at my temple and a reverence on his face I haven’t seen him give me before, like a man on his knees at an altar.

He doesn’t say mine again. He doesn’t say yours. He says foxglove, love, Iris, low and dragged, again, and again, as if reciting a prayer he’s kept to himself for centuries.

His hand moves from my face to my shoulder and grips hard, and at the join of my shoulder and my neck I feel a point that isn’t the pad of a thumb.