Page 36 of Omega’s Fold

“Yeah.”

I do it again. I use my teeth a little. His hips come up off the bed and I put my hand flat on his stomach to press him down and he makes a sound like I’ve killed him.

“Julian.”

“Still here.”

“I can’t—”

“You can.”

He can. I move lower. His stomach jumps under my mouth. His thighs are shaking before I’ve touched them, and when I put my hand on his hip and my mouth on the crease of his thigh, he says, low and broken, “please,” and it’s the first please he’s ever given me and it almost undoes me.

I take him in my mouth.

He shouts. Actually shouts, heels digging into the mattress, back off the bed, one hand scrabbling for something to hold and finding my shoulder, gripping hard enough I’ll have bruises and I don’t care. He’s hot and he’s leaking and he tastes of skin and salt and the green note of him, the Wyatt note, so sharp this close I have to breathe through my nose.

I set a rhythm. Nothing fancy. He’s not going to last. I don’t want him to.

He’s making a continuous sound now. Wordless. Climbing. His hand moves from my shoulder to my hair and grips and I let him pull me where he wants, and he wants deeper, and I give him deeper, and his thighs clamp around my ribs.

“Julian—” A warning. Polite, even now. “Julian, I’m—”

I go down on him and hum and he comes into my mouth.

It goes on. Longer than I expect. His whole body locks, shakes, locks again. I work him through it, swallow, keep my hand on his hip because he’s moving in ways that could throw us both off the bed if I let him.

When it’s over, he’s limp.

I come up his body slowly. Kiss his stomach. Kiss his sternum. Kiss the hollow of his throat where he’s slick with sweat now, not water. His eyes are closed. His chest is heaving. I brace over him and look at him and he’s beautiful like this, wrecked, mouth open, and I have to put my forehead against his for a second just to get my own breathing under control.

He opens his eyes.

“You,” he says. His voice is gone.

“Me.”

“Come here.”

“I am here.”

“Closer.”

I go closer. I press the whole length of myself down onto him, skin to skin, and he makes a sound in his throat that’s pure relief, and his arms come up around my back and he holds me there, tight, the way you hold something you think you might lose.

We lie like that.

His heart is hammering under mine. His breathing slows. The room is still gray at the window. Outside, somewhere, a cow is complaining about something and neither of us cares.

He turns his head.

It’s not a big movement. His face is against the side of my neck and he turns it a fraction, an inch at most, and his mouth is suddenly on the skin over my pulse and his nose is pressed to my jaw and he breathes in, deep, and holds it.

My hand goes still on his ribs.

He’s scenting me.

I don’t move. I don’t breathe, for a second. He takes another slow breath with his face in my neck and lets it out against my skin and I feel it, the thing I didn’t understand was coming — every muscle in his body lets go at once. His shoulders drop. His jaw, which has been set since I walked into his kitchen, goes soft under my ear. His hand on my back uncurls and lies flat.