Page 101 of Flames and Blood

“No.” He doesn’t say anything else. He crosses the room and takes my face in both hands, and his hands are cold. I turn my mouth into one palm before he can kiss me—just to feel the cold on my lips first.

“Slow,” I say into his hand. “That’s the rule tonight. I make the rules tonight.”

“You made them the first night too.” He pauses. “Or did you?”

There it is. He’s never pushed. Not at the cabin, when he asked, and I gave him a tenth of the truth. Not on the road since. He has carried the question the whole way up this mountain and never once pushed. And that is why he gets the answer.

“I wasn’t there the first night.” I take his wrists and hold them and make him look at me. “It was her. The dragon. I took too long, so she decided for me… For herself.”

“Kallista,” he says, as if he’s talking about a different person. “That was her.”

“Yes. I guess you could say that. I got the morning after; your marks on my skin and four seconds of memory I can’t make sense of. My own body knows things about you that I don’t.” My voice stays level. “I want to know what I missed. All of it. And this time I’ll be there for every minute.”

His thumbs move once along my jaw.

“Then we go slow,” he says.

He undresses me first, and he takes his time over it. My coat goes on the chair on top of his. Then each button of my shirt, one at a time, his eyes coming up to mine between them. I let him look, because as cool as he is, his eyes still warm me.

When the shirt’s off, he finds the two bruises above my hip bones with his thumbs and stops there. They’re still dark.

“Those are mine,” he says.

“They are.”

“They haven’t faded.”

“Nothing fades on me like it used to. Not since that place.” I put my hands over his and press them into the same spots, hard enough to feel it. “Yours stay on me. Mine don’t stay on you. I don’t like that.”

“I know,” he says. “I’d change it if I could.”

He goes down on one knee and sets his mouth against each bruise in turn, unhurried. My fingers go into his hair, and I stand there in a stone room under my own mountain and watch him do it.

His mouth is cold on my hip, and everywhere it leaves goes hot behind it. It’s like he takes the heat out of my skin, and my body sends it straight back, twice as much. I want him to do it again somewhere lower.

He does. Not there yet. The soft place beside the bone. Then the crease at the top of my thigh, through the fabric, which is worse.

“Take the rest off me,” I say.

He does that too, and he does it kneeling. By the time my pants are down around my ankles, and off, I have both hands braced on his shoulders, and my knees are not entirely reliable.

Then his shirt’s on the floor, and my hands are learning his chest in the lamplight. Smooth. Nothing on him anywhere. I saw four nail marks across his skin, and there’s not a line left now.

“Gone,” I say.

“They always go.”

I pull his mouth down to mine and stop keeping track of anything after that.

The bed is narrow. We use all of it. He lays me back and starts at my throat, his mouth working wide of the bite without being told. My collarbone. The inside of one arm. Under my breast and then over it. When he closes his mouth around my nipple, the cold of him goes through me hard enough that my back comes up off the blanket.

“Oh!”

His hand flattens on my stomach and pins me down, and he does it again on the other side, slower. I choke out a moan.

“That’s cheating,” I tell the ceiling.

“You said slow. You didn’t say gentle.”