Page 77 of Enslak

"Come here," she said, reaching for me, pulling me up the length of her body.

I came willingly and she pulled me down to her mouth, kissing me with a thoroughness that left no ambiguity about what she wanted next. Her hand wrapped around my cock and I groaned against her lips, my hips rocking forward into her grip without meaning to.

"I want you," she said quietly, very clearly, her eyes holding mine. "I know what that means with your size. I want it anyway. Tell me if I need to tell you to slow down."

"I will go slowly," I said, and it cost me something to say it calmly with her hand on me, but I meant every word. "And you tell me if you need me to stop."

"I will," she said. "I promise."

I positioned myself carefully, watching her face. She was watching mine, which helped me stay present in a way that nothing else could have. I pressed forward slowly, feeling her body adjust around me by degrees, and when her eyes went wide I stopped immediately.

"Okay?" I asked.

"Very okay," she breathed, and then she shifted her hips to take me deeper herself, which was her answering the question more clearly than words. I pressed a little further. The sound she made was low and wanting.

"More?" I asked.

"More," she confirmed.

When I was fully seated inside her, we both held still, breathing. Her hands were on my arms, her nails pressed into my skin, and the expression on her face was something I was going to spend a considerable amount of time thinking about later when I could afford the distraction.

"You can move," she said, her voice a little unsteady. "Please move."

I withdrew slowly and came back in, and the sound she made told me to do it again. So I did. And again, finding a rhythm that made her breath come faster, that made her fingers dig in harder, that made her say my name in a way I'd never heard her say it before.

"Harder," she said after a while. "I can take it."

I checked her face. She was completely present, completely with me, her eyes open and dark and entirely certain. "Tell me if that changes," I said.

"I will. Now please stop being so careful and actually move."

Something in me loosened at that, and I stopped managing myself quite so tightly and let the rhythm build. She met me with her whole body, her hips rising to match mine, both of us working toward something together rather than one of us simply receiving what the other offered. The distinction mattered to me. I wanted to know we were doing this together.

The pleasure was enormous and building, but underneath it I stayed aware of her, aware of the sounds she was making and the way she was moving and whether she was with me or somewhere else. She was entirely with me. Her voice was breaking on every exhale, saying fragments of words that were mostly my name, her hands alternating between gripping my arms and splaying flat against my chest as if she needed to feel my heartbeat.

When I felt her start to tighten around me, I changed the angle of my hips on instinct, trying to find whatever made it better, and she cried out suddenly with a sound that was pure surprise and then pure pleasure as she came, her whole body arching against mine, her nails drawing lines down my back that stung in a way that tipped me over the edge after her.

My release moved through me like something released under pressure, and I heard myself say her name in a voice I barely recognized, and then it was over and we were both still, both catching our breath, the cave very quiet around us.

I lowered myself carefully to the side, keeping one arm across her, and she turned toward me and pressed her face against my chest. Her breathing was gradually slowing. Mine was doing the same.

For a while neither of us said anything.

Then something strange happened. A faint, unfamiliar sensation moved through my chest, a flutter like a second pulse overlaying my own, there and gone and then there again. I pressed my hand to my sternum, and Niki lifted her head.

"Did you feel that?" she asked.

"Yes," I said, unwilling to put more words to what was clearly magic.

I looked at the cave entrance, where the light had shifted from amber to deep blue. Avalon was settling into true night outside, the usual chorus of nocturnal sounds fading toward silence. Niki's hand was warm against my ribs, her breathing evening toward sleep, and I lay there taking stock of what I actually felt rather than what I thought I was supposed to feel.

There was warmth here, and the specific satisfaction of having been present and careful and genuinely connected to another person. There was something that I thought might be the early shape of love, though I held that word carefully because I wasn't sure yet whether I was remembering how love was supposed to feel and mapping her onto it, or whether what I felt was really her specifically. I wanted to be honest about that difference, at least with myself.

What I was certain of was simpler. I knew her. Not all of her, not yet, but enough to want to know the rest. I knew how she moved through the world and how she sounded when she was angry and what she looked like when she was trying not to be afraid. I'd watched her throw herself between me and her own people's mercy without a second of hesitation, and I hadn't forgotten that and didn't intend to.

I wanted to stay with her while I kept healing. I wanted to be someone she could trust with her weight. Whether that was a Vaktaire bond in the old sense, I genuinely didn't know. My memory of those traditions was still coming back in pieces, doors opening slowly onto rooms I hadn't been able to access for a very long time, and I wasn't willing to use a word I didn't fully remember the meaning of just because it might seem meaningful to say it.

"Enslak." Her voice was sleepy, soft.