Page 134 of Graceless

"Yes."

"You've never said it."

"I was saving it," he said, "for when you could do something about it."

I looked up at him — ten thousand years old, bulletproof, beautiful, holding that sentence out like he'd timed it, which he had, because he counts everything.

"You dumbass," I said, with my whole heart, and kissed him.

Up on my toes, both hands in his shirt, no hesitation anywhere in me — and he made a sound against my mouth, low and wrecked, like something let off its chain at last.

He picked me up. No catch this time, no may I — my legs went around him and the studio went past and the curtain went past, and he set me on the bed and stood over me pulling his shirt off with one hand, and there it was, the whole impossible landscape of him — and not a mark on it. Five days. A brawl that broke my roofline and bent iron, blood on my pavers, and his body had already forgotten all of it. Perfect again. Unrecorded. Only the two old scars on his back kept any receipts at all, and I understood something then about what those must have taken, to stay.

"Come here," I said. "Slowly. We have all day, and I intend to be greedy about every minute of it."

"All day." He came down over me by degrees, all that catastrophic mass arriving like a decision. "I have had five days to plan this, Caterina. You should be very worried about the word all."

Oh.

Oh.

He kissed me like the first morning of something, and my nightgown left by way of his hands — unhurried, thorough, the fabric drawn up my body with a care that was its own kind of filth.

Then his mouth went traveling. My throat. My collarbone. The new soft weight of my breasts, where he stayed until my hands were fists in his hair.

"Raq—"

"No." Against my skin, unhurried. "You said slowly. I am holding you to it."

Lower. To the small hard curve of my belly, where our daughter-or-tenant was keeping her quick time. And there he stopped.

He pressed his mouth to the swell of it. Once. Still. His hand spread over my stomach, covering the whole of it, and something moved through him that was older than desire, the thing under it, and I put my hand over his hand, and we stayed like that. One breath. Two.

"Both of you," he said, against my skin. Not to me.

Then his mouth kept going, and the reverence turned filthy by degrees, exactly as I'd hoped it would.

He hooked my knee over his shoulder like he was setting a table. Kissed the inside of my thigh, high, deliberate, and looked up the length of me with those burning eyes while his thumb dragged through exactly how ready I was.

"Five days," he said, low, wrecked, reverent as a curse. "And you're this wet for me."

"Are you going to talk about it or⁠—"

His mouth came down on me and the sentence died in office.

He licked into me slow, learning me all over again, and when I gasped he did it again, and when I swore he settled in — patient, precise, merciless, his tongue circling my clit at a pace he refused to negotiate no matter what I called him, and I called him plenty. My hips came up. His forearm came down across them. Easily. Pinned.

"Raq — God —"

"Not quite," he said, into me, and the word hummed straight through the center of me, and I broke — hard, loud, his name and half the saints in one breath, his mouth working me through every wave of it and refusing to stop until I pushed at his head.

He pressed one last kiss to the inside of my thigh. A signature.

"Again," he said.

"I need — Raq. Now. I have waited⁠—"

"I know exactly how long you have waited." He came up my body, took my hands, laced them through his on either side of my head. "To the hour."