Page 39 of Graceless

"You are very far from fine." His mouth on my collarbone. His hands sliding down my ribs.

"This is dangerous," he said. Low. Against my skin.

"So is the gas stove." I got the first button open. "I manage."

Buttons. His shirt had more of them than any shirt has a right to, and my hands weren't cooperating. I got them open. I pushed the shirt off his shoulders.

Under it he was warm. Furnace-warm, wrong-warm. And built the way the marbles are built, which I already knew, I have eyes, but knowing and touching are different disciplines entirely. His skin under my hands felt like standing too close to something electric — not a shock, not pain, just a hum my whole body leaned into before I told it to.

My hands went up his back. Shoulders, the hard ridge of muscle along his spine — and then my fingers hit something else. Raised skin. Two lines, long, both sides, running down his back.

He sucked in a breath.

I looked at him.

"Scars," he said. "Old."

"How?"

"Battle."

His hands found my hips and pulled me against him. He picked me up — one motion, nothing wasted — and I got a fistful of his hair and told him the bed was through the curtain, that if he tore Nonna's curtain⁠—

His hand slid up my spine, spread wide, covering half my back. The curtain survived. I don't know how.

The box spring announced us to the building. I laughed. He lifted his head and looked at me.

Nobody has ever looked at me like that. Like the laugh was the point.

"Do that again," he said.

"Make me."

I reached for his belt. He let me — held still, watching my hands, his stomach muscles jumping under my knuckles — and when I pushed everything down his hips he kicked the rest off and the weight of him settled over me, skin to skin, nothing between us, and the hum I'd felt when I touched his chest was everywhere now.

He untied the robe. Slowly. Watching my face while he did it, and the watching was almost worse than the touching — his eyes tracking every inch of skin as the robe fell open, and I have never been looked at like that, like I was the first uncovered thing in five hundred years and he was the restorer now.

He pushed the robe off my shoulders. It hit the floor. I was underneath it in nothing, because I sleep in nothing, which I had not thought through when I got out of bed, and which I was now viciously grateful for.

His mouth. My throat. The hollow between my collarbones where my pulse was hammering so hard he could probably taste it. Lower — the curve of my breast, and I sucked in a breath, and his hand came up and held the other one, his thumb dragging across the nipple, slow and deliberate, and my hips moved against him without permission. He made a sound against my skin. Low. Hungry. And I stopped thinking.

His mouth on my ribs. The dip of my waist. My hip, and his teeth grazed the bone and I gasped and grabbed his hair. The inside of my thigh, and his hands spreading me open, and I could feel his breath on me, hot, and my whole body was shaking, and then his mouth was on me and my back arched off the mattress.

He was thorough. He was devastating. He found the rhythm that made my thighs shake around his head and he stayed on it, relentless, his hands holding my hips down when I tried to move, and I said his name — "Raq" — said it against the dark, and he groaned against me and the vibration of it almost ended me.

"Say it again." His voice against the most sensitive part of me. I looked down and his eyes were fully blue — all the dark burned out of them, just blue, just light — and he held my gaze and put his mouth back on me and I said it again, I said it loud, I said it with my hands fisted in the sheets and my heels digging into his back, and I came so hard the room went white.

He kissed his way back up my body while I was still shaking. My stomach. My ribs. The underside of my breast. I pulled at his shoulders — "now, come here, now" — and he settled between my thighs, and I could feel him against me, hard, and I reached between us and took him in my hand and the sound he made — wrecked, desperate — was the best thing I had ever heard.

"Now," I said against his mouth. Plain. No jokes left.

He pushed into me slow. Watching my face. Those blue eyes steady on mine, and I watched them back, and he filled me inch by inch and the sound I made was not a sound I'd ever made before. He held there, fully inside me, both of us breathing hard, and his forehead dropped against mine.

"Cate," he said. My name. Like it cost him everything he had.

I moved my hips. He moved with me. Slow at first, finding the rhythm, his hand coming under my knee and opening me wider, deeper, and the angle changed and I gasped and grabbed his arm and said "there, right there" and he stayed there, he stayed exactly there, and the slow became something else.

The air around us was doing something. Warm, charged, pressing against my skin from every direction like the room itself had a pulse. I couldn't tell if it was him or me or the space between us. I didn't care.