Page 64 of Graceless

His hands came up my back, and I reached for the lamp.

“Leave it.”

“Raq—”

“Every time before, you turned it off. I let you.” His thumb moved once across my knuckles. “I want to see you this time. All of it.”

“You’ve seen me.”

“I’ve felt you.” The blue came up. “It is not the same thing, and I have been living on the difference.”

“Oh,” I said. My voice was not entirely available. “Okay. The lamp stays.”

He took the rest of my clothes off slowly. Not carefully — slowly, with something like rage in it, at time, at everything he had never once been allowed to want.

And then his hands stopped being slow.

He picked me up like I weighed nothing and put me down on Nonna’s quilt, and came over me, and there was no more waiting in him anywhere. His mouth went to my throat, my collarbone, the underside of my breast. His hand spread wide on my stomach and went lower and I heard myself say something that was not a word.

“That,” he said, against my skin. “Again.”

His mouth followed his hand.

Down my stomach. The crease of my hip. The inside of my thigh, where he stopped, and breathed, and I felt him take in the state of me and make that sound again, the not-human one, low enough to feel where I needed his mouth.

“Raq. Please.”

“I know,” he said, against me. “I can taste it.”

And then his mouth was on me, and the whole world went down to that.

He licked into me slow. Learning me all over again in the light — long, flat, unhurried strokes that had me fisting the quilt inside a minute, and then his tongue found my clit and settled in, patient and precise and merciless, circling, flicking, working me exactly where I needed it and refusing to hurry, and my hips came up off the bed.

His forearm came down across them. Easily. Without effort. Pinned.

“Oh God⁠—”

“No,” he said into me, and the word hummed straight through my clit. “Just me.”

I laughed — broken, breathless — and the laugh turned into something else entirely when he slid two fingers into me, curled them, and found the spot that took my vision at the edges. He worked me with his fingers and his mouth together, that ancient patience turned all the way onto one task, building it and building it, holding me down while I shook and swore and pulled his hair, keeping me exactly at the edge until I was begging in two languages, one of them Nonna’s.

“Now,” he said against me — permission, command, both. “Loud.”

I came apart with my thighs shaking around his shoulders and his name in my mouth like a curse — long, and hard, and he worked me through every wave of it and did not stop until I pushed at his head, and even then, he pressed one last slow kiss to the inside of my thigh like a signature.

He came up my body while I was still shaking.

“Again,” he said.

“Raq—”

“Again.” His eyes were burning blue an inch from mine, and nothing behind them was human, and he was not asking. “I know what you sound like in the dark. I want it in the light.”

He pushed inside me slow.

I could not breathe.

He held there, all the way in, forehead against mine, and something enormous shuddered through the whole length of him — and then he began to move, and it was deep and unhurried and absolutely deliberate, and every stroke took something out of me and put something back.