Page 190 of Sweet Ruin

Inside me, another noise is coming.

It builds up in me the way it never has with anybody else, because with anybody else, I was always half-present. The other half of me was watching the time, wondering if he was bored. Wondering how I looked from that angle, from this one, from every angle at once.

Right now, there’s none of that. I have enough brain cells for one sentence and one sentence only:

“I’m—”

“I know.”

“Don’t—”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

I clamp the heel of my hand over my own mouth and come so hard that my leg slips off his shoulder.

It goes through me like that first blast of heat when you open the oven. A searing, otherworldly sensation.

My spine bows. My heels bounce against the undersink cabinet. Kane keeps devouring me through it as the blood rushes in my ears like a rocket ship launching into space.

Everything below my ribs clenches and lets go, clenches and lets go, in a series of sweet, aching pulses that spread out through my thighs, my belly, the soles of my feet. My vision goes white at the edges.

He catches me. One arm behind my knees, one across my back, his mouth still gentle on me while the last of it shudders through and out.

Kane presses his forehead against my hip and stays there a moment, breathing. Then he kisses the inside of my knee and puts my dress down over it.

He stands up. I get one look at him and go hot all over again. His mouth is a wet, swollen mess. His hair is wrecked, because at some point, I got a fistful of it and I was not gentle.

I reach for his belt.

He catches my wrist. Again.

“No,” he says simply.

“I… You… What?” I say, confused in a particularly stupid post-orgasmic kind of way. “Don’t you want⁠—”

“Of course I do,” he replies with a choked laugh. “Do you think I wouldn’t fuck those pretty lips if I could? Do you really think it’s not killing me not to feel you clench around me?”

“Then why not⁠—”

“Because it’s not my time. It’s yours. This is mine to give and yours to receive.”

“Kane, I’m not just going to⁠—”

“Yes, actually, you are.” He puts my hand against his chest and holds it there. His pulse pounds under my palm. “This is not a transaction, Lilah. You don’t settle up. You don’t return the favor. You don’t thank me. You came, and that was the entire point of it. That’s all.”

I look at him.

“Then what did you get out of it?” I say, because I can’t help myself.

Kane looks at me for a second, weighing whether to be angry.

“You have no idea,” he says.

He turns me around by the shoulders to face the mirror. I’m even more wrecked than he is. Hair in all directions, face blotchy and flushed. There is lipstick nowhere near where lipstick should be.

“Look,” he says. “That’s what I got.”

Then he lets go of me and picks up the seashell soaps from the floor and puts them back in the basket, one by one, the way they were.