Page 26 of The Girl Beneath the Sea

He looks at me a moment longer. Whatever he is looking for, he finds it or gives up looking, because he kisses me again.

He gets me out of his shirt first. He pulls it up over my head and I come out of it with my hair everywhere and he stops, with the shirt still in his hands, and looks at me.

I have often been the focus of attention, but not like this. They’re always looking at the prince. Not me.

“Fuck,” he says, quietly.

He puts his hand flat against my chest. His palm covers most of it, then he moves it down slowly, over my ribs, my stomach and every place he touches stays warm after his hand has gone.

Then he lays me down.

He does it carefully. One hand behind my head so it doesn’t hit the plywood, the other under my back, and he sets me down on the blankets. The jacket is under my head. It smells of him. Everything smells of him. I want to swim in it.

He kneels over me and takes his own shirt off with one hand.

There is a lot of him. My eyes follow dark hair across his chest and down his belly. There are old marks, a lot of them. He has one long and pale across his ribs and a round pucker on his shoulder that I think might be a bullet hole. There is a scar across his stomach that looks like it was stitched by someone in a hurry. Maybe he did it himself. Nobody has ever kept anything from happening to him. Not like me. No one has ever even had the opportunity to touch me.

Until now.

I put my hand on the long scar on his ribs. He lets me, but then he bends down. “Later,” he says. “You can look later.”

He puts his mouth on my throat.

That is the end of thinking for a while.

His mouth goes down me. Slowly. He kisses my collarbone, both sides. My chest. He takes one nipple into his mouth. I arch up off the blanket and he holds me down with one hand on my hip, gently, and keeps going to my ribs, then my stomach.

He kisses the hollow under my hipbone and I am shaking.

He gets the sweats down my legs and off. Then my underwear. He does that slowly too, watching my face while he does it, and then I am lying naked on the floor of a cage with a man between my knees. I have never been fully naked in front of anyone.

I am hard. I have been hard for hours. There is slick running out of me onto the blanket. The scent of it fills the box.

He puts his hands under my thighs and lifts them and opens me.

“Look at you,” he says.

He puts his mouth on me.

Not on my cock. Lower. His tongue goes over the slick wet skin behind my balls and then lower still and I cry out, loud, and grab for the blanket, but he growls against me and does it again.

I didn’t know. Nobody told me it could be this. No one ever told me anything.

He licks into me like he is starving and I can’t hold still. I can’t do anything but push against his mouth and make sounds I have never made.

Then his hand wraps around my cock and he strokes once, twice, with his tongue still working, and I come.

I have never come before. Not once. Not by my own hand. I am always being watched and I have never dared.

My back bows and my heels dig into the blanket and I hear myself shout and it goes on and on, and he keeps his hand moving and his mouth on me the whole way through until I am sobbing for breath and shoving at his shoulder.

He comes up. He wipes his mouth on the back of his hand and looks at me and I have never seen anything like his face.

“First time,” he says. It’s not a question.

I nod. I’m not ready to speak yet.

He puts his forehead down on my stomach for a second. Just rests it there. His breath is hot on my skin. I put my hand in his hair and I hold on.