Page 30 of Kavan

The drag of his stubble against the sensitive skin along my jaw makes me gasp, and he does it again, deliberately, mapping the column of my neck with a slow reverence that has no business coexisting with the weight of his hips against mine. I can feel him through the layers, his heat, the hard length of him straining against his fatigues, and I arch up into it without deciding to.

"Kavan."

"Shh." His thumb finds the button of my trousers and works it loose. The zipper is obscenely loud in the hush of the rain. "I've wanted this—" He stops. Breathes. "I've wanted you since the ash."

"Then have me."

He works my trousers down my hips, past my thighs. The cold air hits my skin and I shiver, and then he covers me with his body and the scorching heat of him chases the chill away. His fingers find the slick heat between my legs, and I choke on a sob.

"You're—" He says it like a question.

"Wet. Yes. Obviously. I've been thinking about this since the gutter, Kavan. Since the gutter."

He kisses me, swallowing the sentence, and his hand works between us. When his fingers push into me I break the kiss to press my forehead against his jaw, breathing in the scent of him, ozone and dust and sweat and something underneath that is purely him.

"Look at me," he says.

"No, I⁠—"

"Look at me."

I force my eyes open. His silver gaze is locked on mine. I can see what the control is costing him in the fine tremor of his jaw, the clench of his teeth, the way his pupils have eaten the color whole.

"I need to see your face," he says. "When I push inside you, I have to know that you⁠—"

"That I want it."

"That you want me."

"I want you." My voice fractures. "I want you, I want you, I want⁠—"

He positions himself against me.

The first press of him is devastating, blunt and slick and utterly unhurried. He doesn't thrust. He leans, and the pressure builds and builds until my body has no choice but to open around him, and I feel every centimeter of it, the stretching burn, the impossible thickness working past every place that tries to resist.

"Oh—" The sound that comes out of me isn't a word. It's a broken exhale, a shattered release of air.

"Breathe," he says, his voice graveled to nothing. "Breathe for me."

"I can't⁠—"

"You can." His thumb finds the swollen bundle of nerves at my center, grinding in tight circles. "Breathe, Sophie, and take me."

I breathe.

He pushes deeper. The stretch becomes absolute, a blunt force that bottoms out inside me and stays there. I lock up around him, jaw tight, back arching off the cold glass, muscles clamping down in a desperate, involuntary grip.

"Fuck." The word is torn out of him. "Fuck, Sophie."

I have never heard him swear. Not once. Not in the trench, not on the bridge, not when the ceiling opened his scalp. The sound of it, raw and stripped of every layer of him, takes down the last wall I was holding.

"Move," I say.

"Not yet."

"Kavan—"

"Not yet." He drags his mouth along my collarbone, biting the curve of it. The sting lances through the heat. "I've spent ten days wanting to be inside you. I won't last two minutes if I move. So stay still. Let me⁠—"