Page 164

He did.

By the time I stood in front of him in nothing but the firelight, my knees were unsteady, and my breath was coming in short quiet gasps I could not control. He stepped back. He looked at me, all of me, with an expression of such reverent hunger that I had to close my eyes.

“Don’t,” he said. “Look at me.”

I looked.

“You’re beautiful.”

“So you say.”

“I’ll say it every day. Get used to it.” He was unbuttoning his own shirt now, quick and clumsy, shrugging it off his shoulders. “God, I love you. I love your stupid pale skin. I love your stupid perfect face. I love how you go quiet when you’re happy.”

“I am not quiet.”

“You’re so quiet. It’s like watching a lake freeze.”

He undid his trousers. They dropped. He stood in front of me, tanned and scarred and flushed, in the gold and shadow of the fire, with the garnet on his throat and the mark below his ear, and I could not remember how I had ever thought a person could be too much to look at.

We came together in the middle of the room.

It was not gentle. Or it was, but in a different way, in the way of two people who have learned each other and are no longer afraid to be hungry. He kissed me hard, his hands in my hair, his body pressed the full length of mine. I kissed him back with a low sound I did not recognize. His skin was hot. Mine was warming, drawing his heat like a stone in a stream, and I felt the bond sing between us, a clear, high note.

“Bed,” he said, against my mouth.

“Yes.”

“Now.”

“Yes.”

We fell onto it.

I have thought since about how to describe the next hour, and I find that there is only one way to do it, which is to say that it was the best hour of my long life and then to tell you exactly why.

He took his time. He lay above me with his elbows on either side of my head and looked into my face while he kissed me, and he whispered things in my ear that made me arch off the bed and claw at his back. His hand slid between us, sure and slick and merciless, and closed around my cock, and he stroked me until I said his name over and over and it stopped being a name and became a word for the whole world. When I begged, he laughed softly, delighted, and said, “Say it again,” and I said it again.

Then I turned him over. I pressed him down onto his back against the pillows and kissed a path down his body, over his chest and his stomach and the sharp line of his hip, and I took his cock into my mouth, slowly and thoroughly, until he was cursing in two languages and twisting the sheets in his fists. I held his thighs apart and dragged my tongue lower, over his balls and past them, and he made a strangled noise and lifted his hips, and I licked him open with a patience that I had learned across eleven hundred years and had finally found someone to spend on. I slicked my fingers with lube and pressed one into him, and then two, stretching him, curling them against the place inside him that made him shout, and he said, “Maksim, please, now, I need you,” in a voice that was nearly a sob.

I rolled on a condom with hands that would not stop trembling. I lifted his legs over my shoulders and pushed the head of my cock against his entrance, and he looked up at me, flushed and wild-eyed, and said, “Yes.” I slid into him slowly. He was tight and burning and perfect, and I thought that I would die of it. I held still until he nodded, and then I set a slow rolling rhythm, sinking into him and drawing back, watching his face. His eyes were shut, and his mouth was open, and every time I drove deep he made a sound, low and wrecked, and his hips came up to meet me.

“Harder,” he said.

“Lex—”

“Harder. I’m not going to break.”

I gave it to him. I lost the last of my restraint at last, on the night of my wedding in a log cabin beside a frozen lake, and I let the thing that I had held back for a thousand years run loose. It did not hurt him. It was the opposite of hurting him. He shouted and clung to me and swore that he loved me in a hoarse cracked voice, and I thrust into him hard and deep, again and again, my cock pounding into him until the headboard knocked against the wall and the sound of our bodies filled the room. I pinned his wrists beside his head and fucked him so hard that the old bed shuddered, and he arched into every stroke, begging for more. I felt the bond blaze, and I knew that he felt me, all of me, as I felt him. His pleasure was mine, and my joy was his, and we were one nerve and one pulse and one long unbroken cry.

“Maksim,” he gasped. “I’m going to— I’m—”

“Yes. Now.”

“Bite me.”

I froze.

“Bite me,” said Lex, breathless. “It’s okay. I want you to. It’s ours.”