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“I said I’d put my mouth on you.” He looked up at me, his lips an inch from the head of my cock, his eyes dark and wicked. “Remember?”

“I remember.”

“Tell me you want it.”

“I want it,” I said, and my voice cracked. “Lex. Please.”

He took me into his mouth.

I made a sound I had never made before. My back bowed off the bed and my fingers knotted in his hair, and I felt my fangs slide down without any instruction from me. His mouth was hot and wet and tight, and he sank down slowly, taking me deeper with every inch, until the head of my cock hit the back of his throat and he gagged a little and kept going anyway. He hollowed his cheeks and dragged his tongue along the underside, clumsy and enthusiastic and devastating, and he moaned around me, and the vibration shot through every nerve I had. I said his name over and over, in two languages, and I could not stop my hips from lifting into his mouth.

“Lex,” I gasped. “If you continue, I will—”

“Not yet.” He pulled off with a wet pop, his lips swollen and shining. “I’m not done with you.”

He had brought the lube. He had stolen the bottle from my nightstand in Room 214, he confessed, with an air of great shame, and I laughed so hard that I nearly lost the thread of the moment. He warmed it in his hands, and he asked, and he asked, is this all right, can I, tell me if, and when I said yes, he murmured “Thanks” in that sweet, gruff, embarrassed way, and I understood that I had taught him this, and that we were teaching each other.

I will say that it was not what I had expected. He pushed my knees up and apart and kissed the inside of my thigh, and his slick finger circled my entrance, pressing gently, and then slid inside me, and I gasped at the strange stretching fullness of it. He pumped it slowly, watching my face, and when I shuddered he added a second finger and curled them, and pleasure burst through me so suddenly that I bucked off the bed. He grinned down at me like a man who had found buried treasure. “There it is,” he said. “Yeah. Right there.” He rubbed that place again, firm and slow, while he took my cock back into his mouth, and I thought that I would die of it. I understood every sonnet ever written.

“Lex,” I said hoarsely. “Please. I want you inside me.”

“Oh, God, “ he said, and I heard the crackle of a foil wrapper.

He rolled the condom onto his cock, which was thick and flushed and leaking at the tip, and he slicked himself with more lube and knelt between my knees. He guided the head to my entrance and looked up at me for a long moment, checking my face. Then he pushed in, inch by inch, and I felt myself open around him, hot and tight and full, and a sound ripped out of my throat that was half a groan and half a sob.

“Okay?” he panted.

“Do not stop.”

“You’re so tight. Jesus, Maksim.” He sank deeper until his hips met mine, and he held there, shaking, with sweat on his forehead. “Tell me when.”

“Now.”

He began to move. He rolled his hips in long slow strokes, pulling nearly all the way out and sliding back in, and every stroke sent a wave through my whole body, warmer than the last. He braced his hands on either side of my head and watched my face with his hazel eyes gone dark and wide, and he looked so awed and so tender that I covered my eyes with my arm. “Don’t,” he said. “Look at me.” He pulled my arm away and kissed me, and the angle changed, and his cock dragged across that place inside me, and I cried out and clutched his back with nails that are not entirely human. He did not seem to mind.

“You’re so beautiful,” he whispered. “You don’t even know. Maksim, you don’t know.”

“Lex—”

“I’ve got you. I know. I’ve got you.”

He moved faster. He pushed my knees back toward my chest and drove into me harder, and the sound of our bodies came loud and wet in the quiet room, skin slapping against skin, the old bed creaking, his breath ragged in my ear. I had never felt anything like it, the stretch and the heat and the helpless, shameless pleasure of being fucked by the man I loved. I heard myself begging. I heard myself say harder, and yes, and there, in a voice I did not recognize, and he gave me everything I asked for.

My fangs had come down. It was not hunger. It was joy, or grief, or something that has no name, and I turned my face into the pillow so that he would not see. He took my chin, gentle and firm, and turned it back.

“Hey,” he said. “It’s okay. I want to see.”

“They—”

“I know what they are. I’m not scared.” His eyes were wet. “You’re the least scary thing I’ve ever met.”

That was when I said it. I had promised myself that I would not, and I had promised Sabine, and I had promised the small stubborn part of me that has kept me alive and knows the cost of speaking before a mortal is ready. But he was inside me and above me and looking down at me with tears on his lashes, and the words rose out of my chest like water from a spring.

“I love you.”

He stopped moving.

It lasted only a second. His face changed, and terror and joy were so mixed in it that I could not tell them apart. His breath caught, and his fingers tightened on my hip almost to the point of pain.