She gasped. This wasn’t a make-believe game, not sport. He was learning her new. “Plum.” She’d painted her toenails the night before.
He cupped her heel, his other hand smoothing up her calve. “Toes like bubbles in wine.” He leaned forward and licked her shin. “What colour do I taste?”
She propped up on her elbows to watch him. His own skin was a darker warmer tone than hers, he tanned golden where she burned pink. She said, “Pearl,” because he made her feel lustrous.
He nipped, then kissed her knee, shaping it with his hand. “What scars?”
None on that knee, but it was a slighter darker tone to her shin. “Oatmeal, no scars but on the other knee.” He shifted, nose to her other knee, making her toes point. “It’s coffee coloured, a crescent shape. I came off my bike.”
“Show me.”
She took his hand, traced his finger over the scar beside her knee bone. He opened his mouth over the place and played his tongue back and forth on the indentation and it was so oddly intimate it dragged a whimper from her. She reached for him, but he ducked her hand, kissed his way up her thigh to her hip. She twitched, wanted his attention to stray lower, not higher. She caught his grin between kisses.
“You taste like vanilla. You smell like green fields.”
“You’ll make me pass out if you keep this up.”
He laughed, an engine purr against her belly, framed by his hands, his weight between her legs. He dipped his tongue into her belly button. “Warm honey,” then nuzzled her ribcage, “Lemon curd.” His hands climbed, covered her breasts, thumbs circling. She blinked hard, she wanted to drift, succumbed to the flush of heated feelings goose-bumping her senses, liquefying her spine, but she needed to watch him as badly as she needed to breath.
“What colour are your nipples?”
His question made her eyes flutter closed. If her skin was pearl, then her nipples were caramel, but under his lips warming to pink, to cherry. He knew what he was doing to her, he didn’t expect a coherent answer. But then he pinched, and she moaned, so he did want her colours charted—impossible man, so she told him in a rush of jumbled words as he licked and sucked and soothed.
He kissed each freckle she directed him to across her chest and shoulders, saying raisin or chocolate or peanut butter. She told him her cheekbones were roses, and her jaw buff, her eyelids peach with black ink lashes. She led him to tongue the circular chickenpox scar near her brow and draw the strands of her cinnamon hair across his lips.
He wasn’t unaffected by this. He ground against the bed, almost but never quite touching her core, never quite being where she wanted him most.
A finger to her bottom lip, he strummed it, gently. “These feel like wet silk, they taste sweet like oblivion. What colour are they?”
They were taupe, or beige, or passion, or in her imagination, a wild, wanton red she could never wear well. She arched her back, tried to bare down on him, but he stopped her with a hand to her hip and a fleeting kiss that he stole back before she could take ownership of it.
“What colour are your lips, Georgia?”
Colours she’d never known existed. The colour of life, real and fantasy; the colour of joy, swollen and plush. “Desire.”
He groaned and claimed them, locking on, flexing his hips under her hands, against her centre, courting entrance, tempting more, but he wasn’t finished with the lesson. He dragged free, panting heat on her skin, trailing moisture down her body to the places he’d skipped.
Fingers to the insides of her thighs, the skin so much softer, paler there, like fine cotton. He spread her legs and she trembled. His touch, the exposed position, she felt both vulnerable and naughty. It made no difference that he couldn’t see her, because he looked at her with such possessive intent, touched her with such dirty reverence, and spoke to her of all the things she longed to feel and be for him, for herself, for forever.
He sucked on her inner thigh, wide open mouth, tongue in play, teeth not far away, the muscles on his back flexing and shifting as he twisted to reach her, and she cried out, pulling at his hair, clutching at her own stomach, a ridiculous attempt to quell the riot of sensation.
When he traced a finger at her entrance she stilled, eyes pinned, breath stalled. With thumb and forefinger he opened her. “Tell me what colours you are here.”
Her breath was a sharp breeze cresting his hair as he moved to taste her. She lost all vocabulary as he used his tongue along, across, around, flicking, dipping, plunging inside. He made her all the colours in the wheel, all the hues of light and dark, all the intensities and shades of the spectrum. He saw only black, but lit up all the colours in her.
She was no colour without him.
A swipe over her clit that made her jerk. He murmured, voice hushed and heavy, crushed like velvet. “This is summer, this is rain.” He dipped again, spoke in a whisper. “Volcano rims, Saturn’s rings and drops of Jupiter.” She would tremble apart. She would tear his hair from his scalp. He had lost his voice, but not his ability to make her drunk on the lyrics of him.
Another swipe. “Flowers.” Another. “Sunshine.” Another. “Salt.” Another. “You taste like lust.”
She shook and shook and couldn’t stop the thunder and lightning inside her, the building storm. “Damon, please!”
He rose up over her, eased swift inside, eyes closed, torso arched, head thrown back. He said the word, “Earthquake,” as he claimed her, rocked her, chased the storm till it broke and split the atmosphere, with a boom.
31: Seen
Damon couldn’t sleep. He shouldn’t have come here, shouldn’t have stayed. He lay beside Georgia and tried to keep from moving, waking her, tried to make this moment with her in his arms last for as long as possible. Because it had to be the last time he held her like this.