She turned in his arms, hands to his chest. There were emotions in her eyes he had no trouble reading: lust, impatience, an annoyed flicker of resignation. “I want to be with you so badly it’s the only thing I can focus on,” she said.
He ran a finger over her lips and she caught it between her teeth. “In all that bounty you unpacked, you wouldn’t have included a toothbrush?” He’d give a lot for a razor, to get this scruff off his face. When he kissed her, he wanted nothing but skin between them.
She’d raided his cabin and brought almost everything he needed, including fresh clothing. If he hadn’t already been hopelessly in love with her, that would’ve done it.
He shaved and took a bath, soaking with a cold pack over his eyes. Felt almost himself, certainly smelled better. The injuries were all superficial. He had a black eye and a cut brow, one hip was purple, and he was covered in red scrapes and bumps, his feet uncomfortable to stand on, with a lingering headache, but the wound he’d carried his whole life, the lie in the meat of his heart, was all cleaned away.
Rory was waiting for him in the bedroom. He was the lit fuse on a firecracker when she smiled. They both knew what that smile, what that old brass bed meant. They moved at the same time, crashing into each other, neither of them careful, too long, too guarded with each other.
He was naked, she had too many layers on. This time her hands weren’t looking for damage, they were owning him. Her lips weren’t simply claiming territory, they were branding him. Everywhere she touched he bruised in a new way, as if his skin had never carried sensation, his senses never ignited.
“I should make you sleep,” she said, pulling away to ditch her pants.
He crowded her, hands interfering with her attempt to undress, making her brush against him as she hopped from foot to foot, taking charge of getting her out of her shirt and bra. The need to sleep was a shadow at the back of his brain, but the need to be with her was the reason he was still alive.
He breathed out sharply when that recognition caught. He’d come close to death out there before he came to. Only the need to get back to her keeping him grounded in what remained of his consciousness not blown out by drug-induced i
llusions that felt perfectly real.
“What was that?” she said, hands pressed to his chest.
“You.” She’d saved him even before she’d come after him. He took her face in his hands, traced her lips with his nose, with his mouth, swallowing her breath and savoring this first full kiss of his new life.
She made it everything. Sun and rain, earth and sky, fire and water, justice and equality. A powerful surge of unstoppable desire that made him back her onto the bed. He didn’t let go of her mouth, he didn’t quit stroking her body, bringing her heat to his own, each contact a sharp pleasure, impossibly addictive after a lifetime of abstinence.
She tasted like the fruitcake she’d had with thermos coffee and the toothpaste he’d needed to clean the stench from his mouth. She tasted like the present was hope and the future was endless graspable opportunity. She moved on him like her need was savage and her appetite insatiable and he was squeezed between the strong need to fuck hard and the want to make this first time a perfect memory.
“Tell me what you need,” he said, against her mouth.
“Your lips, your hands. I need to feel you inside me. I need to know we’re alive.”
Braced over her, the thud of her heart sounding on his chest, the kiss deep and pure, he opened her with his fingers.
She wrenched her mouth away to groan. “I don’t know if I can take you teasing me.”
The way her hips were moving, chasing his fingers, he was a beat too slow taking his hand away. She laughed, the last notes of it hitching into a squeal because he’d found what he was looking for. “Don’t you dare stop.”
He nipped her neck. “Glad I could persuade you to my way of thinking.”
“You knew you’d win.” She jerked her hips up to meet the pressure from his hand.
Not true at all, but he was willing to go with the pretense for the sake of watching her start to come apart. He made chaos of her. A twitching, writhing, sighing, happy mess, with her head thrown back and her spine arched, her body shuddering as he brought her close and then swapped his fingers for his mouth.
“Oh God,” she said, “I’ll kill you if you stop doing that.”
He laughed into her and then kept licking, nudging, sucking, kneading her ass and letting her breath, her muscle tension, be his map to her pleasure. She came with her hand tight in his hair, half curled off the bed, her eyes slammed shut and face flushed. It was the most wondrous thing, but when she collapsed back on the bed, held her arms out and said, “More,” he stopped breathing.
He wanted giving her more to be the rest of his life and he’d never thought she’d want that too.
He kissed up her body, her inside thigh, the flat trapeze of her abdomen. He got a giggle out of her when he swirled his tongue around her belly button before continuing his journey up her body, the underside of her ribcage, the rise of her luscious breast. All the delicious silken warmth of her.
He tried to move slowly, to spin this first time out as long as both of them could stand it. Like driving through a fence, it was a poor fucking choice of tactic because her body was endless fascination, her reactions to his touch unbearably hot and he was over-primed, tempered only by amazement that he had the honor of her murmurs of delight.
The sound she made when he licked across her nipple and then fastened on ricocheted along his spine, an electric pinball wired to light him up, almost enough to make him come.
“God, Zeke, too much, not enough. Please.”
His sentiment exactly.