The Sinner

His words make her heart sing as her body aches for his. Four years of war has brought him new scars, new strength. He is a stone monument, hard and strong, when he was already both. She kisses him ferociously, bites at his lips, presses herself against him.

“Li’ili,” he grits out, and she feels his stiffness between them.

“Father says we’ll be wed within the moon’s turn,” she says, her hands slipping down to the rigid length of him in his trousers. She strokes him and kisses him with increasing urgency. “But I ache for you now…”

He grunts and takes one full breast in his large hand, squeezing. “Did you wait for me, Li’ili?”

“I would wait for you until the sun goes black and the stars fall, beloved.”

The sound he makes is part emotion, part dire need. She gasps as his hand slips under her dress. His fingers tease her opening that is wet and ready for him.

“Are you still mine?” he breathes hotly against her neck.

“Always… ki-áñg ngu.” She presses against his touch, wishing he’d plunge his fingers inside and take her. “My beloved.”

“We must wait,” he says, reading her thoughts as usual. He uses her arousal so that his calloused touch glides over her nub of pleasure, rough but slick. “I’m going to make you my wife and then I’m going to take what’s mine.”

“Yes,” she hisses, taking his lower lip in her teeth and sucking. Her grip on his cock tightens. “And this.” She meets his eye with her own heated gaze. “Mine.”

He chuckles, though it’s quickly burned up in the fire of lust. “Fierce woman. Yes, yours.” He grips her hips, hauling her against him. “I dreamed of you while at war. Every night.”

“Because you love me,” she says, pushing him down into the wooden chair carved with ravens and straddling him.

“Because I love you,” he replies, his voice soft.

He kisses her gently. Deeply. Then harder. His fingers are between her legs again, stroking her. She cries out and rides his hand while palming the thickness in his pants.

They strive to bring each other to release—there are many clothes separating them. But the eyes of the gods are watching and will withhold their blessings until the wedding. That night, they will be together. Joined. Complete.

And whole at last…

I blinked awake Thursday morning, an old—ancient?—longing alive in my heart and a fierce orgasm throbbing between my legs.

“Oh my God.” I squeezed my thighs together, as if I could capture it and hold on. Not just the physical pleasure but the love I’d witnessed. Raw and all-consuming. The dream was like the others I’d told Cas about but a hundred times more potent and even earlier than Japan.

Like, Sumerian-earlier?

I sat up, the dream and the pleasure both ebbing away. My thoughts swirled with possibilities, each more overwhelming and unimaginable than the last.

“It’s what he said. His existence seeping into mine. That’s all.”

With a full body orgasm on the side?

I rubbed my eyes, feeling as if I’d come to the end of my suspension of disbelief. There had to be a plausible, scientific explanation for all of this, and if I didn’t talk to someone and get out of my head, I was going to go insane.

“That’s the most plausible explanation of all.”

It was a little after seven a.m., around noon in London. Cole was likely in class or working on one of his masterpieces. I hated to bother him with my crap, but when he moved to the UK, he told me again and again to never hesitate to call.

I grabbed my phone.

“Three times in one week,” Cole answered with a tired grin. “I don’t have my sketch pad ready. What’s up, Luce? Everything okay?”

“I was going to ask the same of you. Rough night?”

My friend was a night owl but mostly because he didn’t sleep well. Sometimes not at all.

Cole ran a hand through his shaggy light brown hair. “I’ll sleep when I’m dead. Isn’t that how that morbid motto goes?”