I lasted forty-five minutes, but it took almost two hours. It was roughly 150 square feet of dirt that needed to be dislodged, the night was cold and dark, and I was only five foot four with minimal muscle mass. My stamina was pathetic, but I was happy to sit on the flat tombstone wearing Priest’s clove-scented cut around my shoulders while I watched him sweat and heave in the dirt.
It fascinated me to watch Priest open up about his dark deeds. The entire expanse of my skin felt electrified with desire as I watched him work calmly, efficiently, and somewhat brutally to bury his sins. It was erotic as hell to watch him dig that grave, to see the sheer strength in that long, lean form, and the determination, the unwavering longevity he had. I wanted to pounce on him, to devour the grim line of his mouth and scratch at that deeply contoured back.
But there was such focus to his efficiency that I held myself in check. I’d never been a sexual aggressor. I didn’t even know how to begin, especially with a man who was mostly unmoved by normal social cues.
So, I sat mainly silent, sometimes chatting mostly to myself about how I missed Sampson and Delilah, about how I was worried about Billy Huxley and his poor family, about why Fuzzy Peaches were a good substitute to real ones in the winter when it was hard to find the fruit. Priest didn’t react, but there was a quality to him that somehow made me aware he was attentive to every word I spoke.
“Oh,” I said at one point, a short exclamation of awed joy as I tipped my head into the sky. “Priest, look! It’s snowing.”
I laughed into the dark, crowded sky as soft, sugar crystal flakes of snow melted on my forehead, in my eyelashes, on my extended hand. Then, because sitting wasn’t enough, not when it was snowing beautifully and the world was all draped in pressurized silence, waiting with bated breath to be covered in cold, I stood and spun around trying to catch flakes in my open mouth.
“It’s silly,” I called to him. “But snow tastes so sweet straight from the sky.”
A cold hand wrapped around my left hand. I startled, painfully inhaling a large gulp of cold air.
Priest stood there, eyes dark under his furrowed brows, intensity radiating off him in tangible waves. When I tried to move, his grip on my wrist only tightened.
“Priest?” I questioned softly.
I gasped again as he suddenly tugged me hard into his body and slid a hand into the back of my hair, clenching it hard enough to dislodge the ribbon and pin me in place. My hair fell in a sweet-scented curtain around us as he took my mouth in a deep, possessing kiss.
Instantly, I liquified, my cold body like soft wax against his hard edges. He kept me upright with only that stinging grip in my hair and a hard hand on my ass, kneading the flesh there as he held me close against his thigh.
When he finally tore his mouth from mine, I couldn’t help but whimper instinctually, filled as much with yearning as I was with lust.
Priest’s face was all shadow, the deep black valleys of darkness at his eyes, under the steep edge of his cheekbones making him look skeletal. In the middle of a graveyard, burying a body together, being kissed by a man who embodied death in so many iterations, somehow, I had never felt more alive.
“You’re right,” he said, so gruff his words seemed pained. “Tastes sweet on your tongue.”
I surged at him, launching my body at his, scrambling inelegantly to climb his long torso and wrap myself securely around him. He didn’t help; he stood there like a headstone of some dark angel and let me spend my enthusiasm on him like some untrained puppy. I peppered his bearded face with kisses, sucked at the lobe of one ear, ran my hands a little too hard through his tangled, long tresses. My hips canted and pressed awkwardly against his groin, eager for friction but unsure how to secure it. Growing frustrated with myself, my lust flaming higher as some perverse result of Priest’s impassivity, I finally nipped at his lower lip to provoke him. The full swell broke beneath my little teeth, blood welling in the crease. I lapped it with my tongue and shivered with longing at the salt and iron tang.
Oh, but it worked.
His arms banded around me too tight, twin cobras suffocating my youthful, untrained fervour. When I grew still and pliant against him, he molded me deliberately with his cold strong hands in the position of his choosing, legs wrapped around his waist, hands linked around his neck, throat exposed to the march of his hard teeth down my jugular. My pulse beat madly against his tongue.