Kiss The Dead

feed.”

He was right, I hadn’t fed the ardeur. I’d forgotten that was why we were making love. With his body still inside mine, a light sheen of sweat on his chest and stomach, my arms letting me know that I’d held this position and us in place a long time, the afterglow of all that good sex still flowing through my body, and all I could say was, “Well, shit.”

He laughed then, and he was still too hard inside me, so that it started me writhing and making small noises again, as I laughed with him. We laughed and twitched, and tried to stay on that damn bench, and I still had to feed.

He finally lifted me up into his arms, so that he held me against the front of him, and I wrapped my rubbery legs around his waist. He was still inside me, but growing softer, so that as he picked me up he slipped out, and we were just holding each other, faces inches apart. There was a light dew of sweat on his forehead, too.

His voice was still breathy, his eye still lion-orange. “I love that you enjoyed it so much you forgot the ardeur.”

I smiled at him, arms around his shoulders, hands clasped at the back of his neck. “You were amazing.”

He grinned, a quick baring of teeth, more a cat’s snarl than a smile. “I’ve never had to be this good with anyone else.”

“Because you feel you’re competing against the other men?” I asked.

“That and I’ve never been with anyone who likes sex the way you do. I have to keep up with you.”

I hugged him with my arms, and my legs that were still around his waist. His hands were supporting my legs and ass, but he held me easily; even with the sweat drying on his body, his breathing still not back to normal, he wasn’t straining to hold me. He was strong enough to bench-press small cars, but still I was impressed.

“Right back at you,” I said.

He grinned again. “You still need to feed.”

“God said he’d send Ethan, or Domino; you want to send them in?”

He shook his head. “No.”

I widened eyes at him. “You up to it again?”

“I’m a lion, Anita. Give me a minute, and yeah.”

I gave a little frown. “Isn’t this fast recovery for you?”

“There’s usually a line,” he said, “so I step out of the way, usually for Nathaniel.”

I smiled. “He does share well.”

“He likes to watch,” Nicky said. He stood up with me still wrapped around him.

I gave him wide eyes, and tightened my arms and legs around him. “Now I am impressed. I’m not sure I could stand yet.”

“In your bed, I’m not the biggest, I’m not the most flexible, I’m not multi-orgasmic, I don’t have centuries of practice, I’m not even sure that I have the most stamina. Nathaniel and Jean-Claude are scary impressive there.” He stood on one leg as he moved us off the bench completely and started walking toward the showers. “But I’m strong, and I can fight, and my physical recovery time from almost anything is really good. Give me a few more minutes and I’ll prove it.”

He carried me easily, smoothly, as if I weighed nothing. I was strong for my size, I was damn good, but I’d never be able to return the favor. I would never be a really big, physical man, but in that moment I allowed myself to enjoy that I had one to carry me into the showers, instead of being upset that I could never have carried him.

34

WE CLEANED UP in the shower, and when we’d rinsed the soap and conditioner out, Nicky proved to me that he had more game.

I ended up on the smooth, wet tiles on my knees, the hot water pounding down on us. He shielded me from most of the spray, only rivulets of it tracing down his body so that the water was more decoration to all that smooth skin. I licked the water off the edge of his groin, sipped it off the loose skin that dangled so delicately below. He didn’t shave completely like most of the men in my life, so I licked the loose skin, feeling the smoother hardness underneath. We’d already found that my mouth had healed a lot; I wasn’t sure it was up to full oral, but I was willing to try, and I’d never met a man who would argue about the offer. If Nicky had been shaved all the way I would have sucked and rolled those delicate balls into my mouth, but hair between the teeth-not my favorite. But either he shaved, or didn’t need to, above, and that I took into my mouth completely. He was still small, loose from the heat of the water, so I could take all of him easily, rolling, sucking, licking, enjoying the sensation of him in my mouth when he was still soft enough that I didn’t have to fight to breathe, or fight my gag reflex. I could just enjoy myself and I did. He didn’t stay small long.

I was even more healed than I had thought. I hadn’t remembered concentrating on using Nicky’s energy to heal myself, but apparently it had.

I hesitated as he grew bigger, because if I put him in the sides of my mouth he slid over the few wounds that weren’t completely healed. I stopped, and thought about the problem, on my knees, staring at Nicky, so hard and perfect.

“If it hurts too much, we can do something else,” he said.

I nodded, but decided I’d try avoiding the sides of my mouth. If you can’t go around a problem, go straight at it, go straight down it. If I took him straight down, over my teeth, across my tongue, and to the back of my throat, driving him in and out of my mouth so that we were mimicking what he’d done earlier between my legs, it didn’t hurt much. It hurt a little, but the worst was to the sides of my mouth, which meant that I’d struggled more in Asher’s kiss than I’d thought. I pushed the thought away, and let myself enjoy the man in front of me.

“God,” Nicky said.

I rolled my eyes upward to see him staring down at me, face growing frantic. He’d let the water slick his hair completely back from his face. I think it was the first time I’d really seen his face so clean and bare. He was handsome, he really was. I liked the lines of his face without that fall of hair to cover the missing eye. He wasn’t less beautiful because he wasn’t “perfect”; it was Nicky, it was the way he looked, it was him, and I liked it, loved it. I couldn’t smile with my mouth full, but I could put the smile into my eyes. He’d grown long and hard and smooth in my mouth. I loved sliding my mouth down the long shaft of him, until there was that moment when he touched the back of my throat and I could choose whether to go back up or push him down the curve of my throat. He was just long enough that it was an effort to swallow him down. There were some times that bigger was not better.

I wrapped my hand around the base of him, so that I could go down far enough for him to enter my throat, but not so far that it was choking me. I had worked hard to get rid of my gag reflex, and it was a lot less, but there was one reflex that was harder to control, the I-can’t-breathe reflex. I slid my mouth over him, and then pushed until my lips touched my hand, and then I let go, put my hands behind him to hold on to his thighs, while I forced myself that last few inches until my lips touched the front of his body completely, my mouth locked around him. I had to calm my pulse, calm my body, it was almost meditative, to stop my body from panicking that we couldn’t breathe past him.

I drew back off him slowly, and had to cough. My eyes were tearing up, and my nose was beginning to run. I moved to the side of Nicky’s leg and let the spray from the shower hit my face enough to clean the tears and snot away. In movies they clean the actress up between shots, but in real life, it’s messy. It was my body trying to get rid of whatever the fuck was down so far, and not being swallowed. The body rebelled against something that large being that far down, and not being swallowed. It was like my body was saying, Either swallow, or get it out.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Fine,” I said, but my voice sounded hoarse enough that I had to clear my throat. It wasn’t sexiness; it was my throat getting a little abused by what we were doing.

“God, Anita, please feed.”

“You just want me to use the ardeur because I don’t have a gag reflex and get even