She let out a rough exhale of frustration. I smothered it with my mouth. Her lips were soft and ready. She didn’t want to break the kiss when I moved down again, lowering my head to her breast, raising a moan to her lips — fuck, that sound.
My fingers kept tracing her thighs. Down. Up. Still not high enough. Her hips lifted slightly.
“What, Tisaanah?”
She let out a rough laugh. “You are cruel.”
“Cruel? I have a theory that you like this. Besides…” And finally, I let my touch trail higher, lightly, so lightly, running up the wet heat at the apex of her thighs. Her hips bucked, and she let out a sharp breath.
“…I’ll make it up to you,” I murmured, against her lips, and slid my fingers inside of her.
The moan wasn’t silent this time. Tisaanah’s hands grabbed fistfuls of the sheets. She clenched around me. And now I had to actively hold myself back, keeping my touch slow, too slow for what she wanted, reminding myself to be patient.
We have time.
Maybe I was cruel.
Tisaanah let out a breathless, frustrated laugh, her head thrown back.
What a sound.
“You’re not being a very good communicator tonight,” I murmured, and in response she muttered something in Thereni.
“That’s not in my vocabulary. You’ll have to teach me those words.”
A breathless laugh. “Never. It would corrupt you.”
My hand withdrew, and Tisaanah’s eyes snapped to me. Her palm pressed to the bare skin of my abdomen. I kissed her, again, again, our lips barely parting. And she let out a groan when my hand moved back down her thigh.
“I hate you,” she breathed.
“I think you like me very much, actually.”
My fingertips — just fingertips — still caressed her, up and down the length of her body, lingering on the slender vee of her abdomen, the peak of her breasts, the tender skin of her throat. And I just kissed her, and kissed her, and kissed her.
I wanted her. My own body was straining against my self-control, every nerve and muscle calling out for more of her. But the deprivation was a game, at this point.
We had time.
My fingertips brushed her core, just barely, and Tisaanah let out a little whimper.
“What is it, Tisaanah? If you want something, you’ll have to ask for it.”
Her eyes opened, looked directly into mine. They were glazed and shining with want, and, for a moment, something deeper than that.
“I want you,” she murmured.
Those words lit up a primal force in me.
Fuck it.
Her mouth crashed against mine, our slow kisses turning ferocious, feral. She bolted up and pushed me down onto the bed, the full length of her body pressing against me. Her heat aligned with me, and we were so close, one tilt of her hips, away from being joined.
She paused there, eyes looking into mine. A smirk twisted her lips, a spark of satisfaction in her eyes.
“Victory,” she whispered.
And then she pressed down over me, and I slid into her, and nothing existed except for this, for her, for our desire to claim each other. And just as I had teased her with all her silent pleas before, now I listened just as carefully so I could meet them, every shift of her body, every roll of her hips. I could measure the world in nothing but the sounds of her quickening breath or the throb of her pulse. I could revel in the way that here, we were both raw and unfiltered and utterly ourselves.
But then, it had always been difficult to be anything but, with her.
Tisaanah clenched around me and pulled me to her in a long, deep kiss. When it broke, I opened my eyes and looked at her, silhouetted by the moonlight, eyes closed, lost in pleasure.
I paused.
I didn’t know I was speaking until the words were already coming out of my mouth.
“What if this was always us?”
Her eyelids fluttered open, and she gave me a coy smirk. “This? I would not object.”
I shook my head, suddenly serious. “I mean, all of it. The way we’ve been living for the last week. Just you and me. Here. What if it wasn’t just for a couple of weeks? What if it was our lives?”
She went still, giving me a long stare that I couldn’t quite decipher.
Self consciousness fell over me. I didn’t even know what I was trying to say. Even if I did, the words, as always, got tangled somewhere between my thoughts and my lips.
“Do you ever think about that?” I asked. “After you’re done conquering empires and freeing nations and saving the damned world. Have you ever thought about…”
Have you ever thought about what it might be like to be with me forever?
Ascended above, what a stupid question.
But suddenly, I couldn’t not ask. I realized, all at once, that I did think about it. I thought about it constantly. It was insidious, the dreams slipping in so slowly I hadn’t even realized it was happening until right here, in this moment.
For a long time, I hadn’t thought of a future at all. But now, I couldn’t conjure a vision for one that didn’t have her in it.
She was still giving me that look. I lowered my eyes.
What was I even asking her? And what did I expect her to say? It had been a few months. And there were still so many other things that would be at the forefront of her mind.
“Never mind,” I muttered. “I just—”
But she tipped my head back, so that I was looking directly into her eyes again. “I love you,” she whispered. She gave me a long kiss. The rhythm of her hips resumed, and my thoughts unraveled, and it was not so difficult to discard the self-consciousness of what I had asked her, and what she had not said in response, as she fell
