Pleasure falls over me like a curtain, pulls through me like ropes, slides through me in waves, crashes from the tips of my toes to the cold, tingly shock in my scalp as I grip him iron tight with arms and legs and body, and it feels like all the barriers between us fall, like I’m sinking into him, lost forever as I draw him deeper inside me and swallow him up.
When he lets me down, my legs shake and I can barely stand, but I feel sultry, wicked, and grind my ass against his cock, wiggling it as I look back over my shoulder.
He pushes me against the wall and I feel a quiver of fear.
“My princess is ready to give me everything, it seems?”
Does he mean…
He backs off when he sees the look on my face and uses his fingers to sweep water-sodden locks out of my face. I grin.
“Maybe,” I tell him, raking my nails down his stomach toward his throbbing cock, “if my prince is worthy.”
He pushes me against the wall and kisses me. He never stops kissing me even as he washes my hair and scrubs my stomach with a bar of soap, and his hands rarely leave my body. I like it when he touches me while I’m wet, the way his rough hands glide so smoothly over my skin, raking me with shivering delight, and the little nip he gives me at the back of my neck makes me want to bend over and wiggle my ass at him again. Mount up, your grace.
It’s time to go, though.
My stomach drops as he dries me off. He insists on doing it himself, as I sit on a wooden bench. He dries my hair and my arms, and rubs the towel around each of my fingers, my legs and toes. All the attention makes me self-conscious, and I end up sitting there hugging myself to hide my chest, legs squeezed together as if I didn’t just jerk him off all over my stomach before he fucked me. Twice.
“You are cute,” he says as he stands to dry himself.
“Uh-huh,” I say, watching him sweep the rivulets of water from his sculpted form, almost drooling at the sight of his big cock between his legs, still half hard from giving me a pounding that, yes, I am going to still be feeling later.
“We do not have to go at all if you do not wish it so,” he says softly, touching my shoulder.
I rest my cheek on his arm. “Part of me just wants to stay. I like this. I like it being like this. But I have to see my home again. I have to know. Hades let his bride go home for half the year, but you don’t seem the type to let yours leave for that long.”
He kneels in front of me, takes my hand, and kisses it.
“Tell me you love me and I will give you the world.”
I stare at him.
“Ah, figuratively. I assure you.”
“I need to get dressed.”
“If I could I would bar you from ever wearing a stitch again. I like you like this.”
To prove it, he grabs my ass and pinches me as I stride past him, and chases me out into the bedroom. We almost end up on the bed. When I say almost I mean I fall back over it and he almost fucks me right there but pulls back at the last second, tracing his fingers down my stomach as he steps to the wardrobe to take my clothes.
There must be some reason why he insists on dressing me. I don’t argue. I like it, and I like returning the favor.
He looks different from when I first saw him. Smiles come easier to his lips and he laughs when I say something silly, and he pulls his hair back instead of letting it hang all over his face, and he puts on black clothes as though he resents them now, not like he’s swathing himself in his chosen color.
It’s time to leave. It’ll be a nine-hour flight.
I’m going home.
I think.
10
I’ve flown exactly once in my life, three times if you consider the connectors different flights. From Philadelphia to Madrid to Basel to Solkovia. The plane that carries us to New York unnerves me when I first see it. It’s so small, and sleek; more like a rocket ship. I’m a little scared to ask how fast it goes.
Once inside, though, it’s just a plane. I don’t notice any difference in speed and let out a slow breath once it levels off. My seat is huge and plush, twice as wide as an airline seat. To my surprise, though, I don’t drift off to sleep, even after I drink a tiny glass of sweet liquor to calm my nerves. I feel a growing sense of dread as the land below gives way to ocean, sapphire blue as far as the eye can see.
Kristoff says little while we fly, taking the time to review a bunch of documents, both paper and on a computer. When he takes my hand I curl my fingers around his palm as I stare out the window. I feel the way I felt when we would come home from a trip to the beach when I was little, an overwhelming and continuously growing sense of dread and fatigue as the fun world of the boardwalk and ocean and rides and candy faded back into a dreamworld and the dreary prospect of going to school next month or next week or tomorrow would float back to the forefront of my mind.
“You’re very quiet,” he says to me. “That is unlike you.”
“I know. I’m just thinking.”
“Tell me what you are thinking.”
“I don’t know.”