Purposefully, slowly, she rolls herself over, kneeling a little so that her porcelain skinned ass is on display for me and me alone. Casting an amused look over her shoulder, she raises her eyebrows. “Like what you see?”
I rub my hand against the side of my leg, warming up my palm, getting ready to spank the ever-loving shit out of her. “You could say that. You could say I like what I see a lot.” She gasps the first time my palm makes contact with her ass. The room fills with the sound of her surprise, which only makes me want to slap her harder. “Hold on tight, Kaya,” I tell her. “You wanted this, and now you’re gonna get it. I really hope you’re fucking ready.”
Chapter Eighteen
SLOANE
I lay on my side, watching him. It’s late, past one in the morning, but I just can’t sleep. Zeth carried me up to bed and made me lay very still while he went down on me, taking his time with his tongue. I shivered and tried to breathe slowly as he brought me to my orgasm, and when it was over he licked me clean, seeming to take great pleasure in the task. He wouldn’t fuck me. Instead, he took me in his arms and stroked his hands up and down my body in the dark for an hour, tracing circles and strange, alien shapes into my skin before he eventually fell asleep.
He never gradually passes into unconsciousness. He falls dramatically, like plunging head first off a steep cliff. There’s a change in him that’s so instantaneous and intense that it’s impossible to miss. His breathing, the tautness of his muscles, the way the air snaps with a certain energy that always rolls off him—all of that changes. His arms fall slack, his chest rising and falling slowly, rhythmically, and the sharp edge of his consciousness flees the room, leaving the space around him feeling somehow less because of it.
Times like these, when he’s asleep, fighting dragons in his dreams, I love to watch how his face changes. He’s such a hard person to know. There’s a fierceness about him at all times. He loves fiercely. He fights fiercely. He exists in a way that seems like a challenge, as if he’s defiant down to his very core, and no matter what, he’s ready to defend his choices, his beliefs, and those he cares about regardless of what it might cost him. There’s just no fear in the man.
When he’s asleep, though, it’s possible to catch a glimmer of softness to him if you look hard enough. The lines of his face relax. His hands, so often tightened into balls of flesh and bone, ready to attack, turn from weapons into works of art. His hands fascinate me. They’re covered in scars, calloused and rough where his fingers meet his palms; a fortune teller would have a hell of a time getting a read on his future, given the way that roadmap of lines etched deeply into his skin seem so much more chaotic than most.
I wonder if I’m in there somewhere. I wonder if there’s a point in the crisscross madness of those creases where one line meets another and something changes for him. Life suddenly takes on a different meaning. I know my life changed irrevocably when I met him. That change is burned deep inside my very being—in my mind, in my heart, and in my soul. Seems only fair that there should be some mark of it upon Zeth’s body, too.
I press the pad of my index finger against the pad of his index finger, barely touching them together. For a moment, our fingerprints connect and it seems symbolic. We are two different people, so vastly, incomprehensibly different, and yet we are also the same because we’re more than the sum of him as person, and me as a person. We’re forever joined in this life. We are two sides of the same coin. Two halves of one whole. I defy anyone to tell me this isn’t true.
My belly twists, a strange, slightly unsettling feeling fluttering in the pit of my stomach, and I close my eyes. It feels like the tiny life that’s getting to work inside of me wants its presence to be felt right now, in this moment, while I’m musing over thoughts of Zeth and me together. Because now there is another way that we’re joined, and I’m only just beginning to understand how special this new joining of our bodies and our souls actually is. A child. A baby inside me. Half of me, and half of him. God, what a complicated mess this is. Of course, it’s way too soon for the baby to be moving. I won’t feel him move for weeks and weeks, and yet even so, the mind is a powerful thing. It can trick you into believing all sorts of things if it wants to.
Zeth frowns, his bottom lip twitching, the dragons in his dreams giving him hell, and my heart feels like it’s about to brim over. I love him so goddamn much. I never knew it would be possible to care about another person this deeply. If I give birth to this man’s child, if I get to hold his son in my arms, I get the feeling I’ll be dazzled by the entirely new depths of love I’ll experience for the very first time. An amazing, powerful, bottomless kind of love; I see it on the faces of new mothers every day in the maternity wards.