Chapter 190: Feral (M)
MARGAUX
The bite was not what I expected.
I had expected pain in its pure form — sharp, clean and finite. The kind you breathed through and waited to end.
What I got instead was something that started as pain and immediately became something else, something that moved through me in a wave I had no name for, warm, as it was deep, and spreading outward from the point of his teeth until it reached the pit of my belly and settled there, heavy and insistent.
My breath came out in pieces.
My knees found each other without my deciding anything about it, trying to press together against the sensation, trying to contain it, but his hands were already moving before I understood what he was doing. His palms slid down my thighs and separated them with a steadiness that brooked no argument.
The sound I made was not quiet.
He lifted his head from my neck. The moonlight caught his face and the expression on it was something I was going to spend a considerable amount of time thinking about later, in daylight, when I could examine it without my entire body interfering with my ability to think.
"What do you feel?" he asked. His voice had gone low and rough at the edges.
"So good," I said. The words came out without ceremony, without the careful management I usually applied to things I admitted out loud. "Étienne, I feel so fucking good."
Something moved behind his eyes. His hands, still parted against my thighs, shifted inward.
His fingers found my folds and the sound I made this time was louder than the first. He worked slowly, deliberately, watching my face with an attention so focused it was almost unbearable. His other hand came up to cup my jaw and he kissed me, and I tasted it immediately.
Copper and warmth... My own blood mixed with his saliva and a feral need pushed through.
Underneath both of those things that was simply him, and the combination of it should not have been what it was but it was extraordinary, rich and intimate in a way that went past the physical.
His kisses were not gentle.
They were thorough and consuming, as his fingers kept moving between my thighs while his mouth moved against mine.
The dual sensation was the kind of thing that made thought impossible.
I felt my lips swell under the pressure of his kisses, felt the tenderness building there, felt his teeth catch my lower lip and tug with a precision that sent sparks racing down my spine.
I kissed him back with everything I had.
When he finally broke the kiss, the loss of his mouth was loud and immediate and I did not swallow the sound I made at the separation. It just came out, unguarded and embarrassingly honest. A sound that announced exactly how much I had wanted to stay there.
He was breathing hard.
Both of us were.
His chest rose and fell in deep labored pulls while that happened.
He then brought his hand up from my jaw to tilt my chin, and our eyes met, while he kept his fingers moving inside me and his eyes sharply fixated at me.
The intimacy of that — being looked at that clearly while he did that — was almost more than the physical sensation.
"Étienne," I managed.
He watched my face.
His fingers curled slightly and the sound I made was close to his name but not quite, more breath than word.
The pleasure had been building in steady increments and now it was coiling tight at the base of my spine, my whole body pulling toward something, and he felt it, I could tell he felt it by the way his eyes sharpened.
"I’m going to—" I started.
He stopped.
I stared at him.
He looked back at me with an expression that was entirely too composed for the situation and brought his fingers to his mouth, and the sight of it scattered whatever I had been about to say completely.
Then he kissed me again, slower this time, biting at my lips in soft increments that were somehow worse than the rough kisses because they kept promising and not delivering, small bites that made every nerve ending stand at attention and then gave me nothing to do with the attention.
"You are doing that on purpose," I said against his mouth.
"Yes," he said.
He kissed my jaw. The hinge of it. The spot below my ear. Each one landed like a small detonation and my hands fisted in whatever I could reach.
I turned my head until my lips were at his ear.
"I need you inside me." My voice came out lower than I expected. More certain than I felt. "Please. I need you inside me now."
He laughed.
Not unkindly. The sound was warm and undone at the edges. Like the laugh of someone who had been waiting to lose their composure and was relieved to have finally gotten there.
He moved, shifting our positions with a smoothness that suggested he had thought about this more than once, and then I was on top of him, with his hands at my hips, and he was looking up at me with the moon behind my head and an expression on his face that made my chest ache.
He brought one hand up to the back of my neck and drew me down until our foreheads touched.
"Take everything you need," he said.
I kissed him first. One more time, slow and deliberate, his hands in my hair, mine braced against his chest. Then I moved.
I ground against him in slow circles and felt him go completely still beneath me, every muscle in his body locking down against the sensation. He made a sound low in his throat that I had never heard from him before. Something that started as restraint and did not finish as it. I did it again. His hands tightened on my hips.
"Margaux," he said. His voice was wrecked.
I reached between us and led him in.
The sound we both made was different from anything that had come before it.
Deeper.
More complete.
I stayed still for a moment, adjusting to the fullness of him, and he lay beneath me breathing carefully with his eyes closed and his jaw tight.
Then I moved.
I started slow. Long, rolling movements that drew out every sensation, and he rose to meet them, his hips lifting in a rhythm that matched mine before I had consciously established one. Like our bodies had been working on this problem separately and had arrived at the same answer. His hands at my hips guided without directing, feeling my pace rather than setting it.
The tempo climbed on its own.
What started as slow and deliberate became something more urgent, both of us finding the rhythm together and then chasing it higher. The forget-me-nots bent beneath us. The night air moved over my bare skin. He looked up at me with his dark eyes and the moonlight and an expression so unguarded it hurt to look at directly.
"Mark me," he said.
The words landed differently than I expected. Not a request. Not an instruction either.
It was something more like an offering, extended with both hands open.
I took his hand first. Brought it to my mouth and kissed each knuckle, slowly, taking my time with each one, feeling his pulse jump under my lips. He watched me do it and his breath came harder.
I kissed the inside of his wrist, pressed my lips to the point where his pulse was loudest and felt it against my mouth, rapid and real.
Then I bit down.
The blood came slow and warm and I lapped at it carefully, not greedy, not hurried. This was not hunger. This was devotion expressed in the only language that meant something permanent between people like us. I felt him shudder beneath me, felt his hands flex at my hips, heard the sound he made that was my name and not quite my name and entirely undone.
I lapped the wound clean and then pressed a final kiss to it.
He brought me down and kissed me before I finished leaning toward him. We swapped the taste of each other across that kiss. Blood, warmth and everything the night had been, and I felt it through my whole body.
That particular intimacy of being known completely and kissed anyway.
The rhythm had never really stopped. It climbed back up naturally, his hips meeting mine in a pace that was relentless now and neither of us interested in moderating it. The cricking in the garden was a distant theoretical concern. The garden, the manor, the rest of the world — equally theoretical.
There was only this. Only him beneath me and the warmth building at my core in tightening spirals.
"I’m going to cum," I said. My voice was barely functional.
"I know." He looked up at me steadily. "You can."
The permission hit me somewhere I hadn’t expected.
His name came out of me twice, soft and broken, and then the third time it was not soft at all.
"Ettttieeeenneeee!!!"
It left my throat at full volume and I felt the orgasm crash through me completely, my whole body seizing and releasing in waves that went on past the point I thought they would stop. He followed me over, his hands gripping my hips, his voice low and rough against my skin as his own release moved through him.
I fell forward onto his chest.
The garden came back to me in pieces.
The smell of the flowers.
The cool air.
The sound of my own breathing, ragged and slowing.
His chest rose and fell beneath my cheek in a rhythm I found myself matching without deciding to.
His hands moved to my hair.
He smoothed it back from my face with a gentleness that contrasted completely with everything that had just preceded it, his fingers careful and unhurried. Then he pressed his lips to the top of my head and left them there.
I did not speak.
Neither did he.
The moon was higher than it had been. The forget-me-nots surrounded us, small and blue and entirely unbothered by the fact that something had just shifted permanently in the ground they grew from.
I thought about saying something. Something that matched the size of what the night had been.
His hand moved through my hair again, slow and steady.
I decided against words entirely.
Some things were already said.