Page 29 of Honeyfires

I learned her the way I needed to learn her. What made her breath fracture. What made her moan. What made those gorgeous thighs clamp against my head until I pinned them open with both forearms and felt her nearly lose her mind at being held there.

"There," she gasped when I found her clit with my tongue, "oh god, right there, please—Petra, please—"

I stayed exactly there.

When I slid two fingers inside her, she arched completely off the bed, a full bow of her spine, and said something that was probably my name and possibly every word of the Rilke tattoo, hard to confirm, her pronunciation had deteriorated considerably.

"Don't stop," she begged, voice cracking. "I'm so close, I'm so—"

I lifted my head.

She made a noise of pure outrage.

"Hold it," I said.

She stared at me, my fingers still inside her, not moving. "I—what?"

"Hold it for me." I watched her face cycle through approximately five emotions in two seconds. "You don't come until I say so. You remember."

"Petra," she said, in the tone of someone making a very reasonable legal argument, "I am physically right there—"

"I know." I pressed a kiss to the inside of her thigh, without moving my fingers. Felt her clench around them, fighting it. "You're doing incredibly. Keep going."

"This is a very specific form of—oh god—" She exhaled through her teeth as I curled my fingers slightly, not enough, never enough, and her whole body shook with the effort of holding back. "This is cruel."

"This is mine." I looked up at her. "And you like it."

A sound left her throat that I was going to think about for the rest of the year. Her hands twisted in my hair. Her thighs were trembling against my forearms.

"Petra," she begged. "Please. I'm begging you. Please—"

"Now," I said, and put my mouth back on her.

She came so hard and so suddenly that she nearly pulled my hair out by the roots, her whole body lifting off the bed, my name on her lips in a broken, breathless cry that echoed off the walls. I worked her through every second of it, riding every wave, easing her down as slowly as I'd built her up, feeling the uncontrollable pulse of her orgasm on my tongue.

When I raised my head, she was staring at the ceiling with the expression of someone who had briefly left their body and was not entirely certain they'd returned.

"Vera."

Nothing.

"Still in there?"

A long pause. "I'm reconsidering the entire trajectory of my adult life." She turned her head to look at me. Hair everywhere, lipstick a distant memory, flushed from her hairline to her collarbones. Completely, radically undone. "Come here."

I crawled up her body, and she pulled me into a long, slow kiss—and tasted herself on my tongue and made a sound that felt like a lit match against my insides. Her hands skimmed down my ribs, my stomach, the waistband of my jeans.

"Your turn," she said against my mouth.

"Vera—"

She flipped me.

I landed on my back, blinking, which—I was a decorated war veteran and a trained crisis responder, and she was a tiny librarian who wore vintage dresses, and she had just flipped me.

She swung a leg over my hips before I'd fully processed it, already working my belt with the concentrated readiness of someone who'd made a plan and was not taking questions.

"I've been thinking about this," she said, "since noon."