Page 72 of Bonetide

“Hush.”

His mouth comes back to me.

From behind.

I cry out harshly in surprise, and his tongue is on me again, but from a different, better angle. He administers the same long, flat strokes from before, but now also on places I had no intentions of ever letting anyone near.

He puts his mouth everywhere.

He licks me where no one has put their mouth on me—or anything—in my whole life. He does it without ceremony, without asking, like the whole of me is his to taste, and there is no part of me that is exempt.

I make another noise that is muffled by the pillow because I have buried my face in it.

“Don’t hide from me,” he chides me but I keep my face where it is, practically suffocating.

He licks me again. Long. Slow. The flat of his tongue moves up and across me, ending with the point of it where I am wet and aching. He stays there, working me with his tongue, grinding in and further in yet, while his hands hold my hips off the bed, one of his thumbs is doing something to me that I’m going to think about every time I see his hands for the rest of my life.

I come for him a second time, only this time it catches me off-guard. It comes up from somewhere I didn’t know was in me, urgent and violent. I cry into the pillow and my legs shake, and he holds my hips up because they cannot hold themselves up, his mouth on me through every shudder. He does not stop until I am limp against the quilt and breathing in ragged gasps, and saying his name into the pillow in a voice I don’t recognize as my own.

He brings me down, soft and reverent.

He kisses the small of my back. He kisses each of the small dimples above the curve of my ass. He kisses up my spine, one vertebra at a time. He kisses my shoulder blade, the side of my neck where my hair is stuck to my sweat-damp skin. He rolls me carefully onto my side and gathers me against his front, fully dressed against my bare skin, and he holds me there while I shake.

“There you are,” he says softly.

I can’t speak for a minute. If I tried, it would all be gobbledygook.

He waits, his hand stroking my hair, which in itself undoes me further.

When I can speak, my voice is wrecked.

“Let me touch you,” I croak.

“Foxglove…”

“Please.”

“Iris.”

“Still please. Just…let me. I don’t care if it’s only my hand. I want to. I need to touch you.”

A long beat.

“All right.”

He shifts. He’s still dressed, the shirt unbuttoned at the throat, the sleeves rolled, and his trousers are still on him. I reach for the front of his fly and my hand is shaking. He helps me. He undoes the button, and guides my hand inside the fabric, and I discover he’s going commando.

I gasp when my palm meets his cock. He’s hard, so much so that it must be painful, the skin velvet soft and hot to touch. I give it a tight, eager squeeze and a sound falls from his mouth, more animal than man.

I stroke him once. Slow, the way he has been showing me he likes things slow.

He shudders, his breath a gasp.

My lord, he is even more beautiful like this. How badly I want to fucking undo him until he’s completely unraveled. Just to see what that’s like.

I stroke him again, slower, and his forehead drops against my shoulder. His hand goes to my hip and grips hard, and I am starting a third stroke when he makes the sound again and his hips jerk against my hand and he is coming, hot and quick and wet against my palm, wrist, and the blanket underneath.

He breathes against my throat for a long beat.