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“Once.” She broke eye contact. “Not so much now.”
He put his hands to her shoulders. “I have money in the bank for the first time in my life, but only because the woman who brought me up is dead. It’s more than I’ll ever save if I work till I’m dead too. My business dream is over because we don’t have finance, there’s a competitor and they already have investors and markets. I need a job, but I’m obsessed with rebuilding the Ipseity platform, and I don’t sleep anymore or eat properly. I’m a wreck and my prospects are wage slave.” Her eyes snap locked on his. “You’re this pure shining star, this perfect sequence of numbers, just waiting for the right moment to explode with brilliance.”
“Oh my God, when you talk.”
“Told you I’d be hard to shut up.”
“I don’t want you to ever shut up.”
He frowned. “You know when my tongue really gets untied.” Heat stole its way out of his hands and his jacket and into her face. In bed he had no trouble telling her what he wanted, what he was feeling and what he was going to do.
“I’m working on the idea you’re not going to throw me out in the cold, at least not tonight. There’s something I want to do.”
Her body swayed towards his. The pull between them stronger now than it was on the street when she’d thought he might be angry, but he’d looked at her with shock and admiration on his face.
“I want to take you back to bed, get skin to skin and with you, hold you in my arms and sleep.”
She laughed, all her tension resolved into an unrequited lust high.
He touched a finger to her bottom lip, traced it. “Eventually.”
She lifted her hands to his face, his cheeks scratchy. His jacket fell off her shoulders when she stood on her toes to kiss him, tentatively, teasingly. There’d be the rules of engagement to work out, or if not a regime as strict as rules, then protocols, ways to recognise each other and yet not forget their need to be separate, independent people.
She needed that.
He took her easy kiss and made it bold, rude, and addictive. An invasion of his tongue, the quick strike of grazing teeth, lips uncompromisingly firm and possessive. His hands stayed by his sides, while hers fumbled with his buttons. When they found his ribs, she felt his heart pounding under his skin. She broke off to look at his face. He was watching her, eyes heavy-lidded, the memo of his desire.
When he’d finally spoken it’d been confidently, but his pulse was racing. He’d been so uncertain about them, but he’d laid his feelings out anyway, courting rejection. She put her face to his chest, the smell of him; the soft fur. She dragged her mouth to his neck and his hands came up, hauling her t-shirt up her back, then over her head when she lifted her arms.
He caught her hands in the shirt above her head and held them there while he looked her over, slowly, with a gaze that made her shiver, raised the fine hairs on her body.
“You’re beautiful, but I’ve told you that before.” He came close, his mouth skimming up her arm, his other hand on her breast. She was small, but he didn’t seem to care and for once neither did she.
“You’re body does mad things to me. Thinking about you gets me like granite. Being with you is bad for my sense of self-preservation.” She knew exactly what he meant. Her preservation instinct was extinct.
He rolled her nipple between his thumb and the knuckle of his first finger, languid teasing, then pinching. She gasped and arched into him. He laughed and pulled away to look at her again. It didn’t matter what rules she made, he could touch her and they’d all crash, crumble, fall apart when they were together like this, because nothing she knew of was as good.
“I couldn’t sleep till I’d had my fill of imagining you.” He rocked his hips into her belly and groaned at the contact. “I haven’t jerked off so much since I was fifteen.”
“Oh God.”
“Yeah, almost as good as seeing God is watching you take me inside you, hard stone in your soft wet pussy. Fucking nothing like it. And I thought I’d lost you and all I’d have was the twist of you in my head. It was good, but this.” He broke off to drop her hands and palm her naked butt, while kissing her so demandingly she would’ve thrown the rule book out if he’d had breath to ask it of her.
They made it to the bed and he was rock and steel and all things hard, but he flexed like bamboo, strong yet pliant and wrapped around her like a ribbon around a precious gift so she was cradled in his shape and scent, in his motion and grip, and driven to a release that was both tongue biting hard and eyelash curling sweet.
She slept as heavily, as completely as he did, but woke before him, sun streaming into the apartment. He was curled around her, his hand on her hip, his knee folded into the back of hers, his arm under her pillow. He breathed deeply and he didn’t wake when she shifted apart.
She was inordinately pleased about having Mace in her bed still, on a day she had no need to be anywhere else but beside him. The itch to sketch him again was strong enough to have her forgoing a shower for a quick wash and coffee for a pad and pencil. She pulled on her t-shirt and crawled back into the bed, and got lost in the wonder of him. He needed a shave and his face at rest showed his stress, the toll on his health. His body looked harder, his weight loss most evident in his face, at his hips and across his chest.
“What are you doing?”
She’d been studying his arm, the thick bicep tapering to his elbow; the curve where the muscle narrowed was particularly touchable. He looked at her with one eye half open. He took in the pad on her lap.
“Don’t you need my permission for that?” His voice was raspy, half awake. He could ask for anything with that sleep sodden crackle and she’d struggle not to give it to him.
She struggled. “Finders keepers.”
He smiled and lifted his arm and he didn’t look tired anymore. She dumped the pad and pencil and snuggled into the spoon of his body. He grunted happily, folding further around her, but she wasn’t sleepy anymore. “Are you just going to lie there?”
