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“Even if I did let you leave, would you still want to?”
Her tone is light, humorous, amused. Ethan knows what she’s really asking, of course, but they’ve had enough of those heavy, masked conversations to last them a lifetime. For once, he’d like to take her words at face value - does he really want to get out of bed right now - so that’s what he does.
Vanessa is giving him that look, the one where her eyes and mouth and face - all of it - smiles. Her head is a welcome weight against his shoulder.
The morning sunlight - pale, gray, tinged by London smog - scatters itself across the room. In the absence of candle flames, the entirety of his room (the guest room, his mind reminds him) looks washed-out and melancholy, but neither of them mind. She’s still looking at him, curiously, her whole face animated and lit. He thinks he sees something in her face - her eyes darken briefly, her eyelashes flit closed just a bit coquettishly - but it’s gone when she reads the laugh lines surrounding his mouth. His smile is full, his laughter thick.
“No,” he chuckles, words floating into the air beside her ear, before he rolls on top of her, nose to nose. “No, I don’t think I’d like to be anywhere else but here.” Their smiles match.
She spends a good minute watching his face from underneath him; watching the flicker of his eyes, running her hand from his temple to his collarbone and back up again, stopping to graze her thumb across his cheek. That’s normally his move. He thinks he likes it more when she does it to him.
“We’ll be all right,” he tells her, stopping her hand from wandering its path and grasping it in his own. “You don’t have to worry. I know you don’t mean to, I know you don’t want to, but I know you do. I know you. I’m not going anywhere.” Her eyes blink shut at that, and he sees one lone tear fall down the slope of her cheek. He brushes it away, idly, sees her press her mouth into a line and then smile again, stronger than before. The sunshine always seems brighter when she smiles.
He’s still hovering over her, weight on his forearms and knees, but she’s been astoundingly patient with him and now he settles himself between her thighs, snug in the cradle of her hips. The fire between them hasn’t ignited just yet, but it’s only a matter of time before something sparks it. It’s only a matter of time before they lose themselves in each other; they find themselves there, too. He stops stroking her hair back from her face when the gentle pressure of her hand on his back forces his mouth down to meet hers.
Her kiss is tender and delicate, almost shy. It’s not normally like her to be so… soft and… yielding. He’s used to her rage, to the ferocity of her wanting which mirrors his own, but her seldom-seen gentle side is a different puzzle he has yet to figure out. He smiles and chuckles into her mouth: Vanessa Ives, human labyrinth. He looks at her and knows, intrinsically, that a person can be a home too. Guest room, my ass. He grasps the hem of her white nightdress and pulls it over her head and tosses it aside.
The pressure of his mouth is more insistent now, his tongue slipping out and finding its way to hers. She pulls away, breath quickening, before coming back to him and sinking her teeth into his lower lip. The pressure of her bite isn’t hard - she didn’t even break skin this time - but this is what he knows best, what initially drew him to her. He loves all of her, he always will, but it’s with this subsurface violence that they truly connect. This is the fulfilling of their prophecy, the overarching cosmic thread stitching them together: mouths joined and hands clasping and him moving inside her. He’s inside her. He can’t help the primal surge of wanting that always comes at the feel of her around him, and judging from how she’s writhing beneath him - hips shifting restlessly, wordlessly begging him to move - she feels the same.
He’ll indulge her. He always does. But that doesn’t mean he can’t have a little bit of fun.
He leans forward, eyes on hers, and thrusts so maddeningly slowly into her heat that her nails leave red crescents on his shoulder, on the back of his neck. Her legs tighten around his hips, and she presses herself flush against him, still trying to persuade him to drive into her harder, faster. It’s almost working, but it was the mellow sweetness of her kiss that started this, so that’s what’ll set the tone this time. He’ll follow her lead - her drawn-out, vexing, infuriatingly slow lead. He wants to tease her, wants to watch her fall apart and know that it was him who made it happen. No, she doesn’t get to speed through this one.
The smoky light from the window falls right into her eyes, but she doesn’t notice because he’s hooked her right leg over his left elbow and is so deep inside her she feels him vibrating, a full echo all the way down to her toes. She throbs in time to match him, wet and pulsing, left leg frantically gripping his hip. He withdraws, almost fully, then slams back in, and he does it again and again and again; she’s perfectly aware of how it’s going to be this time, aware of him, that he wants to watch her come undone. His eyes haven’t left hers once.
No, his eyes stay on her face as he moves, faster than before, but still slower than she’d like. She’s moaning and whimpering, open-mouthed, and his eyes travel from hers to her mouth, to her collarbone, to her breasts and down to the sight of him plunging into her. He looks back at her face, at her flushed skin and heavy eyes, and grins wide. Now she can begin to feel her orgasm lurking, threatening, but still just out of reach. She’s just about ready to be desperate, but he knows that, of course he knows that she’s near the brink. She reaches up and grabs him by his hair and attacks his mouth with hers.
He kisses her fully and speeds up a little more, her leg still slung over his arm. He changes the angle of his hips so he hits her there and then he keeps on hitting so she’s gasping and moaning into his mouth, left trembling when he doesn’t stop. He breaks away from her lips, letting the sounds falling out of her mouth linger in the air around them, and moves down to her neck. He licks up the sweat that’s gathered there, bites into the junction of her neck and shoulder and sucks a dark circle into her white skin. It’ll be easily covered up by any one of her dresses, hidden from the public eye, but it’ll show if she’s wearing her nightgown. No one but the two of them will ever see it.
He can tell that she’s close by the way her unsteady and haphazard breath comes out, by the bright flush of her skin, by the half-pinch he feels where her nails dig into his back. He can tell by her open mouth, the near-pained expression on her face, her high-pitched keening that she needs just a little more to get her there. He’s not as in control as he’d like to be, with his clenched teeth and muffled groans and his heavy-handed grip on her body, the wolf barely contained back in the recesses of his mind, but he will always, always put her first.
He speeds up, slamming into her and making sure he hits that spot inside her every time he enters and withdraws, enters and withdraws, her hips tilting up to meet him thrust for thrust. He drags his hand down, down, down over her heaving chest and abdomen to brush against her clit as he picks up his pace.
“Show me,” he whispers in her ear, her hands tight on his back, “show me. I want to see you,” as she tightens around him so much it feels like a vice and grinds against him, moan turning into a scream as her walls flutter around his length. As she comes she drags her nails from the nape of his neck to his shoulder blades, and the sting of it, combined with overwhelming feeling of her collapsing around him, is enough to send him over. He empties all of himself - everything he feels for her, everything he isn’t brave enough to say - into her, into the welcoming warmth of her heart and her mind and her body.
They collapse together, panting, before he tumbles off her to lie on his side, drawing her into his arms. Her head returns to the area between his neck and shoulder, her hand pushes his sweaty hair out of his face and she asks him, jokingly and somewhat sleepily, “are you still sure you want to get up?” The time on the clock reads almost seven in the morning. He looks at her hazy, satisfied face, her small smile, and gives her the same answer as he did the first time she asked him if he really wanted to stay with her, to try and make sense of the strangeness that entangles them. He was chosen, destined - of course he’ll stay with her.