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As dawn stretched its legs across the threshold of Mel’s residence, its light reached out and touched her, warming her back. When Mel’s eyes fluttered open, she found herself spooned around Jayce, breathing in the scent of pine and honeycomb.
She smiled, the bow of her lips against the nape of his neck. She didn’t know if she’d ever completely get used to waking up next to him, but a familiar contentment settled into her mind anyway. Steady and calm.
She studied the way the sunlight caught in his hair, deep brown shining bronze, a few grey strands turning silver. For a moment, she thought how nice it would be to grow old with him.
Even in his sleep, his hand still interlocked warm with hers, and Mel stroked her thumb across his fingertips. He took a breath, sounding almost like a sigh, as if he could feel the contact through the thicket of sleep. She leaned to set a kiss against his nape, and that seemed to finally stir him.
He shifted a little in her embrace as he awoke, trying to keep as much of her warmth as possible.
“Good morning,” she said, voice still thick and weary.
“Morning.”
She could hear the smile in his voice.
He turned in her arms, their eyes met, and Jayce smiled at her in that achingly gentle way that always made Mel feel like she was melting. A sheet of molten metal shaped by the upturn of his lips. She kissed him then, and her joy bloomed like a million magnolias in her chest. She couldn’t stop her elation from bubbling over, the laughter spilling out of her breaking their kiss.
“Sorry,” she said softly, her hand covering her laughter.
Jayce couldn’t help but think that she sounded like the sun, bright and radiant, though unlike the one that rose above the horizon, Jayce was content to look until he went blind.
He swept a loose curl behind her ear and studied the flecks of gold brushed across her cheeks. “You never have to apologize for being happy.”
Her smile was almost too big for her face, and when she moved to press her lips to his again, he thought that her warmth put stars to shame.
He drew her in close, skated his fingertips under her silken nightgown. Tracing her contours was drawing a brush across organic art, and she breathed and moved as he painted heat across her skin. A gallery of one.
Their kiss broke with Jayce’s need to impart his lips unto the rest of her, leveraging himself to reach her cheek. He kissed up to her eyelids, and down to the shell of her ear, the ghost of his breath sending a shutter up her back. She needed to feel him at every inch of her, moving to undo the knot tying her nightwear and shifting onto her stomach once she’d shucked it off the cliff of the bed.
Jayce ran a hand down the divot of her spine, studying every curve as it thinned like a river at the small of her back. A path made, his lips traced the winding brook back to the nape of her neck. The light of the day had intruded into the room fully now, the welcome voyeur hugging Mels black curls as if sunlight was made just for her to bask in. It outlined the rest of her too, rising to cut across her shoulder blades. A woman made of light.
As much of a delight his kisses were, they always left Mel wanting more. She was too far from the cliff side, needing him to take her hand and plunge into the endless wind with her.
“Jayce,” she said, her voice still thick with lethargy, the only part of her still in slumber.
He hummed in acknowledgment, mind still singular in mapping every nanometer of her with his lips.
“Touch me…please.”
She laced her plea with a lilt of something verging on needy. There was little in this world that could possess him the way her voice did, a command only he could hear. He obliged, taking hold of her hips and encouraging her to her knees.
When schmoozing with aristocrats, Mel could wear many faces, adapt, and blend as she needed, a chameleon seen and unseen at her whim. But here, in the privacy of her bedchambers, she willed her body to betray her, to say the things she couldn’t voice, and trust that Jayce understood. And he did, he always did. That’s why it was easy for him to slip his fingers between her legs, to circle and press exactly the way she wanted, all without her saying a word. And it was good that he understood, because once he got started, Mel usually found herself in the predicament of only being able to form her lips around moans - and not much else.
Her hands fisting into the sheets, Mel dipped her head onto the pillows, muffling her gasps. Somehow, even now, his devilish dexterity surprised her. She should’ve known from the moment she laid eyes on him that a man whose hands are his livelihood, ones that forged weapons and perpetually gripped a pen, would have her reeling. But she hadn’t, and that made the pleasure he pulled from her all the more devastating. Even more so, when he took the fingers that had been perched on her waist, and slowly, sank two of them into her. She would have sworn, if her gasps and moans hadn’t beaten the vulgarity to the tip of her tongue.
Jayce just watched her like that, like he was privy to something special and novel. As an inventor, fascination was a word he knew all too well, but nothing and no one captured his very essence like Mel Medarda. She was simultaneously an anomaly that evaded his full understanding, and someone he understood so well he could fill a tome with how much he knew. He knew that she liked wine that burned and tea that soothed, knew that that in the night, she held onto him as if he were something that waxed and waned, impermanent. He knew how to touch her, make her breathe and gasp and shake in ways that only he was privy to. He curled his fingers enveloped by her, pressing just so, and her legs trembled.
Just as suddenly as he'd slipped his fingers into the furnace, he retracted them, wet heat coating them down to their base. Mel was about to protest, the loss of him nearly maddening, before she felt the full thickness of him slowly pushing into her.
He’ll never get used to her heat around him, nor will she. Jayce folded himself over her, putting a gentle weight on her back, keeping his touch between her legs. They moved together, her pushing back into him every time he pushed forward.
Just how her voice possessed him to act on her whim, her very essence expanded in his chest, blooming words he couldn’t keep to himself.
“You’re so radiant, Mel.” He said it against her ear, and she knew he was talking about the sun. Sometimes he’d look up at her as if dawn and dusk rose and fell at her whim, that if he didn’t hold onto her, the moon would hang over the endless sky forevermore, and he’d never feel the heat of sunlight again.
Bleeding-heart sentimentality. If there was anything that kept Mel wrapped around his orbit, it was this. She couldn’t quite unearth the depths of that, of his allure being so tightly wound around how genuine he was. As he thrusted a little deeper, Mel knew it wasn’t the weakness of her flesh and blood that sent her into the throes of bliss, nor his, it was how every movement said a million things, like he was writing his every thought into her nerves, pressing every word into her skin with his fingertips, with his lips, with his cock, with his everything.
She was quivering now, her muscles clenching and unclenching, a rope clinging on to the last fraying threads. Jayce took careful notice, a precision to his actions that only those versed in the inner workings of marvels inanimate and organic could muster. An inventor. He drew out his movements, slow, deliberate, and though he couldn’t see, he knew her toes were curling, knew that her lashes were fluttering, knew that she was biting her lower lip as if her teeth were stakes driving into the soft of the earth.
He was burning fast and so was she, stars about to explode in a supernova. But he didn’t rush, setting his lips on the nape of her neck, kissing her as slowly as his hips moved. Right before he succumbed, he breathed her in, drinking in the scent of magnolias, and exhaled with finality against her skin.
“I love you.”
Like she thought, it wasn’t the weakness of her flesh and blood that would drive her over the edge, it was that. That simple utterance of devotion made the rope snap its final fraying thread. She gasped, and everything shattered. Her body reeled, orgasm a million stars exploding, rippling, rolling hot down to her painted fingertips. And Jayce’s lips were still gentle at her neck and shoulders, kissing her through it, steady and unyielding as she trembled under his touch.
Mel inhaled, breathing in like she’d stepped outside on the first day of spring, blooming, calm, and she exhaled a sigh.
When Jayce withdrew from her, she let herself collapse into the sheets, bathing in the light like a cat. He moved to draw her into his embrace, looking into the gentle forest of her eyes as if he could see dappled sunlight passing through the gold flecks of leaves caught in hazel trees.
She felt the smile returning to her lips, crinkling the edges of her eyes, and there he was, regarding her once again with that disarming genuineness that made her fall in love with him.
He couldn’t help but think that she looked like the sun.