Chapter 30 - Want Me, Take Me, Haunt Me, Make Me
By Isabel Crowley
“Coping strategies after all?” asked Ligat, as if he’d just heard the words. He let go of her chin, dropped his hand back into his lap, and sat still.
He was waiting, Hazel thought, giving her time to answer honestly or judging how honest her answer was. It was admirable, and she cursed him for it. “I doubt it. No more than anything else I do.” She got to her feet, searching for an explanation that wasn’t quite an admission, that didn’t make her feel desperate in front of a man who’d been an enemy until very recently. “I’m not…trying to be distracted.”
“Ah,” said Ligat, with a smile that said she might as well not have bothered trying to be indirect. “Good. I’d hate to feel used.”
He stood up as he spoke, and Hazel took the opportunity to run her eyes up and down his lanky frame, lingering at the spot where his robe no longer fell smoothly. “Would you?” she asked and turned toward the door.
Ligat laughed as he followed her in.
* * *
Following Hazel was almost like being in the ethereal again. The rest of the world faded around her, not actually immaterial but certainly unimportant. Ligat was vaguely aware of the hall and the kitchen as they moved through the rooms, but he couldn’t have described them, any more than he could have taken his eyes off the taut curves of her backside as she walked.
They halted in a small room with white plaster walls and a gray stone floor, one methodically stripped back until it was even emptier than their temporary shelter in the abandoned city, with no remnants of its previous nature or inhabitants left. A faint smell in the air suggested pine but was actually chemical. It might actually have been the least romantic place Ligat had ever considered for a liaison, and he didn’t give a damn.
He reached for Hazel as soon as she stopped, and she stepped into his embrace at first, only to duck away before he could kiss her. “Wait.”
“If you’ve changed your mind—” he began, reminding himself that she had the right to do so.
Thank God, she shook her head. “No. Wait here.”
Ligat did, standing in the middle of the floor and watching as she darted out of the open doorway. He wondered if the medium’s invitation might have been a trap and decided he didn’t much care if it was. Listening to Hazel’s footsteps in the hall, he pulled off his high boots, then began to undo the buckles on his robe.
He’d reached the middle of his chest by the time Hazel returned, her bare feet making almost no sound on the floor, and she stopped with her arms full of blankets to stare at him. Ligat knew what she saw: the pallor, the slight silver tinge, the winding crimson sigils. He didn’t know what she thought of it and didn’t trust himself to read her face. Wishful thinking had clouded his judgment before.
“Let me help you,” he said, falling back on chivalry to break the tension.
“Thanks.” Hazel flashed him a smile. “I’m too old and too paranoid to bring you into my bedroom, and I’m also too old to fool around on a bare floor more than once a year or so.”
Their hands brushed as she passed him a thick yellow blanket, a fleeting touch that sent a thrill through Ligat nonetheless. He felt his awareness shifting again, refocusing on Hazel and his own body, making him conscious of each movement either of them made, no matter how minute.
It wouldn’t be fast this time.
He laid the blanket on the floor and covered it with a star-patterned comforter, one he’d glimpsed briefly through Hazel’s window on the first night of his mission. The familiarity stung. Ligat had thought he’d forgotten shame, left it behind as useless in the dark years of his servitude, but as he looked up at Hazel, he felt himself flush.
“I always turned away if you were undressed,” he said, “or asleep.”
Hazel met his gaze, hers calm and dark and thoughtful, and Ligat cursed himself for an idiot. I spied on you for a demon, but I never endangered your modesty. If he were lucky, she’d just laugh at him rather than slap him or throw him out of the house—and he’d have taken a slap, gladly, if it meant he didn’t have to leave.
“Thank you,” said Hazel, with no trace of sarcasm, and stepped forward to kiss him.
Her lips were soft, even gentle at first. She slipped her arms up around Ligat’s neck for balance, bringing her body flush with his, and the light pressure of her breasts made him forget both shame and foolishness. As his hands settled on Hazel’s waist, her tongue slipped into his mouth, and the kiss, still slow, became a demand.
Ligat gave her what she wanted. He couldn’t have resisted if he’d wished to, not when she was supple and warm in his grasp, only a whisper of fabric between her and his hands. Up close, she smelled of pine, lemon, and some sweet soap, mingled with clean sweat, and her fingers felt like silk against the back of his neck. Those sensations alone would have been overpowering. He could have gotten lost there, buried thought and let impulse drive him, and when Hazel traced her fingernails up his spine, he groaned aloud.
She was the one to step back, though she clearly did so reluctantly, trailing her hands down over his shoulders and chest to find the first of the buckles that was still fastened. Ripples of desire followed through the heavy cloth of his robe; her fingertips against his bare chest nearly made him dizzy.
She hesitated before she made contact with one of his tattoos. “These don’t hurt, do they?”
“No,” he said, though nobody but he had ever touched the marks. He was eager to extrapolate and willing to risk being wrong—and he waited with far more anticipation than wariness to find out if he was right.
It didn’t hurt when she brushed her fingers downward. It sent an intense shock of pleasure through him, stronger perhaps because Ligat’s tattooed skin was more sensitive or perhaps because of the way her slim fingers looked against the crimson sigils, and that itself was almost pain.
He reached for Hazel almost blindly, and she batted his hands away. “Hold still,” she said, punctuating it with the click of metal as she opened another buckle.
“You’ve been waiting,” Ligat accused her, “for the chance to give me orders.”
A smile curved her lips, darkly sweet and challenging. “You’re flattering yourself,” said Hazel, and kept going.
Ligat had learned some arts of self-control: patterns of breathing, ways to switch his concentration, the odd mantra to repeat when needed. He’d had occasion to be glad about that before, but he was pleased in an entirely new and better sense that he could hold still while Hazel went about her mission. He could resist the urge to pull her back into his arms, or to throw her down onto the makeshift bedding, and simply savor the shift of fabric as she undid his robe or the gloss of her black hair as she bent to see what she was doing.
When the last of the buckles opened, she stepped back again and appraised him, eyes bright.
It was a bolder and more thorough inspection than Ligat had been used to on such occasions. He wasn’t quite surprised to find himself enjoying it. Standing a little straighter, pleasantly warm beneath her inspection, he shrugged out of the robe and let it fall.
* * *
Hazel didn’t love admitting, even to herself, how often she’d thought about what Ligat would look like naked. She couldn’t deny that she’d wondered, though—she couldn’t imagine anybody who wouldn’t have in her situation—and he more than lived up to the best of her fantasies.
He wasn’t an action figure or a Greek statue. His body was rangy, sleek, with his collarbone more clearly visible than any muscles, but its long lines captivated Hazel. Dark red sigils spiraled across all of his frame like chains or briars, with a few inches of skin between each loop shining faintly silver under the unlovely fluorescent light. A sparse fuzz of dark hair dusted his chest, then became a thicker line down his flat stomach before spreading out into a neat cloud around an already substantial erection.
Ligat’s cock was marked like the rest of him, crimson glyphs standing out against faintly flushed silver, and curved smoothly upward to slightly below his navel. The analytical part of Hazel’s mind briefly managed to wonder whether the sigils had gone on magically or if Ligat had sat, or been made to sit, through an actual tattooing process. Then the question vanished, drowned in the quicksand of her need to touch, to taste, to see how he responded and feel his hands on her in return.
Hazel had enough self-control to peel off her jeans—denim against bare skin had never gone over well, in her experience—and Ligat had enough to let her, but they’d barely hit the floor before he was kissing her again, cupping her ass and rubbing slow circles through the thin cotton of her underwear. She wished she’d worn silk, or lace, or even a pair that matched her bra instead of green-flowered Hanes briefs, but if Ligat even noticed, he didn’t show it. He just hooked his fingers into the elastic at her waist and gently tugged the briefs down. Hazel had never noticed the light scrape of fabric against her legs before, and now, with Ligat trailing kisses along the side of her neck, that mundane contact made her shiver.
“Beautiful,” he said, hoarse and muffled and completely sincere.
She grasped for steadier ground, not with words but by sinking to the blankets and pulling Ligat down after her. It didn’t take much. He stretched out above her, settling his cock, hot and silky, between her thighs.
Hazel caught her breath. She could have stayed like that forever; she couldn’t endure another few seconds.
Time drew out, delicious torture, while he worked her top off over her head, not deliberately playing with her breasts but brushing over them as if by coincidence and then chuckling when she whimpered. It might have been revenge for her own teasing before, a vengeance she was glad to let him take.
She did grin when he encountered the clasps of her bra, and she sat up to give him a hand. “Not used to women’s underwear?”
“Shockingly, no,” said Ligat, watching her with eyes like campfires on a dark night. Hazel wasn’t sure he blinked while she unhooked her bra and slipped it off, and he simply stared at her afterward.
It was flattering, arousing, and unnerving all at once. Hazel glanced down at her breasts, more conscious of them than she’d been with any other lover—more conscious, maybe, than she’d been since she’d passed through puberty. Half a dozen flippant questions came to mind. Then Ligat moved at last, closing the distance between them again and tracing his tongue around one of Hazel’s nipples, and she didn’t want to ask any questions at all. She had all the information she needed: It was in the hot, slow pressure of his mouth on her breasts, in the unexpectedly silky feeling of his hair between her fingers, in the skillful intrusion of his hand stroking up one of her thighs.
For once in her life, she didn’t need to know any more.
* * *
Naked below him, arching toward his touch and his tongue, Hazel was bliss and torment at the same time. Ligat couldn’t remember ever having wanted a partner so much—he was fairly sure that the last time he’d been so achingly, drivingly hard had been in his school days, if even then—or feeling such a rising sense of urgency, and at the same time he’d never wanted less to give in to that need.
It was better to go slowly, now that he could. Better to run his fingers over her thighs, firm beneath silky skin, while he teased her nipples with his lips until her breath was ragged. When he reached the soft curls between her legs, he simply grazed over them at first. It took only a little pressure to feel how damp they’d become, and that knowledge alone made Ligat’s entire body tighten with delirious need, but he wouldn’t hurry.
The interlude with Hazel was an unexpected gift. Ligat didn’t see many carnal pleasures in his future. He didn’t see Hazel’s company at all—and his own continued existence would be damned bleak for it, literally.
So he took his time, trying to store each memory as vividly and firmly as he could: the low moans that came from Hazel’s parted lips as he stroked her open, the yielding warmth of her breasts, the slick heat of her passage around his fingers. The smell of musk and salt overpowered the scent of her soap, and Ligat rejoiced in it.
“Patience,” he urged her as she flexed her hips, though the word came out breathless.
Hazel tried to glare at him, but her eyes were clouded with pleasure. “Easy—ah—” She gasped as Ligat moved his hand, a gentle rocking that nonetheless made her clench around his fingers. “—for you to say.”
“Oh, no. Not easy at all.” He allowed himself a moment to press forward, letting her feel the steely hardness of his cock against her thigh and the moisture gathered at the tip. “But worthwhile.”
The way she squirmed in response nearly snapped Ligat’s self-control. He pulled back hurriedly, back and down to settle his face between her thighs. She was as pretty there as everywhere else: rose-pink and wet, her clitoris a stiff little bud that he couldn’t resist licking almost immediately, forgetting plans to wait any further. Hazel made a wordless, desperate sound in her throat at the contact, thrusting her hips up, and he was lost.
He would drive her over the edge before he was inside her. Anything more was asking too much.
And that didn’t take very long at all, once Ligat bent his head to his extremely enjoyable work. He had no intention of trying to rush Hazel, and he started off exploring, savoring the taste of her, but her reactions very soon revealed the rhythm she craved. Ligat gave it to her gladly, his only struggle not to rub his pulsing erection against the floor as Hazel’s body tensed and her moans turned into sharp cries.
Then she was rippling around his fingers, her moisture flooding over them, and he absolutely stopped giving a damn about the future.
Ligat slid up over Hazel, looking into her dazed eyes as he pushed the head of his cock against her. He barely managed to stop there. “Yes?” It was the only word he could think of.
“God, yes.”
She wrapped her legs around his, and he sank into her. The aftershocks of her orgasm gripped his cock at every inch, exquisite caresses that drew a half strangled groan from him. He held back as much as he could, wanting to feel more, but desire had become need, and he could more easily have stopped breathing than stayed still just then.
Hazel met him eagerly, joining in movement that started relatively slow and almost subtle, tilting her hips so that she was rubbing herself against Ligat with every thrust. Her short nails against his shoulders were a sharp note that danced just on the edge of pain and heightened his pleasure by contrast, and he returned the favor by leaning down to close his teeth lightly on her neck. The sound she made in his ear was half moan, half gasp, and done entirely with abandon. Ligat, braced on his elbows above her, could see her face flush as pleasure started building again.
This time he threw himself into the spiral with her, the winding braid of sensation where each of them sent the other higher in turn. They rose on that momentum, on the sounds of wordless cries and the scent of sweat and sex, ecstasy that fed on itself in an unstoppable chain reaction. Ligat felt the full force of Hazel’s climax grasping him this time and didn’t so much let go as lose his last tenuous hold, pouring himself into her in a series of deep thrusts.
The world outside went away completely. Even better, for a few seconds, he did too.