Page 23 of The Fae Queen's Captive
Lust swims through my blood as I caress the tumid part of her that needs touching, slowly at first. Not because I particularly think she wants gentle but because I don’t want it to feel like I’m trying to rush this.
I want her to know I love being her pet, for however short a time I’ll be one. And that if there’d been no bargain at the banquet, no transaction of safety, I’d probably be here anyway, offering myself up for her to use however she’d like.
Her eyes are still closed, her red lips parted the smallest amount. Her stomach hitches when I change my strokes from up and down to side to side, her thighs falling as far apart as they can in the tub. The water sloshes; petals stick to my arm and to her breasts. There’s a scent on the air that’s so heady I can barely stand it, and it’s not the petals in the bath or the roses blooming on the wall, and it’s not the soap I used to wash the queen, and it’s not anything I can even describe, because what it smells like makes no sense. It smells like the way I felt as a teenager at my first girlfriend’s house, the blankets over our heads as we kissed for the very first time in the dark. It smells like Edinburgh at night when the fog is up and the lamps are lit against smoke-stained walls and every narrow alley beckons me forward to find its secrets.
It smells the way I used to feel about magic and history and secrets. Like something more was waiting for me—like if I just went to the rightplace, just turned the right page, just cracked open my chest a little bit more, I would find a special story meant only for me. A special destiny, a special life.
That’sthe smell in the air.
And also it makes me hungry. Ferociously hungry. My mouth is watering.
The queen takes my hand and, with imperial assurance, pushes my fingers down to the slick breach of her body. She barely waits for the two fingers I give her before she rocks her hips into my hand, fucking herself not only on my fingers but against the heel of my palm.
The balls of her feet are braced against the tub as she arches. She’s so soft inside that I think I might die.
She climaxes abruptly, faster than I would’ve thought it would take, and there’s a distant part of me that wonders if it’s been a long time for her, like it had been for me. If even in a court of orgies and excess, she’s denied herself to the point where a hand between her legs in the bath is such a relief that it only takes two minutes for her body to culminate.
She turns her head away as she comes, toward the far wall, so I can only see the long line of her neck, her hair sticking to it, and the curve of her cheek and jaw. I think her eyes are still closed. Her hands curl around the edge of the tub, white-knuckled and tight-gripped, and her flushed, petal-strewn chest heaves. She’s squeezing my fingers in slippery flutters, and I suddenly wish I were in the bath with her, or that she were out here with me, or that I could at least see her face…but I can’t deny I like this too. Making her come like a servant might, like it’s just part of her bath, part of her nightly ritual.
She softens slowly, her head still turned away. The fire pops. When she lifts her hands, fresh rose petals, dark as the night sky, fall from the edge of the tub into the water.
I stare at them as they float and swirl on the surface, like miniature boats. My fingers are still gripped by her, and it occurs to me with a blast of dizzy wonder that I just fucked someone who can conjure flower petals from thin air. Someone whose lungs and blood-pink ribs are visible to the naked eye.
That she’s a queen too somehow seems like the most normal part of it all—although fingering royalty isn’t exactly a common occurrence for me either.
I slide my hand free and, without thinking, lift it to my mouth. A habit as old as sex, and I think nothing of it, although when she turns her head and watches me do it, her expression turns ardent. Like I’ve just done something that thrills her to her core.
She tastes perfect—sweet, sour, salt, an entire meal with dessert after. There’s a hint of rose too, but as I keep sucking my fingers, the taste changes. And now it tastes like how the air smells—like electric sex, electric hope. Like a long-ago version of myself who dreamed and hoped and lusted without restraint.
And before I can even decipherhowpussy can taste anything like that, the world floods itself with magic. Suddenly, like a gate has pulled up and dizzy, headyeverythingis sluicing into the room as if the room were a rose-lined bowl. The fire is brighter, citrine and scarlet and even a deep, deep blue. The autumn moon burns like a dark red sun through the window. The stars are brighter than I’ve ever seen them, and there’s more of them than I’ve ever seen, so many more, and the Milky Way is a mottled, glowing smear through it all.
I look back to the queen, and she is—she isluminescent, a mysterious burn like the moon outside, at once cool and light-giving. Her eyes are the darkness that the night sky no longer is with its glut of stars, and her mouth is the shape of all my wild and secret thoughts.
And why have I made them secret? I am sitting next to a glistening queen in her castle, my fingers still in my mouth, my mind blowing wide open, and all I can think is:Why?
Why have I been pressing myself into the shape of someone easy, someone composed and guarded and temperate, when I’m none of those things? When I don’t even really want to be? When what I really want is to be as hungry as I can be, as messy as I can be, asmuch?
When what I really want is someone or someplace insatiable for my insatiability?
And god, I’ve never been hungrier than I am right now—and yet never have I felt this sated, this alive. Is this what fairy sex is like? Why didn’t this happen in the hall, then, with Maynard and Idalia?
And what does it matter when the queen is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen and all I need to do is lick every drop of water from her skin until she lets me have another taste of her directly from the source?
“Janneth,” the queen says. Her voice is musical, a full song when she speaks, and I can’t believe I didn’t hear it before.
It’s a lonely song—wind on the hills, a single deer in the trees—but it’s the most exquisite sound I’ve ever heard.
She’s moved forward in the tub while I’ve been staring at her with my fingers in my mouth. She rises, and then her hands are on me, her arms are around me, and I’m being hauled against her as her mouth crushes into mine. My fingers are still between us, and her tongue flickers over my knuckles, the thin web between forefinger and middle finger, making me moan. I feel her tongue on my fingers like I’d feel it on my cunt, and then when she impatiently yanks my hand down and her tongue slides freely against mine, the surge of need between my legs steals my inhales and exhales.
I press eagerly against her, even as her wet body soaks my thin robe, even with the tub between us, and I find her waist with my hands and search for her hips, and then I—
She pulls back, pressing a finger to my mouth because I’m chasing her kiss, chasing her, needing more. I feel crazed with it, and if she won’t let me kiss her again, I think I might die.
“Pet,” she murmurs, the edge of her mouth curling a little.
I answer with a grin, a wide, happy grin, because I’m sohappyright now, in a way I haven’t been for the past few years. The world is beautiful and she is beautiful, and I’m here, and everything tastes and smells and sounds like magic and hidden things.
She looks down at my robe—completely see-through now—and runs an idle finger over the erect tip of my nipple over the wet fabric. “We should get you to bed,” she says.
