Page 128 of The Shape of Monsters
“Since when?”
“Fuck you!”
Lyric smiles and it isguttinghow much love is cupped in the curve of those lips.
So she kisses him about it. He lets her, soft and welcoming, but he barely kisses back. Iriset flattens her hands to his cheeks and leans in, brushing her breasts to his chest. The cloth covering him is plain and smooth, but not silky, not fine like what he used to wear. It catches pleasingly on her nipples, and she does it again, lifting on her toes to lick at his mouth.
Opening up, Lyric finally kisses back. He holds her, hands fittingwhere they’ve always fit, one splayed over her spine, the other sliding low to her hip and ass. Nodding, Iriset nudges at him to walk back to the bed. “Just be open,” she instructs as he sits down, and she begins taking off his robe. He’s wearing three layers and loose skirts. Like he’s still cold despite the lateness of the spring.
He catches her hands. “Iriset,” he says, but stops like he’s unsure what to ask.
“I don’t know what it will feel like, but just let me try, Lyric,” she says, clamoring onto his lap. “Do you feel good enough to get it up?” She makes herself tease him, wiggling against his lap.
“Try—try curing me? How—you said it isn’t apostasy.” He sounds tense, but also like he’s controlling his breathing too carefully. Probably he doesn’t want to start coughing again, which is a very good point.
Iriset sits back on his legs. “It isn’t design. It’s… magic,” she says, trying to sound harmless and confident.
“Sex magic,” Lyric says very seriously.
Iriset’s mouth hangs open, and she feels heat flushing her cheeks, her chest. She clenches all the muscles along her pelvic floor against the surge of lust because he’s so serious, so committed to hearing her out. “S-sundering,” she manages. She tucks her face against his, in order to hide and urgently whisper in his ear. “I can just take it away. All the cancer. I can change it into harmless life stuff. It’s better if I don’t overthink it because it’s not science or arrays.” Iriset pants for a moment, realizing she’s been moving against him in little ripples, tiny undulations of her hips, and her fingers squeezing like a kitten lapping at milk. Lyric holds her easily, letting her, listening.
“Please,” she says.
Lyric turns his face to kiss just in front of her ear, then he draws his hands up to her shoulders and nudges her away. “I’ve been with others.”
“Others, or just the little bunny?” she asks knowingly.
Blushing doesn’t appear on mirané skin, but Iriset is familiar with the embarrassed flutter of his lashes. She leans in and licks at the corner of his sandglass eye, kissing toward his hairline. The scars are so tiny, but she feels the impressions against her lips. She says, “I fucked the Moon-Eater.”
Lyric’s body startles, and Iriset laughs, pressing closer. She wiggles to get her thighs where she wants them so she can prop herself up for better access. “Really, he fucked me. It was…” She trails off, starting on Lyric’s robes again and isn’t sure what her face does to make him stop her.
“Iriset?” He holds her hands, looking close.
Iriset meets his gaze. “I’m all right. I’ll tell you later, after, please?”
Nodding slowly, Lyric kisses her lips gently, then helps her undress him. Naked, Lyric looks skinnier, absolutely no excess fat on him, giving him a gaunt, wiry look, and it makes even Iriset, a decidedly non-parental person, want to feed him and get more pillows. She wonders if she could give him everything back in a long burst of the fifth force, not only scour him cancer-free but regrow layers of health over his stringy muscles. She trails a hand along his pectoral, over a nipple, and down his navel, to press her finger against the jut of hip bone. His cock is plumping up, at least, thank Silence.
“That bad?” he says, clearly going for a joke, but too uncertain.
“Yes!” she declares, smacking his hip.
Suddenly his hands are on her waist and he rolls onto his back, picking her up with him to set her on top exactly where she needs to be. Her breath woofs out of her and she steadies herself.
“Still strong,” he challenges. A frisky gleam in both eyes.
Iriset’s vision blurs with fucking tears and she leans back, flinging an arm over her eyes. When they were married—when she was Singix—he could be so playful in bed, or on the floor, or in his office throne, especially in the bath. Lyric strokes her sides, holds herbreasts in both hands, and Iriset arches, grinding down to smear wetness along his groin. His very ready cock rubs lightly against her ass.
Lyric touches the rousing array on her lower belly, tracing the spiral of it with his thumb. It is so sexy to have him caressing it, Iriset’s hole aches and she presses her hands to her eyes—she has got to get it together. Lyric seems to sense the design, tickling her belly along the array in exact time with the build of power in her inner design.
He slides his other thumb down between her labia, sinking into the folds, and lightly touches her clit. Iriset jolts and looses the knot of arousal as it sparkles out to all her limbs. She drops her arms and reaches back for his cock, but Lyric hums and picks her up again, flipping them. He lays her gently on her back. “You concentrate,” he murmurs against her breast, kissing the nipple, sucking kisses down the mound to her ribs and down, down, crawling with his mouth and hands until he kisses the array. He bites the north ecstatic node and sucks at it, and Iriset grunts with the pleasure, spreading her legs for him.
Iriset sprawls as Lyric kisses over her pubic bone and into her vulva, using his mouth and tongue to devour her. It’s so easy to center the hot cycling of her inner design like this, it’s right there, she can do this, it is absolutely sex magic, she thinks wildly. Iriset angles her hips up and Lyric licks into her, stroking long and hard with his tongue flat, and Iriset cries out. She could come instantly, she’s so eager for this, but she tugs at his hair, not quite ready. She needs him touching more of her; no, she needs to be touching more of him—and Lyric gets it, hears her, moving up to kiss her slowly and push his cock into her slowly, too.
Wrapping arms and legs around him, Iriset lets Lyric set the rhythm, lets him do the external work while she reaches for his inner design like she’s used to doing, as if they were still connected. His breath suffuses through her hair, heats her ear, warms her neck, and he is hot inside her, his skin slicking with sweat.
Iriset knows his body—his perfect, healthy body. Mirané and balanced, part of the Holy Design. Inside and out. Perfect.Unbreakable.
She’s losing herself, but not the feeling of forces building, the thread of rising arousal and falling to her core. Flow between them in every pull and press, and ecstatic in every gasp and squeak she doesn’t hold back.
