Page 41 of Night of Shadows
"Oh god."
"Yes."
"Oh—"
He sucks, hard, and my back arches off the bed before I've given it permission. He laughs against my skin, dark and low — the laugh of a man who's just learned that the woman he's been carrying for three years will come apart from his mouth at herbreast alone. It's the most undone sound I've ever heard him make.
"Tell me what you want."
"I want?—"
"Use your words, sweetheart."
"Sweetheart." The word goes through me the way nothing else has in this lifetime. He's not called me anything — not once at the brownstone, not at the gala. Maeve. Ms. Callahan. Three years ago, on a folded scrap of paper,extraordinary.And now, low into my breastbone, his mouth still moving on me:sweetheart.It's the word that breaks me.
"I want your mouth."
"Where?"
"Lex."
"Where, Maeve?"
I can't say it. Thirty-six months of trademark briefs and a one-bedroom apartment, and I can't make my mouth shape the words while his is already moving down my stomach.
He doesn't make me. "I know where," he says against my hip. "I've known for three years."
He drags my jeans and my underwear down and off, and then his hands are on the insides of my knees, spreading me open, slow, the way you open something you've been told to handle with care. Cool air. Then his breath. Then his mouth.
He licks into me like he has all night and intends to use every minute of it — long, flat strokes, then a narrowing focus until he's working the one spot that lifts my hips off the bed, and his forearm comes across my pelvis to pin me down. I'm soaked. I can hear it, the slick of his mouth on me, and the sound of it undoes something in him, because he groans against my clit, and the vibration nearly finishes me on its own.
Then two fingers, pushing into me slowly, curling to find what his mouth can't reach — and the two together, his tongueand his hand, coax a sound out of my mouth I don't recognize as mine.
"Please—"
"Tell me."
"Please—"
"What do you want?"
"You. Inside. Now."
"Come on, my tongue first."
"Lex—"
"Sweetheart. Come on my tongue. Then I'll give you the rest."
And I do.
It takes me out at the knees. It starts where his mouth is and rolls up through me in a wave that hits the back of my throat and breaks, and I'm saying his name in a syllable that's half a sob, and his hand on my hip is the only thing holding me to the bed. It doesn't stop. It keeps going, a tide, the slow undoing of the woman I've been for three years — and through it I hear the rough, ragged sound he's making against me, and I understand, in the last clear corner of my mind, that he's making it because he's as wrecked as I am.
He stays where he is until I stop shaking. Then he kisses his way up my body, my own taste on his mouth, and stops at my ribs, his cheek over my heart, and I feel him shaking.
"Lex."
"Give me a second."
