Page 18 of Last Flame
The note is still in my hand.
I could set it on the nightstand. The nightstand is right there. I keep holding it instead, loosely, like it’s keeping my hand company, like letting go of it is one more small decision I’ve decided not to make tonight.
What are you doing, Elara. It’s not even for you.
Probably.
I close my eyes onprobably, and the room tips, slow and warm and forgiving, and somewhere in the tipping I stop holding anything at all.
Warm.
That’s the first thing, before there’s a me to notice it. Warm everywhere, the deep kind, the kind that doesn’t come up off a blanket. A body at my back — big, solid, the whole length of it lined up against the whole length of mine like it was measured for the job. An arm comes across me, heavy, a forearm dark with ink, and it draws me back into him slow, no question in it, like I’m already his to gather up. A mouth, close to my ear.
“I’ve got you. Nothing’s getting near you tonight.”
Xaviar.
Obviously. I’ve had my face buried in that book for three weeks straight and he says things exactly like that — low and certain, the kind of sentence that ruins you a little to hear. The brain takes what you feed it and I have fed it nothing but him. Dreams don’t have to make sense and this one is under no obligation. It just has to keep going.
So I stop poking at it and let myself lean back into all that warmth.
His arm tightens, pulling me in until there’s nowhere left to go and nowhere I’d rather be than gone. His mouth finds the side of my neck, open and unhurried, and the first slow drag of his lips sends heat pouring down my spine and pooling low and heavy, and my whole body softens back against him before I’ve signed off on any of it.
And he wants this. I can feel it everywhere he’s touching, he’s not rushing. There’s no agenda but me, like he’s got the entire night and the only item on it is how good he can make me feel. He isn’t taking. He’s giving, patient, like he’s done it a hundred times and plans to doit a hundred more. And the part of me that lives at a low boil of overthinking just — goes quiet. Gives in. Lets him.
His hand spreads flat and warm over my stomach, and everything underneath it pulls tight and aching before he’s even moved it lower. Then he drags down, past the waistband, no hesitation anywhere in him, like he already knows the exact place I want him.
Like he’s been here before.
“Let me.” Not a question. It doesn’t need to be.
The first brush of his fingers between my thighs punches the air clean out of me. I’m soaked, embarrassingly, ridiculously soaked, and the low rough sound he makes into my neck only makes it worse, makes me throb against his hand wanting more. He drags through me slow, spreading the wet up, taking his time like he’s got nothing but, and when he reaches my clit and circles I jerk back against him, a current going off everywhere at once, too much and not nearly enough in the same breath.
“There she is.” His voice is a low rasp against my ear. “Always so ready for me.”
Always. Something in me catches on the word — always, like there’s a history, like there’s a record of all the other times — and then his fingers push into me, two of them, and the stretch of it rolls all the way up my spine and pulls a sound out of me I have genuinely never made before, and the snag comes loose and floats off. I let it. He curls his fingers up into the spot that makes my hips jolt, and the only thought I can hold onto is this is right, this is so right. Better than anything I have ever gotten while I was awake and paying attention.
Some far-off, dignified part of me lifts its head to note how good this is. How his voice goes through me like it’s all I need. How his breathat my ear makes me clench down around his fingers without meaning to.
The rest of me tells that part to lie back down and be quiet.
He’s slow until he isn’t. Every drag of his hand winds me a notch tighter, the heel of his palm grinding against my clit on every push in, until I can’t hold still, can’t stay quiet, strung tight between his hand below and his chest at my back and climbing fast whether I gave permission or not.
“That’s it,” he breathes, and his fingers go deeper, faster, sure. “Come for me. I want to feel it.”
His other arm bands up across my chest, holding me up, holding me back against him, and I lose it — hips working down onto his hand, every shred of caring how I look gone, just chasing the edge that’s right there, right there, all of me narrowing down to the place where he’s got me and won’t let go.
It snaps without warning. It wrings up through me long and deep, my whole body clamping down around his fingers, and the pulse of it whites out everything — no room, no bed, no name, nothing but the throb and his arm holding me together while I come apart on his hand. He works me through every wave of it, slow and steady, doesn’t stop, eases off only when I start to shake, until I’m wrung out and boneless and slumped back into him.
His chest rising and falling slow against my spine. His fingers still resting against me, lazy, like he isn’t anywhere close to finished. His arm heavy around me like there is nowhere on this earth he’d rather be than exactly here, holding the wreckage.
I want to see his face.
I turn—
It’s not him.
It’s not Xaviar.
