Page 249 of Slashed Bonds

~CASSIAN~

Apussy should be appreciated the way any other part of a body is appreciated.

Delicately. With attention. With the understanding that it isn’t a destination you arrive at and finish. It’s a thing with a temperature and a history and a way it likes to be spoken to, and if you treat it like a task you’re the kind of man who loses draws he should have won.

I’m picky about fucking.

That’s the plain version. The longer one is that my commitment, once I make it, doesn’t have a door on the back of it. Four years with Nikolai. Killian in the same bed more nights than not. A captaincy I didn’t put down when the season asked me to. I don’t sample. I don’t pass through. If I put my mouth on a woman in my own bed with two men I love asleep on the other side of the mattress, cuffed together like a verdict, it isn’t a morning. It’s a decision that doesn’t reverse.

Which is why it’s taken five weeks.

Five weeks of a loading dock and a hill at dawn and a hoodie she stole and a note in the margin of my book. Five weeks of waiting in a line I put myself at the back of, because I will not be the fourth man who takes what’s offered and calls it enough.

I’m not waiting anymore.

She’s in my hoodie and nothing else. The gray one. Hem shoved up past her hips, thighs over my shoulders, and the scent of her has gone from the room’s weather to the only air in it. Black cherry. Crushed plum. Night jasmine with the smoked vanilla under it, sweeter than it was on the stairs last night, thick enough that I can taste it before my mouth gets there.

I look up the length of her once.

Gray eyes. Mine. Hers, blown wide, the piercing at her lip caught on her teeth, the spider bandage on her arm and the drummer behind her eye apparently fired.

“Grace before meals,” I say again, lower, and I put my mouth on her.

Slow.

The first lick is a fact-finding mission. Flat, from the place she’s already wet to the place she’s swollen, and the sound she makes goes straight through the mattress. Sweet. Hot. Slick on my tongue in a way that isn’t performance and isn’t polite, and I have to close my eyes for a second to keep the inventory straight.

There. That’s the center. That’s the left, where she twitches. That’s the clit, and she doesn’t want it direct yet.

I give her the indirect. Circles.

The flat of my tongue along either side. A kiss to the inside of her thigh where the slick has run, because I’m not wasting any of it and because the kiss makes her hips jump, and I like the jump. My hands stay on her thighs. Not pinning. Holding. Thumbs moving in the soft crease while I learn the pace her body is already trying to set.

She moans.

Not the sound a woman makes to end a thing faster. I’ve heard that sound described. This one is involuntary. It breaks in the middle. It comes with her fingers finding my hair, both hands, sliding in at the roots and holding on like the bed might try to take me.

“Cassian.”

“I’m here.”

I say it into her. The vibration gets me a pull. Sharp.

The good kind of pain, a fist in my hair that has nothing to do with stopping me, and my cock answers it like she’s put her hand on that instead. Hard against the mattress. Throbbing. Seven inches of a problem I’ve been refusing to solve for five weeks, pressed into the sheet, aching in time with every sound she gives me.

I work.

Tongue in long passes. Then shorter. Then I seal my mouth over her and suck, gentle, and she swears, and the swear turns into my name, and the name turns into a beg I feel in my teeth.

“More. Please. Don’t— there, fuck, there.”

I give her there.

Two fingers of tongue, pointed, fucking into her slow while my mouth stays on the swollen peak above it, and her walls close around me like a hand. Hot. Slick. A flutter that isn’t a finish yet and is absolutely a promise. I can read it the way I read a shoulder before a pass leaves a blade. She’s going to be an addiction.

The kind that doesn’t care that we’ve got seven days to a building with twelve thousand seats and a man who’s going to come to a dot breathing through his mouth.

Bad timing. Noted. Irrelevant.