Page 42 of Feast of Sparks (Thornchapel 2)
I know she can’t. I felt her body pulse and tense at his dirty words, I can see her breathing now, fast and fitful, like she’s just emerged from the deepest part of a lake.
Auden knows it too. It only takes a glance at the confident set of his jaw and the curl at the corners of his mouth to see that he knows exactly what he’s doing to her. And to me.
He always knows.
Quietly, as quiet as we can manage, we begin to move, Auden behind me with his hands braced on the shelves on either side of our corner, me with my hands full of warm, curvy arse, and Poe pressed up against the books, like some kind of primitive librarian sacrifice, impaled over and over again by my need. By her own wish and by Auden’s command.
This is, incidentally, the only place I want to be for the rest of my life.
I know it won’t be.
Which only makes me fuck her all the harder, all the needier. I love her gasps, her stitched breaths, her little squirms when she gets close to coming. I love how she changes and transforms—the fierce woman who seizes her pleasure one instant, and in the next, Auden’s little bride, staring up at him with big, big eyes and parted lips, going loose and soft in my arms like a doll, my own little fuck doll. And the beauty of it is I can’t tell who’s using who, whether she’s using me or Auden’s using me or if I’m using both of them to fulfill the filthy fantasies I’ve been imagining for years.
Auden doesn’t change, not now. His breathing stays even against my neck as he shields our fucking bodies from view, and while his hips stay tight to mine, he doesn’t chase my thrusts. Still in control. Not lost to pleasure like Poe and me.
“Shorter,” she gasps. “Grind me against you—oh fuck, that’s it. That’s it.”
She practically climbs me as I obey her, using my grip on her arse to move her like she needs, rubbing her hard little bead against me with every stroke. She hoists herself higher to get the angle she wants, she squeezes those soft thighs against my hips as I fuck her through the rip in the middle of her tights, she wraps her arms ever tighter around my neck and bites my earlobe. And then I hear kissing.
She and Auden are kissing with me between them—and as he utters a crude oath into her mouth and finally, finally, thrusts against me, she comes in a series of bewitching flutters around my length.
That incredible hot-cold tension twists right in the pit of my belly, and then snaps with a rush, a wave breaking—and breaking—and breaking—
I’ve crushed Poe completely to the shelves now, my face pressed against the side of hers and my hips just rutting and rutting and rutting, furiously emptying every last drop of my spend into the latex. Pouring myself out for her, into her, but not really. Not really into her.
God, just the thought of it though . . . spilling inside her with nothing between us . . .
I collapse
against her as my cock slowly stops jerking, my heart pounding so hard I think it’s slamming against the inside of my chest. She’s so soft and warm and sweet against me, and I never want this moment to end, I never want to pull out of her, because once I do, once I tie off this condom and we straighten our clothes, then it’s over. This in-between space of uncertainty punctuated by vicious fucks—it’s got to be killed and buried. Like everything else interesting and worthy, it has to die.
“Is this really what you want?” I can’t help but ask her. “For this to stop?”
Our breathing is one, shared as we press belly to belly against the shelves. Auden still cages us in with his hands, but he’s as motionless as a statue now that we’re done. Regretting this careless lapse into vulgarity, maybe. Regretting agreeing to Poe’s request that we work toward some kind of peace, almost certainly.
She shakes her head. “I don’t want anything to stop, Saint. Dammit, you could do this to me ten times a day and it wouldn’t be enough.” She eases away; I reach down to keep the condom steady as we separate. It was so warm in that opening in her clothes, a warm, tight place just for me, and now everything is all draft and chill once again.
Auden moves, finally, pushing past me to help Proserpina straighten her clothes.
She lets him, like a little queen, her shoulders back and one eyebrow lifted as she looks at me. “It wouldn’t be enough, but neither is whatever this is now. I won’t trade sating my body for sating my heart, not when I can have both. What we have now, it can’t last.” Vulnerability shines in her eyes, and she looks away as she swallows. “Maybe you don’t want something with me to last. But I do.”
Auden sighs, wraps her in his long arms. She does that thing where she buries her face in his chest and then peeps out, like a rescued kitten. It makes my heart try to squeeze out between my ribs to get to her.
And then he bends down and says something against the exposed shell of her ear, something I can’t hear. Her kiss-stung mouth pulls into a wide, wide smile.
“Really?” she asks him.
He gives her a solemn nod.
She looks up at him like he’s just given her the moon, and it makes me want to give her the sun instead. Jealousy rolls through me like vinegar, sour and burning and chemically blighting everything that just happened. I was the one who fucked her, after all, the one who made her come all wet and helpless against the spines of the books she loves so much. And yes, I love being used by Auden, shamed by him, but this moment? This one apart from sex, when he was able to say a few words and have her look like he’d just proposed marriage?
I want that too.
“So yes,” he says. “If I have to crawl on my belly through a pit of coals, the answer to whatever you want is still yes.”
“Flattering,” I bite out, suddenly too brittle and raw to handle any more of his needling. His insinuations that my mere presence is worse than medieval punishment for him.
I turn away to attend to the condom and my jeans, vowing that I’ll have my shit together when I turn back around to face them. Except then he’s right in front of me, hand extended. “I’ll take care of it,” he says, meaning the condom.
