Page 54 of The Court the Fae Forgot
I hadn’t realized Zev had finished undressing Finch, whose body still lay sprawled across the better portion of the bed in nothing more than a pair of well-fitted breeches. The long haired fae sat at the end of it now, his own hands reaching to untie the laces of his boots with weary fingers.
Something about the way the light hit him from where I stood, the dim moonlight combined with the flickering fire of the lamps lighting the hallways down below, it illuminated an exhaustion in him that I’d not seen before. It could have been the alcohol too, Zev’s ale cup draining almost as often as Finch’s throughout the night.
I’d been surprised that the three of us had lasted as long as we did. When we’d first arrived at the inn, all that was on my mind was the draw of sleep. I hadn’t thought I’d have the energy to sit in the tavern and pick at stale bread and cheese, let alone wait while this duo drank their way through half a keg of ale between them. But the moment we’d stepped beneath these rafters, sleep had become the furthest thing from my mind.
I’d feared I wouldn’t be able to sleep with the press of the Wildness around me, but it turned out that the proximity of hateful humans was even worse.
The laces slipped from between Zev’s fingers as I crept back over to his side. It was my turn to kneel before him, my movements slow and a little wobbly as I tried not to put much weight on my still-healing ankle. Zev had been sure it would take at least a day or two to heal, but the pain was already almost gone. Either it hadn’t been as bad as it first felt, or it was a sign that the faerie glamour supposedly racing through my veins had finally begun to awaken.
“Right now,” I said, taking the laces from Zev’s fumbling hands, “the only fae I’m worried about is you.”
“Me?”
There was a strange emotion on Zev’s face when I looked up at him. It was surprise, I thought, and something so tender I couldn’t put a name to it.
“No one ever worries about me,” he muttered, blinking back something that looked suspiciously like tears.
I had to fight the urge to keep my jaw from dropping open.
There was a vulnerability in Zev’s voice that made me avert my eyes. He was usually the quiet one of the three, the very last fae I’d expect to be tearing up at the mere thought that a human—or once human—girl might be worrying about him.
I finished pulling Zev’s boots from his feet and then did the same to help him take off his shirt. He, at least, had not drenched himself in ale too.
“Wait,” he said, his hand reaching out to stop me as I got back up to my feet to place the folded shirt on top of the packs piled up beside the bed. “Before we go to sleep, I need you to add one more tattoo. Right here.”
He traced an empty patch of skin along his ribs on the left side of his body. It was one of the remaining areas that wasn’t crowded with the markings that had already healed from our earlier session.
“It faded before you could get to it. I don’t want to forget it.”
Though exhaustion was finally tugging at me with its relentless grip, I couldn’t find it in myself to refuse him. Not when he was looking up at me like he was, the emotion so raw on his face.
I found the tattoo needle and sat beside him as he crossed his arm up over his head and leaned back against the headboard to expose the ridges of his ribs.
I had to straddle his waist in order to reach the spot he directed me to. Heat prickled in my veins as I hitched up my skirts and climbed up onto the bed with him and Finch. The warmth of his body pressed against the insides of my thighs as I settled down onto him in order to work.
I wasn’t sure if Zev was as aware as I was of the precarious position he’d prompted me into. He was already half asleep, his body wedged into the only position that allowed me to reach the small patch of his unmarked skin without having to nudge Finch out of the way.
His skin was even hotter than before, the blood in his veins pumping more furiously now that it had been diluted with ale. That blood rose more freely to the surface too, as I began to trace the lines he patterned out to me with his finger. It was a simple addition at least, a few sweeping lines that I began to trace as carefully as my clumsy fingers and tired brain would allow.
For the first time, Zev winced back in pain at the touch of the needle.
I stopped right away, leaning back to look into his face as I tried to ignore the way our bodies had begun to settle into one another.
“No,” he groaned, sleep as heavy in his voice as it was in my fingers, “don’t stop.”
His eyes met mine only for a second before I brought the needle back down to his skin. He sucked in a breath at the prick of it, his eyes squeezing shut as I continued to work along the reddened lines he’d traced into his skin for me.
What I couldn’t ignore for long, however, was the way he started to harden between my thighs. I pretended, at first, that I was imagining the way the length of him began growing beneath me. Surely, I thought, it was just the feeling of me settling into his lap as I worked.
But soon, it was unmistakable. The longer I worked, stabbing the needle into his skin and transferring the ink into the wound along the way, the harder he became. Soon, it was all I could do to sit comfortably on the fae’s lap. His … member … was fighting to lift me from his lap as it pressed into me with a considerable strength all of its own.
Either Zev was unaware of this fact, or he simply chose not to acknowledge it.
He kept his eyes closed and his breathing steady as I finished the last lines of the markings he’d scratched out for me. I wanted to ask Zev what it meant, this word written in a language I couldn’t read this time, but by the time I’d finished and looked into his eyes, now open and watching me, any thought other than the way our bodies pressed together had vanished.
We said nothing, no words passed between us, but Zev’s arm slowly moved from where it had been wedged behind the bed to wrap around my waist. He shifted his weight, pulling himself up slightly while pulling my hips down closer to him.
There was nothing but the thin press of fabric between us, and it was not enough. Not enough to stem the ache between my thighs as he ever so gently pressed himself up harder against me, even as his hand pushed my hips down into him, too. It was so subtle a movement it was barely a movement at all, but it still made my own body throb with a need so great that it was closer to pain than pleasure.
