Kiss the Dead (34 page)

He was laughing, that deep, masculine chuckle that men have inside them when they are particularly pleased with themselves, usually about sex.

I tried to see me, tried to force my eyes to work, and the world not to be soft-edged and blurry, but another aftershock made me writhe on the bench, and Nicky’s hands were wrapping around me, lifting me.

I had time to try to make my arms work enough to hold on to his arms. He moved both his hands down to my thighs and lifted me slightly, and then he sat me down on top of him, and slid the tip of him inside me. It stole the breath from my throat, too soon after the last orgasm, so that the sensation of him sliding inside me, his hands controlling how slow he entered me, was almost overwhelming. It felt so good, so… my eyes fluttered shut again, my hands convulsing on his arms, trying to hold me where he wanted me, while he guided our bodies together.

When he was as deep inside me as he could go, he said, “God, that feels so amazing.”

I managed to gasp, “Yes, oh, yes.”

Then he bent forward, pressing me back onto the bench with his body still buried as deep inside me as he could go.

“We’ll fall,” I said. The thought was helping clear my head a little.

“Hold on to my arms, I’ve got this.”

I did what he asked, and the happy after-fog was drifting away on my very real fear we would fall off the narrow bench.

He raised my hips a little, angling my legs up and to either side. He steadied me while I found the angle I wanted with him on top, and then he put his hands on either side of me, wrapping them around the edges of the bench, in a reverse grip of what I’d done earlier. He stayed sitting up, his legs on either side of the bench, my legs on either side of his hips and waist, and he began to move himself in and out of me.

“On the bench,” I said, eyes a little wide and not just from afterglow.

“On the bench,” he said, and he raised his hips a little, lengthening out his upper body above me like a roof of muscle and flesh. His arms were moving with the rhythm of his body inside mine, and I transferred my grip back to the bench, one careful hand at a time. Once I wasn’t holding on to him, he changed his angle and started finding a serious, quick, deep rhythm. I watched his body work above mine, only his hips and that long, hard piece of him touching me at all. Technically with the man above me it was supposed to be missionary position, but this was as far from that as you could get and still have the man on top.

The long fall of his bangs began to swing forward at the downstroke so that I could see the smooth, creased scar tissue where his other eye would have been. It was only when he was on top, and only at certain angles that I got to see his whole face above me. I’d come to value those glimpses of all of him. I watched the concentration on his face, that distant inward looking, which was his version of trying to last, trying to prolong the amazing things his body was doing inside mine.

He glanced down at me, truly seeing me. He gave a fierce smile and
said, in a voice breathy with strain, “You are way too in control. I’m not doing my job.”

I don’t know what I would have said, because he sped up what he was doing, driving himself faster, harder, but the bench was too narrow, too hard, too something for pounding. He changed to a rolling, stroking rhythm of his hips, proving that he could dance, even with me on my back. It was a softer orgasm than it would have been if he’d just pounded me thoroughly. It built more like a clitoral orgasm, so that I could feel it getting closer.

My voice showed the strain of holding my position on the bench, keeping my arms tensed and holding, while he danced in and out of me, but I managed to say, “Getting close.”

“Good,” he said, but his eye was closed, he wasn’t watching me anymore. His face had that deep, internal look again, but closing his eye meant he was fighting his body, fighting to keep the wonderful rolling, dancing rhythm, to hold us on the bench, to hold on until I came underneath him, fighting to keep everything moving, and not to lose his concentration now, not now, when he’d done so much work to get us to this moment.

Then from one stroke to another, the orgasm caught me, flung me screaming, writhing underneath him. My hands on the bench jerked and fought with the rest of my body, because my hands wanted to rise up and mark his body with my pleasure.

His voice growled over me, “God, God!” He shoved his body one more time so hard and solid that it made me cry out again, and I couldn’t decide if it was a new orgasm, or if it was just an extra ending for the first one.

He growled at me, his face wild with it, and his eye lion-orange, his humanity slipping away as he shuddered and growled above me. One last shudder ran through his body from shoulders to hips, making me cry out again, because he was still shoved deep inside me as he shivered.

He half-collapsed over me, head dipping down so that his bangs brushed my face. I could feel the frantic pulse of his body in the side of
his neck, the pounding of his heart just above me. He whisper-growled, “You didn’t feed.”

He was right, I hadn’t fed the
ardeur
. I’d forgotten that was why we were making love. With his body still inside mine, a light sheen of sweat on his chest and stomach, my arms letting me know that I’d held this position and us in place a long time, the afterglow of all that good sex still flowing through my body, and all I could say was, “Well, shit.”

He laughed then, and he was still too hard inside me, so that it started me writhing and making small noises again, as I laughed with him. We laughed and twitched, and tried to stay on that damn bench, and I still had to feed.

He finally lifted me up into his arms, so that he held me against the front of him, and I wrapped my rubbery legs around his waist. He was still inside me, but growing softer, so that as he picked me up he slipped out, and we were just holding each other, faces inches apart. There was a light dew of sweat on his forehead, too.

His voice was still breathy, his eye still lion-orange. “I love that you enjoyed it so much you forgot the
ardeur
.”

I smiled at him, arms around his shoulders, hands clasped at the back of his neck. “You were amazing.”

He grinned, a quick baring of teeth, more a cat’s snarl than a smile. “I’ve never had to be this good with anyone else.”

“Because you feel you’re competing against the other men?” I asked.

“That and I’ve never been with anyone who likes sex the way you do. I have to keep up with you.”

I hugged him with my arms, and my legs that were still around his waist. His hands were supporting my legs and ass, but he held me easily; even with the sweat drying on his body, his breathing still not back to normal, he wasn’t straining to hold me. He was strong enough to bench-press small cars, but still I was impressed.

“Right back at you,” I said.

He grinned again. “You still need to feed.”

“God said he’d send Ethan, or Domino; you want to send them in?”

He shook his head. “No.”

I widened eyes at him. “You up to it again?”

“I’m a lion, Anita. Give me a minute, and yeah.”

I gave a little frown. “Isn’t this fast recovery for you?”

“There’s usually a line,” he said, “so I step out of the way, usually for Nathaniel.”

I smiled. “He does share well.”

“He likes to watch,” Nicky said. He stood up with me still wrapped around him.

I gave him wide eyes, and tightened my arms and legs around him. “Now I am impressed. I’m not sure I could stand yet.”

“In your bed, I’m not the biggest, I’m not the most flexible, I’m not multi-orgasmic, I don’t have centuries of practice, I’m not even sure that I have the most stamina. Nathaniel and Jean-Claude are scary impressive there.” He stood on one leg as he moved us off the bench completely and started walking toward the showers. “But I’m strong, and I can fight, and my physical recovery time from almost anything is really good. Give me a few more minutes and I’ll prove it.”

He carried me easily, smoothly, as if I weighed nothing. I was strong for my size, I was damn good, but I’d never be able to return the favor. I would never be a really big, physical man, but in that moment I allowed myself to enjoy that I had one to carry me into the showers, instead of being upset that I could never have carried him.

W
E CLEANED UP
in the shower, and when we’d rinsed the soap and conditioner out, Nicky proved to me that he had more game.

I ended up on the smooth, wet tiles on my knees, the hot water pounding down on us. He shielded me from most of the spray, only rivulets of it tracing down his body so that the water was more decoration to all that smooth skin. I licked the water off the edge of his groin, sipped it off the loose skin that dangled so delicately below. He didn’t shave completely like most of the men in my life, so I licked the loose skin, feeling the smoother hardness underneath. We’d already found that my mouth had healed a lot; I wasn’t sure it was up to full oral, but I was willing to try, and I’d never met a man who would argue about the offer. If Nicky had been shaved all the way I would have sucked and rolled those delicate balls into my mouth, but hair between the teeth—not my favorite. But either he shaved, or didn’t need to, above, and that I took into my mouth completely. He was still small, loose from the heat of the water, so I could take all of him easily, rolling, sucking, licking, enjoying the sensation of him in my mouth when he was still soft
enough that I didn’t have to fight to breathe, or fight my gag reflex. I could just enjoy myself and I did. He didn’t stay small long.

I was even more healed than I had thought. I hadn’t remembered concentrating on using Nicky’s energy to heal myself, but apparently it had.

I hesitated as he grew bigger, because if I put him in the sides of my mouth he slid over the few wounds that weren’t completely healed. I stopped, and thought about the problem, on my knees, staring at Nicky, so hard and perfect.

“If it hurts too much, we can do something else,” he said.

I nodded, but decided I’d try avoiding the sides of my mouth. If you can’t go around a problem, go straight at it, go straight down it. If I took him straight down, over my teeth, across my tongue, and to the back of my throat, driving him in and out of my mouth so that we were mimicking what he’d done earlier between my legs, it didn’t hurt much. It hurt a little, but the worst was to the sides of my mouth, which meant that I’d struggled more in Asher’s kiss than I’d thought. I pushed the thought away, and let myself enjoy the man in front of me.

“God,” Nicky said.

I rolled my eyes upward to see him staring down at me, face growing frantic. He’d let the water slick his hair completely back from his face. I think it was the first time I’d really seen his face so clean and bare. He was handsome, he really was. I liked the lines of his face without that fall of hair to cover the missing eye. He wasn’t less beautiful because he wasn’t “perfect”; it was Nicky, it was the way he looked, it was him, and I liked it, loved it. I couldn’t smile with my mouth full, but I could put the smile into my eyes. He’d grown long and hard and smooth in my mouth. I loved sliding my mouth down the long shaft of him, until there was that moment when he touched the back of my throat and I could choose whether to go back up or push him down the curve of my throat. He was just long enough that it was an effort to swallow him down. There were some times that bigger was not better.

I wrapped my hand around the base of him, so that I could go down
far enough for him to enter my throat, but not so far that it was choking me. I had worked hard to get rid of my gag reflex, and it was a lot less, but there was one reflex that was harder to control, the I-can’t-breathe reflex. I slid my mouth over him, and then pushed until my lips touched my hand, and then I let go, put my hands behind him to hold on to his thighs, while I forced myself that last few inches until my lips touched the front of his body completely, my mouth locked around him. I had to calm my pulse, calm my body, it was almost meditative, to stop my body from panicking that we couldn’t breathe past him.

I drew back off him slowly, and had to cough. My eyes were tearing up, and my nose was beginning to run. I moved to the side of Nicky’s leg and let the spray from the shower hit my face enough to clean the tears and snot away. In movies they clean the actress up between shots, but in real life, it’s messy. It was my body trying to get rid of whatever the fuck was down so far, and not being swallowed. The body rebelled against something that large being that far down, and not being swallowed. It was like my body was saying,
Either swallow, or get it
out
.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Fine,” I said, but my voice sounded hoarse enough that I had to clear my throat. It wasn’t sexiness; it was my throat getting a little abused by what we were doing.

“God, Anita, please feed.”

“You just want me to use the
ardeur
because I don’t have a gag reflex and get even better at deep-throating once I release it.”

He nodded, the water misting around him as he moved his shoulders in it. “Yeah,” he said, and his voice was a little frantic.

I did what he asked, because honestly I wanted my mouth completely healed, and my stomach was letting me know that there were other hungers that needed feeding besides the
ardeur
. That I noticed it in the middle of good sex meant I was way hungrier than I knew. It was the kind of hunger that if I didn’t fix it, my beasts could rise and look for food on their own, and take my body with them while they did it.

Once I’d fought to keep the
ardeur
penned up, but now I had to
think about it, find it, call it, unleash it. One minute I was in control, the next the
ardeur
rode me, and spilled out of my skin and into Nicky.

What little gag reflex I had was gone; the small, sharp pains of the wounds in my mouth just added to the desire, everything translated to sex, to want, need, desire. I drove him as deep down my throat as I could, and now there was no need to fight my body. It was on the same side as the
ardeur
, and the
ardeur
wanted to feed.