Page 128 of The Nightmare Before Kissmas
His reaction is so panicked and miring that I pull away. “Has anyone ever done this for you?” I ask, throat raspy and I haven’t even really gotten to work yet.
His lips are swollen like we’ve been kissing and his head is pressed back into the pillows so I see the underside of his chin, ligaments bundled.
He shakes his head, breathing labored, arms falling in sharp angles on either side of his body. “Given. Didn’t receive. It was a mess anyway.”
That has me pulling up onto my forearms. I keep one hand around him though, stroking sluggishly, and he whimpers but finally looks down at me.
“You said you were with one other person,” I clarify. “You went down on them. They didn’t for you? Or at least finish you off some other way?”
“Is now really the time for this conversation, Coal?” He thrusts his hips in my hand but I flatten my other palm on his thigh to hold him down.
“Absolutely,” I say like I’m swearing an oath to him, and it is, anoath and fealty and acquiescent devotion. “I want to know you. All parts of you.” I pause, reining in my zealotry. “What parts you’ll show me, at least.”
He presses his head back again, staring up at my bed’s canopy. But I keep stroking him so his breath catches, so he doesn’t quite topple into whatever memory is trying to creep across his face.
“It was—ah—right after Raven died,” he says in breakneck succession.
I go still. Release him, come up onto my hands, and lean down over him. “What?”
His eyes slam shut and he swallows. “One of her friends—she and him had been dating before… and the funeral was over and we ended up alone in my room. It was stupid, Coal. It was a huge, idiotic mistake. So yes. Is that what you wanted to talk about?”
His voice grates, red color staining his chest that has nothing to do with arousal now. He’s angry. But when I take his chin in my fingers and pull until he looks at me, the darkness in his eyes feels so fucking familiar, that terrified unworthiness I’d shown after I told him about the New Koah incident. Something dug up from shame and shadows.
It renders me dumbstruck. Not that he’d have something to make him sink down into that drowning pool of mortified self-deprecation; but that he was so recently a gulp of air for me in my own drowning pool, and I get to be that for him. Shared lifelines shift the perspective. Not one-sided,me—a delicate widening,us.
“You blew your sister’s boyfriend after her funeral?” I ask.
Hex’s laugh is throttled. “It sounds even worse without my fumbling decorum.”
My turn to press a thumb over his lips. “Hex. You were grieving. He was too, I’d expect. It really wasn’t surprising that you sought comfort from someone. What’s fucked up is that he didn’t give you any comfortback.”
Hex’s tumbled guilt and humiliation harden over. “You—you’re upset that hedidn’treciprocate. Not the manner in which we messed around.”
“Reciprocation isn’t the point. I’m upset he didn’t take care of you,” I say, and yeah, my tone goes a bit pissed, because I can see it all too clearly. Hex, so pushed to the brink of grief that he opened himself up to someone, got used for a quick one-off, then was left in his room, alone.
I plunge my fingers into his hair, unable to stop this need to lay claim to him in some way, to let touch be a reminder that he’s here withmenow, and what we make will begood.
All my nerves vanish, I have purpose anew, purpose and agiftin that purpose.
“That guy was an asshole, sweetheart. Let me show you how you should be treated.” I bob my head down at where he’s gone soft during this conversation. “If you think you can now.”
He nods immediately. Seems incapable of saying anything verbally, but the sheer, scrambling need in his eyes is different than it was before. Stripped and whittled and that’s where today has brought both of us, shucked of all our walls, all our pathetic vestiges of protection, until we have no choice but to be fully present and feel all of this.
I kiss him, letting that be the only part of us that touches until I feel his muscles give, those fluid, writhing motions that tell me he’s back in his body, not his head. Then I slide down with less reverence, more hunger; I got a taste of him and I’m crazed for it, and now, now I know—this is his first. I want to ruin him for anyone else, it’s only fair.
Tongue, lips, teeth, I focus on those parts of my body, because everything else is given over to nerve endings swelling under my skin. His moans start up again in a flash flood, forcing their way through his pinched lips until he’s crooning to the ceiling. The easiest movements are driving him wild to the point where I almost feel cruel doing more, but I want to be cruel.
I look up at him, seeing him over the curves and planes of his body, and the sight burns into my head, becomes a fixed point: all long lines and sharp edges, laid out as a contrast on the soft bedding, hair a mess and eyes saying that mess is internal too. I rememberthe way he’d reacted when I pulled his hair, so I slip my mouth off him—to his garbled protest, a lusciously distressingnuh-huh—but pump him in my hand as I press my teeth experimentally into the soft, sensitive skin inside his thigh.
He makes a stunned noise, an intake of breath that could cut glass.
I bite at him again, soothe the spot with a kiss, my tongue. He’sshakingnow, the heels of his hands digging into his forehead. So I do it higher, the apex of his thigh; then up the length of him, gentle nips interspersed with soft kisses, sharpness and velvet.
“Coal—I’m gonna—mmph—” He breaks off into babbles and muttering and I think stops himself from cussing—wouldn’tthatbe kind of hysterical, though—and I gulp him back down in a greedy rush.
A bright, shimmering cry accompanies his back coming fully off the bed, shoulders digging into the pillow, hips bucking into me. I have been drunk on many different types of alcohol before, but I’ve never had an intoxication like the one I’m getting from the barrage that is him fraying because of me. I’m so obsessed, so enthralled, that I nuzzle and lick until he flinches in an over-sensitized daze and grabs at my shoulders, my hair.
“Coal—” I cut him off by surging up to devour his mouth and he makes that cry again but it’s trapped between our tongues. He digs his nails into my back, scrambling me closer, and I obey, my full weight bearing down on him, hands everywhere, his hair, the slope of his side, his thigh where it wraps around me and yanks me in.
