Page 108 of Feast of Sparks (Thornchapel 2)
“That’s not enough,” he pleads, more Auden spilling back in. He twines his hands in the hair at the back of my head like he did before and pulls my head back and searches my face with almost frantic urgency. “Do you know how dangerously much I love you? Do you know how much it hurts? Do you know that I can barely sleep, barely work, barely eat, for how deeply you’ve crawled inside me?” A jagged inhale. “I used to think love could only hurt when it ended, but now I know better. The best kind of love hurts all the time. You make me hurt all the time. You have since you showed up all sleepy and smiley with your questions and your big green eyes, you have since I saw the welts on your legs and knew you wanted the things I’ve hated myself for wanting to give.”
“Auden,” I breathe, stunned.
He drops his forehead almost to mine, pressing it against my flower crown, and closes his eyes. “I’ve always loved you, you know. I loved you while I was still a child. But I knew I loved you as an adult when I realized you make your love hurt as much for me as I make my love hurt for you.”
I reach up and cradle his cheek and jaw in my hand. “Are you my Dominant right now? Or my wild god?”
He gives me a smile that’s sad and fond and hesitant. “Both.”
“Then I’d say that I don’t want to make you hurt. I’m the submissive, remember?”
“It would hurt to love you no matter how you liked your kinks. The soul of you, Poe, is a soul made for living, and living hurts most of all.”
I use my other hand to frame his face. “Then live with me.”
His eyes shine with more than firelight. The sharp seize of his chest and stomach tell me he’s breathing hard, like he’s just run fresh out of the woods again. I remember him saying how the wedding in the chapel changed him, how twelve years ago he started growing terrible and wonderful needs inside his heart. Thorns, he told us. It always felt like thorns.
He’s always been the Thorn King. I just didn’t know until now.
“I think,” the Thorn King says, “that I’m ready for my kiss.”
His sculpted lips brush against mine, soft and slow, licking into my mouth with the same sultry pace, until he’s able to kiss me so deeply my knees are buckling and my breath is coming in short, small pants.
When I kiss you next, it’ll be because I’m enjoying what I’ve earned. What I love.
It’s the god and not Auden who pulls away from my mouth and stares down at me with a conquering hunger. And then my hair is free, my rose crown tossed carelessly aside, and I’m up off my feet, nestled in his muscular arms as he climbs the platform and lays me down on the pillows. He kneels up between my legs after he settles me onto the makeshift bed and stares down at my body, his gaze ravenous. I feel like some kind of sacrifice laid out like this, with my white dress rucked up to my knees and without a bra to keep my nipples from being lewdly visible through the fabric. I can tell the god feels the same, because he pops open his jeans without looking down and gives himself an absent stroke or two while he takes me in.
I spread my legs a little farther apart in invitation, just so he gets the hint. I want to be a sacrifice, I want to be taken and claimed, and if he doesn’t do it, then I’ll do it myself.
There’s the tiniest crook to one corner of his mouth, as if he’s recognizing this, and then he gives himself one final stroke over his boxers before letting go.
With impatient motions, he tugs at the bodice of my dress until my breasts are naked to his gaze, and then he pulls with tight, frustrated movements at his antler headdress until it’s off and he can toss it into the grass next to the platform. I’m about to complain—being fucked by the horned god would be really sexy with actual horns in the mix—but then he bends low, captures a nipple in his mouth, and gives it a long, hot suck. He licks it once and starts to move to the other one, but when my back arches to follow the pleasure, he splays his palm over my sternum and pushes me back down.
“Stay still,” he says, the words all dark and velvet. “You’re mine to taste however I want.”
“Half the fun is squirming,” I complain. I wriggle underneath him, twisting with the ache building between my legs and trying to get my breast closer to his mouth again.
“Oh really,” he says, eyebrow raised in the most Audenlike way, and I should have heard the warning in his tone and recognized it for what it was. But I didn’t.
I let out a surprised squeak as he grabs my wrists and pins them to either side of my head. His thighs are planted wide and they spread my own far enough apart that the hem of my dress barely covers my naked cunt. I writhe even harder underneath him, loving the feeling of being pinned, of being trapped. Of being forced and made. Struggling like Fay Wray, twisting and yanking against the inevitable capture.
“Now,” he says, pleasure curling in his voice like smoke, “let’s try this again.” He dips his head to tongue my nipple, which sends tense, urgent pleasure arrowing right down to my cunt.
“Fuck,” I whisper faintly. He pulls on the tip of my breast with hot, slick suction, breaking the suck to take it in his teeth. It’s enough to singe me with the first flare of pain, but then he kisses it again, keeping the sting balanced with sweetness.
My wrists stay locked down as he moves his attention to the soft undercurve of my breast, kissing and nipping his way to my ribs and then back up to my nipple, which he laves until I sigh and then sucks until I whimper. My legs aren’t trapped though, and so my bare feet slide everywhere—deeper into the blankets, to stroke along his calves, to twine around his hips. It’s one of the times I squirm against the dirty bliss he’s conjuring that my dress finally falls back far enough to expose my sex.
He doesn’t notice at first, too consumed with tasting my breasts to look anywhere else, but when he lets go of one wrist to stroke himself again, the back of his hand brushes over the silky skin between my legs.
He goes completely and utterly still.
I didn’t want our first fuck to be the kind of tender, gentle sex that first times are supposed to be. I wanted Auden as his most tortured, his most arrogant, and after I saw him as the god, I wanted him as the wild god and Thorn King. Of course I did, because I’m the girl who gets antsy if she isn’t flogged twice a week; I’ve never been interested in gentle, and I probably never will be. I want filthy, I want invasive, I want the kind of breathless possession that ruins you for anything else.
All that said, when the god freezes over me, his muscles growing very taut and very still, and then his forest eyes flash to mine in an expression of dark appetite, of blazing, mindless hunger . . . I feel a very real bolt of fear. Terror as primal and animalistic as the god’s hunger bleeds through my mind, and I’m just as still as the god is, quivering, barely daring to breathe. Had I really thought I’d seen true dominance before? Real power? Had I really thought that power was about postures and words and ropes and kneeling and perfectly timed flicks of flogger falls?
Had I?
Because I was wrong. I was so wrong that it could almost be funny if it weren’t so terrifying. So thrilling.
