Page 96 of Resilience

“Well, unless you want to sometime.”

“Never happen.” She scratched lightly through his beard, watching her hand as she did. Then she slid it back over his ear, into his hair, and began to stroke. God, he loved the way that felt.

The air in his room changed suddenly, like a storm front moving in.

When he brushed his hands over her head and set them on her shoulders, she took the last half-step that remained between them. Now her body was pressed to his, and she tipped her head back to meet his eyes. She wasn’t smiling, didn’t try to make any words. He was the same. They stood like that, so close, and dived into each other’s eyes.

Her hand slipped from his hair and her fingertips danced over his jawline, then to his neck, tracing the red seam of his freshly healed wound, and down to his chest. She slid both hands under his kutte and pushed it from his shoulders. He shrugged it off, let it fall down his arms, caught it, and tossed it to the old chair in the corner where he piled the worn clothes that weren’t dirty enough for the laundry.

“You want to?” he asked. It was a dumb question, since she was undoing the buttons of his flannel, but he had to ask, had to have her answer, had to be sure. The night had not been full of things one could mistake for foreplay.

“Dummy,” she signed and pushed his shirt off his shoulders.

He shook his arms out of that and let it drop to the floor.

He was about to help her out of her jacket when she set both hands on his chest and began to explore. She’d seen his bare chest plenty of times, and she’d touched it often enough, but the way she touched him now was new. Even in the limited time of their sexual connection, this was new. She touched him like she was memorizing him.

Her fingers traced the contours of his muscles, drew small circles around his nipples, swept outward to frame his sides, then back to the center, following the shallow rift that separated each ab. When she reached the waistband of his jeans, he caught her hand and lifted it to his mouth.

She let him kiss her fingertips before she pulled her hand free. “I want to have you in my mouth.”

That, too, would be new for them. Sam wasn’t sure he could bear it. The sight of her making those words had him about half gone already.

“You don’t have to,” he told her.

She rolled her eyes at him. “I know that. I want to.”

Sam leaned back against his desk and gave her what she wanted.

First, she shed her jacket and tossed it to his laundry chair. Then she undid his belt, opened his jeans, and reached into his underwear. The feel of her hand wrapping around him yanked a grunt out from way down in his belly.

Apparently dissatisfied with the room she had to work, she let him go and tugged on his jeans. He lifted off the desk and helped her get the jeans and his underwear down from his hips.

Then Athena dropped to her knees. Goddamn.

And then she put her beautiful mouth on him, and Sam was pretty sure this was going to kill him.

With Athena’s hand at his base, most of the rest of him in her mouth, and her other hand resting on his belly, Sam forgot all about the barn, all about their argument, all about anything and everything that wasn’t this moment. If he could have plucked it out of time and encased it in glass, he would have.

She flicked her tongue over his tip, squeezed her hand around his shaft, sucked him deep, let him go, licked him like a lollipop, sucked him deep again. Then the hand on his belly slipped downward and took hold of his balls.

“Fuck,” he gasped. She couldn’t hear him, but it didn’t matter. He just needed to say it out loud.

She pulled back and tucked her hair behind her ears. As she took him into her mouth again, Sam gathered up that thick, dark mass and held it in his hands. With that, Athena decided to get down to business. She gave up teasing, gave up exploring, and sucked him off.

Sam wanted to watch—god he wanted to watch—but it was all so fucking intense, every sensation so much more vibrant than he could process, so much more than he’d ever felt with anybody else, he simply could not control enough of his body to keep watching or to keep holding her hair. His head fell back, he grabbed the edge of his desk, and he fell headlong into the experience.

When his finish arrived, it hit him like a blast. He didn’t know how to tell her he was close, didn’t know how to warn her, and when it occurred to him he could at least tap her shoulder or something, it was too late. A fucking nuclear bomb went off in his gut—and Athena stayed on him, taking it all, finally easing off gently and finishing him with a sweet little peck to his tip.

She looked up at him with a smug little smirk, and Sam laughed before he had his breath back.

“You are great at that,” he told her.

Her smirk got even smugger, and it was the cutest fucking thing he’d ever seen.

“I know.” She wiped the corners of her mouth with a prim fingertip.

Sam dropped to his knees and kissed the shit out of her. Then he gathered her up in his arms and took her to his bed, where he could thank her properly.

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