Page 53 of A Dusk Of Stars

The pressure is too much. I lift my head off the ground, I squirm and I grumble, and he almost instantly eases it, the movements of his tongue becoming more languid.

Content, I throw my head back and look up at the stars, my moaning and the grinding of my core against his face quickly becoming more and more desperate, until I feel I can no longer bear the torture.

Just as I move to pull him up, needing him inside me, he grips me tighter and does this thing with his mouth that makes me cry out, all my muscles clenching just before the coil within me finally snaps, sending shocks of pleasure through my body as the stars explode high above me.

I keep lying on the ground, breathless, pounding and tingling, feeling all the tension inside me dispersing, until I sense himpulling back and I grab onto his waistband, needing more of him.

He just removes my hand, pushes himself off the ground, turns his back to me and says, almost too quietly for me to hear, “Now get dressed.”

Still in a haze, I get up and do as he says, watching him wipe his mouth with his hand with this tension in his entire body.

It makes my eyebrows pull down, when he turns to face me again without looking me in the eye. It takes me even more by surprise, when he bends, wraps an arm around my waist and hoists me off the ground in one determined move.

“Hey,” I protest, starting to finally come back to my senses when he starts walking with me thrown over his shoulder. “What do you think you’re doing?” I demand as I start struggling to get down.

I don’t just fail. I don’t even manage to mess with his steady, determined pace. “You’ve completed your first ritual,” he says in a tense voice, “you’re worn out and you need sleep.”

“Let me down,” I order.

“Will not,” comes the reply.

It’s when the humiliation really kicks in that I get fuming. I muster all my strength, throw my leg back and slam my knee into his chest. Though it doesn’t seem to hurt him, this does surprise him enough to drop me.

I stumble back, but I keep myself on my feet, seeing him throw me a scowl. He takes a step closer, but I lift a warning finger.

“Just… Get away from me,” I tell him, I turn on my heel and run away.

Chapter 19

In this haze, I go to my room and sit on my bed with my knees pulled up. First, I make the sparks appear again only to convince myself of how useless they are. Then, slowly and in great detail, I relive how thinking about the symbol seemed to jumpstart things. I relive my conversation with my wolf and the little lesson she tried to teach me. I relive the moment I was gifted with my first power by the Scorpio.

My mind wants to rush to what happened with Bane, but I don’t let it.

It’s the symbol and my powers I need to be thinking about, I tell myself. What the hell does the symbol have to do with anything? And what do the sparks mean?Canthey even mean anything else but being able to control electricity?

Or thunder, as they’d say in the olden days.

What doyouthink, I ask my wolf.

There’s the image of her flickering before me and there’s the presence telling me she’s here with me, but she’s not saying anything.

She’s sticking with her decision of making everything so much more difficult for me by not even talking to me, let alone helping me.

Fine. Then I guess I’m on my own in this.

But her silence only makes it impossible for me to keep pushing Bane out of my head.

I just can’t help it, becausethis— everything that happened tonight — feels so strange, I can’t even begin wrapping my head around it. I pull my knees tighter to myself, I press my lips and I crane my neck to look out the window.

It feels so strange, in fact, that I find myself wondering if it even happened.

I let him go down on me? Or even better, I initiated it? Or better still, I fucking crawled on top of him?

I can’t seem to help it, but it’s proving to be incredibly tough just thinking about it, for two main reasons.

One, because of how weirdly possessive I felt of him. Ineverget possessive of people.

Two, because of how he behaved. Tonight has made the man even more opaque to me. I mean, I thought I'd already figured him out. And then, well…

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