Page 39 of The Embrace of Evergreen

I just nod, confused and more than a little worried about the way he’s behaving as he leans forward and presses a lingering kiss to my forehead.

“Wait here for a second?”

“Always.” It’s not the first time I’ve told him I’ll always be here for him, and yet again, I find myself hoping. I hope that he knows that when I say it, I actually meanalways.

He chokes out another rough attempt at a laugh as he stands and slides past me. I’m desperately afraid that somehow I’ve done something wrong, that he’s going to come back from wherever he’s gone and ask me toleave, and even though things didn’t end with violence this time, once again, I’ll find myself alone and in pain and wondering how a love that seemed so promising one moment could have ended so badly the next. I don’t turn around when I hear his footsteps behind me, preferring to live in the blissful knowledge that he is mine and I am his for at least one moment longer.

“Blue…” He doesn’t sound upset as I work up the courage to spin around, only to feel my heartbeat stutter and wonder swirl through my veins when I find him holding one of my darkest sculptures.

“I bought it my first day in the city, on my first trip to the gallery. I bought it before I met you, before I met Max, before I knew that my life was about to change. I stood in front of it and felt all of the loneliness and pain and grief and confusion and hope that have been my permanent companions over the past decade all swirling together in harsh lines and soft curves. I couldn’t leave without it.”

I rise and take the fragile glass from him with shaking fingers and set it on the table before cupping his cheeks in my hands. He’s smiling at me even though his eyes are still glistening, and it feels like hope and fate and the universe finally telling me that I can breathe. It doesn’t make any sense that the first piece of glass I fought with and cried over for hours once my ribs had finally healed enough to step back into a hot shop should have found its way into the hands of this man I love. It doesn’t make sense that he would have seen all thedarkness and hurt and despair that it holds and somehow felt hope inside of it as well because when I made it, I had run out of hope, at least the kind of bright, comforting hope that Ethan believes in. All I had left was one tiny spark. A dangerous thing that I hid in a fireproof steel box and buried deep so that it could never trick me again. But Ethan found it. He found me.

I need to touch him, to feel him, to show him just how grateful I am that he found me. I slide my hands from his cheeks down to his jaw and close the distance between us in a blink, crushing his mouth with mine and thrusting my tongue deep until he whines and melts against me.

We part only to make our way to his bedroom and tear off our clothes before coming back together, and my eyes flutter shut as his fingertips trace along my cheekbones and jaw before sliding down the front of my throat. His palm on my chest presses me back to the mattress, and this is what I want - to be his and only his. I throw my legs around his hips and arch up against him as his fingers curl into my hair, pulling my head back to expose more of my throat. He presses slow, gentle kisses down my chest and belly and the rise of my hip, and I revel in the sensation of his lips and tongue and the scrape of his teeth.

I love everything Ethan and I do in bed - and on the couch and the floor and the shower - but watching him discover what he likes. Watching him lose control ashe chases his own pleasure and meticulously crafts mine is the sexiest thing I’ve ever experienced.

I’m already panting and thrusting my hips up, and our cocks are sliding slickly together between our bellies, but I want more. I don’t have to ask or beg or tell him what I want. He knows me now. He knows how to care for me and pull me apart until I’m a trembling mess of need and desire. I’m so entranced by the feel of him, so needy and desperate for more, so focused on how he catches my lip ring between his teeth and the way the bars that pierce my cock roll just under my nearly too-sensitive skin as he rocks against me, that I don’t even notice when he reaches under the pillow for the lube that now lives there.

Delicate kisses rain down along my cheekbone and jaw as he reaches down between my legs, and cool, slick fingertips circle and tease for an eternity before he slips two deep inside of me with one sharp, quick move. I groan and bear down against the intrusion as he spreads them wide and twists them back out before plunging them in again…and again. They move inside of me until I’m whimpering and gasping and begging. Until I’m arching up and writhing under him. Until there is nothing in the world other than heat and sweat and his strong fingers and tender lips on my skin. They disappear for only a moment before I’m filled once again, but now his hips have settled between mine, and it’s so much more. It’s so much pressure and he’s splitting me open and my legs wrap around his hips, unable to decide whether they want to hold him back or pull him close. I’m shaking with need or pain or pleasure and I can’t even tell which it is, but he doesn’t wait for me to decide before his hips begin to rock in short, quick bursts. He lifts his head from the bend of my neck, and our gazes connect and hold as he adjusts his movements each time until…

“Fuck…Ethan.”

I cry out and fight the urge to drop my head back because as much as I want to let myself get swept away in the sting and the fullness and the jolts of pleasure that rush through me each time his hips snap forward, I want to watch him more. His pupils are wide, and there is only a hint of green left encircling the black, and even with sweat beading on his forehead and his breath coming in harsh pants, he’s wearing the softest of smiles as if he knows that he is the best I’ve ever experienced. As if he knows that I would happily trade every other sexual encounter I’ve ever had for one more moment with him like this.

I tighten my calves against his hips, pulling him deeper as I roll and writhe and squirm against him. He pulls back, slipping from me completely before thrusting forward to breech me again and again with long, deep strokes. My fingers dig into his back as he rides me with slow, deliberate care, each movement driving me higher. Closer to him and further from the rest of existence. Any pain has long ago disappeared, and he is nothing but pleasure and lightning as I careen toward the edge of the world.

The air is pulled from my lungs as he vanishes, pulling from me completely and leaving me empty and searching, but then he’s prying my legs from around his waist as he kisses his way from my inner knee up toward my body to suck at the sensitive skin where my leg joins my hip until its tingling and sore, and I know a bruise will blossom there by morning. He places my calves on his shoulders and takes himself in his hand. His thighs are pressed against my ass, and every inch of me is so sensitive and overstimulated that I can feel his downy leg hair tremble against my skin as he shakes with exertion. As he lines himself up, his expression is one of awe and reverence, and every moment I spend with him touching me leaves me feeling exactly that. His gaze finds mine as he thrusts forward, filling me again with one long, slow movement. I want to lose myself in his eyes, but his angle has changed with my legs like this, and every inch of him spreads me wide and sends sparks up my spine and he’s so deep inside me that it’s hard to remember how to breathe. His eyes fall away as my head drops back to the pillow with a cry.

“Just like that, beautiful?” His voice is a deep, panted rumble against my skin as he falls forward, nearly bending me in half as his forearms land beside my head.

“Yes. God, please like this. Please, Ethan.”

Our cheeks are pressed together, and my breath rustles the soft auburn strands that fill my vision as he pulls back and pauses with the head of his cock barely inside of me, stretching me wider. The rough scrape ofhis evening stubble rasps across my freshly shaven skin, and then his mouth is covering mine as he snaps his hips forward. I scream into his kiss. My hands reach down to clutch at anything I can find, grasping at the sheets and his ribs and hips as he presses and presses, leaning his weight onto my legs. He is so very, very deep inside of me, and I never want him anywhere else.

Every drive of his hips, every plunge of his cock steals away my words and my sanity and there has never been anything like this. Never anything like Ethan. I lean up, chasing his lips as his body shifts and rocks against mine, our tongues tangling as I seize the sides of his thighs, pulling him to me as I grind back against him. We’re curled tightly around one another, our limbs messy and tangled as our bodies fall into a smooth rhythm together like this is something we’ve done since the universe was young. He slides in and out of me, filling me completely in a way no one else ever has, and I clench down, making his movements stutter and his exhale rush out with a curse.

Sweat is dripping from his skin to blend with mine, and the pressure is building inside of me. A stream of “gods” and “yesses” and “deeper” and “please” and “more” escapes between my grunts, and I’m nearly sobbing with the perfection of this moment and my desperation to live in it for the rest of time. He shifts his weight onto one arm and reaches the other between us to grasp me tightly. I scream his name into the universe as my release floods warm and sticky between us, and Ibarely notice as his head falls to my shoulder and heat erupts inside of me as he follows me into oblivion.

Ethan’s fingers trail along the tattoos that cover my ribs. Our skin is hot and sticky, our souls tender and sated as we fall back down to earth together.

“Promise me you won’t ever scare me like that again.” I mumble the words into his hair.

“Scare you?” He sounds genuinely confused as he shifts to lean up, his eyes searching mine carefully.

“When you got upset that you didn’t know my professional name.” Ethan’s hair is longer now than it was when we met, and I reach up to push an auburn lock behind his ear. “It felt like I’d done something to upset you, like I’d scared you away somehow. I’ve barely found you, and I was afraid I was going to lose you.”

“Oh, Blue.” His breath is warm as he leans close to whisper against my lips. “You couldn’t pry me away from you, okay?”

When he leans back up, his emerald eyes are smiling at me. “I just panicked for a minute over the thought that maybe if I don’t know enough about you, like where you display your work or…” He snickers. “Little things like, I don’t know…your name, that it somehow makes this thing between us less…” he pauses, searching for the right word, “solid, I guess.”

I laugh and slip my fingers into his hair, curling them tightly and dragging his mouth to mine. I taste him and worship him and let our lips play until they’re swollen and red, and only when he pulls away with a contented sigh do I let the relief swirling in my soul finally settle. “I am yours for as long as you’ll have me. No matter what.”

He looks so open and vulnerable as his eyes hover close to mine, and his smile is wide enough that his nose freckles scrunch, and the tiny dimple in his left cheek makes an appearance. When he looks at me like this - like I'm worth knowing, worth loving, like I'm his entire world - it’s so easy to let go of my past. So easy to get lost in his evergreen eyes as I count the small brown flecks that speckle the edges of his irises. When he looks at me like this, it feels like coming home. I'm happy with the life I've built for myself, but until Ethan stumbled into my world, I hadn't realized just how much I'd been missing the simple contentment of belonging to someone.

A sense of serenity and belonging so deep and unshakable that I feel inexorably connected to the rest of the universe is something I've only found wandering misty beaches or through forests, listening to the sounds of remote and unspoiled beauty and life untouched by man…but I feel it around Ethan now too. It's in the touch ofhis fingertips and the taste of the salt on his neck, the quiet, stuttering gasps he breathes against my ear, and the way he whispers my name in a voice filled with wonder and worship and passion and love. It’s in the way he’s captured my heart and my soul and the way the universe seems to exist only to bring us together.Being with Ethan is like finding the meaning of life.

---