Page 231 of A Winding Wave of Magic
Want you, his thoughts echoed again and again.Need you.
Love you.
Or did I only imagine that as he briefly set me aside to peel off his own wet layers? Because then it was just us on that plane of stone, an ancient sort of altar made by the essence of time. It was just the water and the earth to witness what we were to eachother. Words seemed to dissolve into the bond, inadequate to the task of expressing everything flowing through us.
It had never felt like this before, when the unwanted thoughts of previous partners had been so distasteful, so utterlydisruptiveto my pleasure to the point where pain had often intervened instead. I wasn’t sure where my mind ended and Jonathan’s began. Every scratch, touch, and kiss came from a place of raw instinct here in the depths of the earth, in one of the places where once, we were in fact animals and nothing else.
Somehow, he anticipated my wants before I could articulate them to myself; even more miraculously, I seemed to be doing the same for him.
The way his fingers explored the space between my legs.
The way my hand knew the shape of his erection.
The way his mouth had already memorized the shape of my lips.
The way our bodies melted together as he slid between my thighs.
The savage in me connected with the one in him. Together, we formed a palimpsest of instinct and desire, a million layers of everything we were and would ever be, indistinguishably aligned.
A perfect mille-feuille, delectable art, unbearably sweet.
Balanced on his elbows as he hovered above me, Jonathan took my face between my hands, thumbs sweeping across my cheekbones with the adoration of a painter’s brush. His gaze found mine again, wide and full of something like love.
Are you sure? Even his thoughts quavered with need.
My hands memorized the tight sinews of his thighs, buttocks, and back.Forever.
It didn’t matter that the word had no meaning when we were facing the end. I couldn’t contemplate death in a moment like this, when I was so full of life. Especially when Jonathan’skiss engulfed me completely, our bodies fully joined, and any remaining barrier between us disappeared for good. As he found my darkest spaces, swelling and holding me closer, his thoughts found mine like a rope pulled tight.
You areminenow, he informed me as he thrust deeper. Filled me completely.
I stretched, eager to hold him there. Words were too weak to express everything I was feeling.
Shock at the absoluteinevitability of each other.
Wonder, then, that either of us had a mate at all.
Joy, that it should be each other.
And then, at last, acceptance.
It was like the final turn of a key in a lock.
There was no end. There was no beginning. There was no me or him, just one soul, one magic, reunited at last after eons split.
It expanded, embracing both of us, filling the cave with light and maybe love and something else I couldn’t name but knew just the same for the way it choked my heart full and grew into a song that poured into the rocks and stone and earth around us.
“Cassandra!” My name turned into a cry, a yowl that shook from the earth to the heavens beyond.
Our bodies poured into each other as the magic shot through us both, then clapped with a sudden explosion that exiled the darkness with light.
Our light.
My hand fell to the water’s edge, fingers dipped to the surface as he shouted my name again and bit my neck, my shoulder, anywhere he could.
I Saw the moon.
I Saw the stars.
