Page 254 of The Fall
“Please,” breaks from me.
His thumb pushes past the ring of muscle, testing, before he replaces it with one finger sliding in to the knuckle. A second finger follows immediately, spreading me open. I keen into his mouth, thighs trembling around his waist.
He slides up my body, never breaking the kiss or removing his fingers, and grinds down into me. He rolls his cock against mine, both of us leaking, both of us sliding through the mess on our stomachs. Our hot, slick skin moves together while he finger-fucks me, driving into my prostate.
“There,” I gasp against his lips. “Right there, don’t stop?—”
He doesn’t. His fingers curl with every thrust, nailing my prostate while his cock grinds against mine in the mess of precome and sweat between us. The obscene squelch of lube fills the room as he adds a third finger.
“More,” I beg, lost in the wet glide of his touch and the rough rub of our cocks as they slide together.
He grinds deep into me with his hips and I cling to his shoulders. He twists inside me, and the moan he pulls from me could wake the entire floor. Heat pools low in my belly, spreading through my veins like wildfire as he drops his forehead to mine.
He drags my lower lip between his teeth and bites, then sucks the sting away. My cock jerks, leaking steadily, the slide between us even slicker. I hook a leg over his hip, ankle digging into his ass, pulling him impossibly closer.
“Yes,” I breathe, barely a sound. “Yes.” My hole clenches around him, trying to keep them exactly where he is. The pressure is perfect, too much and not enough. “Feels?—”
I arch into him, pleading for more. More, God, more. More of this ache that feels like the only cure for itself. My fingernails rake down his back as our mouths crash together, messy and desperate, tongue and teeth. His touch angles just right, a fourth finger teasing at my rim while three work inside, and I’m right there, right on the edge, muscles coiling tight?—
His teeth skim my throat. “Say my name when you come.”
The world shatters. Release surges through me. I keen into his mouth, screaming, “Blair,” and he captures my shout with his kiss, swallowing the sound to keep it for himself. I’m clinging to him, he’s claiming me, my hands are tangled in his hair, refusing to let go as he tumbles over the edge with me. His heat spills across my skin, and I catch his moan this time as he shudders apart.
We collapse into each other, limbs entwined. A quivering exhale sounds, his or mine, I can’t tell. “Blair,” I whisper. “Fuck, Blair.” Our heartbeats fall into rhythm, slowing together as sweat cools over our skin. Every breath Blair draws pulls me with it.
I could stay inside this hush forever, every inch of me mapped by his touch. His hand drifts lazily across my back, his touch skating the ridges of my spine.Don’t let go. Not now. Not ever.
“I love you,” he breathes. “So much it terrifies me sometimes.”
The pad of my thumb finds the sharp edge of his jaw, follows its curve to where it softens beneath his ear. Why does love always feel like holding your breath underwater, waiting for either salvation or the sea to claim you? I’ve carried him in dreams and daylight, our past and present blurring untilour love has become its own haunting. I’m envious of him. He hasn’t woken up in a different life with the ghost of another still burning in his chest, or watched himself fail what he needed most.
If fate rips him away again, if there’s a universe where I wake up alone—again—I won’t survive.
His gaze meets mine as the quiet between us stretches wide and golden.
“Me, too,” I say.
“I love you,” he breathes as he kisses me, over and over and over again. “I love you, I love you.”
I lie on my side, propped on an elbow, my body angled toward Blair’s. Moonbeams lay stripes of borrowed light over the slope of his shoulder as he sleeps with one arm thrown over his head. A dark strand of hair has fallen across his forehead. I brush it away. The clock on the nightstand glows: 2:37 a.m.
“Blair,” I whisper. He turns, his face burrowing against my neck, his arm wrapping around my waist.
This bed held me once before, when I thought I’d finally learned how to stand. Peace had settled into me—or what I mistook for peace. I wondered then how it was possible to feel so complete with my past in fragments. Feeling that was the beginning of the end.
His breath warms my collarbone, steady as tides. I thread my hand into the soft hair at his nape. He lets out a low sound in his sleep, pulling me closer. How many times has he reached for me in the dark, in how many lives?
The moonlight shifts, painting new shadows across his back. Time keeps its steady march while I lie here, again.Againimplies I’ve done this before, implies I’ll do it once more, implies an ending I can’t see.
We’re moving forward on a track laid out clean and straight, and I can’t see a single switch to change our direction. Those broken images that surface in my nightmares—Blair’s blood on my hands, water rushing through shattered glass, the fall—are getting more insistent, like fingers tapping at my consciousness, demanding to be let in.
I want to rage against whatever decided I should remember enough to fear but not enough to prevent. And I want to stay this man—the one who has his trust, the one he reaches for in sleep. I want to be the first face he sees in the morning. I want to be his constant shore in the darkness. There was a time I was none of those things, and going back to that, to a life without him, would be the end of me.
I wish, fuck, I wish I knew where this ended, where we fell. And I wish?—
Blair, if wishes live anywhere, let them find you.
There’s no map for this, no compass pointing toward safety or tomorrow, only the hush of his breathing and my stubborn hope that maybe this time, just this once, love is enough.
