Hunter’s palms stilled my knees, his smooth fingertips pressing lightly. He leaned forward slowly, until his breath was in my ear, shifting the hair at my neck in the slow, calming beat of his pulse. I turned to him, our faces inches apart as I studied him studying me, and breathed in deeply. A gentle fizzing on the air, the Light in him straining to comfort me, an enveloping warmth like a hot spring in a hidden cave, something wanting to warm and secure me all at once. Overlaying it was the sharp, depthless need I always tried to ignore, and the poised flint of his banked gaze, ready to spark to life. Oh, I thought breathlessly as we locked eyes. I’d forgotten. Hunter felt like lava-licked sea water and smelled like ozone, and yes, it was totally different from any man I’d ever known.
“Because once he’s been inside you,” he whispered in the breath of a scalding ocean, “how could any man mistake you for another?”
A final sigh stuttered out of me, my defenses unraveling, and I lowered my gaze to his sea-swept mouth.
Ah, I remembered now. He tasted different too.
His strong, solid face blurred as I leaned closer, then reappeared touching mine, lips soft and warm and waiting. The kiss started out uncertainly, a meeting and parting, desire squared and split in two. Then, the smoothest flick of his tongue and heat shot through me, a slide that numbed, like bubbling champagne hitting the tongue.
With the gentlest press of printless fingertips, he lowered me to the bed, and this time-as never before-I let him, watching the faux stars spread out overhead as he loomed above me, the glow of distant planets and forgotten origins the only witnesses to my acquiescence. They grazed my irises before I closed my eyes, winking their approval.
Five minutes later he rose to his knees, stripped off his shirt, and unbuttoned his jeans. Tenting his body over mine, he held his weight on his arms and I ran my hands along his tight biceps, over the dense rounding of the shoulders I’d been wanting to caress since seeing him shirtless, and traced where I knew that enigmatic tattoo lay, marking his back. Meanwhile I branded him with my tongue, wet warmth sliding over his chest, crisscrossing the peaks of his nipples as I pushed his jeans down using my instep. We kicked them away together, a little more rushed, slightly frantic now, and I gazed up at him, down at him…and wished for more light.
The removal of my clothing went a little more slowly, more considered as his hands worked over and down, between and in, his warrior’s artistry turned soft, but still relentless as he shaped and pressed and molded me as he pleased. My focus faded and sharpened in turn, as did my breath as he licked me into place, pressing kisses just so to ensure I stayed there.
By the time I lay naked beneath him, my body was dewy from openmouthed kisses, mind numb from those electric fingers, and my legs curled lightly around the backs of his thighs. He bent, found a breast, performed the lazy crisscross I’d fired across his nipples, and I arched back, hooked my ankles in on a moan, and rose to him.
He slid inside me like he’d been there before, like I’d drawn him a map he’d committed to memory, tracing memorized pathways on my bridging body so he could find his way there in the dark. Though coming to it late, I began to study him too.
But Hunter saw me looking, and offered a swollen smile before slipping his thumbs over my eyes, sliding his tongue between my lips, rocking forward to rest solidly at my core. All my senses shorted out as I curled around him, tightening inside. My hearing dimmed, sight snuffed, taste melting on a moan. My fingertips curled like talons on his naked back, and the safety he offered, that steady peace, the barrier between me and the rest of this heartbreaking world swept over me like a gauzy net.
And that was when his need reached in to kindle the remnants of our once-shared aureole. I hadn’t known it was possible, but there it was still living between us, sparking to life. What I thought was dead had only been banked, and I saw the same surprised realization flash across Hunter’s face before he plunged into me again, mouth and middle, separating those soft places while I simultaneously opened for more.
The connection was like electricity surging across naked distance to collide with a bolt of lightning; one force instantly recognizing the other. Seconds earlier I was wishing he could go deeper, and now he did…into my thoughts and knowledge, my experiences and past, the flash of a hard memory causing a tear to fall over his cheek. This both was and wasn’t the aureole we’d shared eight months earlier, more of an apparition born of our need, stark black and white line drawings blurring as one rushed into the next.
Our individual memories of the last few months fused to make a new story. My knowledge of how he felt about Marlo’s death was no longer empathetic. I owned it now, and gave him my recollection in return, our shared guilt shorting out as the memories repelled one another. There was a flashback from the last time we’d kissed, tucked in the shadows of a boneyard maze, and the power we’d denied then flamed to life now, redoubling itself so we both stiffened in the wake of its current. My memories differed from his only in that they appeared in boldface, but otherwise we shared them, like we were both scales, and the aureole the beam balancing out the raw power streaming through our split pulse.
But it wasn’t a bridled thing. The power turned on us suddenly, pulsing and alive, and we groaned together, bartering for breath as those shared memories fragmented into incomplete and current thoughts.
More…love this…can’t stop…thank you…
And, finally, Fuck. Now.
His orgasm drenched me in his aura, I could see it in our joining, and the syllables of my name arched gold across his tongue, into my mouth and down to warm where my bruised heart slammed mercilessly in my chest. When I cried out, sending my red aura channeling across to saturate his soul, it was in the tongue of the same ancient power that caused stars to shatter in the sky, elemental chaos reigning, the rich twining of color trailing behind like the tail of a shooting star.
I opened my eyes in the last moment, Hunter clasped close, and stared at the stars above. Each one looked cocked and ready to shoot. Yet as I gloried in the rightness and oneness and random perfection of an observable universe, I knew even celestial bodies were subject to certain laws. Strongly opposing elements only came together, brightly, because of so many other far-off deaths.
“Your map is fucked up.” My voice was disembodied as we lay in the near darkness on that narrow bed, and raw from the yelling I’d done before we made love. Hunter had gone downstairs to retrieve some bottled water-hadn’t even gotten shot in the ass by fatal arrows while doing it-but I didn’t attempt to escape or follow. I was boneless and numb, parched from my loss of breath and dizzy from the gift of his.
“No,” he said, reclining beside me as he took a long swig from his bottle, one strong thigh bent and resting against mine, the other hanging off the bed. “The constellations are correct. The rest are frozen stars.”
I glanced back at the sky and only then noted the stars I’d thought were positioned incorrectly were all blazing more brightly than the others. I should have known I’d never catch Hunter making an astronomical mistake. He took the reading of the sky far too seriously. I was a novice, and that was being generous. “Frozen?”
“Black holes. All that’s left of giant stars that have evolved, contracted, and died.”
I shifted, trying to make out his features, but I was prone, and much of his face was hidden by my pillow. But his silhouette showed he was gazing up at his treasured recreation. “You track the death of stars?”
“Only the large ones.” He paused uncertainly before continuing. His voice rumbled deeply; I could feel it vibrating through the pillow beneath my head. “They have the shortest lives.”
I had enough trouble remembering the days of the week on the Western calendar, so while I didn’t know exactly what he was talking about, I did detect the sad undercurrent to his whisper. “Why?”