Sarah
This feels like the very first time. There’s nothing frantic about this. Each touch, every stroke of his fingers, is calculated and meticulous, honed to my pleasure.
Sydney’s hands graze up my back as I continue to straddle him, my thighs locked against his hips. I grind against him, growing desperate with need.
His fingertips drag down my spine in a touch that sends chills cascading over my body, like he’s hitting every nerve and setting them aflame.
There’s nothing in my head. My mind is blissfully quiet as every ounce of my energy focuses on the way he’s touching me and how he tastes when I kiss him again and again.
“Sarah.” He growls low in his throat when I bite down on his lip. I grind against his cock, nothing but my leggings and the towel he’s wearing around his waist to separate us.
“Please,” I whimper. “Please, Sydney. I need this. I need you inside of me. I’m desperate.” I don’t even recognize my own voice. Whoever’s speaking sounds like a siren, her voice low and sultry.
He gasps when I pull away and lean down to brush a kiss over his neck, raking my teeth over his skin in the same way he did to me only moments ago. I have the sudden urge to bite him. To clamp down on his shoulder and sink my teeth into his skin until I taste blood.
My wolf is dormant, too young to emerge, but she trembles inside of me.
He grips the back of my neck to hold me there, my teeth leaving small indents on his shoulder. His other hand fumbles with my leggings, pulling them down over my hips.
“Don’t stop doing that,” he rasps as he runs his hand over the slope of my bare hip. He jerks beneath me when I bite down again, sucking a bruise into his skin.
This is insane. What we’re doing right now–to each other–feels so wrong but also so right. Maybe I feel this way because he’s the only person I’ve ever been with before, but something about this feels… instinctual. Natural. Like it’s a part of who I am.
My senses are going haywire. He smells divine. His touch warms me through and through.
He pulls my leggings down farther, taking my panties with them, but in this position there’s no way to get them off completely without me having to get off his lap, and I’m not budging.
I kiss my way back up his neck. My lips are swollen when I kiss his mouth again, and his hand tightens on the back of my neck, his fingers tangled in my hair.
“Please,” I beg, panting.
Sydney opens his eyes to slits as I pull away to look down at him fully. I rest my hands on his chest. I can feel his heart racing beneath my palm. Bruises dot his right shoulder surrounded by small bite marks, nothing that broke the skin.
Yet.
I meet his gaze and feel the mate bond sweep through me and snap in place like it’s the first time all over again.
He feels it too. His gaze is heavy and dark with need, and his grip on my hips tightens to the point of pain before he rolls me over so I’m beneath him, on my belly.
He rips my leggings off in one swift motion.
“Sarah,” he says in a tone I’ve never heard before. It’s like he’s holding back a growl, like he’s about to shift, letting his wolf side free. “Do not move.”
My breath catches in my throat as he lowers himself to cover me with his body.
A memory flutters forward from the recesses of my mind. An obscure detail about shifters I’d long forgotten, having buried it away with the rest of my schooling.
Sydney traces a line up my spine with his tongue. My eyes nearly roll back in my head.
Synapsis fire. My nerve endings erupt with a new kind of pleasure, something ancient and deeply ingrained in the part of me that’s shifter.
Shifters have special nerves in their back, spine, and shoulders. Once, long ago, when we were more wolf than man, mates used to scent each other, marking each other with their tongues, not just their teeth. Little bites would accrue all the way down the spine, the base of the neck, the wrists. This occurred back in the times of knotting, when shifters were scarce, and they had to do what needed to be done to produce more children.
It was a ritual. An event between mates to make their bond official. It’s primal and feral, and he’s doing it to me.
But we’re modern wolves; such practices are a thing of the past.
“Ohhh,” I moan when he bites down on the place where my shoulder meets my neck. He sucks the skin there, peppering it with a bruise. His cock rests against the globes of my ass, rigid and hot, but he isn’t in a hurry.
I flood with desire, though. I wiggle my hips, chasing any kind of friction I can find. It’s not enough.
“I told you not to move,” he rasps, breathless. He bites down on my shoulder blade, his teeth sinking ever so slightly into my skin but not hard enough to leave a mark.
I grip the sheets, crying out as he kisses another bruise onto my skin and moves on, his tongue gliding down my shoulder.
He presses one of his hands to the mattress while the other snakes between me and the bed, his fingers wrapping around my throat. He starts grinding his hips, his cock, against my ass, and his breathing picks up as he so carefully, so thoughtfully, searches for the perfect place to leave his mark.
His knee slides between my legs, nudging them apart.
“Mate,” he rasps against my spine. His breath is heavy and uneven, and I sense him losing himself in the feel of me as he slides his cock into my pussy. He hisses a breath, and I squirm beneath him, arching my hips up to meet him, to take him deeper.
Goddess, I’m losing it. I grip the sheets and cry out his name as he thrusts as deep as I can allow.
“Goddess, Sarah,” he pants, groaning with satisfaction.
I’m beyond words. Every stroke of his cock has me coming unglued, my mind in shambles, and my body thrumming with heat.
I bite down on my lip and turn my heated moans to hums as pressure builds in my lower belly. He kisses my nape–sucking and gently biting–and it feels so intimate, so excruciatingly sweet compared to the way he’s absolutely ravishing me everywhere else.
“Grab the headboard,” he says, brushing the words over the top of my ear.
Oh, Goddess. What now? I’m not sure how much more I can take as I reach up, wrapping my fingers around the slates in his headboard.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he whispers against my shoulder blade, but I sense an edge in his voice. “Do you trust me?”
“Yes,” I moan as his thrusts slow and drags himself out of me fully, the head of his cock teasing my entrance.
He pants a breath, running his fingers down my side as I strain to keep my sweaty hands locked on the headboard.
“You’re beautiful,” he whispers, his touch turning more rough, more exploratory. He slaps my ass, and I whine with pleasure, biting down on my lip so hard I taste blood. “You’re mine.”
There’s something about being this wanted that makes me turn molten. His possession is fire to my blood, and I’d do anything to hear him say it again. Mine. I belong to him. I am his mate. I am his.
He enters me again, slowly. It’s so gentle I could cry. He puffs out a breath, ragged and strained, as he holds himself still and drinks in the feel of me clamped around him. He adjusts my hips so I’m resting on my knees. My hands slip down the slats in the headboard, but I keep holding on.
He curves his body over mine and pumps into me, one hand holding my hair back, the other resting on the mattress beside us, propping him up.
A moan slips out before I can bite it back. Tension coils as tight as a bow string in my thighs and belly.
“I’m so close,” I whimper.
“Quiet,” he orders, his voice low and full of smoke.
This is different. This is a ritual. I am being worshiped like my body is an altar, and he is laying out his offering, and my blessing is blood.
He bites me on the little knob at the base of my neck, where my shoulders meet. I feel pain shimmer down my back, down my spine, and settle in the pit of my stomach. I cry out, and he lets go of my hair to clamp his hand over my mouth.
He holds me there, his teeth sinking into my skin, and thrusts into me once, then twice, and I come undone.
My orgasm floods my mind before exploding through my body. The tension snaps–sharp and hot–and then I’m shaking, my pussy spasming around his cock while he edges closer to his own release.
He holds on with his teeth like he’s trying to keep me in place, causing the mark to sink deeper into my skin.
There’s no doubt it’ll leave a scar.
And the results are… stupefying.
He lets me go with a pop, panting, and drags me away from the headboard, roughly flipping me onto my back. The mark stings with pain, but I ignore it. His face is washed with longing as his mouth meets mine in a feral kiss. He enters me again roughly, groaning without restraint, and I meet him thrust for thrust until we’re both crying out, and I’m totally, completely, dizzy with pleasure.
He cups the back of my head and presses my face into the crook of his neck.
“Mark me, Sarah,” he says through gritted teeth as my body locks up again, another orgasm drowning me in ecstasy I don’t have the words to describe.
“Oh, Goddess!” I scream, blind with pleasure, and squeeze my eyes shut against the torrent of tension snapping loose and flooding me completely.
I taste him, his blood, unaware that I’ve bitten down at the base of his neck. He grunts, hissing out a breath, and comes inside of me, filling me with warmth.
I only let go when my body starts to feel hazy with the need to take a breath.
I open my eyes, panting, my head knocked back in exhaustion, and meet his gaze.
He looks… happy. Utterly, wholly, and completely happy.
He lowers his head to kiss me.
“I love you,” I whisper, my voice barely audible.
“I waited so long for you,” he replies in the same breathless, exhausted tone.
* * *
I stare at the headboard as I sit naked on the edge of the bed. Sydney is beside me, turning me to face the wall while dabbing at the mark between my shoulder blades.
“How did you learn how to do that?” I ask, my eyes finding shapes in the texture in the paint on his wall.
“Do what?” His voice is scratchy as he gently runs a damp rag over the mark. I wince, and he grimaces, murmuring, “I’m sorry.”
I was right about it being deep. It hasn’t stopped bleeding yet, but I already refused, twice, when he wanted to use his healing powers on it.
I lick my lips. “You were… scenting me, in the old way.”
He chuckles softly. “I don’t know why people don’t do it anymore.”
I do smell like him. It’s an almost overwhelming feeling. Like he’s everywhere, like my entire body is now bound to him in this way.
“I don’t think our kind was ever meant to stray so far from what we are intrinsically,” he continues.
“Will you do that to me every time?” The words slip out before I can stop them.
He rests the rag against the mark. “I don’t think I could stop myself from doing it again.”
Now I’m the one chuckling. I look at him over my shoulder, smiling. His eyes crease with pleasure.
Knotting, though… the thought of that makes me bite my lip with sudden apprehension. He knows exactly what I’m thinking about, and his cheeks go a bit red as he clears his throat.
“We should sleep,” he says.
“Are you tired?” I’m not. Energy like I’ve never felt before runs wild through my veins. I have a sudden sense–a sudden desire, really– to shift, even though I’m still too young.
At least, I think.
“I’m not.” His eyes suddenly narrow on mine. He grabs my chin. “Open your mouth.”
“Why?” I laugh, but my lips part on their own accord. His finger jabs into my mouth. I wrench away. “Hey!”
“Hold still,” he says. He brushes his finger over my lower lip, looking suddenly lost in thought, but shakes himself out of whatever he was thinking of, and runs his thumb over the edges of my top teeth. “Sarah.”
“What?” I ask when he removes his finger and fixes with me an astonished look.
“Can you shift?”
“I’ve never tried.”
“Because you’re too young. When’s your birthday?”
“I honestly have no idea,” I admit with a shrug.
He looks momentarily confused, mouthing, “You don’t know your own birthday?” but blinks, taking me by the hand.
“We have two hours until Cosette wakes up. I want to see if you can do it. Are you okay with that?”