He lowers his head.
The first touch of his lips on mine is so soft it almost isn't there. A brush. A suggestion. The ghost of a kiss that's asking permission even as it's taking it, and the tenderness of it is so at odds with everything I know about this man, everything I've seen him do with those hands and that mouth, that it breaks something open inside me that I've been holding shut for a very long time.
I make a sound. It’s smaller than a gasp or a moan. It’s something that lives in the back of my throat and sounds like the noise a person makes when they've been cold for so long that the first warmth actually hurts.
He pulls back. Looks at me. His eyes are searingly pale this close, and there's a tremor in the arm holding him above me that I would never have noticed if my hand weren't resting against his bicep, feeling the tension vibrate through the muscle like a plucked string.
"Wren."
"Yes."
"Do you want me?"
I could lie. I could say what a smart captive would say, the calculated yes that buys time and preserves options, the strategic surrender that keeps the predator calm while you look for an exit.
But the exit has been right there all along. The lock on the door that I stopped using. The fork beside the plate that he stopped wielding. The nightly ritual where he waits for me to stop him, and I never do.
I have been choosing him for days.
"Yes," I say. "I want you."
The sound he makes is not human.
It comes from somewhere deep in his chest, a low, raw, fractured thing, and his mouth is on mine before the last syllable leaves my lips. Not the gentle brush from before. This is the real kiss. The one he's been holding back. His hand comes to the back of my neck and his fingers tangle in my hair and he kisses me like I’m his salvation.
I kiss him back, and the last wall I have comes down with a sigh.
His hand slides down my body. Along my ribs, over my hip, down the outside of my thigh, and then up, pulling my leg around his waist, and I can feel him through his pants, hard and thick and pressing against me, and my hips roll toward him without my permission, chasing the pressure.
"Wren." My name in his mouth like a prayer. Like a vow. "Tell me to stop and I'll stop."
"Don't stop."
He pulls back long enough to take off his shirt, and I see his body for the first time. I've felt his forearms, his hands, his jaw, his mouth. But I've never seen him like this. Broad chest, tapered waist, the kind of body that's been built through violence and discipline rather than vanity. There are scars. A long one across his left ribs. A puckered circle on his right shoulder that I recognize from television as a bullet wound. A scatter of smaller marks across his abdomen that tell a story I don't know yet.
I reach for him. My fingers find his chest and he goes still under my touch, absolutely still, like a wild animal being touched for the first time, and I feel his breath catch and his heart slam and I realize with a clarity that makes my eyes sting:
Nobody touches this man.
People fear him. People obey him. People step out of his path and lower their eyes and do what he says because the alternativeis unthinkable. But nobody touches him. Nobody puts their hand flat against his chest and feels his heart beat and traces the ridge of a scar with their fingertip. Or watch his eyes close and his jaw clench and his whole body vibrate with the effort of not falling apart.
I'm the first.
He chose me because nobody had ever chosen me.
I'm choosing him because nobody has ever touched him.
His pants come off, and then there's nothing between us. His weight settles over me, and the full-body contact of skin on skin sends a shock through my nervous system so intense that I arch into him and gasp and he catches it with his mouth.
"Look at me," he says.
I open my eyes.
He's right there. Close enough that I can see the individual shards of color in his irises, silver and ice blue and something darker at the center. His face is stripped of everything I've seen him wear in the last eleven days. In its place is need, raw and enormous and terrifying. The need of a man who has told himself for too long that he doesn't need anything and has just discovered that he was wrong.
He pushes inside me.
Slow enough for me to feel every inch, and there are a lot of inches, and my body stretches around him with a burn that tips over into something else, something deeper and fuller and more overwhelming than anything his mouth has ever done to me. He watches my face while he enters me, watching for pain, watching for resistance, watching for the thing that would make him stop. But there isn’t anything because the fullness of him inside me doesn't feel like invasion.