hold my hand, it's a long way down to the bottom of the river
There is only you. He tells her between kisses, and she might not have believed him if it weren’t for the way he held her so close, so tight like he was afraid she might fall away into the sky if he ever let go. He kisses her dapples again and again, traces patterns along the curve of flesh and bone and she knows that not even the stars burn as hot as she does where his lips have been. She shifts in his embrace and he shifts too, to pull her close, touching a kiss to each vertebrae and she never realized she had so many. “Offspring.” She says, she whispers, she begs with her mouth against his damp black skin.
She is suddenly terrified by the weight of her feelings for him, by the intensity of the fear she feels at the thought that she might ever lose him as she has lost everyone else. In this moment, with the heat of his mouth pressed to the shivering of her dark, dappled skin, it is impossible to think that she could ever live a life that did not include him. Disappearing with her fear into the deepest parts of this forsaken forest no longer felt like even the remotest possibility for the way she suspected she would shatter into dust without him. This was the love she had always resented her mother for, this wild, thinkless love that you would do anything for. It was a destructive kind of love, so selfish, so greedy, burning too hot to hold on to for long. But it was also a love, or at least it would be soon, that once you’ve known it you cannot live without. Everything feels empty in comparison.
“I will have all of you,” she vows when he asks, her dark eyes bright and hungry where they alight on his face, “I want every part of you.”
He shifts and pulls away and for a moment the space between them feels as jarring as ice pressed against her skin. But instead he circles her and there is something in her belly that responds to the possessiveness of his gesture. When he pauses again and pulls her even closer than before, she complies, fitting perfectly within the curve of his massive body. His teeth touch her neck and she can feel her belly tighten in response, a shiver of surprise, of carnal delight washing through her body. “Offspring.” She whispers again, says his name like a prayer even as curls against his side.
But then her teeth flash to the line of his jaw, quick and gentle, forcing him to look at her. “Don’t do that,” she tells him with a soft frown, the uncertainty in her voice replaced with new fire burning in her dark eyes, “don’t put me up on a pedestal. You’re undeserving of nothing, least of all me.” Her teeth find his skin again but it is even gentler this time, and before she pulls away she marks the place with a kiss. “My night, my days, all of them are yours.”
She settles beside him again, quieter now but for the heat growing in her belly with each touch of his lips to the tremble of her dappled skin. When she speaks again her voice is little more than a quiet hum of sound against his skin. “Before, when I left you, did you look for me?” Her face lifts, another stolen kiss pressed to the soft skin at the side of his mouth. “I went back. I looked for you, but you weren’t there.”
Isle
