She is a statue beneath his gentle explorations, frozen at first in a tremulous kind of uncertainty and then locked there again by a soft realization that turns her blood to feathers in her veins. “Nightlock,” she whispers, at once so fragile and so breathless, turning her head to watch him discover every inch of her body. Every ridge of stained bone, and the motes of raw skin around them, every strand of copper hair and even the ones that fade abruptly to bone white. She can’t close her eyes, can’t even blink for fear that doing so will disturb this moment, disturb the tension building between them that feels like anything but. She reaches for him, finds it so impossible to be still when his lips are so soft against her skin and every nerve ending is surging up like a heliotrope in the light of his sun.
“Nightlock,” she whispers again, and the word is transforming on her lips, no longer a name but a prayer. She murmurs it against the silver of his hip, leaves it in a kiss over that point of bone beneath hard, lean muscle and then trails lower to leave more in the hollow below. She wants to give him more, wants to explore him as he explores her, claim every inch of this beautiful body with her smiles and her kisses and those lips curved in the shape of his name. But she’s trembling, breathing hard like her ribs are being crushed around her heart and everything is coming out in small gasps.
Except it doesn’t hurt, this falling in love.
And maybe that’s because she’s still too busy falling.
His lips find her inner thigh and she bows her antlered brow so breathlessly, closing her eyes and tucking her nose against her own shoulder. She can feel the heat of her breath there, feel those little aching huffs that move her chest like the swell of crashing waves on the shore. She feels entirely weightless, feels untethered by his touch until it is all she is aware of, all she knows - until his weight settles against her back and she is undone by him.
She cries out softly when he pulls her back into the curve of his hips, cries out again when he sinks inside her and her body spasms painfully around him. “Nightlock,” she says again, more whimper than whisper as she eases back into the crook of his body. She is surprised by the pain though, turns her head until those delicate lips find the leg that grips her side so carefully, until she feels his mouth against her neck, against her spine. Hears him murmur her name against her shoulder with a groan that sends electricity humming beneath her skin, makes her forget all about the stinging pain. In its place something else builds inside her, a half-lidded haziness that grows with each thrust, each squeeze of his legs pulling her back and into him.
And then it’s more, like something is building in him, too. Like this hazy pleasure coursing sunshine through her veins in spilling into him. She gasps, huffs softly against each thrust until her voice is a knot in her chest and the sound on her lips is a breathless mewling she can barely hold inside. There are no more wasted seconds on worries that she isn’t good enough, isn’t beautiful enough. That these bones and this blood and the weight on her shoulders makes her something he could never love so openly. They are things that seem silly now, so unimportant compared to everything else.
She cries out again, soft and aching at the tension building between her hips as he grips her mane and drags her back beneath him again and again, at the way sunshine turns to ecstacy, a world awash in light and fire. She isn’t aware of the markings the race up along her back, bright gold rosettes that gleam like ore buried in the copper of her skin, isn’t aware of anything but the moment that they race towards together until they are falling, falling, and she is a symphony of soft sound as her body tightens in waves of spasming pleasure around him.
When he lays his head against her shoulder, she turns her face to him, brushes endless kisses across his nose and his face and the soft whorl beneath his forelock. Anything she can reach until he dismounts and she can reach everything, can press in against his side and remember the beautiful weight of him against her back, the ecstacy of pain and wild pleasure he sowed so carefully inside her. The ragged way she breathes makes it impossible to say anything, but she doesn’t need words to tell him she loves him, doesn’t have to say it for him to understand. He moves to hold her again and she all but pushes beneath his neck to claim her place against his chest, against the beautiful heart that beats her favorite song. She feels his lungs move, feels him take a breath to speak, but the words that fall like stardust on her ears nearly blow her away.
I am completely yours, Wonder.
She blinks, her breathing no less ragged than it was in the moments before as she tries to make sense of such an impossible declaration - something that feels too big for where it settles in her chest, carving a home out. But in doing so it frees the words that must have been trapped there because they surge to the lips she presses to the hollow of his mouth as if they’ve always been meant for there. “And I’m yours, Nightlock. Always.”
She kisses his mouth and his jaw, traces a line of them down his throat as though each faded silver dapple is meant just to hold them. When she moves to press her lips to the steady beat of his heart, something inside her stirs. A thought or a feeling, a memory of the future. She pauses, leans closer to close her teeth over the sensitive skin there, and then soothes it with another kiss. But that pull is still there, like a tether in her chest knotted and strong and binding her to him, binding them by the deep feelings they share together. She inhales sharply, pushes her nose against his chest and closes her eyes because something tells her she must. An impulse that feels like a moment remembered. A moment from the future.
“I love you.” She says, and the confession (the promise) lurches from the lips she presses to his heart to bury itself in the silver and faded-steel dapples. When she opens her eyes again, shades of teal ocean-tides and impossible skies, she finds the image of her flower-wreathed antlers settled amidst the gray of his chest. She blinks, stunned and, though she cannot possibly explain it, so immensely satisfied. She touches her lips to it, tastes the sweetness of his skin as though doing so might share its secrets with her. But instead all she feels is a blossoming warmth over her own chest, a heat that pin-wheels in soft cobwebs over that bright copper skin. When she looks to see what that feeling is, she finds the image of Nightlock’s wings unfurled in all their feathered beauty across her chest.
i am brambles but i am tangled in your love