so we let our shadows fall away like dust
He is so still while she circles him, so still with her lips against his skin, her tongue tasting the hollows between bone and smooth muscle, that for a moment she almost forgets who it is she has hidden behind the shadows. That those eyes are steel grey and wicked, the eyes of a predator watching easy prey. She remembers when he growls and turns into the dark looking for her, reaching, though she remains too far away to touch. But she forgets again when he groans, when the sound is more man than beast, when her pale, wandering lips touch him in all of the places they shouldn’t. She forgets, too, that she shouldn’t tease him this way, not the beast. He may seem complacent now beneath her blindfold, quiet beneath her kisses and soft nips, but she is in no way the one in control here.
She pauses at his shoulder and he turns to her, softer, and she stills, suddenly compliant. It is the softness that lures her, the unexpectedness of it, and she eases closer, pushes the velvet of that pale and bright nose beneath his jaw, using the momentum to lift his head enough to slip under his neck and against his chest, against a place that makes nowhere else feel as much like home. “Stillwater.” She tries in a voice like silver, like starlight, like too many unanswered wishes. But the way he crushes her against him is the only real answer she requires to know that it isn’t him. Had he stopped fighting for her? The question is like a parasite gnawing through her thoughts, slipping in where it shouldn’t and festering until all the rest had been tainted by it, too.
“Come back.” She tried, kissing his neck and his jaw and his throat, lighting accidental fires with the ache of desperation growing in her chest, the ache of missing him. “Please, Stillwater.”
He groans again, and she cannot tell if it is beast or man, but he shakes his dark head at her and holds her tighter, crushing her between the muscle of his neck and chest. She exhales a moan, a quiet sound, a defeated sound, knowing she could flex her magic and force him back but somehow she cannot find the will to do so. He is so practiced in his manipulations, so effortless, and it is easy to fall into the illusion of being wanted, of being enough – easy enough that when she kisses the man and beast kisses her back with a fire she cannot match, she bends to him.
She is not made of stone, not carved from marble, so when he claims her with his mouth with a kiss that could set the stars afire, she submits. It is reflex, it is instinct, it is the desire to be wanted; it is molten sunlight in her veins. But unlike before, there is no fire in her chest for him, no knot of urgency pushing her on from deep in her belly. It is the heat he hungers for, a lust paler than his own, but it is shallow and empty and all she can give to him, to the beast.
He releases her and she lets the light and shadow fall away from her flesh, lets the armor disappear like dust so that he can reach her skin, so that she can feel his heat and his lips and his teeth when they sink into her blue oceans. He keeps her locked in the kiss, using his weight and his size to force her back, and for a moment the freedom makes her wonder if it is Stillwater, if he still fights for her. But he pulls away and opens his eyes and they are as grey as they were before, as wrong and beautiful as they had been when she filled them with shadow. Her brow furrows with regret, with disappoint, and her eyes darken to a brown the color of damp earth.
In the moment before the beast returns to her, she reaches out that delicate nose, pushes aside the strands of a dark forelock where they fall across such strange eyes. It is a soft gesture, the kind reserved for the man he holds at bay, the one that, even now, her heart reaches for. But this softness is for the beast, for the one who slips forward to push his chest against hers, to pull at the tangles of her mane in a way that tells her what it is he wants from her. “It isn’t the same.” She breathes against his neck, working the dark skin over with careful teeth, even as he rakes his painfully down her withers. “You can’t force me to want you.”
He can though, in that hollow way she feels like an ache beneath her skin. It is still Stillwater’s face, still his skin and his scent and his lips that he buries her in, that she is drowning in. Still his body that would take her, that she would be sated by even in this empty way. She knows she would be pliant beneath him, arched with pleasure between his knees and beneath those jaws closed over the crest of her neck to hold her still. But the fire would never bloom for him, not like it had for Stillwater. She doesn’t realize that this doesn’t matter to him though, that his pleasure in her body comes from more than just the pleasure of man and woman, that it would come at the cost of her short, unimportant life.
Maybe this is why those grey eyes don’t frighten her as they should, why she dropped her shield to him when she should have strengthened it, used it like a blade to force him back.
She is foolish.
His teeth scrape hard against her neck, again, and he closes his mouth against her, pinches the skin hard enough that she startles and pulls back abruptly, pinning her ears back against that dark, silk mane. She wonders silently at the pain, wonders if he had managed to split the soft skin, wonders why they do this to her, fill her blue oceans with red. Would she have a second scar to match the first, the smooth pit in her neck that the bone and black stallion had carved from her? She shrugs back from him darkly, warning him away with a bite at the side of his mouth that he would probably laugh at if not for the way her magic swelled suddenly around her feet.
Shadow swirled in a hurricane of grey and black, low and slow and weaving darkly around and through the white of those long, slender legs. Here and there were bits of light and bright, streaks of white-gold that gleamed thin and sharp like stars stretched to a thread. With eyes that are dark as bruises and ears still pinned furiously back, she says, “That is not how you convince me.”
And yet-
There is still a softness to her, a curiosity, a willingness she keeps barely hidden from him. She knows she should leave, is reminded by the way her neck throbs with each beat of her pounding heart. But the pain does its job, deepens the molten heat in her veins with a wildness that is tethered to her fury, her impatience, creates a slow burn to replace the emptiness in her chest. Even as her mind tells her to go, something else bids her stay. "Try harder." She says quietly, low, those dark eyes fixed on his with a startling kind of intensity.
