Athena Commands Blaze to His Knees
Athena’s hand closed low around Blaze’s throat with the intimate precision of a key turning in a lock it had been cut for. Her thumb found the pale, raised seam of old scar tissue just above his collarbone and settled into it; her fingers curled around the far side of his windpipe, where the cords of his neck sank toward the other collarbone, so that her whole grip lay in a single band across the base of him. She drove him down.
“On your knees. Hands behind you. Open that mouth and look at me while I use it.”
He went. There was no stagger, no protest, only the sudden surrender of weight as his knees struck the floor and his spine unspooled into the posture she had carved into him. The heat of his skin bloomed against her palm at once, feverish where the scar remembered her, cooler along the unmarked skin beneath her fingers. His pulse knocked against the pad of her thumb, quick and close, and she felt it stumble as she applied that exact, terrible pressure she alone knew—the pressure that made the breath leave him in a sound too raw to be a gasp and too quiet to be a plea. She tipped his head back with the heel of her hand. His throat offered itself because she had never, not once, allowed it to do otherwise.
She did not look away from his face. The rest of the room existed only as temperature and texture: the faint grit of the floor under his knees, the silk of her own inner wrist where it lay against the furnace of his chest, the cool air finding the bared skin of her thighs as she gathered her skirt in her free hand and drew it high against her hip. There was nothing beneath it. She had dressed that way hours ago, deliberately, and the chill of the room slid over her now and found her already wet, already unhidden, the slick of her cooling against the open air. His shirt had ridden up in the descent. A strip of abdomen showed, taut, marked by the same history her fingers already owned. She knew, without looking, how the muscles there would jump if she dragged a nail along the old line that disappeared beneath his waistband. She did not. Not yet. The throat was enough. The throat was the whole language they had left.
His mouth opened. Obedience lived in the wet gleam of it, in the way his tongue rested, waiting, as if it remembered the shape of her before she had even closed the distance. She stepped in until the heat of his breath rose against her, until his first exhale moved over the slick, parted folds of her and made her inner muscles clench with a slow, liquid pull. She held him there. His head stayed tilted back under her hand, his eyes on hers, his open mouth a breath from her and not permitted to close it, and she let him look. She let him see exactly how little she needed him. Then, only when his lashes had begun to tremble, she eased the tilt and drew him forward by the throat, and his face sank into her. His eyes left her the instant his mouth found her—they had to, his brow pressed to the soft rise of her mound, his gaze gone into the dark of her body—and she let them go. She did not need his eyes. She had his pulse. She had the swollen heat of her lips meeting the softer heat of his, the first wet, seeking drag of his tongue parting her from below.
The sound he made then was not quite a moan. It lived lower, in the vibration she felt through the scar, through the tendons of his neck, through the bones of her own hand. She felt him try to lean in, to take more, and she denied him with a minute adjustment of her thumb—that same precise cruelty—until his breath hitched against her and he went still again, waiting. He remembered. His body had never been permitted to forget the unspoken rule: she would give, and he would receive, and any hunger that outpaced her timing would be answered through the throat.
She let him have more. Slowly. The wet heat of his mouth closed over her with a reverence that might have passed for tenderness in some other mouth. His tongue found her with the unerring memory of a man who had mapped this particular geography in the dark, in the light, with his eyes open and shut. He knew the exact pressure she needed along the swollen peak of her, knew when to flatten, when to flick, when to seal his lips and suck until the tendons behind her knees went to warm wax. She knew, equally, the exact second his own body would begin to betray him—the shift of his weight onto one knee, the minute tremor in the thighs that wanted to close, the way his hips would try, helplessly, to seek friction against nothing but air.
She gave him none. The hand at his throat worked him like a leash. When she wanted his face she let him have her; when she wanted his eyes she pulled him off and tipped his head back until he was looking up at her, wet-mouthed and unfinished, as if the ceiling of the world were her face and nothing else. Sweat had begun to gather at his temples. A drop traced the hinge of his jaw, ran the whole length of his neck, and disappeared beneath her fingers where they lay against the side of his windpipe. She felt it arrive. She felt everything: the temperature of his mouth each time she brought him back to her, hotter now, almost fevered; the texture of his tongue, slightly rough, devastatingly careful; the way his breath came in short, controlled bursts through his nose because she had not granted him the luxury of pulling away to gasp.
Her own breathing had changed. She heard it as if from a distance—the deepening, the catch, the small broken sounds she would never have permitted anyone else to hear. The fabric of her blouse clung to the small of her back. The air had grown thick, scented with salt and the dark, sweet musk of her own arousal as it painted his mouth, his chin, the notch of his throat under the heel of her hand. She rolled her hips in a slow, grinding circle, using him, riding the devoted heat of his tongue while her thumb never left that pale ridge of scar. Each time he tried to take her deeper she applied the pressure that unmade him, and each time he folded, a full-body shudder that traveled up through her wrist and lodged in the hinge of her shoulder like heat held under a stone.
Time stretched. She made it stretch. She wanted the wait to live in his bones. She wanted him to feel every increment of her approaching undoing as a thing she was choosing, moment by moment, to inflict upon them both. His hands remained behind his back, fingers laced so tightly the knuckles had gone bloodless. A muscle jumped in his jaw. Whenever she pulled him back to look at her, his eyes—dark, drowned, unreadable except in the wet shine of them—fixed on hers as if they had nowhere else to go. She could not tell if what lived in them was hunger or hatred or the wreckage of something that had once been both. She did not need to know.
She drew back a fraction, just enough that his mouth lost her and the cold reached the wet of her again, and she watched him chase—the involuntary strain of his neck against her palm, the lips parting after her like a man surfacing. Her thumb sank into the scar. He stopped as though a wire had been cut. She tipped his head back and held it there, held his face turned up to her with the taste of her still shining on it, and the shudder that went through him this time was longer, slower, a tremor that began at his knees and climbed his spine and arrived in her wrist as a fine, sustained shaking. She kept him in it, a hand’s width from her heat and not granted it, until his breath broke in ragged pieces against the bared skin of her belly and his eyes went glassy with the effort of staying still. Only then did she let the tilt go, draw him forward, and settle her hips against his waiting mouth.
When she finally allowed herself to take him fully, to press his face into the soaked, aching center of her and hold him there with that merciless collar of her hand, everything she was contracted to the two points where she touched him: the fever under her thumb and the fever between her thighs. His mouth worked her with a desperation that had nothing left of technique and everything of survival. She felt the first deep clench begin, low and inevitable, a slow tightening like a knot drawn in wet rope. Her thighs trembled. The grip on his throat tightened until she could feel the labor of his swallow, the frantic flutter of the vein beneath her fingers. He made a sound against her that she felt more than heard, a vibration that traveled straight into the core of her and broke the last of her pacing.
It went through her in long, rolling contractions, each one wringing a sound from her throat that she could not swallow back. Her hips jerked. She let the skirt fall. It spilled over his head and shoulders and shut him into the dark, hot tent of her, and her freed hand drove into his hair and fisted hard enough to hurt. And in the blind heat of it, in the moment when the held, cold thing at the center of her went briefly, disastrously soft, the apology tore out of her on a gasp she had not authorized.
“I’m sorry,” she heard herself say, the words spilling over the crest of her pleasure before she could close her teeth on them. “I’m sorry for all of it—Blaze—I’m—”
The rest dissolved into the last, helpless shudder. Warmth—a terrible, unbidden warmth that had nothing to do with the orgasm still pulsing through her—moved once through her chest, and she hated the sound of her own voice for making it real.
Then it passed.
She did not help him.
She stepped back. Both hands left him at once, the throat and the hair released in a single motion, and the skirt slid off his head and fell straight. The loss of her heat left his mouth glistening, swollen, his chin wet, his chest dragging air in ragged, uneven pulls, his mouth hanging open around each one. He swayed. His knees began to fail him in small, humiliating increments—a shift, a catch, the slow slide of a body that had been held upright only by her will—and as he pitched forward his laced hands wrenched apart behind him and his arms flung out ahead, one palm slapping the floor, then the other, catching his weight a heartbeat before his face would have. He stayed like that, on hands and knees, head hanging. The scar stood pale and raised above his collarbone, flushed at its edges where her thumb had lived. She noted it the way one notes a tool set back in its place. It had worked. It always worked.
Athena stood over him and watched. The last tremors of her own climax still flickered, distant now, already being locked away. One corner of her mouth lifted, slow. She tilted her head, unhurried, and smoothed her skirt flat over her hips with both palms, taking her time about the seam. She did not offer a hand. She did not speak. She simply looked down at the labor of his breathing, at the shake in his shoulders, at the helpless, unfinished tension still visible in the line of his body, and she held the tilt of her mouth exactly where it was, and she did not move.
