Page 28 of Hopelessly Teavoted

He ran a finger down the column of her throat, tracing her collarbone.

Slow, languorous brushes, and his fingers were grazing her breast, skimming over the hardened nipple through her flimsy bra and shirt.

He brought his other hand up to do the same so that he swiped each one, featherlight, with a thumb, and then pinched gently, relishing her moans.

He was uncomfortably hard against the seam of his pants.

He was uncomfortably hot under her. Goddess, he’d never pictured it like this, the steering wheel jamming against the back of her and his seat in the way of thrusting the way he wanted, and yet even the idea of it was still enough to turn his blood to honeyed wine, pumping through him, blazing and bold and epic. He was an inferno.

“Touch me,” she breathed into his ear, nipping at the lobe and making him groan.

He wanted to be in her; he wanted to undress her; he wanted to listen and do absolutely nothing other than what she commanded.

He was so swollen with all the wanting that it was hard to think. Was it possible to actually catch fire?

Vickie unleashed was his favorite Vickie.

Her brightwildness was so different from his own simmering, cold loneliness.

He growled, shoved a hand deeper into her jeans and yanked her underwear to the side with his hand, dipping his fingers into her as best he could against the stretch of denim.

He pulled his hand back out, catching her gasp with his mouth and consuming it, the way he wanted to consume her.

“I want to taste you, Vickie,” he gasped against her, but she shook her head. Gravedirt had cleared all pretense between them, or perhaps it was the intensity of what they were doing, but their hearts and their wants were naked now.

“Make me feel so good that I can’t stand it,” she breathed. “Ruin me for my own hand, without you, next time.”

She pressed that hand against the window, leaving a steamy print where it was wet with condensation.

The shading magic on the window was unnecessary now, but he left it, the filtered moonlight drifting in casting her in purples and grays that painted her pale skin and her bounty of freckles as little road maps to pleasure that he wanted to trace with his tongue.

He couldn’t wait to lay her out on an actual bed and take his time worshiping every single fucking inch of her.

But he could follow directions. She had told him what she wanted, and he would give it to her.

He breathed against her neck, sliding his hands down to grip her hips, and then working his fingers over the denim again.

He rubbed her center through her pants, and she lifted her body up and then down again, the agony of being so close to where he wanted to be and yet so far pushing against his boxers and his pants.

He was throbbing, and his hand was burning . He ignored it.

“Az. Please. Stop fucking around.”

“Shhh,” he said. “I need to do this carefully so I can remember it. I want you to beg. Desperate for me.”

He had no shame now, no room to be embarrassed at the bare urgency. He ran his fingers across her back again, trying to cool them. “You feel so good, and I need you so much. I always need you, but it’s excruciating. It hurts, Vickie, the way I need you right now.”

“Yes,” she gasped out, running her hands up his shirt, tracing his stomach and the clenching muscle lower in his abdomen, the waistband, to prove that two could play a game of wanting. Of teasing.

He kissed her neck, increasing the pressure of his lips the way he knew she liked, her soft noises increasing and her body tensing around him, driving him out of his mind. He smiled as he felt her rub against him, the friction between their clothing almost unbearable. Almost.

He was dying to make her scream his name, and then to haul the hot wetness of her down on him. But he had waited so damn long, and he intended to savor this, and to ignore the cramping in his hand. He’d deal with whatever odd injury was paining him later.

“Azrael,” she sighed into his mouth, and he met it with his, lips clashing, tongues exploring, swallowing her sounds.

He dipped his hand lower, back past her zipper, and slipped his hand between the denim and her panties first, savoring her gasps, and then, tugging them aside, slid his fingers into the hot wetness of her that cleared his mind of every other thought, rubbing for a few moments and then pulling them out.

“What are you doing?” She moaned the question.

He drew his fingers out slowly and licked them, not breaking eye contact.

“You taste so good that I could die to put my mouth on that sweetness,” he gasped, thankful, for once, for the gravedirt that meant she would know how serious he was.

“Please, Azrael, fuck me now. Taste me later.”

Her fingers were unzipping his pants now, and then scrambling up his chest under his shirt. He ached for her in the dim light streaming into the car.

“Azrael, pretend,” she whispered. “Please.”

The words were talons ripping his soul a little, that she thought this would end badly, but he didn’t care. He would give her exactly what she asked for.

He always had. He always would.

Biting his lip and concentrating to keep from unraveling, he held her hair with the tingling, burning hand and her hip with the other, committing the moment to memory.

She rolled her hips, and he couldn’t take it any longer. Moving his hand down and gripping her shirt, he thrust against her, pulling her on top of him and then hauling her off, dry humping like they were teenagers again, whispering dirty nothings into her ear and moaning.

“Tell me,” he sighed against her ear, noting how her breath caught as his lips brushed her soft skin. Could they unravel like this? Fabric against fabric, desperate, and in half measures?

Azrael swore to himself that he would always capture every detail of her pleasure. He had failed at so many things, and at telling her so many times, but never at loving Vickie. Never at wanting her, mind, body, and soul.

“Tell me,” he said, more insistent this time.

“What?” Vickie asked. Her face was flushed and heated as he trailed kisses along her jawline, moving to finally trace that constellation of freckles down the column of her neck. This was better than every time he’d pictured this moment.

“Tell me you want me. Tell me how much.” Azrael surprised himself with the force of his own words, as though they had been building under a facade of caring less.

The more she begged him to pretend, the faster his pretense crumbled around him.

All his walls. His soul, too, maybe. And his fucking left hand ached now, as though she were undoing the ligaments holding his bones together.

“I,” she started. Her breath was ragged, and he kissed her neck, slipping his hand between them once more and continuing the motion with his thumb, harder. Listening for the susurration of her breath to tell him what she liked most. He wanted her undone. Insensible.

“What was that, Vickie?” he growled, snapping his fingers behind her to alleviate the twinge in his back from the angle in the car, and the ache in his hand, and then pushing back up through her shirt, hand skating upward, into her hair, pulling her closer.

He needed her closer. Always.

Her lips were on his now, and then she was whispering, almost into his mouth.

“You don’t have to bother trying to make me think of you when I’m all alone in my apartment. I already do. When I touch myself, I always think of you. That’s how badly I’ve wanted this.”

Fuck. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could hold out before tearing her clothes off and hauling her down on top of him.

“Me, too, Vickie. Me too. I want everything with you.”

“I don’t think we can have everything. But I want this, at least,” she said.

That hurt, but he gritted his teeth, moving his thumb down in relentless circles and snapping his fingers to increase the pressure on her neck, her ears, the rosy buds of her nipples, which he could see peeking through her shirt and her thin bra.

Thank goddess for mesh and lace.

He stroked, with gentle, snapping magic, everywhere he had felt her gasp softly against him.

The hand in her pants pressed against her in that panoply of pleasure points he had taken care to memorize in all the times he’d ever touched her.

All the moments six years ago, all the breathless stolen glances as teenagers, every word that had ever made her bite her lip in anticipation.

The way her hand had paused just below her navel above her hip the time they went skinny-dipping.

The way she arched for him now. The soft exhales the times he’d run his fingers over those dimples on her back.

He knew them all. Which was good, because he needed her to finish before he was inside her, and his blood thundered in his head and lower, begging him to let go. His left hand throbbed, but he told himself it was nothing.

She was everything that burned brightly and beautifully in his universe.

Brighter than can be sustained , a small, broken part of him whispered.

He needed to be closer to her. He had to be touching all of her.

Slipping his left hand under her shirt, he let the warmth of her skin seep into it, easing the stabbing pain for a moment.

Then, before Azrael knew what was happening, his hand was so hot that it almost burned the metal of his mother’s ring as he caught his breath and kissed Victoria.

Magic he didn’t recognize wreathed them, shifting and snapping into place.

Vickie gasped at the heat of it and pulled back to look him in the eyes. Emotion flickered across her face; the pain in his hand was excruciating now.

Azrael looked down. Flames licked for a moment around his mother’s ring as he stared in horror.

“Az,” she whispered, voice shaky. “Don’t touch me again.” She was scrambling away from him, and for a heartbreaking moment, Az wondered what he had done wrong.

He let her go in an instant, but it was an instant too late.

Holding the hand that felt like it was engulfed in flame in front of him, his ring was too hot to bear, and he pulled it off, putting it on the console between them.

The agony in his hand vanished.

“No,” whispered Vickie, reaching for him and then stopping herself, suddenly, holding her hands up away from him, and scrambling farther away until she was pressed against the passenger-side door, zipping her pants, pulling back on her coat, and wrapping it around her.

“No, no, no. That can’t happen. It shouldn’t happen if I let go. It can’t be happening.”

His lust-addled brain tried to process the words and the sensation of them. His hand was still throbbing, and he realized that the back of his neck, where she had been gripping, was raw and scraped. Burned.

Vickie spoke now, but not to him. She was looking at the back seat, and suddenly he knew his parents were there.

Azrael’s stomach dropped and then heaved, and for a moment, he was afraid he might vomit.

It shouldn’t be possible. She wasn’t touching the ring anymore.

How was it possible that the ring was burning between them on the seat of the car, small flames licking up the side of it without so much as a second brush of her skin?

This was the worst thing he could think of—almost having the woman he had loved forever, finally telling her how he felt, and then having the ghosts of his parents immediately appear to her.

Vickie was listening, her face crumbling, and tears gathering at the corners of those beautiful green eyes.

It occurred to him that there might actually be worse things.

“They said I burned you, where I was touching you. That if I touch you again, you’ll summon them back. That you’re like a departed’s precious object now. Like the ring was. If we touch again, you’ll die.”

The pain of the realization prickled at him gently for a moment. Az breathed through it as the feeling deepened, spiraling out of control, and slicked like oil on top of water, not yet plumbing the depths of despair it would cause when it sank in.

Lex’s words echoed in his mind.

You’ll rue the moment you chose to do that, witch.

A curse trapped in a ring, and now, in him.

Azrael was a precious object now. Another soul to be collected.

And if she touched him again, he would die.

He buried his face in his hands, barely hearing the sound of Vickie’s voice as she spoke in hushed tones with ghosts he could not see.