Page 18 of Skyn (After the End #3)

His tongue darts out, grazing the edge of his lips. It’s fleeting but electric. “You make me curious,” Ben continues. “I haven’t been curious in so long, Fawl. Last time I felt it, I was a boy.”

I am taken aback, and a flock of birds flies into my stomach. My pulse thuds under his heavy-lidded, almost-drunk gaze.

He’s kissing me again, and this time there’s no experiment in it. His mouth crashes into mine, and the world goes liquid. His hand slips around my waist, pulling me closer, and I’m not resisting.

Not at all.

The second my mouth yields to his, I lose the thread of everything—my balance, my breath, my sense of what comes next. The kiss floods me, hot, consuming.

Hungry.

Powerful.

His other hand slides up, cupping the back of my neck, drawing me closer until there is no space left between us.

His tongue slides in, slow at first, then purposeful, teasing the edges of my restraint. I gasp, and then—

Oh God.

He sucks on my tongue, and it’s obscene, it’s possessive, and it sends a hot, splintering shock straight down my stomach. What the fuck happened to testing the matrix? This isn’t a test—this is raw, unrestrained hunger.

And my body—traitorous, eager—moves before my mind can catch up and straddles him.

“I like you on my lap,” he says between kisses.

How to tell him that his soiled jacket, his hand walking up my thigh, and him pulling that silk dress over my face are the only things running through my mind at any given point in the day I seriously have had no other thoughts.

My tiny skirt pools around my hips. My knees press on either side of him.

I look up to see if we’re still alone in this huge private room.

This is madness, in a restaurant with the smell of roasted lamb thick in the air, but none of it matters.

The chair creaks beneath us, but I barely notice as my hips roll forward.

I grind down, and the friction is maddening—just enough to make him gasp against my mouth.

His gaze locks with mine, so raw and pleading. “I just need more of this…supernatural softness.”

I feel him hard and hot beneath me, and a low moan slips from my lips. His mouth leaves mine only to press hot, urgent kisses down my neck, each one more desperate than the last.

I should know something is wrong by now, but I don’t.

I’m too wound up in the chaos and power of his mouth on me.

But the earnestness, the vulnerability… He is way off his dampeners.

I know it’s dangerous, but I push my hips toward him again anyway.

No one has ever made me feel so beautiful.

When he calls me a diamond, I believe it.

He bites my shoulder, grinding into me. I’m going to come if I have five more minutes of this type of scientific inquiry.

“How you melt into me…I’ve never felt anything like this.” He gasps. His eyes are as wide as plates.

I’m rattled too—by him, by the intensity of my response, like I just stepped off a cliff and there’s no ground beneath me.

Ben’s breathing is ragged now, hot against my neck, his hands fisting the fabric of my dress.

He’s shaking beneath me, the thick ridge of his hardness pulses against me impatiently, as his body rocks somewhere between control and abandon.

He runs his hand over the bite mark on my shoulder with one hand, cupping my ass and grinding my wet center into him with the other.

Then, without a word, he wraps both hands around my thighs, grips the curve of my ass like he owns it, and lifts me onto the table. He settles me on the edge, and the plates rattle beneath me.

I am sitting on a huge plate with my thighs spread open in front of his hungry eyes. A smear of sauce kisses the back of my leg. I should be mortified. I am…not.

Ben doesn’t look away. Only nudges me open wider with his palms.

Cool air hits the wet heat between my legs. He finds the edge of my panties and shifts them aside with greedy anticipation.

My chest is burning.

He looks up at me, pupils blown, voice low, and starting to slur. “I told you I wanted to taste everything.”

His mouth finds me like he’s been starved.

The first press of his wet tongue over my clit sends a jolt through my spine, electric and deep, like my body was waiting for this without telling me. Each flick, each stroke, is calibrated for maximum unraveling.

I grip the edge of the table, breath shattering into pieces. Plates crash to the floor.

It’s hot, slick, devouring.

The flat drags of his tongue are slow, wet velvet against lightning, and my hips jerk like they’ve been pulled by a string knotted deep inside me.

I can’t breathe.

I am this man’s dessert.

The sounds that come out of me are messy, involuntary—choked whimpers, swallowed moans. He doesn’t slow down. He presses in deeper, mouth locked to me, tongue moving in tight, maddening circles that make my vision blur.

My thighs tremble, clamping around his head on instinct, and he only groans into me like that’s encouragement. The vibration buzzes straight through my core. I’m dripping, shaking, unraveling by the second, and when he slides his fat tongue inside me—deep, curling—my body arches off the plate.

I think I cry out. I think I call his name.

I think I come apart.

It’s only when I feel him trembling, truly trembling, that I realize how far this has gone.

“Ben,” I say quietly, but he doesn’t seem to hear me, too absorbed in the overwhelming sensation of my wetness sliding over his tongue, too lost in whatever is happening inside his head.

I try again, louder this time. “Ben, are you okay?”

He doesn’t answer, just grips my thighs tighter. His face now flushes a deep, unsettling purplish red that creeps up from his neck to his temples. The server walks in and walks right back out.

He pulls back, and I feel a bite, this time a little too hard, on my inner thigh.

Panic rises in my chest, a tight squeeze that makes it hard to breathe. “Ben,” I say, my voice cracking with fear, “you need to stop. Ben, listen to me.”

But he pulls me off the table and on top of him, getting rougher, bruising my hips.

“Ben, no!”

The word tears out of me, and I twist away. The forks and knives on the table clatter to the floor, and I wrench myself free.

He looks up, startled—mouth wet, eyes wide, lips still parted like he doesn’t understand what just happened.

But I do.

For the first time since I met him, he frightens me.

The line between devotion and consumption felt paper-thin just now, and I’m not sure he knows the difference.

His body convulses as I pull myself fully off him. The burger slips from his hands as he collapses onto the table. His limbs jerk uncontrollably, and his eyes roll back in his head. I look up and around franticly.

Ben’s seizure takes hold as his body betrays him in the most terrifying way possible.

I’m out of my seat in an instant, my hands on his shoulders, trying to steady him. His mouth foams, and finally, I scream, “Is anyone a medic? We need help!”

Two or three servers burst into the dining room and rush out to get help.

Seventeen excruciating minutes later, the first responders arrive in a blur of noise and flashing light. I’m running, sprinting alongside the stretcher.

“He went off his dampeners cold turkey.” I say to the chrome haired woman.

The medics look at me and then look around, wasting precious seconds as Ben shakes in the cool evening air.

“Where is this man’s next of kin?” They look right over me, and I want to commit murder.

I rock the stretcher, roaring, “I am his wife. And if you don’t start this cart, I’m going to throw you onto the tracks and roll over you myself.”

I hear a few laughs and claps in the background.

Ben’s dark face is chalky, drained of the color that flushed it so brightly just moments before. His breaths are shallow and erratic, and I can’t stop peeling the skin around my fingernails.

“Please, please be okay,” I whisper, more to myself than to him, but the words feel empty.

This is my fault.

I pushed Ben too far. He can keep the damned dampeners. I would give anything to take this bit of advice back. I may have hurt the only friend I have in the world right now.

I climb into the ambulance railcar, the metal slick under my palms, my chest still tight with panic. I don’t expect the familiar Mine Whistle. I don’t expect to see him.

But there he is.

Josh. Standing alone in the street, framed by smoke. His eyes are fixed on mine, wide, unblinking. Disbelief etched across his face like he’s seeing a ghost.

I look down at Ben.

And maybe he is…