The Birds & The Bees (S.R. | Pt. 5)
Summary: Spencer wonders if her lips could really make him better somehow. A/N: YEE BUDDY, THINGS ARE HAPPENING. Couple: Spencer Reid/Fem!Reader Category: Slow Burn (NSFW, 18+) Content Warning: Alcohol, scars, canon-consistent trauma, kissing, heavy petting Word Count: 6.6k
MASTERLIST | Series Masterlist
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It was one of those days. The kind where the rain against the window was more anxiety-inducing than comforting. A day of wet socks in scuffed shoes and a heartbeat only kept alert by the sixth cup of coffee.
I was having a bad day, and I didn’t understand how. By all means, it should have been impossible to be this sullen when I wasn’t alone.
A small flower was perched in her usual spot in my office, reading and marking through rough drafts until they were covered in more red than black. She’d moved out of my immediate line of sight in favor of the harsh beating of soft droplets against the old, mossed-over windowpane.
It wasn’t until there was a particularly bright bolt, an equalizing charge tearing through the sky, that I realized she was watching me stare at her instead of the storm outside.
“Is everything okay?”
“Hm?” I asked, finally breaking myself from her spell and returning my attention to the papers in front of me, “Yeah, I’m fine.”
“Are you sure? You’re usually… More smiley.”
The question itself seemed to lift my spirits from their prone position.
“Am I?” I teased, trying to trick her by adding a tilt to my timbre, but it failed. Though it produced a smile, it remained a cautious one.
“Around me, yeah, you are,” she said.
“You’re a cocky little thing. Have I ever told you that?”
“But I’m right,” she giggled, and I couldn’t even bother to correct her. I couldn’t fight it, even if it meant sacrificing a bit of my dignity. I would have given her so much more than that.
Still, she seemed let down by my lack of argument. She’d told me herself that she loved our spirited debates on things like the best flavor of frozen ice and whether Tuesdays or Thursdays were more frustrating. And just as she had failed to realize that those two days would never be anything but brilliant to me, knowing that I would see her, she failed to understand why I failed to fight. That I was trying to protect both her and me from the terrors peeking their heads out every time I closed my eyes.
“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked, and both of our smiles fell, hung down with feelings that we kept locked away behind tight lips.
“No. I’m alright,” I promised, knowing she wouldn’t believe me, “But thank you. You are, as always, very sweet.”
“Okay,” she sighed with resignation before she stood from the chair. I put my pen down, turning my attention to her once she assumed the power pose that she’d been working so hard on. She noticed my watching, the playfulness appearing in my eyes and my tongue caught between my teeth.
She didn’t let it intimidate or dissuade her from commanding, “Lose the jacket.”
“Excuse me?” I laughed, because there was really no other reasonable reply.
At least, I thought there wasn’t. (Y/n) clearly disagreed. With hurried hands, she waved them like a bird’s wings over my shoulders. She cleared her throat and narrowed her eyes with something that actually resembled confidence so closely, I felt compelled to follow.
I did continue laughing the whole time, though.
“I feel like I should be nervous you’re asking me to strip.”
“Nothing nefarious is going on, don’t worry,” she mumbled, albeit with puffed cheeks and eyes nervously trying not to focus on my movements as I shed one of my layers.
When I was in a state of undress apparently conducive to her plans, she gave me a curt nod as if to instruct me to take my seat again. At the same time that I returned to my position, she stepped behind me.
My body tensed on instinct when her hands ghosted over my shoulders. They were waiting for the pain, for the hardness and the sharpness of nails and anger.
But none of the above were found. Her fingers worked slowly, gently finding the lines of tight muscles and smoothing the pads of her fingers along them like a musician might treat worn strings. It took them time, but they eventually realized that they were safe in her hands.
I realized that she wasn’t going to hurt me, and my shoulders collapsed with relief that also expelled from my lips with a deep rumbling moan.
“This is evil,” I cried, and I heard the nervousness in her giggle.
She didn’t stop, though, her ministrations becoming more spirited now that she knew I was enjoying myself. If she heard the guilt in my whining, she wrote it off as my typical self-hatred. My normal belief that I did not deserve anything she offered in honey covered hands.
But as I let my head fall back, I stared up at her and saw the way she smiled. A slight, focused look on her eyes that also happened to be far away. Far, but in a paradoxical sense.
The further away from me she went, the closer I felt her become.
“You’re going to make me reveal all my secrets if you do things like this,” I whispered, unsure if I was talking about the massage or the way she had somehow entered my thoughts.
“Duly noted,” she whispered, a distinct mirroring of one of my favorite phrases. It, like everything else, sounded sweeter on her lips.
I started to shift before I remembered that she couldn’t actually read my mind. Her hands popped up; palms spread in surrender. I couldn’t help but laugh as I reached up to them, placing them back on my shoulders as both a reassurance and a plea for her to continue, which she did.
However, her movements faltered again almost immediately when she realized what I was doing. I hadn’t moved much; just a few clumsy, rushed tugs until I finally loosened my tie to the point where I could slide it off.
But I knew it probably meant more to her, because it meant more to me, too. It was the first time I’d shed the austere costume of authority around her. The first time I made a point to level our playing fields even just a little bit. I couldn’t shake the fifteen years between us, and I couldn’t take back the parts of myself I’d given to others.
I could take off my tie, though.
I placed the fabric on the desk, noticing how much heavier it felt when I viewed it as one of the many barriers that I’d asserted to protect myself. I should have asked myself why I took it off, why it meant so much to me, but I didn’t.
Instead, I took a sledgehammer to those walls for a second time, chasing the adrenaline rush of exposing more of my more human side to her. I unbuttoned the cuffs of my shirt with shaking hands, pushing the sleeves up as far as I could.
I was so much braver when her hands were on me. It was like I could actually feel the way she felt for me, an unbelievable and undeserved level of respect, patience, and kindness that I would never feel I deserved.
But for the moment I would drink from her, soak in the ambrosia with greedy lips until I was drunk on her. I would consume that praise in excess until it made me sick. I would let her worship me like a God, not daring to correct her for just a few moments longer.
But I also knew that a few would never be enough. My poor, pitiful Hebe, too young to understand what power she held in her hands.
“I-Is this okay?” she stuttered, causing my heart to stop with the sound.
“You continue to be wonderful in every sense of the word,” I answered with a troubled sigh. Because it really was unfortunate how extraordinary she continued to be.
“I’m scared I’m going to hurt you.”
The thought made me laugh.
“Trust me, Bunny,” I said through the sound, “I am not fragile.”
“I’m not so sure about that…”
She didn’t expound any further. But while her words became less spirited and timid, her hands became the opposite. They slid up my shoulders and around my neck.
I knew she could feel my pulse against her thumb, but she seemed too distracted to count just how quick it was beating. Her fingers had caught wind of something else, a thick abnormality that didn’t follow any veins.
“You can look,” I announced when I noticed how she lingered.
“What is it?”
“Just look.”
Thankfully, she kept her hands on me, falling back to my shoulders as she brought her face closer. I couldn’t look at her, though. No matter how badly I wanted to. I couldn’t let her see the apathy in my eyes as she inspected the trauma sewn into my skin.
“I was shot. This was the second, although more irritating of the two,” I tried to joke, but I heard the horror as her voice broke through the tense air.
“Oh, god,” she whispered, pulling her hand back like the hardened tissue had burned her, “I’m so sorry. That must have been scary.”
“I don’t really remember it. Besides, clearly, I was fine.”
“Still…”
Again, her voice disappeared. The sentence trailed away from her and carried with it the implication that I was wrong to think that I had walked away from the encounter with nothing but excess tissue to remind myself of it.
I wasn’t ready to follow nor accept that line of thinking.
“I have many more scars than that one,” I offered, instead.
With it, I held out my arm, exposing the more recent of my scars. A small, self-inflicted mark that reminded me of my ability to survive even the most suffocating of places. She looked away from that one quickly, searching for anything else to focus on rather than the jagged lines that indicated the stubborn prison-acquired infection that had followed the original wound.
My palm held her attention longer. So long, in fact, she stopped what she was doing to gain a better look. Dragging her fingers along my arm, she eventually ended at my hand, which she cautiously took in both of her own.
“And those are just the ones I can show you in my current state of undress,” I muttered. It was meant to be a joke, I’d thought, but it came out flat and broken.
I blamed her hands. There was no other explanation for why I couldn’t focus. She was inspecting the rough, puckered skin, and I wondered what she must have thought it was from. For a brief second, I didn’t see it as a reminder of the time I fought every ounce of self-preservation to protect someone else.
I’d fought so hard to take that part of my body back, but in that moment, when her thumb followed the line that cut my love line in half, I only felt broken. I felt like a failure.
How could I touch her, then? How could I let her touch me like this?
Before I could take back the evidence of my failure, my thoughts were disrupted with a quiet, timid little giggle from the girl still staring at my hand like there was anything good, anything worth seeing.
“Something funny?”
“It’s just… You told me that you weren’t fragile,” she explained, softly and filled with a surprising amount of admiration, “but now you’re showing me how many times something broke you.”
She laughed, but it was a horrible, heartbreaking sound. The strain was felt in my own throat, my eyes glassing over just as hers had.
When I moved, she jumped. She didn’t let go of my hand, though — she held it tighter. She pulled it closer, and I didn’t object, because it had always been in my plan to be closer to her. I slid the scar tissue over the unmarred skin of her neck, trying to lose myself in the warmth and fluttering feeling of her pulse, rather than the thoughts that threatened to ruin the moment.
I cradled her cheek in my hand, my lungs ceasing all function as I felt the slight, almost indiscernible weight of her head as she leaned into it. I stared into her eyes, always so full of compassion that they threatened to spill over at the slightest inconvenience to herself or anyone else.
“I’m still here,” I said, unsure of which one of us I was trying to reassure. But then her laughter chimed through the room, echoing with the rumbling of thunder in the distance, and it didn’t matter anymore.
“Yeah, you are,” she mumbled through a pout. Just as I thought to myself all of the things that I would sacrifice to feel those lips against me, she moved. Turning slowly, she brushed soft lips that were still laughing over rough skin. Carefully, she held my palm against her at the same time she moved forward, pressing a chaste kiss against the permanently broken love line.
She lingered, too, long enough for me to feel the next words spoken against the same, flushed and tingling skin.
“I’m really glad about that,” she said.
“Me too,” I replied, failing to mention that it had been fully true for the first time.
In fact, I said nothing else. I didn’t trust myself to. I suppressed my thoughts with deep, uneven breaths that still didn’t feel like enough. I closed my eyes when she dropped our hands, choosing instead to remain in a world where I could intimately feel the steady flow of her breath.
“You should go home,” she giggled, happier now than before, “You look beat.”
With a feigned pain, I croaked, “You wound my pride, Bunny.”
“Yeah? You better get out of here, then. I can go all night.”
The both of us paused immediately after the words had been said. They hung between us, and I watched as the horror spread over each of her features. She tried to hide them behind her hands, but I could see straight through her.
“I bet you can.”
“Don’t tease me!” she squeaked, which only made me want to do it even more.
“I meant nothing nefarious, don’t worry,” I cooed before deciding she had done more than enough to deserve some mercy. But when the words came, I noticed yet another shift in her body language that drew me further into her web.
“I’m familiar with your type and intentions,” I’d said.
I never expected it to light a fire behind her eyes, and I couldn’t have predicted the way it was immediately snuffed out, either. Her shoulders rose just to fall, and the rest of the time she spent gathering her things was uncharacteristically downtrodden.
I didn’t want her to leave, either, but this seemed like a different emotion than a general disappointment.
“Do you need a ride?”
“No, I drove. Thanks, though,” she sighed.
It really felt like she was running away from me as quickly as she could. My eyes were following after her like a lost puppy who’d caught sight of something he wanted. I was desperately tracking each of her movements to understand what I’d said wrong.
But then she spun on her heels, somehow perking herself up like a morning glory at sunrise. Despite the storm raging outside, she pulled her hands tight to her chest and pointed at me with silly little finger guns.
“Hey! I’ll see you at the faculty party, right?”
“You’re actually going?” I chuckled, but her raised eyebrows and persistent pout answered me before she had the chance.
“Of course. I’ve never been able to go to one before,” she said as she continued to conduct a mysteriously absent symphony, “The first time is always exciting, right?”
I watched the second sexual innuendo in a matter of seconds dawn on her but said nothing. The smirk I wore and the petrified look in her eyes spoke enough for the both of us.
“That it is,” I agreed with a small nod of surrender, “I’ll see you there, Bunny.”
“Until then, Professor,” she casually called before she left the room and took half of my heart with her.
As soon as the door closed, the frigid darkness shrouded the room despite the switch remaining untouched. The incandescent bulbs worked as hard as they could, but the heaviness of the thoughts in my head were overwhelming. They had tried to make their way through my throat, but I hadn’t allowed them. Now they were seeping from every pore of my skin and dripping from eyes that were really too tired to be crying.
I didn’t even know why I was crying. I had an inkling of what I was feeling when she touched me, but she’d just left and taken the answer with her.
Maybe that was why I needed her so badly. Maybe it was the way she pulled the answers so effortlessly from my heart. Maybe she knew everything, and I was being stubborn. I was being selfish and stupid, fighting the way it felt when her lips pressed against my palm.
She hadn’t been nervous at all. She’d kissed the hardened tissue without an ounce of disgust or derision. She’d done it the same way I dreamed of my mother doing for me every time I sat at the edge of her bed with eyes practically taped open, praying that she would wake up and be someone I recognized. It wouldn’t have been the same for her to kiss my bruises, anyway, I had reminded myself every time. Healing kisses only work when the lips are not also a product of the person whose hands had hit you in the first place.
But (y/n) had never touched me with anything resembling badness. She only knew to grow, to heal, to inspire. I knew she felt things, too, for she was just a person at the end of the day.
But she was a good person.
The kind of person that really ought to stay the fuck away from someone like me.
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Despite the chill in the air outside, the decorated conference area was plenty warm. Although it seemed impossible, the normally too-bright lights seemed duller. They set an ambiance to the lively room of my peers that also didn’t seem quite right. I wrote it off as a product of my mind, rather than an actual reflection of anyone’s spirits.
After all, they all looked like they were enjoying themselves. In a way, I supposed I was, too. It was just difficult, to stand beside these people I’d been trained to see purely as authority figures and believe that I was meant to be there.
I felt like a fraud.
“First time not quite living up to expectations?”
The sound and feel of Spencer’s question on my ear shook me from my trance. I sat straight up, only narrowly avoiding colliding into him. But he’d expected me to respond that way and was already in the process of taking the seat next to me before I answered.
“I guess you could say that,” I laughed to mask the nervousness.
His response, or lack thereof, indicated to me that he was either expecting something other than the honest truth, or he didn’t believe I was saying what I actually wanted to answer. Either way, I wasn’t ready to be profiled by someone as talented as him.
Especially not when I was already three glasses of wine deep and he seemed to be drinking some kind of soda. We sat together in the silence that was still preferable to dillydallying with my superiors.
Well, my other superiors, I reminded myself. Because that term also applied to him. Him, and the woman who I’d been unintentionally eyeing.
It was hard not to spot my other professor in a crowd. Even if it weren’t for her truly uncanny beauty, there was something about her presence that demanded the attention of everyone in the room.
Spencer was no exception. He’d followed my eyes the moment he noticed they weren’t turning to him like they usually did, and I watched from my peripherals at how they wandered over her the same way he often looked at me.
“How was your meeting with Professor Hawkin?” I asked, hating myself for how small and petty I sounded. The jealousy seeped through my words, but I wanted him to look at me so badly.
He did.
“Candy?” he asked with a wrinkled nose, chuckling at the notion of calling her anything else. But then he must’ve seen the frustrated pout that quickly formed over my features, because he quickly added on, in a low, slow drawl, “Why, are you jealous?”
“Tch,” I scoffed, or at least tried to. But the sound I made was more like a sigh, and I knew I had already been defeated before the battle had even begun.
“How could I not be?” I admitted so he wouldn’t call me out for it, “I mean... she’s pretty. Established. Smart.”
Spencer snapped his fingers together just outside of my ear, chuckling as my attention followed immediately. I wordlessly thanked whatever gods were responsible that he hadn’t actually touched me. I wasn’t sure I would have survived his hand cradling my face again.
“You are also all of those things,” he said like a chastisement.
What followed, however, was anything but— it was carefully affectionate and dangerously full of desire. His eyes dropped, tracing the lines of my body slowly before he meant my eyes again.
“The first now more than usual, although it is difficult to imagine you any other way.”
With a nervous laugh and cheeks that felt scalded by rushing blood, I quickly and sarcastically replied, “Thanks.”
I didn’t know what else to say. I didn’t want to get into the depths of my insecurity nor the ever-running undercurrent of affection I felt for the man. I was already mortified that he knew as much as he undoubtedly did; he didn’t need any more ammunition to shatter my heart.
Shifting in my seat, I leaned forward to rest a hot cheek against the palm of my hand. The other brought my drink to my lips, only for me to take a sip so small it was equally embarrassing as having not drank anything at all.
“Is it just me, or do you ever feel super out of place at things like this?” I asked.
“It’s definitely not just you,” he answered with an astounding amount of honesty, “It might just be the two of us, though.”
It was genuine enough that I found the courage to down the rest of the contents of my glass. But no matter how much pretentious wine I’d drank in my life, I still couldn’t hide the visceral reaction to the dryness. A slight chill ran through me, and I watched the way Spencer tried not to laugh about it.
“I still feel weird drinking in front of other adults. Is that weird?” I whispered before he had a chance to mock me for it.
“A little bit. Why is it weird?”
It was a question I’d thought about, anticipated even, but never had the chance to figure out. If I’d looked at him, maybe the look in his eyes or the quirk of his lips might have given me a hint. But the barely empty glass seemed less intimidating than him, so I watched as the few droplets dragged slowly with each turn of my wrist.
“Hmmm. I guess it’s because… I don’t know. I grew up hearing all these stories about wild, raging parties and chaos. But I never really did any of that.”
“Yeah, you don’t really strike me as a bad girl.”
“Oh, trust me. I can be bad,” I defended, but this time it was his turn to avoid my eyes. He didn’t need to speak for me to read his mind. The highly arched brows and tight-lipped smile told me that he was not convinced.
“I can!” I shouted again, enjoying how it elicited a giggle from the both of us. “Just… not like that.”
“Hey, there is nothing wrong with being a good girl,” he said with a bit of a slur to his words. Once I was able to reroute my brain from the horribly distant line of fantasies that quickly erupted from his use of the phrase ‘good girl,’ I glanced down at his drink again to find that it still carried carbonation.
Spencer wasn’t drunk on alcohol in any way when he spoke again, quieter, closer, and his voice dropping a full register. Taking all possible precautions to ensure I was aware that the message was meant for my ears, and my knowing, only.
“Many men find innocence far more alluring.”
My heart was pounding so hard, I was certain he could hear it from where he was. He would undoubtedly see the way my pulse changed, the same way I felt his breath begin to shake as it hit my ear.
“Yeah?” I dumbly added, and he was quick to answer with a firm, “Yes.”
I forced myself to break eye contact with him, terrified that I would actually melt or be consumed by the way he was looking at me. I was forced to set my glass down so my trembling would be less obvious, but I knew he caught it all the same.
“There’s still something so… exciting about the thought of it, though. You know?” I mumbled, fiddling with the hem of my cocktail dress as if it were the most interesting thing in the world.
But even then, I was still distracted by the way others perceived me. I wondered if Spencer saw me as I did, as nothing but a foolish little thing who’d been tricked into walking straight into the lion’s den.
“Maybe the others are on to something,” I thought aloud, “Maybe drunkenly making out with a random guy in a closet is exactly what I need to stop feeling like a little girl playing dress up and pretending to be a grown up.”
“Those things are always better in theory,” he answered a bit too quick for comfort.
“How would you know? Did the ever enigmatic Dr. Reid participate in his fair share of Seven Minutes in Heaven?”
Spencer had made the terrible decision to take a drink just before the question was asked, and I watched him barely escape choking on it. His laughter was different, boisterous and free as he shook his head.
“Absolutely not,” he said.
It was my turn to not be convinced.
“Did you want to?”
His eyes snapped back over to me, his jaw clenching shut so tightly it looked almost painful. Like there was something he wanted to say but couldn’t.
“Not really, no,” he finally said, “Never had anyone I wanted badly enough to work up the confidence.”
Pleased by my amusement in his explanation, Spencer’s jaw managed to relax again. I couldn’t be sure that he wasn’t just saying what he thought I wanted to hear, but I wasn’t going to stop him even if he was.
I liked this side of him. The imperfect, casual side of him that choked on laughter and soda and freely admitted to his shortcomings. Especially when those things, those insecurities, were so similar to my own.
“Yeah. Same,” I sighed in agreement.
Spencer just gave a solemn nod, hiding that glint in his eyes once again.
I wasn’t ready to let it go.
“But what if I just… did it?” I giggled, shaking my shoulders and hoping the inertia would help my spine straighten. Hoping that I could actually trick myself into doing the things I was too scared to try.
“Is that really how you want to experience your first kiss?”
The world came to a record scratch stop, and for a moment I almost missed it. But then it hit me all at once, and my voice shot out of me much too loud and garbled from the shock.
“Wha— How did you know that?!”
“I didn’t,” he snickered, “but now I do.”
“Y-You— You son of a bitch!” I gasped, now fully lost in my astonished laughter he always seemed to enjoy. I got the feeling he liked the curse even more, though.
The two of us returned to the comfortable quiet, the calmness and contentedness that usually accompanied one another. Spencer wasn’t ready to let it go yet, either. He lifted his elbow just enough to bump into my arm, waiting until I responded to lean closer.
“Answer the question.”
“I don’t know. At least it’d be over, right?” I said with a shrug, “And it wouldn’t mean anything. It won’t hurt when it amounts to nothing, because I went into it with that expectation.”
It was hard to sound genuine when the words were a half-truth. Especially when they were spoken to a profiler.
Because the truth was, the ideas I was spouting only made sense when applied to anyone else. If I were to admit what I really wanted, it wouldn’t be a random hook up in a closet. It wouldn’t be meaningless, detached company.
It would be the two of us, entwined like climbing vines around a trellis. Driven not by a desire to be seen as older or younger or anything of the sort. Rather, having been compelled by the heavy feeling in the center of our chests. The unending yearning to be seen, to be felt and held and loved.
“Does that make sense?” I asked, like he would know the real question behind it.
It almost seemed like he did when he softly answered, “It does.”
His jaw twitched, the muscles in his face tensing as his eyes began to wander. At first, I thought it was his subtle way of telling me that he’d heard my thoughts and didn’t feel the same.
But that wasn’t it. It couldn’t have been. Not when his eyes settled on his hand that had fallen between us, just to immediately outline the path I assumed he wanted to take. He was fixated on the sliver of my thigh visible through the slit in the dress. I looked, too, noticing for the first time I had started to shift my legs open, slowly closing the gap between us.
His knuckle brushed over the heated skin, just to snap away. His hand retreated, but the rest of him stayed close by. We both leaned into one another, forgetting the rest of the world for those few seconds.
I drowned myself in sweet treacle eyes and heavy breathing. My lips parted, trying to speak but losing all of the words almost immediately.
Because I felt it. Spencer’s fingers sneaked between the fabric and his palm coming to rest against my thigh. All the while, his eyes challenged me to do something. To stop him or urge him forward, to make a move with a similar boldness.
“I think I’ve had too much wine,” I said with thready vocals. A voice box rioting against any sound that wasn’t shaped like his name.
The others would blame the glassiness and heaviness of my eyes on the wine, but his hand on my thigh was far more intoxicating. Even when it slid away, it dragged me with it. The pads of his fingers were smooth but still seemed sticky in the way they compelled me to follow.
Leaning forward, Spencer whispered directly in my ear, “Come with me.”
He stood so casually, as if he hadn’t just held my inner thigh in his hand. Those same fingers curled up into his palm, beckoning me to follow him as he fled the room. I probably should’ve been concerned at the sight, the connotations that would accompany us all but bolting out of the room together.
But I didn’t give a single fucking shit.
“Where are we going?” I asked as he guided me through the sparsely populated hallway.
As we took a sharp turn, he vaguely answered, “A closet.”
“Why?”
I had already forgotten the entire conversation we’d had not five minutes before. My entire body was moving purely on instinct, a desperate need to please him. He finally glanced back at me, flashing me the cutest, wickedest little smirk before he responded.
“You’re a smart girl,” he said, “You can figure it out.”
But I couldn’t. Not when the words were punctuated with his hand around my wrist, pulling me forward and against his chest. The world spun around me, or perhaps it was just the wine, but the next time I was able to feel my own feet, they were backed against a door.
Spencer flipped the lock, leaving the lights off and relying on the little bit of moonlight filtering through the windows to see the shocked expression on my face. His forearms caged me against the door, our chests pressed firmly against one another as our breath mixed in the cramped space.
I’d never felt freer.
“Tell me to stop,” he begged.
I’m sorry, Professor.
I can’t follow your instructions this time.
“Do it,” I said.
“Stop?”
“No,” I whispered as confidently as I could before commanding, “Kiss me.”
And he did. With movements like molasses, Spencer closed the only space remaining between us.
He kissed me.
I was so shocked that I couldn’t move, too overwhelmed and entranced by how soft his lips were. At first, he was gentle, his hands barely ghosting over my cheeks. But I felt him change. I felt it in his movements the same way I felt it in my heart.
He pressed harder, his hands showing a thrilling, mutual desperation to take more.
As soon as my lips parted for him, he filled them with his tongue. It was soft in its movements, strongly contrasted by the rough drag of his fingertips against my jaw. While I tasted of wine, he tasted of sugar. So perfectly pure like his tongue had been pulled from the petals of a honeysuckle.
My body went half limp as my lungs ran out of air, but I couldn’t make myself stop. I wondered if he really were like the sweet nectar of the flower and not the poisonous berries of the bush. I sensed no difference in the effect kissing him had on me. My heart was racing, and my pupils dilated to soak in any light we could find in the shadows. Trying to see the way he looked when he finally broke free of me for the first time since we’d come together.
I expected him to stop there, but he didn’t. Spencer’s mouth merely shifted from my lips to my jaw, then down to my neck. Before I knew it, he had nipped at the sensitive skin over my pulse before laying sloppy kisses over the wound.
“Professor,” I cried, but he did not answer with words.
Instead, his hands and tongue became even more persistent in finding and marking as much of me as he could. His fingers dug into my hips so hard that I couldn’t stop the broken cry that it elicited. It only made him grab me harder, his teeth dragging over my shoulder before pressing a chaste kiss to my collarbone.
“Please,” I begged, my voice shaking precariously on the cliff’s edge of desire that I wanted to throw myself into, the rocky shore be damned.
Spencer pulled away, but his chest remained pressed against me with each heaving breath. His hand on my face felt cold compared to the heat that had formed in my cheeks, but I barely felt it. My mind was too fixated on short fingernails still dug into the supple skin of my thigh.
He slipped his hand under the hem of my dress, and I felt the same scar I’d kissed slide against my skin. He used his new grip to hike my leg farther up his hip, forcing a distance between my legs that he once again immediately filled with his body.
That’s when I felt it — A strange, unfamiliar hardness pressed firmly against my stomach. As soon as it occurred to me what it was, the desire that he was demonstrating, I couldn’t stop the pathetic, trembling whimper that followed.
It lit a fire in his eyes that I’d never seen before, and I knew it was reflected in my own.
I’d never felt like this before. I’d never wanted a man this way. Every fantasy I’d concocted of the perfect moment fractured and fell away. I would have given my everything to him right then, and the darkness brewing in our locked gaze told me that he would have taken it with greedy, insatiable hands.
I wished he would. I wanted to be consumed by his impatience. I wanted the darkness inside of him to poison my veins and lead me into the darkness with him.
Still, when he spoke again, the sound was riddled with restraint.
“Tell me, Bunny…” he whispered, sliding his lips across my jaw and slipping his hand on my face up to grip my hair. I hung on his every word, not moving but allowing him to manipulate my head with his new hold.
He forced my head back against the door, pressing his erection hard enough against me that I saw his eyes struggle to stay open. But they did, staring insistently as he finally managed to gather enough breath to ask the question that had finally clawed its way through his throat.
“Do you feel like a woman now?”
It took me a moment to answer, not because I needed the time to decide, but because none of the air I took in seemed to cure the emptiness inside of me that I desperately wanted him to remedy. Eventually, I managed to breathe out a soft, timid affirmative.
“Yes.”
“Good,” he muttered, not full of arrogance or pride but with a genuine relief.
I didn’t understand how it was possible, but Spencer pulled away from me with an eerie amount of ease. His hands didn’t ball in fists, remaining open wide enough that his palms were visible.
I saw how his hands shook, returning to me with a tenderness and affection that didn’t suit the mood he’d established minutes before. He led me away from my spot against the door, flipping the lock back to its previous position and fleeing the room without another word.
I stayed, silently recalling everything that had just happened. The party continuing down the hall felt like a lifetime away. A reminder that the world was still spinning at the same speed as it had before.
Despite Spencer’s absence, I didn’t feel alone. In fact, I’d never felt closer to him than I did in that moment, with my lips tingling in memory of his and my hands roaming skin that felt new.
I didn’t feel alone at all, I realized.
I felt my heart break into pieces that he carried away with him. They had always made heartbreak sound horrible, and in a way, it was terrifying. Because I felt the way he kept me close with memories he knew himself incapable of forgetting.
I didn’t feel alone.
I felt like I was his for the first time, and I never wanted it to end.
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| Part Six |
