Page 53 of Hunger

His voice is rough. It's the second word he's spoken since he came through the window.

I lift my hand to the back of his head. I draw him down.

"Yes."

He lowers himself.

The first feel of him against me — the cold press at the heat of me — is so much that I gasp. He pauses. He waits. He has all the time in the world and so do I, and he's waiting for me to be ready, and I'm ready, and I press up against him and the cold slides into the warm and I'm full of him.

The shock of it rolls through me in a long slow wave.

He doesn't move at first. He's buried in me and he's holding completely still. I can feel him deciding — deciding to wait, deciding to be careful, deciding to give me what I want and not what his hunger is screaming for.

I move.

I lift my hips up under him. The motion runs through both of us. He makes the low broken sound from last night again. He starts to move.

He moves slow.

The cold of him sliding inside the warm of me. The drag of it. The sound that leaves my throat with each push. He braces above me on his long arms and he watches my face the whole time. He's watching what's happening to me. He's reading the slight changes — the tighten of my mouth, the catch of mybreath, the way my eyes go dark and unfocused — and he's adjusting himself to what my body is telling him.

I bring my hands up. I rest them against his chest. The cold gray of his skin against my palms. The long scar under my right hand.

He moves faster.

He's finding a rhythm. My hips have begun to move under him on their own, lifting up to meet him, and the cold and the warm are sliding into each other in the quiet rhythm of bodies that have learned what they're doing. I'm gone. I'm gone. I'm beyond thinking. There's only the cold and the warm and the slow build of the third wave I felt last night, the wave that took me apart, beginning to build again.

He lowers his face.

He kisses me. His cold mouth on my warm mouth. Careful of his teeth. The cold tongue meeting mine inside the kiss. I taste a faint trace of my own blood from earlier — the nick on my tongue — and the taste makes him groan into my mouth.

"Farkas." It comes out as a breath against his lips.

He moves harder.

The wave breaks.

It breaks against me from inside. It breaks slower than last night, deeper, the build of it longer, the height of it taller. The room narrows. The light from the window narrows. I'm clenched around him and my back is arched off the bed and I'm crying out his name into his mouth as it happens.

He keeps moving through it.

He keeps moving until I'm soft beneath him. Until the last wave has gone through me and I've settled back into the bed withmy chest rising and falling and my hand still pressed against the scar on his chest.

He stills.

He hasn't come. He's still hard inside me. He's holding himself still inside me, watching my face, breathing me in.

I look up at him.

His face is the face of a creature who's been kept from a thing for a very long time and is now inside it.

"Farkas."

"Yes."

"What do you need."

His mouth opens and closes. He doesn't have the words.