It’s like heaven, kissing her, as heady as it was that first time in the cave. As hypnotic as that Dr. Pepper flavored kiss twenty-three years ago.
And then the magic starts.
The glimmer of heat and rushing, swirling clarity thrums from her into me, warming every magic-starved inch of me, flooding my veins with the power I’ve had for so long that I’d taken it for granted. I gasp and arch beneath her, nearly squirming with the unbearable sensation of it, but the glimmer doesn’t fade between us, it doesn’t burn itself out as it normally does.
Instead, it intensifies, it grows and grows until Nimue and I are glowing like twin stars, radiant and vibrant and connected to the shimmering threads of fate woven all around us. It doubles on itself over and over again, in a way I’ve never felt, never heard of, never even imagined, as if it’s feeding on the pull between Nimue and me, on our ageless love, on my surrender and her graceful rule of me. Every part of it transforms the magic from something finite and contained into a well-spring of bubbling, endless abundance. Until both Nimue and I are filled with it, I with complete magic and her with complete magic, both of us brimming and spilling over with it.
I come.
I come without her hand on my cock, without anything touching me except her enchanted mouth and her toy buried inside me. I come so hard I nearly roar with it—I growl and writhe and strain—my stomach and thighs contracting along with my cock to jet warm spurts of seed across my abs and chest. Nimue pulls away from the kiss to watch, but the magic stays, hovering around us like a golden cocoon, and she pulls out of me, frantically unbuckles the straps of her harness, and then reaches for one of my hands just as she manages to tug it around her thighs.
I’m still pulsing with the last squeezes as she shoves my hand against her cunt, and it only takes the heel of my hand on her clit and two fingers wedging inside her pussy for her to follow me with a long, gasping noise and tears in her eyes. I don’t even get to the second knuckles as I feel her walls flutter and tighten around my digits, and then she’s grabbing onto me and rocking as her release rips through her, sending the magic glowing hotter and thicker around us as she rides out the strongest orgasm I’ve ever felt from her on my hand.
It feels like it lasts for years—I’d happily spend the rest of my life exactly like this, glazed with my own cum and watching the most beautiful woman in the world fuck herself on my fingers—and when she gradually stills, her fingers are still digging into my chest.
She looks down at my cock. “You’re still hard,” she whispers.
“You’re still perfect,” I explain.
And then she shucks off the rest of her harness and slings a leg over my hips, bringing that wet pussy against my organ and grinding on it. “Let’s see what my boy can do with it, then,” she says, and then we fuck again, the golden fog around us like the very breath of heaven.
9
The winter solstice is the longest night of the year, and when we emerge from the back room—me limping slightly with the best kind of aches—the storm has blown off, leaving a giant moon clear and bright over the glittering ice that the storm has left behind.
The ice glitters for hours that night.
After we shower and Nimue chains me to the bed, she climbs right into my arms as if she belongs there—which she does. Because my arms belong to her, like the rest of me, and as she settles in with her head resting on my chest and the gentle weight of the chain tugging on my ankle, I think I can’t remember ever feeling this content. This happy.
The glimmer has settled between us, but it’s still visible, a faint golden sheen over everything, and I feel as if every veil in my mind has been pulled back, letting in the past and the future. The present.
Nimue.
I feel her there in my mind, just as I know she can feel me in hers. We’ve shared bodies and souls and destinies, but this—this coupling inside the magic, this twin presence within the sight—is entirely new. It’s euphoric and dazzling enough that we lay in silence for a long time, simply wandering in each other’s thoughts and basking in the warmth of the newly fed power sparkling around us.
After a while, Nimue wonders aloud, “Why do you think it’s different this time? This life?”
I’ve thought about this more than I care to admit, and I’m apologetic when I answer. “Your mother.”
“But she…” I feel Nimue’s eyelashes against my chest as she thinks about this. “But I don’t think she was any different than the first time. She was…self-absorbed. Ambitious. Inconsistent and unkind. The only difference between this life and our last is that she’s dead.”
“Yes,” I say, and I let that be my answer.
“Oh.” She presses her face into my chest as she understands what I’m getting at. “I see.”
“Vivienne finished raising you, and you had the chance to grow into the woman you wanted to be, and not just the tool your mother needed to keep her kingdom strong.”
She takes a deep breath, the delicate cage of her ribs swelling and then shrinking in my arms. “I never said I’m sorry, and I am, you know. Sorry. I’m sorry for what happened twenty-three years ago. I’m sorry for what I did fifteen hundred years before that.”
I open my mouth, but she stops me with warm fingertips. “Don’t. I know you’re going to say that I was young, that I couldn’t have known any better, but look at me now! I’m forty and nearly made the same mistake all over again. I deserve the blame.”
I look down at the top of her head, silky and dark and so, so treasured, and I hold her tighter. “I deserve blame too. I should have trusted you with the truth long ago.” I let out a long breath, realizing a hard fact. “If I’d told you, maybe we would have discovered how to share the magic together years before now.” And everything would have been easier. Better. That hard, lonely path I was so determined to walk alone because I thought it was my fate—what if it wasn’t fate keeping me alone, but my own actions? My own bitterness? If only I’d been willing to be honest and vulnerable with her in this life, who knows what we could have achieved together?
At the very least, we wouldn’t have lost so much time that should have been ours. My body shudders with the gutting thought.
I’ve wasted so much time.
“Marry me,” I whisper into her hair. “Make me yours forever.”
