Eternal Sin (Primal Sin #2) - Ariana Nash Page 0,53
not all angel. Inside, you’re demon still? I… I can taste it… when we…” He wet his lips, tasting the lingering heat of Severn still. He’d felt it before. Every time they’d touched, kissed, fucked, or made love, it had always been there, and he wanted to feel it again. He wanted to feel demon beneath his hands. “Gods, I deserve to be cast out of Aerie.”
“No,” Severn said firmly. “You did not deserve what was done to you. Remiel is a bastard. He told me some things, thinking I’d be too dead to pass them on. I want to tell you, but first, will you come to bed—not like that,” he hastily added, seeing Mikhail’s face fall. “Not for sex. Just… it’s better if I show you, and I’m fucking wrecked, and I need to be with you.” He took Mikhail’s hand, and when there was no resistance, asked, “Will you be with me?”
“I don’t think I can—”
Severn smiled softly. “This is a friend thing, all right? Not an angel and demon thing.” He stood and drew Mikhail to his feet, and it was all Mikhail could do to be led up the staircase and into one of the cottage’s bedrooms with creaking floors and wonky windows.
Severn threw back the bed covers, then quickly unbuttoned his borrowed shirt and draped it over a nearby chair. Soft moonlight from the windows painted the smooth skin of his scratched back and shoulder, and then he turned, and the light played down his chest in a way Mikhail longed to follow with his mouth and tongue.
He crossed the small bedroom in two strides and reached for Mikhail’s shirt buttons. “May I, Your Grace?”
He made efficient work of the buttons, and Mikhail shrugged the shirt off. Severn methodically took it and laid it next to his, then returned to take both of Mikhail’s hands. He walked backward to the bed, climbed on, and slowly urged Mikhail onto the creaking bed so they both knelt, eye-to-eye, the mattress sagging under their weight. Mikhail wondered, absently, if their trousers might go next, and then what might happen, and if he’d even be able to without wondering if Severn was manipulating his body. But Severn merely let go of his hands and lay down on his side, implying Mikhail could do the same.
Moonlight lay over him, and he was exactly how Mikhail remembered him, but also a stranger.
“It’s all right if you don’t want to,” Severn said, appearing to mean it.
Did Mikhail want to lay next to his enemy? He wasn’t sure he trusted himself, or whatever this thing was between them.
“It’s fine…” Severn said. “There’s another room. You take this one—”
Mikhail lay down on his back and stared at the ceiling. “What happens now?”
Severn sighed in a way that suggested he was sorry, not frustrated. “I’ve hurt you, and that will take a long time to heal, if it ever does. So, for now, we lie here, like this, and rest.”
The bed creaked as Severn made himself comfortable.
“Nothing else?” Mikhail asked the ceiling.
“Nothing else.”
Mikhail sighed, too, surprised to find he’d been holding back some tension at what he might be expected to do here and how much it would hurt when he refused. Severn had hurt him, but Mikhail had hurt Severn too. He did not know much about love, but he was certain that wasn’t how these things were meant to go.
Mikhail let his lashes fall. Yes, this was strange, but for the first time in a long time, he wasn’t alone.
Chapter 23
Severn
He was going to have to show him the wings and explain everything Remiel had said about demons and love and a book in Haven, but before all that, he just wanted to lay next to the sleeping Mikhail as the sunlight warmed the room and pretend it was just the two of them in a world that wouldn’t destroy them both if it knew the depth of their love.
Gods, he was beautiful, sprawled on the bed, an arm flung behind his head and the other resting over his waist, below the vanishing scar. He wanted to touch. To kiss. The desire was almost unbearable. But Mikhail wasn’t ready. Severn had abused his trust, abused him… Mikhail had opened up to Severn in all ways and been betrayed. He was a long way off from being ready to love physically, might never be with Severn, and that was something Severn would have to come to terms with.