Pure Requiem - Aja James Page 0,43

one corner.

“I love your broad back,” she praises, her words lazy and soft. “Wide, yet lean. It’s beautiful like the rest of you. Strong enough to carry the world. That’s what it seems like to me. That you’ve always carried the weight of the world. Who can carry you, I wonder? Who can take care of you?”

“Any volunteers?” I murmur, trying to lighten her serious words.

“Me, me, and me,” she replies, digging her fingers into the muscles along my spine. “No one but me.”

She leans forward to kiss my nape, her long, wavy hair glancing my skin in teasing cascades. Then, she moves down the groove of my spine, shifting her position when the kisses take her to the rise of my buttocks.

She kneels between my spread thighs and uses her knees to nudge my legs wider, while her hands knead the tense muscles around my waist.

“Have I ever told you how much I adore, worship, am enslaved by these gorgeous hard globes?” She smacks her lips with emphasis.

My body trembles with laughter, joy relaxing my locked muscles more effectively than anything else could.

I flex said globes in invitation, undulating a little to taunt her.

She growls low in her throat, both playful and aggressive. I can smell her heightened arousal, the sweet, musky scent of her swollen, pulsing, empty sex permeating the air.

My erection, trapped beneath my body against the grassy ground, throbs in answer, hard enough to pound stone, thick and ready to fill her.

But when she spreads my buttocks with her hands and licks a long path from the base of my scrotum to my perineum, over the scarred tissues around my anus, my body locks down as crushing shame and terrifying pain engulf me.

I cannot help the choked groan that escapes. I try to breathe in my freedom, soak it into my skin through the air and rain. I remind myself that the pain isn’t real. It’s in my head.

I try…but it’s not working. I cannot do this. I cannot…

“Tal…” Ishtar’s voice comes to me as if distorted through a long, dark tunnel.

“Tal…”

I shake my head and fight to keep still.

Medusa has no place here. I won’t let her win.

This is between me and my Mate.

My love.

Ishtar lays herself on top of my back and kisses my jaw and neck, the side of my face that is accessible to her. She kisses my tightly shut eyes, licking away the moisture gathered on my lashes. It is not from the rain.

“Did you know that you have freckles beneath your scars?”

It’s the first time that she explicitly comments on my scars. I am surprised enough to hear her and listen.

“I think they’re freckles, or maybe small moles. Beauty marks, Sophia calls them. You have a scattering of them on your torso, like shooting stars under the rain and hail of your scars. So beautiful. Bewitching.”

She begins the massaging and kneading again, along with peppered kisses across my shoulders and back, starting the same process she went through before. Her touch heating up my skin, thawing my muscles, her lingering kisses a gentle, erotic reminder that she is making love to me.

That this is us. And we are free.

“You have these tantalizing little spots on your back as well. One here, in the middle of your spine.”

She scrapes the place with the edge of her nail, making me shiver.

“One here, right over your tailbone, like a punctuation mark.”

She presses her finger into the indention and draws it lightly, teasingly through the tight cleft of my buttocks.

I exhale a held breath and slowly unlock my muscles one by one.

“And here, there are three dots,” she murmurs, her finger circling the bottom of my ass cheek where it meets my thigh, inward toward my perineum.

“Like a constellation of stars, but I forget which one. I shall name all of the stars I find on your body, and claim each and every one as mine.”

Before I knew what she planned, I feel her warm, wet tongue flicking, then lapping at my perineum, down to the base of my scrotum, then back up again, teasing ever closer to my tightly shut hole.

“I found another one,” she rasps with delight.

“Right here.”

She spreads my ass cheeks open with her strong hands again and spears her tongue close to my anus, but not quite upon it, presumably tagging another “star” as hers.

My breath hitches in my throat, my heart balancing on a knife’s edge.

My mind expects pain, but my body feels pleasure. The combination is as heady