Chapter 38 – In a World of Our Own
Dusky fingers trailed slowly, languidly up a pale, naked arm, leaving gooseflesh and licks of cold fire in its wake as it painted affectionate strokes up and over the dips and arches it came across.
"Pamela..."
Pam moaned lowly as those fingers of midnight began coaxing her out of the creamy obsidian fog it had previously thrust her into, her body reacting instantaneously, feminine segments of her growing rageescent even though she was currently limp with exhaustion, muscles erotically abused to the point of atrophy, every last nerve ending frayed and shot.
"Open your eyes, my angel."
Pam groaned pitifully, body twisting and getting tangled in sheets that still whispered seductively with residual strains of their combined scents and arousal. She shied away from the cool, insistent fingers that were now dancing up along the jut of her bare shoulder blade, Tara's touch simultaneously, confoundingly soothing and arousing.
"Be gone with you, you insatiable creature," Pam grumbled, a low oath dragging itself past her lips as Tara's lingering caresses over the soft, warm flesh of her back procured from her pleasure-spent body, a visible tremor. Eyes still pertinaciously closed, she reached out, hand initiating a clumsy expedition over the legion of plush pillows Tara seemed to favor before she found the one she wanted.
Dragging the object into her arms, she buried her face in Tara's pillow, body going limp, heavy and unmoving once more as she succumbed to the lassitude eating into her bones, the darkness pushing in at the corners of her consciousness, crooning at her to sleep, to waste away the night.
"Pamela..."
"No," Pam mumbled, voice barely audible even to Tara's hyperphysical hearing. She burrowed deeper, body growing laxer. "You've ruined me; I'm ruined." Her lament emerged on a muffled, drowsy rasp, Pam's voice rough and hoarse from the hours she had previously spent vocalizing her pleasure to the heavens. "You've had more than your fill of me so now leave me be. Let me languish in peace."
A low, amused chuckled sounded out from dusky lips at this, Tara failing to abide by her mate's remonstrations as she dragged her fingers up to Pam's nape, knuckles ghosting past mussed locked of auricomous hair that felt like the softest silk.
"Never in all our time together have I ever heard you construct a sentence so histrionically, my beautiful princess," Tara teased softly as she allowed her fingers to venture across the hollow behind Pam's ear, a smug smile arcing the corners of her tumid lips when the lax body of snow and gold lying supine on her bed visible quaked. "I come bearing gifts," she cooed, voice smooth and sweet as honey as she enticed her mate softly. She ran her thumb down the plane of a shockingly smooth, warm cheek, currently flushed from their recent intimate exertions.
"Those same treacherous words poured forth from the Greeks' colubrine mouths before they stormed the city gates and burned Troy to the ground," Pam muttered, her husky cadence slurring, almost tapering off to maunder as she drifted in and out of a slooming consciousness. She snuggled deeper into the bed sheets, face nuzzling against the pillow its cheek was resting upon, a shiver rasping up her spine as whispers of musk, cloves and sandalwood crooned to her senses, twining torpidly around her like a languid caress.
What had she been thinking, provoking an immortal into the churning whirlpools of their unquenchable desire, especially an immortal as old as Tara? Not to say that she regretted it. No. There was no regret in having shared her body with her mate, none. They had made love together, a first tempestuous, fevered joining that rendered them both lost in the swell of their emotions, to the urgent demands of their desire for each other.
Pam had given herself, with wild abandon, to Tara. She gave and Tara took and in return Tara bestowed upon her, the same courtesies, courtesies she was allotted to as Tara's mate. They had steered the other towards splintering climaxes, fell into blistering torrid pools of their passion for each other, branded and marked each other with teeth, fingers, fangs and tongue. Tara had taken her to up to amphitheatrical heights of pleasure she had never imagined existed, pushed her willing body off the cliff of that pleasure only to catch her at the bottom, cradling her in those beautifully muscled arms as she fell and kissing her so softly, so tenderly that she could do nothing by weep in response.
They had unhinged each other, unraveled each other, all in the name of desire, of lust, of love. They broke the other apart, then put back the pieces with soft kisses and softer touches.
No, Pam had no regrets.
However, she was but mortal and her stamina had breached its limit, leaving her flaccid and boneless in the middle of Tara's bed, her body sore and aching in places she previously had not known could ache, the mere acting of drawing breath an effort, so exhausted was every iota of her mortal being that her lungs burned with every struggling inhale, collapsed almost dramatically with every shaky exhale.
"Go away," Pam murmured even as she leaned hopelessly into the palm pressing into her cheek, the act having no cognizance behind it, Pam's body instinctively, subconsciously reacting to the adoring touch of its mate.
Tara simply smiled, a lopsided little curve of her lips that openly expressed just how besotted she was with the woman lying in her bed, naked and drowsing. "I did warn you," she reminded her mate softly as she reached up to brush away a lock of auric hair that crowded Pam's forehead. Mischief was nigh in her eyes, causing obsidian orbs to twinkle playfully as she gazed down at Pam with a palpably loving expression.
"I cautioned you once before, did I not, that when I finally took you to bed, when you finally gave yourself to me completely, that I would have you in every way imaginable?" Tara leaned forward on the mattress, just enough so that her lips were abeyant over Pam's alabaster ear. "I warned you, did I not, that I would render you hoarse with pleasure, deplete you of your strength?" Her lips brushed teasingly against the shell of Pam's ear as she spoke, stirring the flames of her mate's desire and procuring from Pam, a low moan as her provocative words sent a slab of heat to settle in her stomach.
"And yet you conveniently neglected to mention the libidinous facet of your nature," Pam groused disgruntledly as she fought to quell the rising tide of her passion, sure that if she engaged with Tara another venture into that glittering, hungering world of humid lust and aching heat, she would be rendered unconscious from too much stimulation. "You are insatiable."
"Through no fault of my own, I assure you," Tara whispered huskily. She reared back, ran her knuckles down Pam's cheek then thumbed a kiss-swollen crimson lip, smirking when the bit of tumid flesh immediately puckered out, seeking further contact.
"Your body is the church where nature asks to be reverenced," Tara recited over a low growl as Pam took her thumb into her mouth, biting down petulantly before her tongue swept over the temporary ache her teeth caused, soothing it away. "I was merely paying homage."
Pam blushed, remembering with intimate clarity exactly how Tara chose to pay her body homage.
Numerously. Incessantly. Relentlessly.
With fingers, fangs, teeth and tongue.
Her body throbbed anew as memories of what transpired between her and Tara began surfacing, feminine parts of her commencing a renewed aching as fractured, fragmented pieces that stabbed multiple paths up to the forefront of her mind, playing teasingly on the back of her still closed lids, tantalizing her exhausted senses and stirring the flames of a desire for Tara that would never be fully quenched.
Pam released Tara's thumb from the warm, wet cavern of her mouth and rolled onto her back. Eyes still blissfully closed, she simply tilted her chin heavenward, waited then smiled beatifically into the kiss she had not been subtly seeking.
Tara sipped at Pam's pliant mouth, drawing wisps of lavender, honeysuckle and vanilla past her lips, over her tongue and down her throat. Her fingers played reverent lines down a warm cheek before moving up to comb mussed tresses of gold off Pam's forehead.
"Hello," Tara whispered, voice cracking under the force of her love. She smiled, eyes reflecting the emotions jangling against her stalwart Southern drawl when Pam slowly unfurled eyes that seemed fashioned from crushed sapphires, eyes that were dewy with exhaustion but backlit with a kind of love that would have made the gods rage with envy.
"Hello."
"Have I told you how much I love you this evening?" Tara inquired softly as she bent to feather a kiss to the corner of Pam's mouth, lips lingering as the fingers of the hand caressing her mate's cheek moved down to cradle the line of an aristocratic jaw.
It was a gesture so careful, so tender that it caused Pam's heart to ache in the most pleasurably painful manner. "Many a time," Pam replied, voice quiet, susurrant as she lost herself in those pools of midnight and ink. Tara's eyes would forever be her undoing; they were fathomlessly dark and endlessly fascinating, twin orbs that seemed to hold all the mysteries of the world. "Though you needn't at every turn," she continued as she nuzzled into the hand that had found purchase on the side of her face. "I can see how much you love me in your eyes, feel it in your every touch, taste it on your lips like sweetest wine."
She reached up and curled her fingers around the dusky hand cradling her jaw and brought them up to her lips. Whispering a devoted, besotted kiss to Tara's knuckles, she returned the heartfelt sentiment, "I love you too."
Tara leaned over and recaptured Pam's lips, tasting languidly, unhurriedly at her mate's lush mouth, eagerly swallowing the low, guttural moan the intimate act procured from Pam's throat, her thumb stroking worshipfully, the engagement band encircling Pam's ring finger, a physical manifestation of her love for her mate.
"Are you alright?" she asked, voice emerging like gravel as she broke the kiss to allow eyes of darkest night to make a slow study of her mate her expression ridding itself of playfulness as Tara adopted a more somber mask. Flickers of indiscernible emotions passed fleetingly like clouds across the immortal features of her face as the vampire obtained visual intelligence of the slight marks of passion she had left on previously flawless and unmarred alabaster skin.
Pam smiled. It was an indulgent smile, one that came laced with trace amounts of exasperation. She had been awaiting this question, knew it would spill forth from Tara's lips sooner or later. There was no remorse in her mate's eyes, no. She had partook in the intimacies that had transpired between them willingly, given herself willingly, eagerly to Pam and taken all that Pam had offered with equal fervor.
However, despite her willingness, despite her voluntary participation, Tara's subscription to tradition and honor, her natural inclination towards protectiveness, especially when it concerned Pam, would result in the vampire questioning their lovemaking even as they basked in the afterglow of all they had shared earlier this evening.
Thus, Pam merely smiled as a stormy azure gaze conducted an occulatory tour of the classic, immortal features comprised of Tara's face, finding no trace of remorse but sighing softly when she caught embers of anxiety smearing the dark of her mate's eyes, fed by the coals of guilt lurking at the edges of Tara's obsidian gaze as they darted down to the unmarred column of her neck to the very spot where Tara had pierced her with her fangs before retracing a studiously observant occulatory path back to the brumal features of Pam's face.
When their eyes met once more, a glorious collision of obsidian and winter, Pam couldn't help but shudder as she obtained knowledge of the fact that even after she made the transformation from mortal to immortal, from human to vampire, her mate would still continue to bestow upon her that expression, continue to allow that visard of questioning to fall upon a face only angels and gods dared to wear. It was simply another component of the love Tara had for Pam, another manner in which she demonstrated her care, her instinct to protect what was hers.
The knowledge only made Pam love Tara more.
"I'm alright," Pam whispered, voice aching with love. She touched her lips worshipfully to Tara's, blinked back the tears that Tara's blissful, contented sigh called forth then deepened the kiss slightly, infusing her senses with the alchemy of musk, cloves and sandalwood before pulling slowly away. "I'm perfect," she reaffirmed resolutely though her voice remained soft, hushed.
"You most certainly are," Tara murmured, eyes at half-mast as she stared into eyes holding those thousand shades of blue and tinged with curious flecks of gray. "You are perfect and effulgent. The quiddity of perpetual feminine beauty. I could look at you forever."
Pam blushed furiously at this, cheeks becoming erubescent in wake of Tara's sincere compliment. "You're dressed," she mumbled, deftly shifting the conversation into an avenue not directed towards her attributes. She reached up and tugged petulantly at the hem of the sleeveless undershirt Tara wore over her snug black breeches, mouth water slightly she ran a roaming, hungry gaze up the defined musculature of Tara's arms. "I'm afraid your sartorially attired person has me at a disadvantage." She gestured to her lithe frame, currently naked beneath the covers, shyness backlighting her eyes and tinging her cheeks with a stain of rouge.
"I like you wrapped in my sheets," Tara admitted, voice dropping into a contralto register as she allowed rapacious eyes to drink in the erotic presentation that was Pam sequestered in her bed, naked, hair mussed, cheeks flushed and lips swollen and lush. "Make no mistake, angel; you are apodictically eesome clothed in the attires of your choosing but having had the privilege to study intimately, your natural, god given splendor...by all the gods, there isn't a language ancient or new to describe just how enthralling you truly are."
Tara's admission ended on a guttural croak, her eyes having grown esurient as she possessively marked Pam's lithe frame with every deliberate sweep of her eyes.
Cheeks heating with yet another blush Tara seemed bent on calling forth, Pam ducked her head, mussed locks of blonde hair curtaining either side of her face as she sought to compose herself, Tara's words, as always, rendering her speechless and overwhelmed.
"I brought you dinner," Tara announced, smiling softly, sweetly as she patiently waited for her mate to resume the contact of their eyes. She returned a hand to Pam's cheek, fingers ghosting most reverently over smooth, warm skin.
"Did you make it?" Pam inquired, seizing upon this new nugget of information as a device to regain her composure. She arrowed a half-feigned suspicious blue glance over Tara's shoulder where a dinner tray sat sentinel and patient on the bedside table.
"No, I did not," Tara chortled, amused by sudden turn of events, by the teasing tone jangling sonorously in Pam's muddled accent. "Come on. Come here to me." She helped Pam up from her recline, eyes suddenly blazing like black jewels set aflame when Pam clumsily sat up, the sheet around that lithe body of alabaster and delectable feminine curves slipping slightly, revealing the top of pale, plump breasts.
The vampire swallowed thickly, inwardly cursing her suddenly animated beast as power, wild and indomitable, snapped viciously into the air, turning it viscid with its energy. Her gums ached as her fangs threatened to make an unannounced appearance and Tara clenched down tightly on her jaw to deter them from distending.
Pam shivered as Tara's immortal energy skated down her bare arms, a light burn that didn't hurt but made the fine hairs on her forearms stand erect. She wrapped the sheet around her body, tucking the ends between her breasts, the sensible act of tying the ends of the sheet into a knot that would settle against the valley of her breasts excavating from her mate, a low, wanton growl, Tara's eyes already fixated to the spot where pale fingers were fussing with the knot.
Satisfied that the sheet would remain secure around her lithe frame, Pam turned and batted her eyes coquettishly at Tara, a daring smirk of her own playing about her lips as she observed lust and reason war for dominance across the immortal features of Tara's face.
Tara growled dangerously in response to Pam's teasing gaze, resisting the urge to clench her thighs as Pam dragged a lone, seductive pale finger over her chest and up to her clavicle. "Don't stir, Pamela." She shook her head in affectionate exasperation when Pam merely batted her eyelashes coyly at her once more, turned and liberated the tray of food from the bedside table then pivoted back towards the bed and settled it over Pam's legs. "Eat," she commanded softly. "You've not supped all day. I'll not have you denying your body of the sustenance it needs and deserves."
Pam rolled her eyes but did as bade, pulling the dinner tray towards her carefully so as to not upset the steaming bowl of broth and small plate of crackers. The blonde was not cognizant of just how famished she actually was until she lifted the spoon to her lips and swallowed the first spoonful of a thin but flavorful chicken broth with shreds of meat and vegetables floating enticingly in the bowl. She sighed, smiling around the spoon when Tara took it upon herself to situate her sinewy frame behind her, powerfully muscled thighs spreading wide to bracket Pam carefully between them. She shuffled backwards slowly until her back was flush to Tara's front, her mate already reaching around her to hold steady the tray containing her dinner as she made herself more comfortable against Tara.
"Eat," Tara repeated, her voice a low burr that vibrated into Pam's back as the blonde took a precious moment to snuggle deeply into the cool embrace of those muscular arms, sighing contently when Tara kissed her bare shoulder, one arm snaking around to rest its hand on her abdomen, the act protective as it was possessive. "Eat," the vampire said once more when Pam pressed her warm lips to the underside of her chin.
"Spin me a yarn," Pam entreated as she returned her attention to her dinner. She fished out a small square cracker from the haphazard pile on the plate, dipped it into the broth then slipped the sodden piece into her mouth, humming with satisfaction as it greeted her tongue with epicurean pleasure.
"Any requests?" Tara murmured as she nuzzled her nose into a messy mop of golden-blonde hair, biting back a moan as Pam's powerfully feminine scent wound around her senses, intoxicating her with immediate effect.
"Regale me with a story concerning one of your recent travels," Pam supplied as she scooped another spoonful of broth into her mouth, her body relaxing happily against a sinewy body of feminine curves and defined muscles.
"The year was 1830," Tara began, her voice a low drowsy murmur as she lifted her hands and let their fingers find purchase in Pam's disarrayed mop of corn silk hair, slowly gathering the mussed locks in her hands. "On my journey to Scotland to conclude a business venture, I found myself in this quaint little town known to its residents as Halifax." Deft, supple fingers dipped in midnight began combing gently through the golden tresses, slowly working loose each tangle it came across. "My brief interlude there afforded me a fortuitous meeting with a most intriguing woman the townspeople called 'Gentleman Jack.'" Tara sifted silken tendrils of Pam's hair through her fingers, loving how it rasped against her calloused palm like an intimate brush of a kiss against her skin. "A fellow philogynist, she made no qualms about her affinity towards the fairer sex. It was remarkable really, to be so open about the intimacies of her life in the public sphere. When I inquired if she feared repercussions for adopting and flaunting such an alternative lifestyle, her answer was a simple but resounding 'no'."
Pam's face betrayed her unflagging interest as she continued to dine on her bowl of broth and crackers, smiling all the while as Tara continued putting her hair to rights, her mate knowing intimately just how much she detested leaving her hair unattended, untamed and wild about her head.
"She piqued your interest," Pam inferred knowingly, shivering slightly when the pads of Tara's fingers brushed teasingly over her nape.
"She did," Tara admitted as she began twisting Pam's newly untangled hair into a simple braid. "She was quite the industrious woman, openly subversive in her ways and unapologetic about it despite the barrage of harassments and ridicule."
"What was her name?"
"Ms. Anne Lister." Having fashioned Pam's thick locks that in the aurulent spill of lamp light came across like spun gold, Tara wiggled out lightly from behind Pam before stretching her body sideways to retrieve a strip of leather from the bedside table drawer, a simple thong she would use to keep her own hair in a queue. Closing the drawer, she returned to her previous position and wrapped the thong securely around the bottom of Pam's braid, knotting it with expert fingers so that the braid would remain intact.
"In what manner were her ways subversive?" Pam inquired curiously as she turned to peck Tara softly on the lips, using the act to convey her thanks.
"She inherited her family's estate and improved upon its architecture," Tara supplied. She ran a hand down Pam's braid then settled it over a pale, naked shoulder. "She was a landowner, an avid traveler and a diligent diarist." Tara leaned forward and pressed a kiss to the back of Pam's neck, let her lips linger against warm, alabaster skin, infusing Pam's scent and her natural warmth onto her tepid flesh. "She had business prospects attached to her name, successful ones."
"And she was a lover of woman," Pam recounted.
"She was." Tara dragged her lips across Pam's shoulder, each kiss lazy, unhurried. "Unashamedly so."
"You mentioned her prowess with words," Pam mused as she chewed down contemplatively on a broth soaked cracker, legs clenching instinctively together as Tara nip teasingly at her earlobe. "Would you care to enlarge upon that?"
"I love and only love the fairer sex and thus beloved by them in turn, my heart revolts from any love but theirs," Tara narrated memoriter, her voice contralto and smoldering at the edges with the beginnings of an arousal. She tightened the arm she had around Pam, tightened the legs bracketing her mate between her legs then leaned forward to nuzzle at the hollow behind Pam's ear. "Her diaries, if I recall, were written in a code of her own creation, so as to hide the more scandalous nature of her engagements with women from prying eyes."
"Fascinating," Pam gasped out, not at all interested in the subject at hand as Tara instigated a string of moist kisses down her neck, her tongue sneaking out to lap at her rapidly heating flesh.
"She was," Tara murmured distractedly as she suckled softly at Pam's erratically beating pulse. "But I grow tired of singing her praises. I'd rather instead, conduct a thorough exploration of the exquisite, ethereal creature residing in my arms."
Pam shuddered as Tara's immortal energy began leeching from her sinewy frame. She tasted the sharp tang of her mate's possessiveness, could almost see it become corporeal against the shadow-choked air as Tara dragged her deeper into her cool embrace. Dinner forgotten, Pam arched her neck, throwing her head back onto Tara's shoulder unashamedly as her mate charted deliberate kisses back up her neck, her tongue laving over hot pale flesh, teasing, memorizing, marking.
"I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair," Tara rasped, her voice sounding as though she were attempting to speak around a mouthful of rocks. She voluntarily distended her fangs with a soft click, her beast stirring to life as the sharp incisors grew thick in her gums, making a clumsy morass of her tongue as she recited poetry of a wicked nature into Pam's ear. "Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets. Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me and all day I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps." She abraded the tips of those ivory daggers, protuberant over her upper lip, down the column of a pale throat, extracting from Pam a visible shiver and a low keen, a moan of her tearing out of her parted lips as Pam dug her fingers into the taut muscles of her thighs. "I hunger for your sleek laugh, your hands the color of a savage harvest, hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails."
Pam whimpered as Tara brought her arms fully around her, encircling her into a prison of which she had no desire to escape. Shallow, erratic breaths spilled from parted crimson lips as Tara tugged fitfully at the knot between her breasts, the knot that held that thin cotton bed sheet in a loose makeshift toga around her lithe frame.
Eyes already at half-mast, Pam blindly, clumsily reached down for the handles of her dinner tray, almost spilling the crockery upon it, along with its contents when Tara bit down gently on the juncture between her neck and shoulder, fangs pressing into her warm flesh but not with enough pressure to penetrate, her mate quickly losing control to the demands of concupiscence as the fragrance of Pam's arousal perfumed the air around them.
"I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body, the sovereign nose of your arrogant face," Tara husked as she wrapped her dusky fingers over Pam's shaking, clumsy ones. Together, they lifted the tray up from where it sat on Pam's thighs and in coordinated unison, their bodies turned to set the tray onto the bedside table. "I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes, and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight, hunting for you, for your hot heart, like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue."
Tara hauled Pam back against her front, one arm wrapping themselves possessively around her mate's abdomen, the other tugging loose the knot that held the bed sheet around Pam's lithe frame. She ripped the offending material off Pam's body, incensed almost by how it barricaded her hungry, thirsting gaze from conducting an inventory of sweet feminine curves and flawless snow-kissed skin, barred her rapacious fingers from touching warm, bare flesh.
Tara's arms, gloriously unhindered by the long sleeves of a tunic or a shirt, rippled its beautiful musculature as they caged Pam to her front, her embrace unapologetic in their possession and claim.
"Mine," the vampire whispered, her voice a low, guttural growl. "You are mine, say it," she demanded aggressively as she began a covetous mapping of the topography of Pam's feminine curves, extracting from her mate, low moans and high-pitched keens, pants punctuating each wanton sound.
"I'm yours," Pam managed to choke out as Tara's limber fingers began laving attention to pert breasts that were stiff at the peaks, rigid bits of rosy flesh that were mercilessly, unashamedly begging for attention as they pebbled almost painfully beneath skillful fingers. Dusky fingers were gluttonous, unrepentant as they marked their claim on warm, pale flesh, possession in every deliberate tug, knead and caress. Pam tilted her head up as Tara's fingers began descending down her quivering stomach, juddering the delicately defined abdominal muscles. She wound a hand around the back of Tara's head, grabbed forcefully a fistful of clove scented hair, then dragged Tara's mouth down towards her own, initiating a kiss that that threatened to splinter the world and set its continents ablaze.
When Tara's fingers reached the most intimate parts of her, the meeting of those demanding fingers against damp weeping flesh ignited a raging conflagration that made every last nerve ending in Pam sear with pleasure.
Arousal permeated the air, the bouquet of powerfully feminine colliding with the alchemy of wild, immortal and savage a glorious, inescapable explosion above and around them, starbursting onto their senses and leaving them inebriated.
"Please, Tara, please!" Pam almost sobbed, desperation coloring her voice as Tara continued her light touch, fingers just barely grazing over highly sensitized flesh as she trailed them lazily over heat and warmth and wetness. Pam gripped at the flesh of Tara's thighs, arched the small of her back and threw back her head with wild abandon scattering tendrils of auric hued hair onto Tara's shoulder and down her back.
"Tara..."
Unable to deny her mate and spurred by the unapologetic, almost sordid plea that had chained itself to Pam's husky utterance of her name, Tara gave in.
There was a momentary, blunt pressure as Tara's skillful appendages pushed against damp, contracting walls. Then, as those fingers gently yet assertively nestled its way inside of her, Pam's world detonated in a flash of bright, white-hot light.
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"You know they say those bound by the ties of matrimony open the bottom of their souls to each other in bed," Pam murmured drowsily as she lay limply in Tara's arms. Bleary eyes of cerulean glanced up, found and took up temporary residence in whorls of India ink. "You think it true?"
"One can only hope," Tara replied, her voice soft, expression tender as she ran her fingers down Pam's cheek. "If you ever grow afraid that you've lost the keys to my heart, the keys to my soul, be rest assured; the doors to my heart and soul will always be open to you." Cool lips whispered against her hair. "They will welcome you with nothing but joy and open arms because you are my heart, Pamela." Another kiss dropped into her hair, Tara inhaling deeply the bouquet of lavender, honeysuckle and vanilla as she went. "You are my heart and you are my soul. Never forget that."
Tears madefied Pam's eyes, a lone tear, clear as crystal, sundering a kiss flushed cheek, its descent only halted when Tara reached down and caught it the salty drop with a reverent kiss.
"No regrets?" Pam queried torpidly one last time as she found temporary residence in twin orbs of midnight and ink that gaze down upon her as though Pam had personally hung the moon and the stars in the sky for her.
Tara smiled and pressed her lips to Pam's, a kiss that felt like the purest benediction. "Never," she breathed out huskily. "Tonight you bequeathed upon me the gift of ultimate trust and for that, for trusting me wholly with your heart, your body and your soul, I feel nothing but humbled, nothing but the deepest of gratitude. More than ever, I now want nothing more than to cherish you for eternity, love you as you deserve to be loved, hold you to me forever in a safe embrace and protect you from any and all that dare think to touch you with harmful intent."
Nothing need more be said and Pam simply acknowledged the heartfelt declaration that poured from Tara's lips like finely aged wine with a soft, tender kiss of her own.
"Do you know how I fell in love with you, Tara?" Pam posed sleepily as she settled back into her mate's secure embrace, allowing Tara's scent to cocoon her in a cradle of peace and contentment. Her question emerged on a torpid slur, Orpheus' cloak of sleep pulling her successfully towards the web of dreams he had dexterously weaved for Pam. She grew lax and heavy in Tara's arms, cheek resting against Tara's breast and blue eyes slipping blissfully shut beneath pale lids as her breathing began to even out.
"Tell me." Tara's voice was hushed, the vampire unwilling to disturb her mate's descent into slumber. Her arms around Pam tightened carefully as she loosened the muscles of her body to allow them to mold against her mate's natural curves, her own eyes closing and full lips curving into a soft, contented smile as Pam's somnolent reply reached her ears:
"I fell in love with you the way one falls asleep: slowly, then all at once."
TBC
A/N – Quotes and poems I used:
- Pablo Neruda for Tara's recitation about craving Pam's voice, mouth and hair. (I thought this poem so fitting for Tara. Like totally tailor-made for her.)
- Tara also quoted Marquis de Sade's "Your body is the church where nature asks to be reverenced."
- Tara's narration about Gentleman Jack aka Anne Lister is based on factual accounts. Anne Lister was a fascinating person with a fascinating history. Look her up if you feel so inclined. There's both a BBC movie and a documentary about her and her life.
- Pam quoted from John Green's The Fault in Our Stars. I love this quote; it's so…so much. I predict lots of ugly sobbing when people go watch the movie adaptation in the theaters.
- Pam also quoted from Moby Dick when she talked about married couples opening the bottoms of their souls to each other in bed. Hated the book (penis jokes abounded) but love the quote.