Stephenie Meyer owns all things Twilight.

LovelyBrutal, i love you like don't jump in the shower, like chien chaîne, like omg we got a puppy. i love living with you. i love you endlessly. thank you for everything.

and thank *you* for reading.

you think you need it

you think you want love

you wouldn't want it if you knew what it was

Florence and The Machine: Moderation

XII

Stripped bare and sliding between blankets my lover changed while I was away, I swim from end to end of our bed. Leaving whispers of my scent everywhere, and getting Grim's unmixed scent all over me. Crisp notes of black flint and white musk skim the surface of my skin while the heady hint of nectarines sinks deeper, filling my chest with pitch dark longing.

Orris root and heliotrope have never smelled more in bloom than they do on these pillows.

No flower anywhere blooms as readily as I do, bathed in sleek black sheets.

Surfacing with a smile, I curl up like a shaken-loose petal between clean covers. Fading twilight glows through the windows as I close my eyes to replay my favorite parts again.

How pinioned I was in grey-green eyes.

How tense it made him to touch me.

How hard he couldn't stop getting.

I exhale nice and slow, just he told me to earlier, and the memory leaves my nipples feeling freshly bitten and seared with soreness. Opening my eyes, I draw soft cotton down to see they're still pain-kissed pink, sea-salt soaked clean and swelled slightly with the start of healing. I can feel my heart beating in both of them, and I can still feel his hands holding me down if I concentrate enough. I can still feel the weighted flame of his voice flowing through my ears, deeper than my siren, swaying me from within.

Say yes.

Stay still.

Bella -

I hated that it wasn't my real name, but I loved how deeply I felt the force of it. Grim could call me anything and I'd come to him. He could call me nothing to him, and the sheer push of his voice would bend my knees and part my lips. It would have before, but after what he did to me today - after everything he could have done while I was on his table, bared to him and too frightened to even open my eyes - his hold on me is undeniable.

I'm more made of heat tonight than I was the first sixteen starving years of my life. It inundates my veins and makes every inch of my skin tingle for contact. Aching from and toward his metal, every tender tremble of who and what I am brims with one wild and bewildering demand, and waiting for him is equal parts addictive and torturous. Sodden-hot need keeps my thighs entirely parted and my mouth devotedly open, so that every burning sound I make echoes through the cabin. Reaching out. Searching for him.

Hearing my need out loud only makes me more shameless.

It's kept me arched and rocking for hours, touching and blushing and shivering and coming, but there's no relief.

It's the opposite.

My hunger grows on the salacious prayer of his name. My hips arch higher the longer I imagine his pitch dark fingers where my own are, and every fleeting little wave of warmth deepens my desire instead of easing it.

The sun has burned out by the time the Nova's wheels purr against gravel. It's ominously dark outside and all through our house as I stand on wavering legs to make the bed and grab my clothes from the floor in a hurry. I'm scarcely inside the closet when the door opens downstairs.

Grim's effect on me is as immediate as ever, pinning every butterfly into place and making my racing heart pound as he drops his keys on the kitchen counter and steps out of his boots. Imminent nearness makes me feel so soft, so fast, my eyes water. He puts the kettle on before heading to the shower, and the sound and scent of him undressing taunts my lungs and tongue with traces of what's to come.

Even with a floor between us, his presence bridles me.

With each barefoot step up the staircase, remnants of today's tension burn toward where I wait, and it's bitter torture to my hands and knees, not creeping out and crawling to meet him.

By the time he turns the corner into his room, the burden of his unheeded, unremitting reaction to me is so profound it emanates from him like flames still seething under blackened embers. I don't need to peek out and see the relentless shape of him beneath his towel to know he's still hard or hard all over again, but it thrills me when I do.

Exhausted with instinct he can't help and couldn't resent more if he tried, my vice slouches into bed without stretching or smoking tonight. Tea still steaming hot on the table beside him, he closes his eyes while his heart beats like a thunderstorm. Crescent moonlight silhouettes all his rigid edges as he lies down with a sigh before inhaling slow and deep through his nose, pervading his senses with binding hits of fresh temptation.

With his dark arm bent beneath his head, his other drifts down as he tries in vain to decompress. Straining to relax, he measures every breath as he grips his cock, and it makes his pulse throb like a clenched fist between my ribs. Muscles tighten across his shoulders and chest, under the oracle tattooed on his sternum, through his stomach and down his arm as it flexes and rests. Not letting his hand move like nature demands him to, he holds uncompromising lust by the base, and presses slightly, like he could tame or placate what I'm doing to him.

Like he has any say in my effect on his body.

Like he has any control at all when it comes to me.

The second the first elusive waves of sleep reach for him, I slip from the closet. Hovering over lips that make my own ache, I take his breath into me and give him back the nepenthe he craves, sending him sailing into dreams. He's still holding what I want as I slip down to where I never want to leave, so I brush my nose and lips over his knuckles while I curl up on my knees. I kiss his hand. His fingers. His hips. Letting him feel my breath. My cheeks. My lips.

Reaching languidly through the spell of sleep, his free hand finds my crown, and I melt against him. My mouth parts wide around a whimper, and I kiss the head without sucking. I stay open, wanting him to feel what being in his waking life has done to me. How warm I am for him. How deeply wet. How soft I am for how hard he's been all day.

Edging the heavy tip over my bottom lip, Grim unwittingly traces my top one with his thumb, and his hips rise as I lick it instead of his cock. Turning my face to openly kiss his wrist and palm, I drag my tongue and teeth up his life line. Over the heel of his hand. Along the stem of the red rose growing up his thumb before taking it inside. Sucking with a devout hum. Letting go just to draw my subjugated tongue up his forefinger.

Fast asleep and still tight with hours of tension, mine to undo strokes his cock while I take his fingers. He pushes himself toward my kiss and I open wantonly, eager to lap at his thumb again and the full, formidable length of him as he comforts and pleases himself before my mouth. I part my slick lips as far as I can for everything from his knuckles to the base, and hold out my tongue for anything he wants to give me. I whimper and pant and coat him in luscious heat, licking teasingly all over him until he lets go suddenly and slips both hands to my chest.

My breath catches on a gasp as he finds my breasts, his thumbs drawing roughly perfect circles around sorely-swelled nipples like he knows even in dreams - especially in dreams - exactly how to touch me.

That I'm his to touch.

That no matter how off-limits he thinks I am or how mad what's between us makes him, I'm his to touch however he wants.

Here in this room, he touches me how I know he wanted to today, and it opens my mouth like the ocean around a vulnerable little note for him to slide fully into.

Ecstasy and purpose pour down my spine while Grim reaps what he does to me with uninhibited cadence. Squeezing my tits just enough to keep me whimpering, he slides obliviously along my docile tongue with deepening need and draws endless circles around where he marked me just to keep my lips pushed all the way apart.

So he can fuck how he pleases.

So he can listen to me love it.

Feral and intimate sounds flow from me, all over him with each stroke. I can't help it. It's killing me, how much I love it. How much I love him like this. I love it so much it feels like drowning. Like I'll die without this. Without him.

So I lap sweetly at the full length of lethal heat, all along every thick inch until he's throbbing just like me. Just like our hearts. I open like I was born to, wider like a dirty little star, and make him come with my tongue. With nothing but wet little pleas and greedier than ever licks. I kill him with how desperately soft he's made me, and his little death is anything but.

Rose water rushes into me like a rogue wave that can't stop.

Like the man riding it knows how badly I want to drown.

Taking all he allows, I hold him down with my mouth and keep kissing him, lapping and swallowing until he's pushing at my shoulders, but I keep going. I know it's his nature to protect this part of himself at all costs, but I need what I need, and I'm not going to stop until I get it. Until he's panting and I'm purring gratefully around the last, fundamental drink.

Mine.

Mine.

A moan aches from him as his soul pours, and it's so good. He feels so good inside me I could cry. Slipping down to his side with the flood of our pulses eclipsing everything, I rest my head against his stomach while the A-frame sways around us. My lips tremble without him, but I'm filled breathless. More slaked than I know how to be. He gave me such a heavy dose I feel dizzy with it. Lush with it. Laden -

I barely remember nuzzling up to his chest before blacking out.

But I remember dreaming.

The dream he gives me tonight is terribly vivid.

We've moved again, Lilin and me. We're walking the streets of some nameless city too many thousands of miles from this cabin, and I don't even know if I'm carrying the last of Grim or not. If I've got his whole soul for always or if we had to leave without it, but in the dream it doesn't matter. All that matters, all I can feel is that I'm not with him. That he's out of reach, and the yearning inside me is excruciating. It's agony the way my body misses him, torturing me apart from the inside out like razors and salt. I'm sobbing and frantic, tearing through the crowd but no one turns. No one can help me but him, and I know no matter where I go, he's nowhere.

The sky is on fire when I wake. Rain streaks our walls for windows so that saffron light and soot black burn through the glass in a blur, like a flurry of monarch butterflies. Like dogwoods in the height of fall. Like a field of marigolds splashed in flames.

And I realize it isn't just the rain making everything blurry.

I'm crying.

I've been crying.

There's tears on my cheeks, and it takes less than a second to process that they're on him too.

Shifting quickly, I try to rub them from his body with my hands, then with the sheet we're sharing, but I know it's too late. Even as I brush parted lips over his rib cage, I know my attempt to kiss away what I shed is naively vain. Dream-cut tear tracks have already seeped in, branding his skin in another way. A way I've never marked anyone, and I don't know why, but it makes more tears well up.

Sky-firelight and obsidian shadows cover us both as Grim rests, completely unaware, and I sit halfway up at his side. Tiny, helpless cries race down my face, and I sit farther back, making sure they land on our blankets instead of him while anxiousness coils around my heart, and I look away from what I've done.

I know I have to leave soon, and the thought alone fills every vein and nerve and bone with no.

Not now.

Not ever.

Turning back, I stare down at prey that was once as restless as a riot. Peacefully adrift in the heart of sleep, he breathes slowly and evenly. Every tendon at ease. Every sharp edge burnished smooth. Bathed half-in-sunrise, half-in-night, my lover is as serene as he gets right now, and I've lost all reason not to lay back down with him.

The shop doesn't open until noon, and I know he'll fight waking until the last possible minute. And I know going to school is my part of the disguise Alice and I put on to survive, but teenagers skip all the time. It would probably attract more attention if I was never absent, and my cries have already scarred him. It doesn't matter that I didn't mean to. I can't take back their permanent mark, and honestly -

Why should I?

In fact, ask me a better question.

Why haven't I engraved such an irrefutable claim on him before now?

What was I waiting for?

This person is mine to mark however I want.

To paint like property if it pleases me.

In this realm as well as every other.

Possession flows over me like the horizon swallowing the sea as I curl back down, folding all of myself against the only pet I've ever chosen to keep. Draping my arm over his abdomen, I return my head to his chest and close my eyes. Feeling him breathe. Feeling every beat of his toughest muscle leading my own into heavy harmony. I feel how tightly bound I already am to this man, and my cries come so easily.

Nestling closer, I let countless, covetous tears streak his stomach and chest as I slip softly back to sleep, so deep I can't tell if it's real or a dream when he wraps his dark arm around my waist, gathering me to himself like a snake that hasn't fed in years.