Chapter 908: Small & Cherished: Goddess at the Door
Chapter 908: Small & Cherished: Goddess at the Door
And the Goddess fit in him. That was the unbearable, ruinous part of her. Her tall, slender, willowy frame folded into his godly one as though the two of them had been measured against each other in some workshop before either had drawn a first breath:
The crown of her dark head tucked just beneath the line of his jaw, the cold point of the sapphire pressed a small sweet chill into him through his shirt as the gossamer of her gown crushed soft and warm and whispering between their bodies.
He felt the gentle perfect weight of her breasts press against his chest through the thin black tulle, the way the sheer fabric did nothing to hide the warmth and softness of her, the subtle shift of her nipples tightening against the delicate material as she melted into him.
Her scent reached him a half-beat before the rest of her did — that expensive, restrained floral she favoured, jasmine and something colder beneath it, like frost on glasshouse petals — and underneath even that, faint and warm and entirely hers, the simple living heat of her skin.
The air was cool and recycled and faintly antiseptic, hotel air, the air of a thousand anonymous passings-through; and she was the opposite of all of it, warm and singular and real against him, the only genuine thing on the entire floor.
He felt the curve of her waist beneath his palm, the way her hips settled against his, the long, toned length of her legs brushing his through the drifting layers of tulle.
Somewhere behind her the last of the fireworks let go in a long soft percussion that arrived more as a tremor in the glass than as sound, and he felt her exhale against his chest, slow, as though she’d been holding that breath since yesterday and only now remembered she was permitted to release it.
Wrapped up in the all-encompassing span of his arms, the matriarch of one of Paradise’s founding houses became, for one suspended moment, something small and cherished and entirely shielded:
A precious thing the whole hungry world would have to come through him to reach.
They stayed like that.
She tipped her face up to him every so often as she spoke — soft things, unhurried things, the small fond scaffolding of a day they were about to spend in each other’s company — and her voice against his chest was warmer and less guarded than any she ever loaned the outside world.
"I lay awake," she admitted, fingers idly tracing the undone buttons at his collar, "thinking of the foolish thing I’d done, sending you up there alone. The bed felt absurd. Too large. Too cold. I have slept alone for the better part of my life and resented none of it until you went and ruined solitude for me entirely."
"Good," he said into her hair, unrepentant. "I’d hate to be the only one inconvenienced from the fact that I lost my first night with you, Goddess."
And he pressed a kiss to the top of her head, just because it was there, and warm, and his.
And the goddess, held there against the broad wall of him, let herself — for the length of a single borrowed breath — stop performing.
It was a strange and frightening thing, being soft...
She had spent years building a self that could not be reached, a face that gave away nothing, a spine that bent for no one and certainly not for a boy; and here she was, melted into the heat of him in a hotel with a door still open where anyone might have her photographed, and she found that she did not care, and that the not-caring terrified her far more than anything ever had.
He could ruin her. That was the simple arithmetic of it.
He held, in those careless beautiful hands, every soft and unguarded thing she had spent a lifetime refusing to own — and instead of using it, he kept kissing the top of her head like she was something worth keeping safe.
The Goddess pressed her face a little harder into his chest so he wouldn’t see whatever was happening to it, her breasts shifting softly against him with the movement, the sheer tulle whispering between their bodies like a secret.
She lifted her chin to answer but Phei he kissed her lips instead, brief and light, a peck that landed like a comma in the middle of her sentence.
She tried again. He took that one too.
By the third interruption she’d stopped pretending to be annoyed, and the low, helpless, delighted little laugh that escaped her was a sound he felt blooming against his ribs more than he heard it — the goddess giggling against him like a girl a fraction of her years and not a thousandth of her power, undone, radiant, human in the way she only ever allowed in the circle of his arms.
"You keep handing me your sentences," he murmured against the corner of her mouth. "I can only assume you want them taken."
"I want," she breathed, and didn’t finish, because he’d already leaned in to steal the rest.
Phei felt — for these few stolen minutes — utterly, perilously full.
He held her tighter, one hand sliding slowly up the elegant line of her back, feeling the warmth of her skin through the gossamer tulle, the way her body curved and yielded against his.
The press of her breasts, the heat of her thighs brushing his, the soft sigh of the fabric as she shifted closer — every detail burned itself into him like scripture.
They stayed wrapped together in the doorway while the last fireworks guttered out soundlessly behind her, and it was, by a considerable distance, the finest part of a day that hadn’t even decently begun.
"Excuse me."
The voice arrived from somewhere past the goddess’s bare shoulder, dry as ancient paper and twice as mortally wounded.
"Are we just — are we doing this now? In the doorway? With an audience? Some of us are standing right here, slowly fossilising."
Elena Ashford stepped into the frame, arms folded, pale jade eyes rolling toward the ceiling in search of a deity with more sympathy than the one currently being kissed senseless in front of her.
"I feel like a third character in the story of my own life. The two of you have thoroughly forgotten I exist. I’m a side plot like I’m set dressing or a decorative houseplant they keep meaning to water."
The goddess turned her head against Phei’s chest, unhurried, regal, one dark brow arching with the serenity.
"Aren’t you, though, darling?"she asked, and laughed — low and silken and merciless
Phei laughed helplessly and lost it twice as hard when Elena’s entire face collapsed into a magnificent, betrayed pout.
"Really, Mom?" She flung both hands skyward and pivoted sharp on one heel, stalking off the way she’d come. "Really. Wow. That’s — incredible. I hate you. I hate you for at minimum the next several minutes, possibly the rest of the week, and I am putting it in writing so it’s official."