Chapter 226: Under 3 (M)

BONNIE

The wall groaned. A column of water dropped six inches and recovered. I cried out, raw and broken, and my thighs locked around his hips. He stayed exactly where he was and rode it out with me until I went limp and started pushing at his shoulder because it was too much.

He lifted his head. His chin was wet, and he was grinning like a boy who had won something.

"Do not say it," I warned.

"I was going to say you held it."

"You were not."

"I was." He wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist. "Mostly."

"Mostly."

"Six inches dropped, but they came back."

I hooked my ankle around his hip and pulled. He came down onto his elbows over me, and I felt him against my thigh, hot and hard and far too composed.

"My turn," I told him.

His eyebrows rose. "Your turn?"

"Get on your back."

For a moment he only looked at me, and the look was worth more than any answer he could have given. Then he rolled, the mud took his weight, and he settled onto the stone shelf with one arm behind his head like a man lounging on a riverbank in summer.

I climbed over him.

His hands found my hips and stayed there. I sat up astride him with my knees sunk in the mud on either side and my hair hanging around my face, and I let him look, because for once I wanted to be looked at. The last lights came through the water in bands and laid gold across both of us. His gaze travelled from my hips to my stomach to my breasts to my face, and it did not linger anywhere long enough to be polite.

"Bonnie," he said, and the word came out rough.

I reached down and took him in my hand.

He jolted. His fingers tightened on my hips hard enough to bruise. I guided him in and sank an inch, and we made a sound in the same breath. Another inch followed, and the stretch was slow and full and better than I remembered. I kept going until my hips met his.

His head had gone back, and his throat drew a long taut line.

I laughed, breathless, and began to move.

The rhythm came easily. Something in the angle, in the mud, in the way he gripped me and swore under his breath, made every roll of my hips land exactly where I wanted it. I braced one hand on his chest and found the cadence with my knees. He looked up at me with his mouth open and his eyes half shut, and his face held something very close to worship.

"That is it," he rasped. "That is it. Do not stop."

"I was not going to."

"Come here." He reached up, hauled me down by the back of the neck, and kissed me while I rode him. The kiss was all teeth and bad aim, and neither of us cared.

The pressure built again, faster this time, and higher. My hand on his chest curled into a fist. He slid his own between us and found me with his thumb, and the noise I made went straight into his mouth as everything in me drew up tight.

"Together," he said. "Bonnie. Look at me."

"I am looking."

"Then keep looking."

I did. His eyes, usually a deep and steady green, had gone black. His jaw was locked. His hips drove up to meet mine, and the bond between us flared bright and hot and ringing, and I broke. He broke with me. For three or four seconds the world held nothing but the two of us and the sound of water.

He shuddered beneath me, his hand clenched on my hip. I folded down onto his chest with my forehead against his collarbone and my whole body shaking.

"That," he said into my hair after a while, "was worth the wait."

I laughed weakly against his skin. "Was it?"

"Oh, trust me, it was."

"Poor thing."

"I am a martyr." His chest rose under my cheek, then stopped. "Bonnie."

"Mm."

"Bonnie." His voice had changed. "Look up."

I lifted my head.

There was no water above us.

There was sky. Hundreds of stars, cold and sharp, and the black tops of the pines on either side. The whole lake stood up around us in one vast trembling wall, thirty feet high and still climbing, its face full of weed and silver fish and one extremely startled pike.

I was holding all of it.

My stomach dropped as if the stone had been pulled out from under me.

"Lysander."

"Yes."

"Tell me it is not me."

"I would love to." His eyes tracked the wall upward. "But it is you. Is it not?"

It was. Who else could it be?

The wall wobbled. It bulged. Then it gave way all at once, and a hundred thousand tons of lake came down on our heads.

The noise was enormous. Water hit my back and drove the air out of my lungs and flattened me onto him, and then we were tumbling, rolling, scrabbling, cold in every direction.

Mud.

Weed in my mouth.

His hand clamped around my wrist. I kicked and kicked, and the surface was somewhere above and much too far, and then it was not, and we burst through into the night air together.

I dragged in a breath that hurt.

Lysander surfaced beside me with his hair plastered flat and his mouth open. He looked at me. I looked at him.

He started to laugh.

It was a wrecked, wheezing laugh, and it caught me before I had any say in it. We hung there in the water, coughing and cackling, while the last of the lake slapped itself back into place around us in wide flat rings.

"You," he managed, "held it."

"Shut up."

"You held the entire lake."

"I did not mean to."

"I know you did not mean to." He pushed his hair off his forehead, and it fell straight back. "That is the best part."

"There was a fish."

"There was a very confused fish."

"It looked at me."

"It looked at both of us." He wiped his eyes. "I will never forget that fish."

I splashed him. My arm had no strength left in it, and the water barely reached his shoulder, and he laughed harder. After a second I joined him, and the sound rolled out across the water toward the dark pines and came back at us off the far bank.

Somewhere up on the roof, a sentinel was very carefully not looking.