Kiss the Dead (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter #21)

WE CLEANED UP in the shower, and when we'd rinsed the soap and conditioner out, Nicky proved to me that he had more game.

I ended up on the smooth, wet tiles on my knees, the hot water pounding down on us. He shielded me from most of the spray, only rivulets of it tracing down his body so that the water was more decoration to all that smooth skin. I licked the water off the edge of his groin, sipped it off the loose skin that dangled so delicately below. He didn't shave completely like most of the men in my life, so I licked the loose skin, feeling the smoother hardness underneath. We'd already found that my mouth had healed a lot; I wasn't sure it was up to full oral, but I was willing to try, and I'd never met a man who would argue about the offer. If Nicky had been shaved all the way I would have sucked and rolled those delicate balls into my mouth, but hair between the teeth - not my favorite. But either he shaved, or didn't need to, above, and that I took into my mouth completely. He was still small, loose from the heat of the water, so I could take all of him easily, rolling, sucking, licking, enjoying the sensation of him in my mouth when he was still soft enough that I didn't have to fight to breathe, or fight my gag reflex. I could just enjoy myself and I did. He didn't stay small long.

I was even more healed than I had thought. I hadn't remembered concentrating on using Nicky's energy to heal myself, but apparently it had.

I hesitated as he grew bigger, because if I put him in the sides of my mouth he slid over the few wounds that weren't completely healed. I stopped, and thought about the problem, on my knees, staring at Nicky, so hard and perfect.

"If it hurts too much, we can do something else," he said.

I nodded, but decided I'd try avoiding the sides of my mouth. If you can't go around a problem, go straight at it, go straight down it. If I took him straight down, over my teeth, across my tongue, and to the back of my throat, driving him in and out of my mouth so that we were mimicking what he'd done earlier between my legs, it didn't hurt much. It hurt a little, but the worst was to the sides of my mouth, which meant that I'd struggled more in Asher's kiss than I'd thought. I pushed the thought away, and let myself enjoy the man in front of me.

"God," Nicky said.

I rolled my eyes upward to see him staring down at me, face growing frantic. He'd let the water slick his hair completely back from his face. I think it was the first time I'd really seen his face so clean and bare. He was handsome, he really was. I liked the lines of his face without that fall of hair to cover the missing eye. He wasn't less beautiful because he wasn't "perfect"; it was Nicky, it was the way he looked, it was him, and I liked it, loved it. I couldn't smile with my mouth full, but I could put the smile into my eyes. He'd grown long and hard and smooth in my mouth. I loved sliding my mouth down the long shaft of him, until there was that moment when he touched the back of my throat and I could choose whether to go back up or push him down the curve of my throat. He was just long enough that it was an effort to swallow him down. There were some times that bigger was not better.

I wrapped my hand around the base of him, so that I could go down far enough for him to enter my throat, but not so far that it was choking me. I had worked hard to get rid of my gag reflex, and it was a lot less, but there was one reflex that was harder to control, the I-can't-breathe reflex. I slid my mouth over him, and then pushed until my lips touched my hand, and then I let go, put my hands behind him to hold on to his thighs, while I forced myself that last few inches until my lips touched the front of his body completely, my mouth locked around him. I had to calm my pulse, calm my body, it was almost meditative, to stop my body from panicking that we couldn't breathe past him.

I drew back off him slowly, and had to cough. My eyes were tearing up, and my nose was beginning to run. I moved to the side of Nicky's leg and let the spray from the shower hit my face enough to clean the tears and snot away. In movies they clean the actress up between shots, but in real life, it's messy. It was my body trying to get rid of whatever the fuck was down so far, and not being swallowed. The body rebelled against something that large being that far down, and not being swallowed. It was like my body was saying, Either swallow, or get it out.

"You okay?" he asked.

"Fine," I said, but my voice sounded hoarse enough that I had to clear my throat. It wasn't sexiness; it was my throat getting a little abused by what we were doing.

"God, Anita, please feed."

"You just want me to use the ardeur because I don't have a gag reflex and get even better at deep-throating once I release it."

He nodded, the water misting around him as he moved his shoulders in it. "Yeah," he said, and his voice was a little frantic.

I did what he asked, because honestly I wanted my mouth completely healed, and my stomach was letting me know that there were other hungers that needed feeding besides the ardeur. That I noticed it in the middle of good sex meant I was way hungrier than I knew. It was the kind of hunger that if I didn't fix it, my beasts could rise and look for food on their own, and take my body with them while they did it.

Once I'd fought to keep the ardeur penned up, but now I had to think about it, find it, call it, unleash it. One minute I was in control, the next the ardeur rode me, and spilled out of my skin and into Nicky.

What little gag reflex I had was gone; the small, sharp pains of the wounds in my mouth just added to the desire, everything translated to sex, to want, need, desire. I drove him as deep down my throat as I could, and now there was no need to fight my body. It was on the same side as the ardeur, and the ardeur wanted to feed.

Nicky put his hand on the back of my head, and I had enough of me left in there somewhere to look up and say, "When I go down, hold me against you."

"You can't breathe," he said.

"I'll tap out, then you let me go. I'll breathe again, then go down again."

"You want me to hold you, force you to stay down on me?" He made it a question.

"Yes."

He raised an eyebrow, and looked totally suspicious.

It made me laugh. "I want you to mouth-fuck me, Nicky, and the ardeur will help me do that."

He frowned at me. Naked, wet in the shower, body hard and ready, but he wanted to make sure this wouldn't come back and bite him later. I guess I couldn't blame him.

"I've done it with Nathaniel, and Asher, and Richard."

That made him give me a wide-eyed expression. "Richard, really?"

"Yes," I said.

"Well, fuck, if you can do it with him..."

"Yep," I said.

He still looked a little doubtful, but said, "Okay."

I let the ardeur rise back up, like heat spilling over my skin, down my fingertips to find Nicky's thigh and pour over us both. I used my other hand to help guide him into my mouth, down my throat, then had to move my hand so I could go all the way down, until my lips were pressed tight to the front of his body. His hand pushed against my head, and I used my free hand to push his hand harder against the back of my head.

He didn't question it this time; he just pressed his big hand against the back of my head and used all that strength to hold me against his body. At first it was exactly what I wanted; it felt so good to be able to just stay there with him impossibly far down my throat, but even with the ardeur riding me, eventually I needed to breathe. I tried to come up off him, but his hand pushed harder and I was trapped. Part of me enjoyed that I was trapped, that he could, if he wanted to, keep me there, keep me there until I choked, until my body made me fight for breath. I pushed against his body with my hands, but he pushed back, holding me, forcing me to stay down. I stayed as long as I could, before panic chased back the ardeur, and then I tapped against his thigh. There was a moment where I had to trust, utterly trust, that he'd respect the tap-out. I'd admitted to myself a couple of years ago that part of what I enjoyed was that moment of trust, that instant where the person you were with could do something really bad to you, and only their choice to be good kept the bad thing from happening. I liked that moment of not knowing if it was all going to go horribly wrong this time. I hadn't liked that this did it for me, that this kind of moment really, really did it for me, but I'd made peace with it. I'd made peace with myself, and I fucking loved it.

Nicky let me go; he let me draw back off his body. I took a deep, shaking breath.

"Are you okay?" he asked, and he sounded worried.

I nodded, and finally was able to say, "Yes." I looked up at him and said, "We can do this a little more, but the not being able to breathe makes the ardeur back off, eventually. It does that when self-preservation is on the line."

"Then we fuck, so you can feed."

"Or we mouth-fuck; with the ardeur I can do that, and I enjoy it, too."

He had a moment of indecision so plain on his face it was almost painful, but then he said, "We'll see how we feel when we get there."

I agreed, and we went back to our game of deep-throat bondage, because you don't need ropes and chains for it to be bondage, just to be held and not be able to get away. This game had that in spades.

When we'd done it as long as my throat could take it, even with the ardeur, Nicky said, "I want to fuck you again. I love that I'm on your short list of the men you don't make wear a condom."

It hadn't been a front-of-the-head decision; he was just with me when I was with Micah and Nathaniel and Sin so much, and they were on my fluid-bonded list, too, so... it had been a recent change to not make Nicky put on that extra layer of protection. I was on the pill, and I was a carrier for lycanthropy so I couldn't catch that even if the rough sex bled me, but I still made most of the other men wear condoms, just in case. I remembered the moment I hadn't made Nicky put one on; Nathaniel and Sin had both been there, but Micah had been out of town. It had just seemed natural, but his mentioning it like that made me think about it. I wasn't always good when I thought about things. I tended to start tearing at my relationships, as if I were trying to break free of some sort of trap. Did I still see love as a trap? Was I still that unhealthy, that once a man reminded me how much he meant to me, I had to fight my way free of it until I destroyed everything? Wasn't that what I was doing with Sin? Was I about to do the same with Nicky?

"I can't hear your thoughts, only feel your emotions, but I don't like that look. It's never good. What did I say wrong?"

I looked up at him. His hair was still slicked back from his face, leaving it bare and wonderful. His body was naked and covered in water, so lickable and yummy. I could still feel the happy ache of him in my throat. He'd been at my side for two years. What did he have to do to prove himself? What did anyone have to do to prove themselves to me? Some of the men in my life would have said a hell of a lot.

I realized that the ardeur had receded again. Once I'd been at its mercy, but not now. I controlled the ardeur so well that I had to remind myself to feed sometimes. If I didn't feed, my ability to heal was compromised, and I would eventually begin to draw energy off Nathaniel and Damian first, and then move on to Jean-Claude and Richard, but only after Nathaniel and Damian were dead. Jean-Claude had explained that metaphysical math to me when my control got this good, because I'd thought control meant victory. I'd forgotten the ardeur was like your stomach; just because you could teach yourself not to want to eat didn't mean your body didn't need the food.

I still needed to feed, but it wasn't the overwhelming control-stealing thing it had been. I had more choices now. I couldn't blame the ardeur for the sex I was having. The ardeur put some of the men on my plate, but what I did with them was me now. I tried to decide how I felt about that.

"Anita?" Nicky made it a question. His face was closing down, drawing away from me, putting his defenses back in place. He'd been made into a sociopath, which meant some of the emotions were in there. I didn't want him to put them away again. I liked the glimpses I got of his heart.

"Fuck me," I said it softly.

"What?" he asked, like he was having trouble hearing above the pounding water.

"Fuck me," I said, louder.

A smile curled the edges of his mouth, and filled his face with an almost disturbing happiness. There was always the sense that there was darkness inside Nicky that he got to let out thanks to me, but it was still in there, and it always wants out, the dark. It can be controlled, harnessed even, but in the end it just wants to come out and play dark games.

He let me see the happy monster inside him. It had nothing to do with his beast; what I saw in his face wasn't animal, it was all human, just most people didn't like to admit it. Nicky didn't mind. Nathaniel didn't mind. Dev didn't mind. And because they didn't mind, I was beginning not to mind either.

"Fuck me," I said, again.

He didn't make me ask again.