The Summer Palace (Captive Prince #3.5)(8)
His own cock, hard and heavy, was rubbing deliciously between them and the feel of it was as good as the feel of the sunlight on his skin. He wanted to keep going, his body thrusting slowly to please himself, and to please Laurent, who liked it slow and lazy like this.
A push, a few deliberate steps, and they were back in the shade. He felt the brush of gauze hangings, the cool stone of the wall at his back. His hands slid down past the small of Laurent’s back, palming the curves there. The features of the room became a series of stations on the way to their destination, the journey neither urgent nor hurried. A period of separation when Laurent poured a cup of water and drank from it, Damen watching with his shoulders against the opposite wall. A long interval where Damen braced a palm against stone and kissed Laurent’s sensitive neck. Then he turned Laurent so that he was belly to the wall, and kissed his neck again, from behind.
Intentionally, he did not drive towards a conclusion, but simply let himself explore, the softest kisses to Laurent’s neck, sliding his palms over Laurent’s chest, slowly over the nipples, which were sensitive and which, later, he would take into his mouth. He liked the feel of Laurent’s back against his torso, the dip of Laurent’s head. Laurent leaned into the gentlest touch as though starved. He stroked along Laurent’s flank, slow, slower. Again.
‘Damen, I—’
‘Really?’ said Damen, rather pleased.
Caught up in the way that Laurent’s skin responded to him, he had missed the quickening pulse, the subtle signs of a body’s approach to its brink. With another lover, it was the moment to speed up in order to reach their peak. Damen slowed further.
Laurent made a soft sound, and Damen slid his hand up the inside of Laurent’s thigh, stopping right at the juncture, thumbing the join between thigh and torso as he kissed Laurent’s neck again, slowly. Laurent groaned, his forehead touched the stone.
His desire to explore Laurent and to enjoy this pleasure was transforming into a desire to mount, to be inside him, and to fuck him this way, slow, their breaths flickering into one another’s mouths as they kissed. Laurent was pushing back against him rhythmically now. Damen’s cock was sliding continually over the place where he wanted it.
Damen turned Laurent and kissed him, Laurent’s back against the wall, the kiss like consummation, hard and deep. Laurent made that slight sound again, right into Damen’s mouth.
When they broke apart again it was to look at each other with uneven breaths, and it already felt like he was inside.
‘I want you,’ said Damen.
He watched the flush rise up over Laurent’s skin.
‘So, on the balcony, but not in the gardens,’ said Laurent.
He was leaned against the wall. Damen had taken a step back. ‘We’re not quite on the balcony.’
‘I can’t keep track. You had us walk here naked.’
‘This is Akielos. We can do things your way in Vere.’ He thought about it. ‘It’s cold there.’
‘And in our new palace,’ said Laurent, ‘on the border?’
Damen felt warmth pool in his stomach. ‘Our new palace.’ Softly, into Laurent’s ear. He had returned into Laurent’s physical space, irresistibly.
‘I’m just—’
‘Talking,’ said Damen.
‘Yes.’
‘I want do it slowly, the way you like,’ said Damen, and Laurent closed his eyes.
‘Yes.’
The number of times that they had made love were still finite enough that Damen could remember each one of them: at Ravenel, the unspoken full of painful secrets; in Karthas, losing themselves in each other; aching sweetness by firelight at a roadside inn at Mellos; the desperation of their first lovemaking after Damen’s recovery.
None of them had been like this, half sprawled on the bed looking up at Laurent. Laurent’s hands smoothed over his chest, up to his neck, then down over the planes of his torso, his abdomen. In the streaked sunlight, they were kissing. He loved the way that Laurent kissed, as if Damen was the only person that he had ever kissed, or would ever want to.
The openness from the baths lingered. Laurent, whose tangle of overthinking usually only disappeared at the moment of climax, had his defences down in the quiet. Damen could hear his soft exhalations of breath; once or twice, a sound passed his lips that he didn’t seem to be aware of. Time unslid the knot of any last ribbon of tension, letting it slip, letting him go further and further into his own pleasure.
Their bodies tangled together, touches blending and blurring. Damen gave himself over to the feeling of Laurent in his arms. It was an age before he put his hand between Laurent’s legs, and felt his legs part.
When he finally slid inside, it felt like time had stopped in the small, intimate space between them, after a sweet forever of deep kisses, of opening Laurent up with oiled fingers. He didn’t move but stayed where he was, in breathless silence. Everything felt connected, open. Their movements were more like nudges than thrusts, their bodies pushing together without the long, sliding separation of withdrawal.
He could feel Laurent drawing closer and closer to his climax, not, as it was sometimes, like he was pushing past the gnarl of his own barriers, but hotly, inevitably. The thrust were longer now, Damen’s body moving to seek out its own gratification.
He heard a choked off sound as Laurent dissolved under him, and Damen was lost to the feel of it, the hot, liquid pleasure of fucking, the closeness, near as a heartbeat. His own body pulsed and flared, an interval of flooding pleasure, and it almost didn’t seem to end but to transform into the sweet, heavy feel of his limbs entangled with Laurent’s, pleasure still between them, the throbs of it ebbing.