Juniper & Thorn(67)
I nearly fell over. My hands dropped to Sevas’s shoulders and he lifted his gaze, staring up at me from beneath dark lashes. The whites of his eyes were shot through with red, but still he was so beautiful that I could hardly bear to look back at him.
“You told me you’ve never been kissed,” he said. “It’s good magic, you know. Maybe the best.”
“I couldn’t say one way or the other.” My skin was so warm and I could see a flush of bright pink spreading from my forehead past my collarbone in mirror after mirror.
Sevas smirked, with the reckless charm of the man I had strolled with along the boardwalk that one impossible night. “Let me show you,” he said.
And then he wrapped one arm around my waist and brought the other hand to the back of my head, snarling a fistful of my wild hair. He pulled me down toward him and kissed me so thoroughly, so relentlessly, that I thought I would faint before he was through. His tongue parted my lips with gentle insistence.
My own hands went to his face, his throat, his chest, touching all the places that had featured in my feverish nighttime fantasies, and still I felt almost surprised that there was no noose to jerk me back into the gray-washed waking world. Behind my eyelids, everything was blooming hot and red.
When at last he pulled away, I said breathlessly, “If that were true magic, I would have turned into something else by now.”
“Perhaps I didn’t try hard enough,” he said, and then bore me down beneath him. My hair spilled across the floor, mingling with bits of broken glass. He kissed me resolutely on the mouth, and then trailed his lips doggedly down my chin, along the line of my jaw, over my throat. All the while I could do nothing but gasp and pant, my arms locking around his neck to pull him closer and closer and closer.
“I do feel different now,” I said faintly, the next time he gave me leave to speak. “Maybe it’s good magic after all.”
Sevas smiled, and it was so lovely that my heart broke a little bit, the way a hundred other girls’ hearts had certainly broken when he looked at them like this. “What are you now, do you think?”
It occurred to me then that perhaps this was my magic: that the secret I’d held in my belly without spitting it back up and the lie I’d told over and over again to keep the secret safe were now made manifest.
“A just-kissed girl,” I said. “A woman, maybe.”
I could feel the press of something hard and stiff against my thigh, and my dress had gotten rucked up over my knee. I ran my hand along Sevas’s chest, along all the coils of muscle and the planes of bone, his skin pulled tautly over them. Everything was twined and hard and strong.
When I reached the slope of his abdomen and the knob of his hipbone, Sevas shivered, and through his parted lips there came a soft moan.
“Do you mean to torment me?” he asked.
I was as light as dust motes drifting through a tract of sunlight, as light as air. I took Sevas’s hand in mine and guided it to the small of my back, where the laces of my corset began.
“Take it off,” I said, and then remembering my long-gone governess’s etiquette lessons, added, “Please.”
Sevas’s fingers scrabbled at the laces, but he did not find much purchase. He exhaled through his nose, lips puckering with a little scowl, and at last I rolled over onto my belly, propping myself up on my elbows. Sevas’s breath caught a bit at my boldness and I felt so glad to hear it, glad that for once I was the one who had flustered him.
I looked over my shoulder, through the loose strands of my irreparably mussed hair, and saw the shape of his hardness through his tights. That thrilled me even further, so much that I didn’t even mind the way he tore my corset laces like a savage animal, peeling off my sleeves and taking down my skirts, nor even the way the wooden floor chilled my breasts and made my nipples knot with cold.
He kissed his way across my shoulders, down the length of my back, over my bottom, and sucked at the sweet place between my thighs. I whimpered and then he turned me over, sliding between my legs. As he held himself there above me, he said, “Marlinchen . . .”
“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t stop, or you’ll be a liar, a cheat—”
He laughed. “Who says so?”
“I do.”
Transformations were a fickle, dangerous magic, and every spell came with a high and terrible cost. Once you turned into one thing, you could no longer be what you once were. A cat turned into a cat-vase lost its whiskers and darting pink tongue. A carriage turned into a gourd lost its wheels and glass windows. And once you became a woman, you gave up all the trappings of girlhood, all its precious bounties.
I knew once I was through with this I could no longer hope to be rescued from a tower or kissed awake from my cursed slumber. Princes didn’t come for women; they only came for girls with intact and immaculate maidenheads, opening them up like flowers waiting to be plucked. I was excising myself from half the stories in Papa’s codex, and perhaps it ought to have terrified me. But I only felt a pull of want in the bottom of my belly, and between my legs I was almost embarrassingly slick.
Sevas stripped off his tights and then he was kneeling there above me, naked. I drank in the sight of him like it was sweetest kvass: the gold paint still smudged on his cheeks and throat, the tattoos scrawled over his shoulders and the back of his hand, the rippling muscles of his chest, the straining hardness standing taut against his stomach.