Chapter 12

Chapter12

Idon’t know how long we walk, not only because the fruit of the queen’s kiss is sweet in my blood but because the sun doesn’t move across the sky in the same way here, and so what feels like an hour might only be a few minutes in fairy time. But we stop by the burn, which is shallower and wider here, and wash with rose-scented soap from the queen’s bag.

After the blood is cleaned from our hands and faces, the queen gives me a leather costrel of water to drink, and then when I’m done, she runs a thumb along the edge of my lower lip to catch a stray drop of water.

Her eyes are as hot as they were when she was kissing me with the heart between us, and the answering heat inside me arrows straight to my clit. An ache—hot and full—throbs along the narrow length to the small, needy glans, and my entire pussy responds.

Just from her stare.

“Would you like me to be your pet now?” I whisper. It doesn’t even occur to me to be shy about it, to try to hide how much I want her. Or to hide how much I want her to want me back. I could blame it on the fruit, of course, and pretend I’m too stoned to keep up the pretense of Easy Janneth, but I won’t.

Even without the fruit earlier today, I felt the same—like keeping hold of that flimsy, colorless version of myself had become impossible overnight. Impossible once she told me that everything I did would be pleasing to her.

And she seems pleased now, or at least aroused, because her eyes flash as she leans in to kiss me again, and her hands are demanding, eager, pulling me close and then finding my hips, my ass, my breasts. “Yes,” says the queen finally, shoving up my dress to curl her fingers over my clothed pussy. “Now. Always.”

I moan into her kiss as she plunders my mouth and then give a surprised exhale when she pushes me onto my back. I’m cushioned by ferns and leaves, and so it’s not at all uncomfortable, only a bit cool and damp, and that’s no bother when I’m running so hot all over.

She’s kneeling over me with her knife once again in her hand.

I have a moment of cold, clear worry, which simmers into something so molten I can’t help squirming as she slides the point against the soft fabric of her breeches and then cuts them open with an impatient flick. She tosses the knife aside and tears the fabric even farther apart so that her sex is bared to the open air.

She moves over me, swinging her knee easily over my head so she can straddle my face. She reaches down to drag her fingers to my chin, parting my lips, and then she lowers herself to fuck my open mouth.

I’m not prepared—could never have been prepared—for the unmediated taste of her. Sweet and warm, almost citrusy. With that deep flavor only pussy has. And then, just as with her kiss, just as last night, there is the taste under the taste, and if her kisses were enough to get me stoned, then licking her cunt is enough to send me flying.

I feel every thread of life around me, every breath and whisper of stirring leaves and searching tendril of mycelium. I feel her, strong, hot, the muscles in her thighs and hips quivering, her blood rich as an entire universe in her veins. I feel myself: the quick pants swelling my lungs, and the twist in my belly, and the restless kick of my legs as my body searches for friction that isn’t there.

And then, as I pull her erect clit into my mouth, I realize I can feel her pleasure too, like we’re connected, like the sensation shivering through her is universal, radiating out from her and into the rest of the world, and with a cry against her flesh, I climax with a shuddering seize, without having even touched myself once.

I buck and writhe underneath her, the orgasm too hard to bear, because it’s not just in my body, but in my mind, like all of me is releasing, clenching, releasing, and though it’s hard to see anything but torn breeches and scarlet tunic and flashes of the gold leaves, I know she must like this, that this pleases her, because she stabs a hand into my hair and rides my face like she paid for it. Or bargained for it, at least.

I’m no stranger to having a lover sit on my face, but no one has ever done it like the queen is doing now, giving me so much of her weight, her hand twisting hard in my hair to give herself enough leverage to fuck my mouth with short, sharp rocks of her hips. I feel pinned, used, blissed out as fuck, and I can’t get enough of her even as the fading orgasm still ripples through my cunt. Each taste is another blow to my sanity, each new rush of slickness is the end of everything I ever knew and the beginning of everything I ever wanted.

And it occurs to me, with the fairy queen hot and wet on my face, with my back against the damp forest floor, that the reason I’m not more afraid, that I’m not miserable despite being literally kidnapped, is that I think I might fit here. Somehow. Nonsensically.

Because when everything else is so outrageous, so dangerously indulgent, when everything around me is also too much, I don’t feel like I’m too much at all. I feel like I’m just the right amount.

The queen’s thighs tense around my head, she gives a sharp, punched exhale, and then she orgasms against my mouth, which I know mostly from the hard quiver of her thighs and the rough grunts she makes as she fucks my mouth through it all.

My body answers again, a softer climax than the first but powerful nonetheless, and when she finally goes still, she reaches back and impatiently rucks up my dress so she can slide her hand into the front of my hose. She doesn’t stroke me, it’s too perfunctory a touch for that—more like she wants to see how wet I am.

She makes a satisfied noise when she finds me dripping and then gets to her feet. Rose petals fall from her hands as she does; I can feel them tangled in my hair. I lay dazed on the ground, blinking up at the silver sky through the gold and red leaves, already pining for the taste of her again and not knowing if she’ll let me have it.

“Janneth,” the queen says, and I look at where she’s settled herself under a large oak, her legs crossed. She licks me off her fingers as fastidiously as a cat might clean its paw.

I get to my hands and knees, and she beckons me forward. I crawl, even though she hasn’t asked it of me, because I think she might like it and because I know I will.

And she does like it, I think, because her chest is moving with barely controlled breaths and her mouth is parted, like someone’s set a feast in front of her.

“Come closer,” she says, voice low and songlike, and I crawl into her lap and straddle her. The queen wastes no time in shoving her hand down my hose once more, and she finds the heart of me right away. The first slide of her fingers against my clit has me looping my arms around her shoulders to support myself, and the second has me pressing my head to hers.

She angles her hand and pushes two fingers inside me—then three when she sees how easily I take two. She’s not the kind for easy, I think, not the kind for gentle. She’d want to me to feel her after she’s been someplace on my body, and I love that, I want that. I want to be marked, I want her to make me sore, because then every time I move or twist or sit, she’ll be with me, the memory of this moment will still be alive.

“I want to eat you again,” I breathe as she works her fingers inside of me. My face is against the side of hers; I smell the rose scent of her hair. I shudder as she curls her fingers inside me. “I want to taste you again. Please let me. Please let me.”

“Oh, Janneth,” she sighs, fully fucking me now. My legs can’t go any wider; I’m resting my full weight on her hand. “That’s the fruit talking.”

“I don’t care,” I pant, because I don’t, I don’t. I desired her before the fruit, and I desired her after, and the only difference is in how dizzy and light and fantastic I feel now, and I’m so hungry for her, for the fruit, that I know why mortals died without it in the stories. Why they wasted away, keening for it, weeping for it.

If I don’t get to lick her cunt again, I will simply die.

As if taking mercy on me, she offers me her mouth as I ride her hand, moving my hips so I can rub my clit against her palm, and the sweet, still slightly bloody taste of her mouth slakes the thirst somewhat, eases the urgent need inside, just in time for me to explode right there in her lap.

I cry out against her lips, my hands twisted in her tunic, my entire body one big bowstring drawn taut and then released.

“That’s right,” she murmurs, giving my lip a swift bite and then licking away the sting. Bursts of pleasure bunch and flow around her touch, her breach of me. “That’s it. You are so beautiful, Janneth, so beautiful always, but especially when you’re coming for me.”

Eventually, I can’t even kiss her anymore, can’t even move or think beyond the cataclysm erupting around her fingers and pouring bliss into every corner of my being. At some point, she’s leaned back against the trunk of the tree, and my face has ended up in the crook of her neck, and I’m slumped totally against her, trembling and consumed.

“I want to know your name,” I mumble. “I want to say it when we fuck.”

I feel her considering this.

“Not your whole name or true name or whatever it’s called,” I say quietly. “Just something to call you. I love it when you say my name; I want to say yours so you can have that feeling too.”

She goes still. I pull back a little to see her face, and I see her giving me the same expression she gave me in the bath, like I’ve surprised her beyond measure. Like her own reaction is surprising.

A muscle jumps in her jaw, and then she takes a breath. “Morgana,” she says. Her fingers are still inside me. “My name is Morgana.”