Page 37 of Dose

“Isla.” His voice is low and warm. He brushes the loose hair from my cheek, the tenderness of it at odds with the grip bruising my waist. “I suspected in the alcove. I knew when you told me you’d had one trial and no idea what came after.”

“You knew.”

“I knew.” His thumb traces my cheekbone. “Do you want this? Not the theory. This. Now. Me.”

“Yes.” There is no delay. “Emphatically. I just don’t know if I’ll be any good at it, and I’m used to being the best at things, and⁠—”

“Don’t worry, baby girl.” The words leave him rough and quiet. “I’ll be gentle.”

Baby girl.

No one has ever given me an endearment. Specialist. Summer. Subject. Asset. I have been designated my entire life. This man looks down at me with his restraint coming apart and calls me something soft. Something kept.

The sound my body makes is not one I authorize.

“Oh,” I say faintly. “Log that. Whatever that was.”

“Logged.”

He smiles—actually smiles—then kisses me again, slower this time.

He removes the rest of my clothes without looking away from me for long. His come off faster: shirt over his head, trousers pushed down and discarded. For the first time, I see all the ink across his shoulders and chest, skulls and roses threaded with chemical structures. I put my hands on him because I want to. Wanting is the point.

His skin is hot beneath my palms. His breath catches.

“I want you,” I tell him, and my voice cracks. “I don’t understand the mechanism. It doesn’t reduce to anything. I just want you. All of you.”

“It doesn’t have to reduce.” He catches my hand and presses his mouth to my palm, then my wrist, then the muscle below my shoulder, where I once offered his needle. “Let it be true without proving it.”

Then he lowers his mouth to my body.

He starts at my throat and takes his time. His hands frame my breasts, his thumbs passing over my nipples until I arch beneath him. He listens to every broken sound, repeats the touches that pull them from me, and adjusts when my body answers differently. Patient. Thorough. Ruinous.

“Every sound you make,” he murmurs against my ribs, “I’m keeping.”

“The museum takes donations,” I manage.

His mouth curves against my skin.

He kisses down my stomach. Lower. His shoulders settle between my thighs and ease them apart. The position is too open, too far beyond every rule I have lived inside. My muscles lock.

He stops.

“Look at me,” he says.

I look down the length of my body at him: this dangerous, careful man between my legs as though there is nowhere else in the building he wants to be.

“Yes?” he asks.

“Yes.”

His mouth comes down on me, and language becomes useless.

The first stroke of his tongue jerks my hips from the mattress. His hands close around my thighs, holding me open while he learns what I like. Slow, then harder, then slow again. He finds the rhythm that makes my legs shake and the pressure that turns his name into a plea.

Heat winds tight inside me. I know what the literature says should happen. The literature has never had Theon’s mouth on it.

The pleasure breaks hard enough to bow my back. White light bursts behind my eyes, and my cry hits the concrete walls and comes back to us.