Page 82 of Sky and the Grumpy Troll

“After I buried Bryndala, I told myself I’d never fall in love again. And I was so damn wrong. I’d rather risk everything for a chance at three hundred years with you and the grief at the end of it than a safe and tidy forever without. The joy is worth the risk. You are worth the risk.”

The whole room had gone underwater. “We’re doing this,” I said. It came out cracked down the middle. “Obviously.”

He kissed me. Or I kissed him. I tasted both of our tears as we pressed close, bodies molding together, my legs wrapping around his waist, and as more of our skin touched, the way I could feel him intensified, and I reached up and held his horns at the trolgar point.

Sensation came in like a tide coming over your feet, warm, shocking, and total. It was Moerrven: the inside of him, handed to me raw for the first time. The great roaring tenderness he kept behind the grumbling, the size of it, the way it had my name written through it. The fear was there, yes, and the old grief. But under all of it, holding all of it up, was an ocean of love so deep and so settled, so utterly without bottom, that I sobbed into his mouth.

“I’m going to feel this when you’re inside me, and when I’m inside you.”

“Yes. The way I feel when you grab my horns and fuck my mouth.”

“Oh, we are absolutely still doing the punishment.”

He laughed, this broken, wet, helpless laugh, and through the door I felt the laugh as it happened in him, felt the joy of it light up the dark like a struck match. “I was hoping you’d say that. Hoping you’d get to feel how good it feels for me. I know it scares you how much you like it.”

I shoved him down onto his stomach. And this time, when I tied his wrists properly to the headboard, snug in the new rope, and he tested it and chose to let it hold, I felt his choice from the inside, felt the deep animal relief of it, the troll who could snap the bed in half handing me the reins. The surrender wasn’t weakness, and it never had been.

“Fuck,” I breathed, straddling him, the horn swinging warm between us. “You like this. I knew you liked it, but it’s overwhelming how much.”

“I like you,” he said, “having me. Using me. Making me feel everything.”

I took my time, desperate to understand how it felt to him, but just as eager to give him exactly what he needed. I massaged his back and his ass first, enjoying the way his mind went soft and quiet as I worked his thick muscles, and even more the thread of impatience that went through it all. He wanted more. He wanted my pain.

I reached for my paddle, starting with lighter hits and gradually growing bolder, and with each impact, I felt the bright, dark spike of pleasure he took from it, the way the pain landed in him and turned to something delicious and erotic. The magic didn’t read thoughts, just the emotions and sensations behind them, but it was a clear enough picture to tell me exactly how much he loved this type of play. And it was a lot. I moved to his side, reaching for his trolgar point with one hand as the other continued to wield the paddle, and he arched, bucking off the bed as everything became one, and it became impossible to understand which emotion or sensation was coming from which of us.

“That’s it,” he whimpered. “It’s starting.”

“Oh, fuck yes,” I said, leaning over him to dig my teeth into his shoulder, feeling the way he reveled in being marked. I’d played with men before who liked it rough, and I’d given them what they asked for and enjoyed the giving. This was something else. This was feeling Moerrven’s pleasure as my own, learning his body from the inside, finding the exact edge where the hurt became the good thing, because the second I found it, the bond lit up like a city and I was getting off on his getting off, a loop with no end.

I rolled him onto his back, the rope twisting with him, and straddled his hips, then bit a mark into the slab of his chest and felt him love it. By the time I slicked him with oil and sank down onto his cock, he was desperate and begging for it. I felt myself from his side too, felt how tight, how hot, how good I was around him, felt my own body the way he felt it.

“This is the bond?” I asked.

He thrashed on the bed, rutting up into me as magic swirled between us, pulsing from the point where we were joined, where he was so deep inside me he felt like part of me. “Sky.” He was wrecked. “Sky, please, I can’t come until you do. I need to.”

“Not yet.” I rolled my hips and we both groaned. “You don’t get to rush this. You’re going to lie there and let me ride you and feel exactly how much I love you doing it, and when I decide you’ve learned your lesson, then.”

“I’ve learned it. I’ve learned so many lessons—”

“Liar.” I leaned down, took his face in my hands, the horn pendant dragging hot up his sternum. “You’re going to do it again the second you think I need you to. You’re going to use that ridiculous strength to flip me and wreck me. Aren’t you?”

Through the door, the answer came before he even said it, not in words but in feeling: a rush of assent and devotion pushed deliberately forward, steady and absolute, mine whenever I needed it.

“Yes,” he said. “And you’re going to punish me for it in the best possible way.”

“I am.” I was crying again, riding him slow and filthy with tears on my face, both of us flooded with each other, the whole bond singing. “Show me how you break those bonds and stroke my cock.”

He arched up and ripped his wrists free before I even finished talking, and I moaned as his big, hot hand closed around my cock, riding him harder and faster, reveling in the way his huge cock felt, buried deep inside me. The pressure grew with every stroke of his hand, with every wave of desperate pleasure coming off of him.

“Come with me,” I whispered.

I let go and he came apart under me, bucking beneath me as one hand gripped my hip and the other held my cock through my orgasm. I felt it from both sides at once — his orgasm tearing through him, mine tearing through me, each of us feeling the other’s, a hall of mirrors with no edge, his pleasure my pleasure his pleasure, until I genuinely could not have told you whose body I was in. I spilled across his stomach and hand, sobbing his name, and he came deep inside me, filling me with a rush of troll warmth. The door stood wide open between us, and there was nothing on either side of it that wasn’t love.

He gathered me onto his chest, and we lay in the bed of a cute little inn that had probably heard too much of our wild fucking, and breathed, the horn warm between us, the bond a low constant hum I was never going to get tired of.

And then I felt it: a little dark thread under the love, there and trying not to be there.

“Hey.” I propped myself up. “I can feel that now, you know. The worrying. I need your honesty right now.”