Ignite Me

“Up,” he says, gasping for air. “Lift your arms up.”

I do.

He tugs up my shirt. Pulls it over my head. Tosses it to the floor.

“Lie back,” he says to me, still breathing hard, guiding me onto the table as his hands slide down my spine, under my backside. He unbuttons my jeans. Unzips them. Says, “Lift your hips for me, love,” and hooks his fingers around the waist of my pants and my underwear at the same time. Tugs them down.

I gasp.

I’m lying on his table in nothing but my bra.

Then that’s gone, too.

His hands are moving up my legs and the insides of my thighs and his lips are making their way down my chest, and he’s undoing what little is left of my composure and every bit of my sanity and I’m aching, everywhere, tasting colors and sounds I didn’t even know existed. My head is pressed back against the table and my hands are gripping his shoulders and he’s hot, everywhere, gentle and somehow so urgent, and I’m trying not to scream and he’s already moving down my body, he’s already chosen where to kiss me. How to kiss me.

And he’s not going to stop.

he pulls back just to look me in the eye and his chest is heaving and he says, “I think,” he says, “my heart is going to explode,”

No gun, no sword, no army or king will ever be more powerful than a sentence. Swords may cut and kill, but words will stab and stay, burying themselves in our bones to become corpses we carry into the future, all the time digging and failing to rip their skeletons from our flesh

Because my friendship,” he whispers, “comes with so many more benefits than Kenji could ever offer.”

I want him to know it the way only he can, the way he can sense the depth of emotion behind my movements. I want him to know and never doubt.

“You were told,” he says, “a little over a month ago, that we’d won the battle against a resistance group by the name of Omega Point. You were told we decimated their home base and slaughtered their remaining men and women on the battlefield. You were told,” he says, “never to doubt the power of The Reestablishment. We are unbeatable. Unsurpassed in military power and land control. You were told that we are the future. The only hope.”
His voice rings out over the crowd, his eyes scanning the faces of his men.
“And I hope,” he says, “that you did not believe it.”

“And things are going to get better. Things are going to get so much better. I promise.”
He takes a tight breath. “The scariest part,” he says, so quietly, “is that for the first time in my life, I actually believe that.”

I do so much with these lips, I think.
I taste and touch and kiss and I’ve pressed them to the tender parts of his skin and I’ve made promises and told lies and touched lives all with these two lips and the words they form, the shapes and sounds they curve around. But right now my lips wish he would just read my mind because the truth is I’ve been hoping I’d never have to say any of it, these thoughts, out loud.

“Was it ever hard for you?” I look up, hopeful. “Figuring out how to control the energy?”
“Oh,” he says, surprised. “No. Though I’ve always been very good at everything I do.”

“I thought you could sense feelings,” I say to him. “I thought mine would be so obvious to you.”