Written

by Kathryn Moon

  “Where are we going?” I asked as we wavered in step for a moment.

  “To find my dignity,” Callum muttered, taking me over to his desk chair.

  “Callum, you don’t need-” I said with a small ‘oof’ as I landed in the seat, the leather cold against my skin.

  Callum kneeled at my feet, cheeks still flushed from his orgasm, and a light smile replacing his glare. “I forgot how that felt, if I’m being honest,” he said, hands stroking over my thighs, and then sliding between to touch where I was still aching and now dripping as he said, “Being in a woman. But I did not forget how to please. And that’s all I want, Joanna.”

  His hands parted my legs, drawing me forward in the chair to make room for his shoulders. He kissed up the top of my right thigh, and then across my belly and back down the left, all while his hands cupped and petted at my swollen folds.

  “I’m a mess,” I said, squirming under his touch but my knees were falling open for him and his hands were already stirring up sparks in my skin.

  “Who’s fault is that?” he grumbled, and then his hands slid away and he pressed a tender, open kiss to my clit, tongue flicking out. My fingers dug into the arms of the chair and I held a whimper at the back of my throat. “I want to hear you, Joanna,” he said.

  He licked a stripe up my center, the hair of his beard prickling at my skin and I let my gasp carry up to the ceiling. His hands scooped under my bottom and pulled me forward, nose nuzzling at the top of my lips as his tongue dipped and swirled. It was a teasing, sweet touch, tickling up the pleasure he had brought to a simmer with his cock. He alternated sucks over my folds with probing licks and gentle nibbles until I was bucking in his hands, now desperate for the pounding pressure. He kissed and soothed and stroked while my whimpers built into sobs.

  “Callum, please, please,” I chanted, hips rolling towards him even as he backed away, keeping the same delicate touch. “I need more.”

  He pressed a long, closed-mouth kiss over me, hands stroking at the outsides of my thighs as they creeped towards his shoulders. Then his tongue pressed flat, mouth wrapping around me as he sucked and licked. My back bowed as the pressure broke, sweeping slow through me like warm syrup while Callum kept lapping and kissing. I was a trembling puddle in the chair as the aftershocks eased. I hissed, eyes popping open, as he dipped a finger inside of me.

  I looked down to my lap, where Callum’s cheek was resting against my thigh, lips still shiny. His finger pumped gently, pressing deeper and then easing back again.

  “Can you take more?” he asked, thumb brushing over my clit and making me twitch and draw back.

  “I…I don’t know,” I said. My body still felt glowy and soft but every touch was on the edge of too much sensation.

  He smiled, beard scratching at my skin. “I think you can.”

  A second finger joined the first, twisting and he lifted one of my legs onto his shoulder. He sucked a ring around my over sensitive lips, stirring up warmth and making my legs shake and my toes curl, all while keeping a shallow rhythm at my opening. I unclenched my hands from the armchair, dipping my fingers into his hair, body relaxing under his ministrations. There was a hum in my ears and it wasn’t until Callum looked up from between my legs, eyes smiling, that I realized the sound was coming from me.

  “Feels nice,” I said, voice slurring with the lazy heat flowing through me. I didn’t know if it meant I would come again but Callum seemed in no rush and it was too nice a feeling to want it to end.

  “You taste sweet,” he said, tongue flicking gently over me.

  I snorted at that and his eyes darkened, fingers delving deeper suddenly and then crooking up.

  “Oh!” I shouted at the swelling feeling inside of me.

  “I’m not teasing,” he said, still stroking inside of me as I squirmed closer, wanting more and less, lips parted on a soundless cry. “I want to keep the flavor of you on my tongue.”

  And then he was laving at me again, tongue firm and seeking out all the places he had already discovered, but now with intent and purpose. I was riding his hand and mouth, a cracking, pleading noise rising up from my throat. My hands held him tight to me and he groaned against my skin, the sound echoing deeply and making me writhe. I called out his name and his touch grew firmer, tongue pointing and lashing at my clit. The pleasure was spiky and burning and seemed to stretch from toe to head through, one long bright heat content to leave me hanging.

  “Come for me, Joanna,” Callum said, the words heavy in my ears. “Let me hear you.”

  And then his lips wrapped tight around my clit pulling and pressing, and his fingers pushed high against me. My legs lifted up around his ears and my belly clenched and I tugged tight on Callum’s hair even as I drove my hips against his face, stars bursting behind my eyes. He moaned into me again and all the tension in me splintered as I fell apart and body trembling into a limp puddle in the chair.

  Callum rose slowly, easing my loose fingers out of his hair and settling my legs back from his shoulders. He kissed a slow wet path up my stomach and his arms wrapped around my back as I let out a small, helpless sound that was meant partly in thanks. I felt almost wounded with how thoroughly undone I was but the tender hold of him around me soothed away the sting and I snuggled into his chest.

  He draped my arms over his shoulders lifted me from the chair and I grunted. “No,” I said.

  He chuckled, holding me to him as he stood up from the floor. “No?” he asked. “I’m taking you to bed.”

  Oh. I wasn’t sure what I had thought, only that I knew I was officially used up for the night. I nodded against him and wondered if it was really possible to hear someone’s smile. Or if I was just that tired.

  He carried us to Isaac’s room where Isaac and Aiden were facing each other on their sides in the bed, the sheets low enough that I knew they were naked too.

  “I hope you two are satisfied for the evening because Joanna here is done,” Callum said, sounding a little too smug. I pinched at the skin under my hand but he only shrugged and I caught him grinning.

  “We heard,” Aiden said and my cheeks blushed hot.

  “Come here, love,” Isaac said, rolling in my direction and pulling back the covers.

  Callum settled me on the mattress and I pulled him down with me, wanting to be surrounded. I got my wish, Isaac pulling me to his chest and Callum sliding in tight behind me. Three hands stroked down my side and I hummed again, eyes drooping.

  “What was all the crashing about, though?” Aiden whispered as I sank into slumber.

  “Books,” Callum said, and then I was asleep.

  20. Callum

  I woke as Joanna twisted next to me, rolling away from a now empty spot and cuddling into my chest. I squinted in the dim light and found Aiden and Isaac rising out of bed.

  “Where’re you going?” I whispered. My hands were helping Joanna, soothing at the bed warm skin of her back and pulling the sheets back to cover us.

  “Groceries, errands,” Isaac said, hunting his dresser for clothes.

  “It’s your turn to come up with an excuse for her to stay here,” Aiden said, low voice almost growling in an effort to keep quiet.

  “She’s staying,” I said. “We talked last night.”

  “For good?” Isaac asked and both he and Aiden had paused in dressing.

  Joanna made a small sound of protest, hands clutching at my skin, and I wrapped my arms around her, reveling in how she settled at the touch.

  “Until it’s safe,” I answered. Aiden’s expression fell but he nodded. “But…don’t you think? She might…after some time?”

  “We hope so,” Aiden said softly. “The day she doesn’t skirt the subject, I’ll feel confident.” Isaac and I both frowned and Aiden came around to the bed, bending down and kissing the center of Joanna’s back. He smiled at me and leaned in for a real kiss. “She will,” he whispered before leaving the room.

  Isaac kissed us both before leaving as well. “Let her sleep,”
he said, but his expression looked as if he didn’t expect me to follow the advice.

  And a part of me was tempted to wake her—slowly, with lips and hands—if only to have a chance to perfect my efforts from the night before. Mostly to have her in my ear again, her begging words and the pretty broken twist to her voice as I did something right.

  But I didn’t want to interrupt the sleepy cling of her on my chest so instead I half-dozed with my fingers in her hair and her toes against my calf. I turned my face to her and took long breaths, the salt and sugar of her filling up my lungs until I was drowsy. She whimpered in her sleep and her back tightened so I stroked my free hand down the length and pulled the sheet up to her shoulder. Her forehead was knotted so I loosened the tangles in her hair and brushed it out of her face. And when she shivered I rolled us so she was in my warm spot of the bed.

  She stirred then, breath hitching and fingers tightening on my sides. There was a half second of terror in her eyes as they fluttered open and then it faded as quickly and the frown on her mouth curled up into a smile.

  “Morning,” she murmured, eyes falling shut again as she relaxed back on the mattress.

  “Morning,” I said. “Bad dream?”

  Her mouth pouted with a sleepy frown and she twisted, leaning into my hand that was stroking down her side to her hip.

  “No dreams,” she said shaking her head.

  “No nightmares?” I asked.

  Her nose wrinkled and her hands uncurled from between us, circling to my back. “No. I don’t remember dreaming in…weeks. S’like…like I’m not even sleeping. I’m awake and then-then I’m waking up again. Almost doesn’t feel like rest.”

  All the drowsy lazy pleasure of the morning stilled as she spoke, turning dull and muted as my thoughts started catching up. My brain was cataloguing away the warm maple color of her eyes in the morning, and the deep peachy pink of the tips of her breast, in favor of recalling the weight of dreams. And the forces that had the ability to take them away.

  “Hmm, I lost you somewhere, didn’t I?” she said, smile creeping up on one side of her mouth. A hand appeared between us, one finger reaching up to stroke between my eyebrows. “What did I say?”

  “How long have your dreams been missing?” I asked.

  There were psychic drains, like parasites, that might take on a host. But that wouldn’t explain the woods, or even the attack on the library.

  “Weeks,” she repeated, shrugging. She looked at me for a moment and then thought again. “Since…since that first batch of books turned back up.”

  “The night I walked you home,” I said, stiffening.

  “I suppose…probably.”

  I jumped out of the bed, hearing her laugh my name as I hurried to the door and into the hall. Gatekeepers was on my desk by the window of my office, buried under a stack of books. I grabbed my pants out of the pocket of space I’d left them in and tripped my way into them on my way to the window. Soft footsteps padded behind me and Joanna was at my side, wrapped in Isaac’s green robe and peering over the arm of the chair.

  “You think what was in the library, what’s taken over the woods also has to do with me not dreaming?” she asked. “I’ve gone without dreams before.”

  “You said it felt like you weren’t even asleep,” I said, pushing the other books aside and pulling forward the fragile old beast of a nightmare text I had left stinking up my desk.

  “Out like a light,” she said softly. “That’s significant?”

  “Dreams are often a warning system. Something has stolen yours,” I said. I flipped through the pages with clumsy fingers. Nails scratched gently into the back of my hair and I paused to shift the book in her direction.

  “I skipped ahead,” she said, still combing her fingers into my hair. She brought her free hand down, turning in halfway through the pages and flicking ahead to land on a wavery illustration of a figure in the woods. “It eats,” she said, pointing down the words beneath the woodblock print.

  “Sounds…” I trailed off, the vision of the library coming to mind. A maw of darkness throwing silhouettes in eerie relief. The librarian who sent a cowering student across the room to safety and then splintered in a metallic grind of light.

  “Like a boogeyman,” Joanna said. She was perched on the arm of the chair and I looked up at her, puzzled. “You know…don’t go into the woods, or you’ll get eaten up for being a rotten child. What?”

  “Nothing. Is…is that what parents say to children in the country?” I asked. “Isaac made it sound rustic but-”

  Joanna grinned. “My mother was northern. Every misbehavior was threatened with death or kidnapping by a monster of some sort.”

  I swallowed and looked back down at the book in my hands. Her mother was northern. Did she know about my part in the war yet? Would Isaac or Aiden share that with her, take the burden out of my hands or would they leave it alone as my business. I would never share it with another soul if I thought I could. Even Joanna. Especially Joanna.

  “It does say it consumes everything but dreams seem like a light meal,” Joanna mused, tracing her finger over the page of the story.

  I shook off my thoughts, leaning into Joanna’s side—as if her closeness might burn away old stains from my past, as if I could keep them from her indefinitely.

  “Dreams could be powerful,” I said. “From the right person. Stronger than a desk or-” I broke off, feeling her tense at my side. “And this story looks a little familiar.”

  “That illustration looks familiar,” she mumbled, leaning in as well.

  “You’ve seen it before,” I said, just to tease.

  She ignored me, pulling her fingers from my hair and making me regret my joke. She lifted the book out of my lap and held it back from her face.

  “That looks like Isaac’s painting,” she said. “The trees and- and the meadow. The one I…”

  “Painted a shadowy figure in the background of?” I asked as she trailed off. Her eyes narrowed and her lips pursed and a low-sinking weighed heavy in my gut.

  There were plenty of terrible possibilities behind the current situation. There were only terrible possibilities. Someone had been killed already and the color green was vanishing. Being eaten, I amended, looking at the illustration in the book. But if what was plaguing Canderfey campus had a place in Gatekeepers then our situation was even worse than I expected. And if Joanna had any special kind of connection…

  My chest burnt with how hard my heart began to beat. I needed more information. Answers to questions and a collection of plans to study. I needed a solution to the problem and an action to take. I need Joanna safe and uninvolved.

  “Callum,” she whispered, and she tilted the book in her hands, brow furrowing. “There’s…there’s something-”

  The front door on the ground floor shut and Joanna jumped up from the chair. I pulled the book out of her hands, leaving it open on my desk.

  “That’ll be them back with groceries,” I said as Joanna watched the doorway. “Go down and fill them in? Let me do a little hunting for more information.”

  She was chewing at the corner of her mouth with worried eyes. I stood, drawing her into my chest and settling my lips over hers until she answered the kiss, rising up on her toes.