Cards of Love

by Sierra Simone

  I was.

  Even Nimue’s increasingly worried glances my way didn’t help. She kept trying to catch my eye, to brush against me in passing as I forced my way through idle small talk with some of Vivienne’s politically minded friends, but I couldn’t bear to actually look at her, actually feel her. Not with Pelleas’s claim so publicly marked.

  It just hurt too much. To love her and not have her. It’s always hurt so much.

  I walked out to the lake after a while, after I couldn’t bear it any longer and started having disturbing fantasies of beating Pelleas to the ground and carrying Nimue out over my shoulder like some kind of Viking marauder. Just grabbing onto her and telling her you’re mine you’re mine only mine until she agreed in that singsong-y voice of hers and begged me to fuck the words into truth.

  Needless to say I didn’t do that, but even the lake couldn’t slake the sudden, violent lust I felt, and when I heard her call after me, there was a striking moment when the violence and the lust turned inward and all I wanted was for her to claim me. To fuck me into being hers.

  To possess me.

  “Why did you leave?” she asked, but she knew why. It was written in the shakiness of her voice, in the hunch of her shoulders as she folded her arms across her chest.

  “I’m not necessary,” I said, and I meant those words not just about her, not just about the party, but about so much else too. I may have been the hand that puppeteered the fates of so many, but it often felt as if my own puppet strings were slack. What was the point of all this suffering? Ash and Greer and Embry would suffer for a lasting peace, Mark and Isolde and Tristan would suffer for much the same, but me? Merlin the Enchanter who both made kings and brought them low?

  I suffered for nothing. I suffered for suffering’s sake.

  And I looked up at the lovely silhouette of this too-young girl, all limned in silvery moonlight, and I wished for one fierce, blazing moment that if I had to suffer, at least I could suffer for her, at least my suffering could bring me closer to her and bind me to her forever.

  But then the moment faded and I saw the tears tracking down her face, and I knew. My suffering only wounded my little moon’s heart, and it only wedged us further and further apart. Maybe she would be happier with Pelleas.

  I had, after all, believed that in the last lifetime too.

  “I’m telling your mother tomorrow that I can no longer work on her campaign,” I said. “And I’m afraid I must go back east.”

  “You’re afraid you must go?” she shot back in a mocking tone, swiping hastily at her tears. “Really, Merlin? You’re pulling that shit on me?”

  Frustrated, I spun to face her fully. She was dazzling, angry and tearful with the moon like a halo around her dark head, and I wanted to take her in my arms and kiss her until she moaned for more, I wanted to drop to my knees and eat her cunt under her dress until she couldn’t stand.

  I did none of those things. “If I stayed here, Nimue, what would happen next? Would you stop dating Jack for me? Would you live with me? Marry me?”

  She furrowed her brow. “I’m eighteen, Merlin, I don’t fucking know who I’m going to marry yet.”

  I do, I thought grimly.

  “Fine. But what about Jack? Would you have us both? One for day and one for night, maybe?”

  Even in the dark I could see her angry flush. “It’s not like that,” she muttered.

  “Then what is it like? I confess to being jealous, Nimue, I confess to being so jealous that sometimes I can’t breathe for how angry I am. It makes me frantic and filthy with the things I want to do to you because of it.”

  Her breath caught. “What kinds of things?”

  I gave her a dark look. “I think you know.”

  “And what if I want to do dark things to you?” she cried out suddenly, as if the words had been trapped inside her for longer than just the last few minutes. “What if I want to punish you for being so handsome? What if I want to torture you for being so mysterious? What if I want to tie you up so you can never leave me? I just want to break you open until you have no secrets from me ever again. I loathe how opaque you are, how hidden and closed off you are—yes even from me—” she interrupted, forestalling my objection “—and yet at the same time, I’m drawn to it. I’m obsessed with it, possessed by it. Your mystery—it’s like I was put on this earth to find a way inside it and live there forever.”

  We were both breathless then, panting, her words spilling into the deepest cracks in myself and illuminating me. I was terrified and exhilarated and hard.

  But.

  “You didn’t answer about Jack,” I said.

  She stared at me. And it was clear that she didn’t have an answer.

  “Do you love him?”

  “Yes,” she said quickly, then just as quickly shook her head. “I mean, no. Or maybe I used to. I thought I did. Until I met you, and then I realized what I felt for him was…something else.”

  “Is that something else better than what I can give you?”

  And Nimue—brave Nimue, merry, honest Nimue—answered, “I’m not ready for what you can give me.”

  It was an answer so different than what she would have said in our last life that it gave me pause.

  She filled in the pause with, “My mother loved Jack before she died, she even wanted us to get married one day, and Vivienne wants me to date Jack because his parents can help her career.” An inhale. “He and I have an open arrangement between ourselves, but I still feel like I owe him my time for all he’s done for me. He got me through my mother’s death, Merlin. I can’t overlook that.”

  “So it’s what your family wants and you feel obligated anyway,” I said. “And I’m not enough on the other end of the scale.”

  “Stop it,” she said, growing tearful again. “That’s not how it is at all! You’re putting me in an impossible position, and if you could just stay—”

  “Stay and watch you continue on with Jack? I’d rather suffocate,” I told her. “I’d rather be buried alive. I can’t. My…feelings…for you won’t allow it.”

  “So what are you saying?” Her tears were really flowing now, glistening in the moonlight. “What way are you going to hurt me?”

  “Just with a goodbye, little moon. I’ll only hurt you with goodbye.”

  I left her alone on the lakeshore, and her last words to me came through the slowly settling night mist.

  Stay. Don’t hurt me like this.

  I love you.

  I love you, Merlin.

  Please.

  5

  “You’re drifting,” she says, sounding pleased and exasperated all at once. “Come back to me.”

  Had I been drifting? Yes, I suppose I was.

  She’s still standing above me, her dress dropped down so it rests along my stomach and legs, hiding her cunt from view. I want more than anything to pull that dress back up, but I feel like that would earn her displeasure, so I keep my hands by my sides.

  “There you are,” she says, scanning my face. “You’re back.”

  “I was remembering.”

  “And do you remember what I said?”

  I know exactly what words she means. “You said you loved me.”

  “Did you believe me?”

  I hesitate. Decide on the truth. “I didn’t.”

  She doesn’t seem upset by my admission. She even looks like she expected it in a way. But still, there’s something about the way she blinks a little too slowly, as if fighting back some powerful feeling, that makes me add, “I came back anyway.”

  Her eyes snap all the way open and she’s suddenly still. Taking a deliberate breath. And then another.

  She doesn’t ask me for more just yet and I don’t volunteer it, letting her process my words as she braces one knee up on the lounge by my hip and then the other on the other side. She reaches under her dress and takes hold of my male flesh, which is so swollen by this point that it almost hurts to be touched, and positions it against the wet well
between her legs.

  She doesn’t rub me against her, doesn’t run my tip through her slick seam; she merely places me at the place where she wants me and starts to sink down.

  Her eyes flutter as her pussy squeezes over the fat head, and she has to screw her hips back and forth in order to work her cunt over me. It takes work—she pauses several times to rest her hands on my chest and breathe—because she’s so tight. The kind of tight where I think we might have to change positions or maybe I’ll have to get her off with my fingers. I might be forced to do so anyway—the kiss of her skin against mine, bare wet pussy on bare fat cock, is too much to endure after everything else.

  My back arches up and I ball my hands into fists. My belly feels like it’s made of corrugated steel with how clenched tight it is, and my thighs are hard swells of muscle against Nimue’s sleek legs as I fight with all my body to keep my orgasm at bay.

  And I’m only halfway inside her.

  Nimue immediately senses the problem and reaches behind herself to circle my shaft with her fingers and squeezes—hard.

  The mounting climax crashes into the obstacle of her grip, and even my toes flex with the agony of it. “You’re pitiless,” I pant. “Cruel and hard-hearted.”

  “You were about to come,” she explains poutily. “Before I even had a chance to enjoy you.”

  “It seemed that you were enjoying me earlier,” I manage, but my would-be rebuke only makes her mouth tilt up.

  “Yes, I was. Very much.”

  With hard effort and a final shaky gasp that I can feel in my spine, she manages to slide all the way down onto her fingers, and then once she removes them, she’s completely flush against my pelvis. My cock is so far buried in her that it’s hers now, it belongs completely to her, and she seems to feel the same, because she begins stroking my stomach and chest possessively as she rocks herself on my hips.

  “Don’t come,” she orders.

  I swallow. “Nimue—”

  “Don’t,” she repeats, in a tone that brooks no arguing. And then she goes back to the work of making herself release with my body, riding me all angled forward so her erect little clitoris can catch friction against the hard flat above my cock.

  It’s nearly impossible without her fingers clamped around my base, and I struggle. I writhe underneath her, I arch and I strain and I beg.

  And Nimue remains merciless through it all, simply humming and tracing the sweat-slicked flesh over my clamped muscles and tendons, as if my labors were a mere curiosity and not torture.

  “Nimue, this is the first time for me since the last time I was with you,” I admit hoarsely, trying to force some pity out of her. “A person can’t last after that long.”

  She pauses her movements, looking down at me. Her smile has faded into something puzzled. “You meant what you said earlier then,” she says slowly. “About not fucking?”

  “I’ve only ever fucked you, Nimue. When I left, I left that part of me with you.”

  She seems stunned by this, settling back so her ass rests against my thighs. “Is that why you came back? After the night at the lake?”

  “I came back because I decided it didn’t matter if you loved me or not. It only mattered if I loved you, and I thought—hell, I thought—” Even now, buried inside her, knowing that the flush on her cheeks and chest is all from me, the memory stings. “I thought maybe I could find a way past you being with Jack. I thought I could share you if I tried hard enough. I thought: Merlin, some people are made to be with more than one other, and I’m not but you are, and maybe if I just accepted that—”

  “When did you come back?” she asks, leaning forward. She braces one hand by my head so the other can stroke at my hair, and the shift of her tight glove over my thick length is enough to make me curse.

  “Dawn,” I force out through the pleasure and the strain of keeping my orgasm at bay for her. “The cleaning crew was still working to set the place back to rights and I was able to slip right into the house. I went to your room just in time to hear you come through the door. Come for him.”

  “Oh Merlin,” she murmurs, her eyes blinking with tears. Her hand tugs tight in my hair, as if to anchor me to her, as if to assure us both that we’re together now. “I’m so, so sorry. I was angry and hurt and it was so easy to let him help…”

  “I know,” I say heavily. “And it’s just as well. Turns out I wasn’t strong enough to share anyway.”

  “I don’t want you to share either,” she says. “Because I can’t. I can’t share you. I never want to take that cuff off your ankle, Merlin. I want you to belong to me forever.”

  I think I’m crying again.

  “Don’t ever take it off then,” I whisper. “Keep me.”

  “You’re kept, my love.”

  Our eyes lock and heat gathers at my fingertips, along the crown of my scalp and the bottoms of my feet. It’s heat and light and power, and I’ve never done this before, not in this life, except once with Ash and that was only a kiss.

  This time, when I offer my lips to Nimue, my body is as close to hers as a body can be. Pressed against her, nestled inside her, marked and bruised by her.

  “I’ll give what I can to you,” I breathe, “if you’ll kiss me.”

  She kisses me, and all the heat and light and power surge up in my body and then into hers in a transmission that feels like it rips a piece of my soul right out of me.

  And I give it gladly, so long as I’m giving it to her.

  This was what I wanted all those years ago by the lake. I wanted to suffer for her. And if the welts on my body please her, if the part of my soul that I’m feeding into her soul pleases her, then I’m content.

  More than content.

  Joyful.

  Nimue lets out a soft moan as heat and magic glimmer between us, and I know what I’ve shared is the memory of us in this lifetime. For the first time, she’s seeing and feeling my love for her as acutely as I felt it; she’s hearing my thoughts, my wonder, my hurt.

  The glimmer is everywhere between us, surging at every point of contact, making even the most innocuous of touches, like her hand in my hair, feel unbearably sensual. And of course, hardly any of our touches are innocuous right now. We are grinding, thrusting, grabbing, slick. Mouths dancing, skin sliding. Breath sharing.

  Nimue comes.

  She keens against my lips, her entire body shuddering and I follow her over, not sure if I’m allowed, but I’d be helpless to stop it. In the sparkling cloud of magic between us, all the pain and power and ecstasy of this life made manifest between us, I’m helpless. Her own memories flood mine as I give her my own, as I give her the essence of my body along with the essence of my soul, and now I can feel her pain, her ecstasy. Her wounded confusion as I left her, her youthful optimism before that. Her sliver of wisdom in looking at my dark eyes and knowing she wasn’t ready.

  She’s ready now.

  We rise and we crest together, both on the same flooding tide of magic, each peak longer and more beautiful than the last, and she writhes and flutters above me as I surge inside her over and over again, spilling heat and love inside the most tender part of her body. Every pulse, every pump, is heavy and hot and wet and it’s all for her, every last drop. Every single iota of my pleasure has belonged to her for twenty-three years, and an eternity before that.

  Gradually, our bodies settle, and the glimmer between us recedes, leaving the shared memories in its wake. But I feel as Nimue reaches for it again. She’s slumped against my chest, her eyelashes ticklish and sweet against my skin, and I feel as she inhales and searches for that glimmering sight with her mind.

  She finds it, but she can’t hold onto it, and it pulls back from her again, like the sky as a child swings backwards and away from it.

  “It takes practice,” I say. My voice is husky with spent pleasure—and maybe a little fear.

  The sooner Nimue finds her power…the sooner the end comes for me. And now I realize what Nimue truly meant by surrender, by t
ake what I needed. At the end of her crop, I become helpless to her. Under her body, I’d die to make her happy.

  I’d give her anything. Including the key to my life.

  “Practice,” she says dreamily. “I can do that.”

  She moves off me, my cock leaving her body in a regretful slide, and noticing my wince, she cups me again. “We’ll do more. But for now…” She leans in and kisses me as she continues to cup my manhood, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world for her to do, as if it belongs to her all the time.

  “Thank you,” she whispers. “For the memories. For sharing with me. I’m—” she struggles for words “—deeply moved.”

  “I’m glad,” I say simply, honestly. “I loved you.”

  She pulls back to see my face. “Do you love me still?”

  I’ve already surrendered magic…why not the truth?

  “Of course, little moon. I’ve loved you for eternity, and eternity stretches both ways.”

  “Then can you forgive me for what’s happened between us?”

  “Can you forgive me for hurting you when I left?”

  She considers, and I think of how strange this all is.

  She’s angry that I left.

  I’m angry that I died.

  It’s the trouble with our two lives, I suppose, that we don’t only have one past to work through, but two. Double the pain, twice the betrayal. A million times the tragedy.

  But I set that aside for now as she says softly, “I forgave you the moment it happened, I think, even though I didn’t know it yet. I wasn’t ready for you, for this gift of yours, and it wasn’t fair to trap you until I was ready. Jack and I split the very next month, because it also wasn’t fair to him when I only could love you. And I still do, you know. Love you.”

  She looks almost shy as she says it, and I think she won’t mind so much if I break protocol and pull her into a searing kiss.

  She doesn’t mind.

  6

  The next week is brutal. Glorious. Cum-drippingly magical.