Chapter 11: Chapter 11: Teaching him how to kiss
(Elena)
I wake up because something is wrong.
Not wrong like danger. Wrong like — warmth. Too much of it, pressed against my back, breath on my neck that isn’t mine, and an arm thrown over my waist like whoever it belongs to has been asleep long enough to get comfortable and completely forgot they hate me.
I lie still.
My first thought is Viktor. Cold, automatic, the way four years of marriage wires your brain. Then the smell reaches me — smoke and pine and something younger, something wilder — and I remember.
Rhydian.
My husband.
God help me.
I can feel him breathing. Slow and even, still asleep, his chest rising and falling against my back in a rhythm that has absolutely no right to feel as good as it does. His arm is heavy across my ribs. His knees are tucked behind mine. At some point in the night we folded into each other like we’d been doing it for years and neither of us noticed.
I should move. I’m about to move.
Then he shifts.
Not awake — just shifting, the small unconscious adjustments of sleep — and his face turns into the back of my neck and his lips brush my skin and my entire nervous system stops working correctly.
I don’t move.
His lips do it again. Still not intentional. Just sleep, just warmth, just a boy who hasn’t been close to another person in four years gravitating toward heat like something starving.
Then he goes still.
The breathing changes. Shallower. Slower in a different way. The way breathing changes when someone is suddenly very awake and trying to seem like they’re not.
He knows. He’s realized.
I wait to see what he does.
His lips touch my neck again — and this time it’s deliberate.
Just barely. The lightest possible contact, the kind you could still blame on sleep if you had to. But deliberate. I’d bet my Pack on it.
My heart does something inconvenient.
I keep my breathing even. Keep my body still. Let him think he’s the only one awake, because I want to see — genuinely want to see — what he does when no one’s watching him perform defiance.
Another kiss. Slightly more certain. Slightly lower, closer to my shoulder.
His arm tightens across my ribs. Not grabbing — just tightening, like he’s checking I’m still real.
I close my eyes.
I’ve spent a year in this bed not being touched. Viktor never held me in his sleep. Viktor slept on his side with his back to me and three feet of cold sheet between us. I used to lie awake counting the ways absence can hollow a person out.
And now this boy — this infuriating, untrained, terrified boy who bites people when he’s scared — is pressing his mouth against my neck like I’m something worth moving toward.
He doesn’t know what he’s doing. That’s the thing. That’s what makes it worse.
"You’re awake," I say.
He goes rigid.
Dead still, every muscle locking up at once, lips frozen against my skin. A beat of silence where I can feel him deciding whether to deny it.
"...yeah," he mutters against my neck.
"How long?"
"Few minutes."
Liar. "Okay."
Another silence. He doesn’t move away. Doesn’t move closer either — just stays exactly where he is, arm still over my ribs, mouth still near my shoulder, suspended in that particular kind of paralysis that happens when you’ve already committed to something and can’t figure out how to walk it back.
"You could have stopped," I say.
"I know."
"But you didn’t."
"...no."
I turn over.
It takes him by surprise — he pulls back fast, giving me room, and by the time I’m facing him he’s already got that guarded look on, jaw set, eyes doing that thing where they go flat to hide what’s behind them. But his ears are red. His hair is a disaster. And his mouth — God, his mouth is slightly parted and his lips are still soft from sleep and he looks nothing like the snarling rogue they dragged into my hall.
He looks like a twenty-year-old boy who just got caught.
"Hi," I say.
He blinks. "...hi."
I reach up and push the hair back from his face. He goes very still at the touch — not flinching this time, just still, like something that’s learned to hold itself carefully.
"You want to keep going?" I ask.
His throat moves. "That depends on what *going* means."
"Means what I told you last night. Slow. You watch, you copy, you learn." I hold his gaze. "Nothing you’re not ready for."
Something crosses his face that isn’t quite belief and isn’t quite hope but lives somewhere between the two. Then it disappears behind the usual armor.
"Fine," he says. Like he’s doing me a favor.
I take his hand.
He lets me, which is still new enough that I notice it every time. A week ago he was ready to bite my fingers off. Now he lets me hold his hand and tries very hard to look like he doesn’t care.
I bring his hand up between us and hold it palm up.
"Watch," I say.
I lower my head and press my lips to the center of his palm. Just that. Just my mouth against the rough skin there, the callouses from four years of fighting, the faded scar across the heel of his hand that he never told me about.
He makes a sound. Small. Involuntary. Like I pressed on something bruised.
I lift my eyes to his face without lifting my mouth. Watch him feel it.
His jaw is tight. His eyes are dark. He’s staring at me like he doesn’t have words for whatever is happening to him right now.
I open my mouth against his palm. Let my tongue trace a slow line from the base to his middle finger.
"*Elena—*"
"Your turn," I say.
He just looks at me.
"Take my hand," I tell him. "Do what I just did."
His hand finds mine — he takes it too tight at first, corrects himself, loosens up. He stares at my palm like it’s something he needs to memorize before he touches it.
Then he lowers his head.
His lips land awkwardly — a little too far to the side, pressing too hard, the way he does everything the first time. But then he adjusts. Slower. His mouth opens against my skin and his tongue touches my palm and it’s tentative and unpracticed and I feel it everywhere.
"Better," I breathe. "Softer. You’re not trying to prove anything."
He pulls back and looks up at me and something about the way he does it — through his lashes, lips slightly wet, a line between his brows like he’s concentrating very hard — does something to my chest that I choose not to examine.
"Like that?" he asks.
"Like that."
He does it again. Takes his time. His tongue traces the lines of my palm like he read somewhere that they mean something and he’s trying to figure out what. His other hand has found my wrist at some point and his thumb is resting against my pulse point, not pressing, just — there. Feeling it.
My pulse, which is not behaving.
"Now here." I turn my wrist toward him, the inside where the skin is thin.
He doesn’t hesitate this time. He presses his mouth there, and when his tongue touches the inside of my wrist I have to remind myself to keep breathing evenly. He lingers. I don’t tell him to stop. His lips drag up slightly, following the vein, and he pauses there like he felt my pulse jump.
He did. I know he did.
He lifts his head and looks at me, and there’s something in his face that’s new — not the hunger, not the fear, not the defiance. Something quieter. Something that looks almost like *power*. Like he’s just realized he has some and doesn’t know what to do with that yet.
"You liked that," he says.
Not a question.
"Keep going," I say instead of answering.
His mouth curves. Just slightly. Just one corner, barely a movement.
I guide his hand to my throat — lay his palm flat against it so he can feel my pulse there too, faster than I’d like, fast enough that there’s no point pretending otherwise. His eyes drop to my mouth. Come back up.
"Can I—" He stops.
"What?"
"Can I kiss you." He says it all one one breath. "Actually kiss you. Not — not like yesterday, not in front of everyone. Just—"
"Yes," I say. Before he finishes.
He moves slowly. Nothing like yesterday’s desperate claiming — this is careful, the way he handles things he’s afraid of breaking. His hand stays against my throat. His nose brushes mine first, and he pauses there, breathing the same air, and the pause is long enough to be its own kind of intimacy.
Then his mouth finds mine.
Soft. Uncertain. Nothing like what he’s capable of being. His lips press against mine and stay there, not moving, like he’s forgotten the next step.
I tilt my chin up slightly. An invitation.
He takes it. His lips part and move and this time there’s no clash of teeth, no missing, no disaster — just him trying, feeling for where to go, following every small signal I give him. His hand slides from my throat to my jaw. His thumb brushes my cheekbone. I don’t tell him to do that. He just does.
When I pull back, his eyes take a second to open.
His hair is everywhere. His lips are red. His chest is rising and falling too fast and he knows I can see it and he doesn’t even bother pretending.
I’m breathing harder than I meant to.
I press my fingers against my own lips for a second. Look at him.
He’s watching me with those gold eyes and something between satisfaction and disbelief, like he’s not sure he’s allowed to feel both things.
"Well?" he says. Low. A little rough around the edges.
I let the silence sit for a beat. Let him wonder.
"That’s—" I take one breath. "—a good start."
Something breaks open in his face.
Not wide, not dramatic — just one corner of his mouth pulling up slow, the way the sun comes up when you’ve been awake long enough to watch it. His first real smile. Not a sneer, not a bitter curve, not armor wearing the shape of amusement.
A real one. Small and reluctant and completely unguarded.
Gone in three seconds. He catches himself and reins it back in and looks away, jaw working like he’s trying to decide if he’s embarrassed.
But I saw it.
And now I know what I’m working with.
