Annihilation - Book Three

Chapter 11

Verando feels I'm ridiculous for healing him when he's a dead man, but he's not going to die, I don't know how, but I'm going to save him. He reluctantly rolls onto his stomach as I remove the book from its concealed sleeve and lay it on the bed beside me. 

Instinctively, it opens to the page I want, reading me as if we were operating from a single mind. 

His body is rigid, unwilling to be near the thing that cursed his entire race. "Nicolas, I don't like this." He tells me, tension evident in his voice. "Do you have any idea how difficult it is for me to lay here beside this atrocity?"

"I don't either, but we have to do something about this; I can't have you limping around, and I think I can fix you." I can feel my suspicion is confirmed; the shoulder was back in a state of disrepair. According to Tonic, Verando had rolled down the incoming hill while he was in his lycan state, which couldn't have been good for him or Alpha. 

Scanning over the text, I can't help the small swell of amusement that begins as he squirms beneath me. I'm sitting over his hips, my knees hardly touching the bed on either side as he wriggles beneath me, effectively grinding his ass against my groin while trying to avoid any sort of movement I made in conjunction with the book. 

Unable to help myself, I giggle, pressing my hands into the small of his back. "Stop. You're not going to die. Alright? So just, let me do this."

"I'm not used to being in this position, I don't like feeling your dick against my ass either." Grasping a pillow, he buries his face into it with a low growl of disapproval. "This is a very vulnerable position."

"Hmm... " I sigh, amused by the true cause of the offense. "Then stop wiggling, you've got a great ass, you know. It's all I can think about and you're distracting me. Think of it from my perspective!" I run my fingertips down his well-muscled back; my hand slides back up to trace over the scars as I read the text to myself.

"The difference between you and me is that you appreciate receiving. You beg for me to treat you in such a manner, while this is not my preferred. I hope you understand how much I love and trust you; every instinct in my body is telling me—" Sighing, he clutches the pillow tighter, trying to focus on my hands stroking over his back. 

Hesitating, my fingertips pause; I cock my head and recognize the tone from my own past. "Hey." I tell him quietly, flatting out my hands with a slow exhale. "I'm not going to do anything to you that you don't want me to.. not that someone like you worries about that, but if you were... just know that I'd tell you before I did anything. "

While I worry he might retaliate, after a long moment, I feel the muscles in his back start to relax and he forces himself to take a breath. "So you think I have a great ass?" He attempts, trying to make light of what turned into a heavy conversation. Making me chuckle, I grope him through his undershorts. 

"The best I've seen." I insist, continuing on with the massage as I read over the text.

 It appears to be a pretty easy chant, but the magical requirements are mid-range, so I can't do it very often. The book is hard to read; some of the writing appears to have been added, and it's hard to tell where the spell begins and ends. "Sânge." I breathe, thinking about the meaning behind it. "Family?" The handwriting and the dialect appear wrong, as if someone was having a hard time thinking clearly and the spelling was quite misguided.  

"Don't you speak Romanian?" Verando complains. 

"Hush. I do. It's scribbled in 'deranged old man'; maybe you should read it." The fire comes back to me whenever I'm around him. I want to defy; I want insight into a response from him, feeling the taut muscles of the sculpted man under my fingertips doing ridiculous things to my libido. I'd missed him dearly in our time apart, and my body shuddered to think of what it'd feel like to partake in him again.