Chapter 157 – The Shape of His Mouth
Hazel
His voice loops like a tether I keep wrapping around my own throat. No smile. No softness. Just that hard line of a mouth cutting me open and telling me I did well.
My body keeps moving, but it’s all for him.
I run the pattern the way he drilled it into me. Four-count approach, outside angle, shoulder feint, cut to the ribs. I feel the ground the way he taught me to, with the arches not the toes, softness first and then the drive. I hear him, even though he isn’t here.
His mouth moves with the words in my head, and that’s where I make my first mistake, letting myself picture it.
I know the shape too well. The cut of his lip when he’s unimpressed. The clean bracket of his teeth when he bites down on temper and swallows it. The way the corner quirks when someone does something that fits the blueprint he drew in his head.
I finish the sequence and reset, palm slick against the hilt of my dagger. If I squint, I can see the exact place he stood yesterday when he said it, arms folded, jaw tight, the smallest dip of his chin. Good.
The word licks a stripe down my spine.
I hit the dummy with a slash that would open anyone foolish enough to step into me, and I hear him again.
Harder.
The shape of harder is a command you can feel on the lips. Open on the har and closing with the push of der, like being shoved exactly where he wants you. It’s ridiculous that I notice this. It’s embarrassing that my thighs press together.
I put the knife away and switch to handwork, because blades make it too easy to pretend the heat in my belly is violence. The truth makes my skin prickle. I want his mouth on me. I want to know what those clipped orders feel like when he’s not holding them back. I want to drag the sharpness of him down where it hurts sweet, to see if his precision can come undone against my pulse.
Ridiculous. I am ridiculous.
But I know the shape of his mouth better than my own. Upper lip finely cut, lower lip a fraction fuller, the indent at the center begging for a thumb I absolutely shouldn’t press there. When he’s just finished saying good, there’s a damp gleam at the edge of his mouth. I want to chase it with my tongue. I want to see if the word good tastes like honey.
His lips would fit at the hinge of my jaw and leave a mark like a seal. Down the line of my throat where the pulse is loudest. Over the notch of my collarbone, one kiss, then a second, then one he holds too long until I hear myself make a sound I’ve never made in his presence and it startles us both.
Lower.
His mouth traces the edge where my bra meets skin, teeth scraping lightly, soothing it away with his tongue. He knows how to dispense pain, of course he knows how to salve it.
Down, down, the path his breath paints is indecent. The soft underside of my breast where no one sees. The long flat of my stomach, where muscles pull tight under his attention. He doesn’t ask and I don’t tell him to stop because the dream knows what I don’t have the courage to say out loud. Please.
Then lower still, and the thought of it undoes something in my knees. Jace on his knees in front of me is a weapon I can’t defend against. That mouth going soft because it wants to be thorough. He’s thorough in everything. He would be relentless here too. The kind of patient that would drive me beyond the edge of sanity.
I stumble. Actually stumble, a real misstep that jars me back into the field, into morning, into my own body humming on a frequency I refuse to analyze. I throw a glare at the mountain as if it did this to me. The mountain doesn’t care.
Mara sets up sparring rotations with a voice that can cut rope. “Pairs. Three-minute rounds.” Jace is nowhere to be seen.
I bounce on the balls of my feet and tell myself to be normal. Normal is a moving target.
Sera comes at me with her usual quicksilver confidence. I meet it, match it, slide under it. The first exchange is clean and I almost smile. The second gets messy, but I fix it before messy turns into hit. The third is where I sabotage myself.
Because Sera feints with her shoulder and I see it, I absolutely see it, but in the same moment I hear the sentence my body is addicted to and I watch it form on the mouth that isn’t here. Footwork’s tighter. Good.
The good lands like a palm between my shoulder blades, a push I lean into instinctively. I imagine leaning back instead, into him, into the smallest graze of lips by my ear with the word caught between us.
And that’s when Sera’s jab kisses my ribs and my breath whooshes out like I’ve been kicked by a friendly horse.
“Head in the game,” Mara snaps, the sound splitting the ring. “Or get off the mat.”
I swallow a curse and nod, heat flooding my cheeks. Sera gives me a look that’s half apology, half triumph. We reset. I’m fine. I’m fine. I am absolutely not thinking about Jace’s mouth. I am thinking about keeping my guard where it belongs and returning the favor with interest.
I make it through three more rounds without embarrassing myself.
The field grows loud with effort and my body finds the groove that it usually falls into so easily. For precisely four minutes and thirty seconds, I don’t think about anyone’s mouth.
Then a shadow cuts across the ring. Tall, broad-shouldered, familiar like a bruise you poke because you want to know if it still hurts. I don’t look. I absolutely do not look. The air tells me anyway. Soap. Steel. The salt-clean thing that shortens my breath. It slides over my skin and my focus fractures with a soft, awful oh.
“Guard,” Mara says, sharper, closer. “Hazel.”
I snap back so fast my neck twinges. Sera nearly catches me again because I am ridiculous and leaking attention. I fix it. I fix it twice over, because humiliation is fuel.
At the end of the round, I step out and finally chance it. Jace stands exactly where I knew he would. Arms folded. Expression unreadable. The mouth I’ve been building architecture around all morning is a straight line. It carves me open anyway.
Our eyes snag. Not for a long time, but enough to ruin me for the rest of the day.
He tips his chin once in acknowledgment.
I nod back like my spine is a spear and turn away before I bleed adoration in public. My heart is causing a riot in my chest. My face is hotter than a furnace.
Eli appears at my elbow like he grew there. “So,” he says lightly, “On a scale of one to I’ll-gnaw-through-a-dozen-wolves, how badly do you want his-”
“Stop,” I say, voice strangled.
“Mouth,” he finishes helpfully. “I was going to say cock, but honestly, it seems like that may kill you in your current state. All that would be left of you is a little pile of ashes.”
I threaten him with my water bottle and he bites the inside of his cheek to hide a grin and somehow manages to looks smug and fond at the same time. “He’s not avoiding you anymore,” he says quietly.
“I noticed.” It comes out a rasp.
“Good.” Eli taps the bottle with a knuckle. “Now how about you do something about it?”