He started to crawl off me as if he were going to stop. I grabbed his arm. "Don't stop, bright Goddess, don't stop. Just help me roll over. If you take me from behind, you won't be brushing up against the part of me you bruised."
"If I have hurt you so badly, we must stop."
My fingers tightened on his arm. "If I wanted to stop, I would say so. Everyone else has been too afraid of hurting me, and even if you went too far, I do like it. Mistral, I like it a great deal."
He gave an almost shy smile. "I did notice."
I smiled back at him. "Then let us finish what we started."
"If you are sure." In the moment he said it, and meant it, I knew that I would be safe alone with him. If he was willing to pass up some of the first intercourse he'd been offered in centuries for fear of my being hurt, then he had the discipline to control himself in private. Consort preserve us, but he had more discipline than I would have had. How many men would have turned down the finish, after a start like that? Not many, not many at all.
"I am sure," I said.
He smiled again, and something moved above us. Something grey was in motion near the high domed ceiling. Clouds - there was a tiny knot of clouds up near the ceiling. I looked into Mistral's face and said, "Fuck me, Mistral."
"Is that an order, my princess?" He smiled when he said it, but there was an edge of something that wasn't happy in his voice.
"Only if you want it to be."
He looked down at me, then said, "I would rather do the ordering."
"Then do it," I said.
"Turn over," he said. His voice did not have quite the firmness it had had earlier, as if he wasn't sure I would obey.
I had recovered enough to roll over, though I was slow. He moved back until he knelt by my feet. "I want you on your hands and knees."
I did what he asked, or ordered. It put me looking at Abeloec, who still knelt, motionless, at the top of our makeshift blanket. I expected to see lust, or something to let me know he was enjoying the show, but that wasn't what was in his face. His smile was gentle, peaceful. It didn't match what we were doing, at least not to me.
Mistral's hands stroked my ass, and I felt him rub against my opening. The front of me was sore, but the rest of me was eager.
"You're wet," Mistral said.
"I know," I said.
"You really did enjoy it."
"Yes."
"You really do like it that rough."
"Sometimes," I said. The tip of him rubbed around the edge, so close, but not inside.
"Now?" He made it a question.
I lowered my upper body, so that my lower body lifted toward him, pushing against the feel of him. Only his slight movement backward kept me from taking him into my body. I made a small sound of protest. The wind held the smell of rain, the press of silent thunder. The storm was coming, and I wanted him inside me when it came.
He laughed, that wonderful masculine sound. "I take that as a yes?"
"Yes," I said. I pressed my cheek into the brittle leaves, my face, and hands, touching the dry ground. I had to close my eyes against the push of dead leaves and plants. I pushed my ass up at him, and asked, wordlessly, that he take me. I didn't realize I was saying anything out loud, but I must have been. For then I heard my own voice chanting, "Please, please, please," over and over, soft under my breath, my lips closer to the dead earth than to the man I was begging.
He pushed just the tip of himself inside me, and the wind changed instantly. It felt almost hot. I could still smell rain, but there was also a metallic smell. The scent of ozone, lightning. The air was hot and close, and I knew in that moment that it wasn't that I wanted Mistral inside me when the storm broke, but that the storm would not come until he was inside me. He was the storm, as Abeloec had been the cup. Mistral was the heavy press of the air, and that neck-ruffling promise of lightning.
I raised up and shoved my body onto him. He actually stopped me with his hands on my hips. "No," he said, "no, I will say when."
I went back to pressing my upper body to the dry ground. I said, "Mistral, please, don't you feel it? Don't you feel it?"
"Storm," he said, and his voice seemed lower than it had been, a growling roll, as if his voice held an echo of thunder in it.
I raised up, but not to try to control him. I wanted to see him. I wanted to see if there had been other changes besides the growl of thunder in his voice. He still glowed with power, but it was as if dark grey clouds had moved in over that glow, so that I saw only the shine of his power through the veil of clouds.
He stared down at me, and his eyes flashed bright, so bright that for a moment his face was half obscured by that white, white light. The brilliance faded, leaving afterimages in my vision. But without the lightning, his eyes weren't the grey of rain clouds; they were black. That blackness that rolls across the sky at midday, and sends us all running for cover, because just by looking at the sky, you know that something dangerous is coming. Something that will drown you, burn you, concuss you with the power that is about to fall from the sky.
I shivered, gazing down my body at him, shivered, because I wondered...was I too mortal to survive this? Was his power going to burn along my flesh, and hurt me in ways that I did not want?
It was as if Abeloec heard me thinking. He spoke, in a low, soft voice that made me look at him. He was still kneeling in front of us, but it was as if his pale skin were fading into the growing dark, as if he, himself, were dissipating into the circle of power. His hair was shot through with lines of blue, red, and green, and those lines traced the circle that held us, and on into the dark to the men beyond. His eyes held sparks of all those colors, but it was as if his power grew. He began to be that power, and not be as much Abeloec. I could tell that if he were not careful, he would become only the lines of power that traced out into the dark.