Chapter 35: Loving the Beloved
Blair woke to a warm, wet, unhurried ruin being made of her.
She did not open her eyes at first. Consciousness arrived in pieces: crimson velvet somewhere above her, jasmine thick in the air, sunlight through the tall arched windows laying stripes across the bed. She did not remember falling asleep. She remembered talking, the three of them on the chaise and then the bed, Lucien's voice going low, Vespera's laugh, hours of it, and at some point the conversation must have swallowed her whole.
And now her legs were open and the Queen of the realm was between them.
Vespera's mouth moved over her cunt with a patience that felt deliberate, almost scholarly. Slow strokes of her tongue, flat and broad, dragging up through her folds from entrance to the aching hood of her clit, then back down again, savoring. Not chasing anything. Tasting. Her hands were folded under Blair's thighs, keeping her spread, and her burgundy eyes were closed like a woman at prayer over a reliquary.
Blair's breath left her in a shaky thread. Her hips twitched without permission.
"There she is," Vespera murmured against her, the words vibrating directly through her clit. She did not lift her mouth. "I was wondering how many strokes it would take."
"How long," Blair managed. Her voice came out sleep-roughened and stupid.
"Since before dawn. You were talking in your sleep. Something about bread." Another slow lick, the flat of her tongue pressed deep, gathering slick, and Blair's back arched off the wine-dark sheets. "I decided the conversation could wait."
"Where's Lucien?"
"Gone to his wing to dress. He kissed your forehead on the way out like a man leaving a temple." Vespera finally raised her head, and her lips and chin glistened, and she made no move at all to hide it. She looked down the length of Blair's naked body the way she read treaties. "He said, and I quote, she's yours until noon, don't waste her."
Blair laughed, and the laugh broke into a gasp because Vespera chose that exact moment to suck her clit into her mouth.
It was not the frantic over-stuffed pleasure of the fever nights. This was slower and worse. The Queen worked her in long savoring pulls, tongue circling, lips sealed tight, humming low in her throat so the sound buzzed through the swollen bud. Her fingers joined, two of them, sliding into Blair's cunt with obscene ease, curling forward and dragging against the front wall in rhythm with her mouth. Blair's hands found the sheets and twisted them. Her heart beat once, and the twelve seconds between beats filled with nothing but the wet sounds of the Queen eating her.
"You're close," Vespera said, lifting off just enough to speak, her fingers still working, knuckle-deep, unhurried. "I can feel it in your thighs. They've gone tight as bowstrings."
"You've been," Blair panted, "down there for how long? An hour?"
"Forty minutes. I counted. It seemed important to be precise about the first time I had you without an audience and without a lesson attached." Vespera kissed the inside of her thigh, then the crease where leg met hip, then lower again, her breath hot against the soaked folds. "Do you know how long I have wanted this? Just this. Not the writ, not the rite, not the court watching. This. A morning. A warm room. No one to perform for."
"How long?"
"Three hundred years." She said it lightly, the way she said terrible things, and then put her mouth back where it belonged and stopped talking.
Blair stopped being able to answer anyway. Vespera fed on her now with more purpose, still slow, still savoring, but her tongue focused hard on the clit, flicking the tip of it in tight maddening strokes while her fingers pumped, and the pressure coiled low in Blair's belly and pulled tighter with every pass. Her hips started to move, small shameless circles, fucking herself on the Queen's fingers and mouth at once. Vespera made an approving sound against her and let her.
"Come when you like," the Queen murmured. "No counting this morning. No begging required. This one is a gift, not a lesson."
"Vespera."
"Mm. Say it while you come. I want to hear my name in it."
The orgasm rolled up through her like a tide, long and deep, not the sharp snap of the fever crests but a slow overwhelming spasm that started in her cunt and climbed her spine. Blair cried out, her name in it the way she'd been told, Vespera, Vespera, and the Queen rode her through it, mouth sealed to her clit, fingers curling, drawing out every pulse until Blair's thighs shook and fell open, spent, twitching.
Vespera did not stop.
She slowed, yes. She went back to those long savoring strokes, tongue lapping through the mess of her, gathering Blair's release and her own slick and humming like a connoisseur with a glass she intended to finish. Blair writhed, oversensitive, and Vespera's folded hands tightened under her thighs and held her exactly where she wanted her.
"You taste different every day," the Queen said conversationally, between strokes, as though Blair were not quivering. "Yesterday you tasted of Lucien. This morning you taste of me. Sweet at the base, and the sweetness deepens the more I feed you by hand. I think it's the honey."
"You're, ah. You're having a conversation right now."
"I'm a very good multitasker. Ask Dante." Another slow lick, deliberate, from hole to hood, and Blair's whole body jerked. "Your body was wonderful when it was human. Soft. Warm. A heart I could hear racing from across a room. But this," she pressed two fingers back in, felt Blair clench around them, smiled against her, "keeps perfecting. Every day a little more. Another century and this cunt will be the finest object in my palace, and I will have made it myself."
"That's so romantic."
"I thought so." She sucked the clit again, gently this time, a long pull that made Blair whimper, then released it and kissed it once, almost tenderly. "There. Look at you."
Blair looked down her own body. Her tan skin was flushed pink from throat to navel, her coily curls a wreck against the pillow, her thighs glossy and trembling. Vespera rose off the bed in one fluid motion and poured two glasses of watered wine from the carafe on the mantel, and she brought one back to the bed and held it to Blair's lips herself, because of course she did.
"Small sips. You lost fluids."
"I lost fluids because you ate me for forty minutes."
"Nineteen days alive and already keeping accounts." Vespera set the glass down and stroked a thumb through the mess on Blair's inner thigh, watching it, fascinated. Then she got brisk, the way she got brisk, and it was somehow the most intimate thing yet. "Up. Legs apart. You know the drill."
"The plugs."
"The plugs. Sun's barely cleared the sills and the day is already late." She fetched them from the lacquered box on the vanity: the two-piece crystal set, cool and gleaming, charmed to warm against skin. Blair sprawled back on the pillows and let her Queen arrange her, one knee hooked over Vespera's shoulder, and the Queen worked the larger piece into her cunt slowly, twisting it, watching Blair's face the whole while, seating it deep with a final press of her palm that punched the air out of her. Then Blair rolled onto her side as directed, and oiled fingers stretched and pressed the ribbed plug past her rim, slow, patient, until it nestled home and her body closed around it and she groaned into the pillow.
"Good girl," Vespera said, and patted her hip. "You'll feel them all morning. That's the point."
Breakfast came on four trays. Vespera dismissed the butler at the door herself and arranged Blair among the pillows like a doll, then fed her by hand: torn warm bread dragged through honey, figs split open with her thumbs, soft cheese, quail leg stripped and offered bite by bite from her own fingers, and finally the goblet of warmed blood, held to Blair's lips while Vespera watched her swallow and counted the swallows aloud even though no counting was needed anymore, because it was a ritual now, and rituals were the Queen's native tongue.
"You have a jam on your chin," Vespera observed, and licked it off herself, slow and shameless.
"You're spoiling me."
"That is the entire project." She set the blood goblet aside and settled back against the headboard, pulling Blair between her legs so the smaller woman's back rested against her silk-clad chest, her arms folding around her middle. Her chin came down on Blair's shoulder. "Now listen, because I've laid the day out and you'll want to argue and I'll win."
"Argument prepared."
"Predictable. First: breakfast is done. Second: a nap. A real one, in this bed, with me beside you. The plugs will keep you warm and half-distracted, and by the time you wake you'll be too full and too comfortable to move, which is precisely the condition I require. Third, and this is the part you'll argue at: this afternoon, your first lesson in being spoiled."
Blair twisted to look at her. "What does that mean? I've been spoiled for weeks. I have a schedule. I have plugs. I have a wife who licks jam off my chin."
"You've been fed and fucked. Those are different things." Vespera's burgundy eyes were very calm. "Being spoiled is an art and you are a peasant at it. You apologize when you're given too much. You flinch at gifts. You said thank you to a footman last Tuesday and he didn't know where to look."
"He was holding my coat!"
"Kings' wives do not thank footmen." She kissed the top of Blair's head, stealing a breath of her curls. "This afternoon I will teach you to receive. Entirely. To lie back and be adored for hours and never once earn it or pay for it or say a single word of gratitude. You have no idea how difficult it will be for you. I can't wait."
"That sounds like a punishment."
"It is the most exquisite punishment that exists, and you'll be weeping with pleasure by the second hour and I'll simply keep going." Her arms tightened. "Sleep now, wife. You'll need the strength. And when you wake, if you wake before I do, you know what your hands are permitted."
"What are they permitted?"
"Anything that isn't me. I'm resting." Vespera's voice had already gone lazy, half-lidded, silk over steel. "Though if you knock against my door from the inside, I may answer."
Blair turned her face into the Queen's jasmine-scented throat and laughed there, warm and helpless, the crystal seated deep inside her shifting with every breath, and let the sunlight stripes and the wine and the fullness pull her back down. Somewhere behind her heart, the strange arithmetic of her nineteen-day life ticked over: she had demanded to be won, and the Queen had answered with forty minutes of her mouth and a lesson in receiving, and Blair understood, drowsily and exactly, that this was what a hundred-year courtship was going to feel like from the inside. Being ruined slowly, on purpose, by people who meant it.
"Vespera," she mumbled, nearly gone.
"Mm."
"I'm going to be so good at being spoiled."
"I know," the Queen said into her hair. "That's what terrifies me."
The sunlight crawled another inch across the crimson velvet, and Blair slept.