Chapter 548 | Buttermilk

Chapter 548: 548 | Buttermilk

I followed the order.

Not the one about their names. The other one, the one she hadn’t said out loud but had communicated through the grip of her thighs on my hips and the way her fingers laced behind my neck like she was anchoring herself to something she’d waited nine years to touch.

Misato rolled her hips once, slow, testing, and the friction of her tactical pants against my bare stomach sent a jolt through me that started at the navel and ended somewhere behind my eyes. Her breasts swayed with the movement and I could not look anywhere else. She’d hidden these from me. For nine weeks she had stood two feet away during morning drills in a compression top that must have been engineered by someone who hated joy, and the whole time she’d been carrying breasts that made everything I’d seen at this academy feel like a warmup act.

Her dark nipples were stiff from the cold air and the proximity and probably from whatever volcano was going off inside her chest. Red compression lines ran underneath each breast in parallel grooves that told me how tight she’d been binding herself, every single day, all day, since fourteen.

I kissed the line under her left breast.

Misato’s hand tightened in my hair. She sucked in a breath through her teeth and her stomach clenched.

"That’s not where I told you to start," she said.

"You didn’t tell me where to start."

"I was getting to it."

I kissed the line under her right breast. Slower this time. Let my tongue press flat against the groove in her skin where the fabric had lived and then dragged upward in a long, deliberate stripe that ended at her nipple. The graft in my chest slammed like a second heartbeat, and the warmth that flooded through me was so strong I could feel it in my fingertips.

Misato grabbed the back of my head with both hands and pulled my mouth against her.

She tasted like nothing I’d catalogued. Naomi was vanilla and caramel. Belle was butterscotch. Aurora was strawberries in champagne. Addison was dark chocolate and cayenne.

Misato tasted like buttermilk.

Rich and tangy and thick, with a sweetness hiding underneath that hit the back of my tongue like something homemade. Like someone’s kitchen on a Sunday morning when nobody was watching and nobody expected anything from you. There was depth to it, a density that Naomi’s silver sweetness and Belle’s amber warmth could not touch, and I understood immediately that this was because Misato had been waiting longer than any of them. Nine years of compression. Nine years of wanting things she refused to name. All of it concentrated into something that tasted like safety and fury in equal parts.

I drank.

The System notification flashed in my peripheral vision. Silver-tier target, twenty-five points per mouthful, first session bonus active.

I didn’t read the rest. I didn’t care. The milk flooded my mouth and I swallowed and pulled again and Misato made a sound above me that I had never heard her make. Not the clipped bark of drill commands. Not the flat tone of tactical assessments. Something pulled from deep in her ribs, involuntary and raw, halfway between a moan and someone finally setting down a bag they’d been carrying across a continent.

"Don’t stop," she said. Her voice had dropped an octave. The captain’s voice, the one that made Jordan jump, except now it was aimed at me for a completely different purpose. "Don’t you dare stop."

I pulled harder. She gasped and her back arched, pushing more of herself against my mouth, and the milk came faster, warm and heavy with that buttermilk richness coating my tongue. I wrapped my arm around her lower back and held her steady because her thighs had started shaking against my ribs. My free hand found the button on her tactical pants and I worked it open without breaking the seal of my mouth against her breast.

Misato lifted her hips long enough for me to peel the pants down past her ass, and she kicked them somewhere behind the couch without looking. Black regulation underwear. Standard issue, functional, designed by someone who had never once considered the concept of seduction. On Misato they looked better than anything Aurora had ever worn from a boutique.

I slid my hand between her legs over the fabric and she was soaked.

Not damp. Soaked. The cotton was so wet it stuck to my fingers when I pressed, and Misato’s hips jerked forward into the contact like a reflex she couldn’t override. She bit down on the side of her own hand to muffle whatever sound came next, and I pulled away from her breast just long enough to grab her wrist.

"Don’t," I said.

Her eyes opened. Dark and unfocused and dangerous.

"Don’t hide the sounds. Not here."

"Concrete walls," she reminded me, her voice cracking on the second word.

"Then test them."

I hooked two fingers into the waistband of her underwear and pulled it to the side. The first touch of my finger against bare skin made her grab both of my shoulders hard enough that her nails broke skin through the scratch marks Addison had left two days ago. I didn’t flinch because Euphoric Feedback converted the sting into something that lit up my spine like a fuse.

She was hot and slick and swollen, and when I found her clit and pressed, Misato’s whole body jerked. Her forehead dropped against my shoulder and she breathed in short, bitten-off gasps while I worked her in slow circles, learning the specific pressure and rhythm that made her legs tighten around me.

"Harder," she said into my neck.

I gave her harder. I pushed two fingers inside her at the same time my thumb pressed down on her clit and Misato slammed her fist into the couch cushion beside my head. Her inner walls gripped my fingers so tight I could feel her pulse through the contact, rapid and desperate and completely different from the woman who ran our drills.