Divine Milking System-Chapter 47 | The Private Sanctum and the Secret I Kept Since 4 PM
The pocket dimension swallowed them whole.
One second Naomi was sitting on Jace’s bed, her hand warm in his, and then the room just— wasn’t there anymore. The walls dissolved. The ceiling lifted. The whole world rearranged itself into something that had no business existing, and Naomi stood in the middle of it with her heart doing something embarrassing against her ribs.
The sanctum looked different tonight.
Last time it had been a luxury apartment with a false cityscape. Tonight Jace had made it warmer. Softer lighting. A king bed with actual linen sheets the color of cream. Floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over a coastline that didn’t exist anywhere on Earth, the water dark and silver under a moon that was too big and too close. A single lamp on the nightstand. That was it. Nothing performative about the setup. Just space and quiet and a bed that looked like an invitation.
Naomi’s stomach dropped in the best possible way.
She’d told herself on the walk over that she was coming to talk. She’d actually believed it, a little. She’d rehearsed three different versions of what she wanted to say about the other girls, about what this arrangement meant for her, about the fact that she needed guardrails and clarity and an actual conversation.
Then Jace had opened the door and looked at her like she was worth looking at, and all three versions evaporated.
She was in so much trouble.
"It’s different," she said. Her voice came out steadier than she felt. 𝚏𝐫𝚎𝗲𝕨𝐞𝐛𝕟𝚘𝐯𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝗺
"Felt like the right night for a view." Jace stood a few feet away, hands relaxed at his sides, watching her take in the space. He always did that. Just watched her, patient and still, like he had all the time in the world when she knew for a fact he was running a countdown in his head every single minute of every day.
The thought of that made her chest ache a little.
She turned toward the windows and crossed her arms loosely over her stomach. The fake moonlight fell across the floor in long rectangles.
Outside, waves rolled in slow and silent against a shore that was just light and shadow, beautiful in the completely unreal way that dreams were beautiful.
"Jace."
"Yeah."
"I didn’t wear any panties."
A beat.
She felt her face go nuclear. She hadn’t planned to say that out loud. It had simply existed in her head since field training and apparently her mouth had decided the filter was optional tonight.
She heard him move. Closer.
"Naomi."
"I know." She pressed her palms flat against her own stomach. "I know that was, um. A lot of information."
"Why didn’t you?"
The question was quiet. No mockery in it. Just genuine.
She kept her eyes on the fake ocean.
"Because," she started, and then she made herself actually say it, "during training, when you were doing the circuits, you got really sweaty. And you kept trying even when it was obvious your legs were dying. And I just." She pressed her lips together. "I’ve been wet since four o’clock."
The silence lasted exactly long enough to make her want to crawl into the fake ocean and stay there.
Then Jace said, "come here."
She turned around.
He was right there. Closer than she’d registered. His amber eyes were doing the thing they did sometimes, the thing that made her feel like she was the only object in the room worth looking at, and her legs made the decision before her brain caught up.
She closed the remaining distance between them.
His hands found her waist first. Then they slid down, slow, deliberate, past her hips, until both palms were full of her ass through the thin material of her shorts, and he held her there, steady and warm, and Naomi made a sound she hadn’t authorized.
"Oh," she breathed.
He squeezed once. Just enough.
Her hands went to his chest on reflex, fistfuls of his shirt, because she needed something to hold or she was going to embarrass herself completely.
"Still nervous?" he asked.
"Extremely."
"Good nervous or bad nervous?"
"Jace." She looked up at him. "There is nothing bad about this nervous."
He tilted his head down and kissed her.
Not fast. Not the way she’d half-expected from someone with a countdown clock ticking behind his eyes.
He kissed her slow.
His mouth was warm and certain and he held her against him with both hands still cupped around her, and Naomi felt the kiss move through her like the first deep pull of warm water. Her fingers loosened their grip on his shirt. Her shoulders dropped. The part of her brain that had been running performance reviews on every social interaction since she arrived at the academy went completely, blissfully offline.
She kissed him back.
He made a low sound against her mouth that she felt more than heard, and her whole body responded to it in ways that were going to keep her awake for weeks. She went up on her toes without thinking. His hands tightened on her. The kiss deepened by about fifteen degrees and Naomi completely lost track of the fake moonlight.
When he finally pulled back, she stayed up on her toes for a second longer than necessary.
"Oh," she said again. More quietly this time.
"You’re doing that thing again," Jace said.
"What thing."
"Where you forget to breathe."
She exhaled. "I’m new at this."
"I know."
He said it without any weight to it, which somehow made it hit harder than if he’d made a thing of it.
Naomi was new at this and Jace knew and he was kissing her slowly on purpose.
She was absolutely losing her virginity tonight. She’d known it since field training, honestly. Maybe she’d known it before that.
The knowing had just been sitting in her chest being politely ignored until this exact moment when Jace had both hands on her ass in a pocket dimension and her heart was going completely haywire.
"I want to," she said. She watched his face. "All of it. Whatever all of it is."
Something shifted in his expression. Warmer. More focused.
"Okay," he said.
