His fingers rubbed faster, his lips claimed mine, and his words were haunting the depths of my heart.
I was nothing but nerves and pulsing want, my body a hum stretched so tight that every touch threatened to snap me in half. He was relentless, consuming.
His lips, his teeth, the heat of his hands on my skin, all of it sent me spiraling. I clung to him because falling was inevitable, and I’d rather crash into Caiden than splinter alone.
He dropped his forehead to mine, breathing harsh and ragged. “I’m going to ruin you,” he murmured, voice splintered, haunted. “You fucking know that, right?” His hand pressed between my legs, the friction a white-hot brand, and I arched against him, letting the pain and pleasure melt together until I couldn’t tell them apart.
“Do it,” I breathed, my voice foreign and cracked. “Break me.”
He grinned, teeth bared like a predator. “You always were a masochist, Langston.”
He hiked me higher, until I was pinned between wall and muscle. My shirt rode up, bare skin scraping against the drywall.
The roughness stung, but I craved it, every scrape and bruise a proof of existence, a record that I was here, that I was his.
I ached for him. I should have been ashamed, but shame was a dull moral calculus, the kind of thing you do in daylight.
Right now, there was only this: bare skin, pulse thudding in my ears, the violent glow of him between my legs. The pain and the pleasure spiraled together, a braided cord, choking off any thought except how much I needed him.
He pressed two fingers inside, slow at first, then faster, matching the rhythm of his teeth on my throat. The stretch was exquisite. I arched into the sensation, clutching his biceps, feeling the tense flex of his muscle under my nails.
His thumb circled my clit, hard, and I gasped, almost sobbing. His other hand slid up my shirt, palm splaying over my ribs, the heat of him a brand through my skin.
He growled my name, low and hungry, and the sound alone made me want to dissolve.
The stars were back, and they were blooming. Igniting. Piercing my breath. I was a mess of sweat and whimpers, collapsing into this destruction, letting it be the death of me.
He stopped, his gaze piercing, intense, making me feel utterly exposed. I groaned, the sound raw, and pressed against him.
The rush of his breath was hot and shallow against my skin, and the simmering heat radiating from his body was intoxicating.
“I want you to look at me, Amelia, as you unravel on my fingers. I want to fucking watch you unravel.”
And I did.
His fingers were magic as they caressed my wetness, so brilliantly. Emerald met brown as I came undone in his presence, my eyes never left his.
My insides twisted, my body clenched, and I became scattered among the stars of our desire, falling into his madness.
He didn’t stop. He didn’t let up, not for a moment. His hand stayed between my legs, drawing out the tremors until I was limp and ruined against him, slumped on his chest.
He held me there, arms locked around my hips, his breath hot and ragged in my ear. The words kept pouring from him, low and filthy and desperate:
“I want to break you. I want you to be the last thing I think about before I die. You don’t get it, do you? I would burn for you, I’d kill for you—I already fucking have?—”
The confession, ripped out of him, made my pulse stutter.
We blindly stumbled through each other, we left the rage-scorched path, its heat still ghosting on our skin, far from the searing sting of fresh wounds.
We vanished into the chasm of yearning, a suffocating darkness woven with the stench of bleeding darkness; reality dissolved into the echoing emptiness.
We were each other’s madness, and he was right. It would ruin us, but in this moment, I wanted to fall into his ruin and let it engulf me.
Like moths to a flame, we collided and burned.
Beneath the searing passion, there was a cold, clammy dread, the taste of loneliness, settled deep in my bones. A dark, insidious thing. Its icy grip threatened to drag me under, a suffocating phantom pushing me toward the very thing I’d loathed: Caiden Baxter.
Our breathless harmony echoed the hollowness within. He was the architect of my solitude, yet paradoxically, my only savior, the epicenter of my despair.
