She comes apart with my name in her mouth—thighs clamping my head, hand fisted in my hair hard enough to sting, her whole body pulling taut and then breaking. I stay with her through every aftershock, because I can see exactly when the last one's coming and I'm not about to waste it.
"Okay," she says, breathless, wrecked, staring at the ceiling. "Okay. That was—how the hell did you?—"
"House secret."
"That's cheating."
"Sweetheart, it's all I do." I crawl up her body, kiss the dip of her throat. "Complain harder. I've got a whole stack of it left."
She laughs, and then she pulls me down by the back of the neck and kisses herself off my mouth, which just about undoes me. Her hand drops between us, wraps around my cock, strokes once—and every shred of the patient man goes up like flash paper. I'm so hard it borders on pain, leaking already, my whole body strung toward her like a bet I can't take back. Four minutes, the odds said. I beat the spread by a mile. I'm done being slow.
I shove my jeans and boxers down in one motion and kick them off somewhere I won't find until morning, and she looks down at what she's holding for a second like she's rethinking something of her own.
"Now," she says. Out loud. The way she always says exactly what she wants, which is its own kind of mercy. "I want you inside me. Now."
I line up and push into her in one long stroke, andfuck.She's tight and slick and scalding around me, her legs already wrapping around my waist, heels digging in like she wants me exactly this deep and no shallower. I have to stop halfway, jaw locked, breath hissing out through my teeth, because the want is a live wire and if I let it run for even a second I'll embarrass myself like a kid. I hold there, shaking, every nerve in my cock screaming to move, and I make myself wait until I've got the leash back on it.
Then I watch myself sink into her the rest of the way. Inch by inch. Until I'm seated to the root and she's gasping and I can feel her pulse fluttering around me.
The relief of it is obscene. That's the only word for it. It's a door slamming on the last of them—the deepest one, the Well-branch, gone, snuffed—because there is no room left in my skull for a future where she dies while I'm buried this deep in her, her heels locking at the small of my back, my name in her mouth. The dread just—quiets. Goes under. For the length of this it isn't running. I've found the one branch with no count in it, and I'm in it, and she's holding me there.
"Felix." Her hands are everywhere. "Stop reading the room. Be here."
"I'm here." I drop my forehead to hers. "I'm right here."
And I am, mostly. But I can't fully stop—I never fully stop—so I do the only honest version of stopping I've got.
I start to move. Slow drags out, then back into the slick heat of her, and every stroke is its own small war, because she feels so good around me that the orgasm is already sitting right there at the base of my spine, crouched, waiting. I take her pleasure and cheat it higher anyway. Every thrust, I'm sliding branch to branch under the surface, hunting the one where she tips over a second time: the angle, the depth, the exact filthy grind of myhips against her clit that the numbers swear will break her open. I find it. I keep it.
And I'm spending my own odds to do it. Burning down my own count—the branches whereIlast, where I hold the line—trading them away one at a time to buy her another. My jaw aches. There's sweat at my hairline and my thighs are starting to shake with the effort of not finishing, and I don't care, because I would rather come apart right now and give her two than grit my teeth and give her one.
That's the whole game of me where she's concerned. I'm a man at the table shoving his entire stack across the felt for somebody else's hand, and not even pretending to mind.
She's close. I can see it three moves out.
That's when the mark fires.
It goes off like a struck match laid flat against the back of my hand—white, instant, the leash catching the bond flaring up bright between us and deciding it's seen enough. I've lingered too long in the reach. I've been pouring everything I have down the line to her for the better part of an hour and the thing on my skin has finally noticed and sent the bill. It sears. The half-moon goes molten. The penny taste floods up the back of my throat, somebody else's magic biting into me, and the pain whites out the branches for one full second, every future I'm standing in going to static at once.
I don't stop.
I want to laugh, actually, even with my hand on fire. They think this is a deterrent. Cute. They priced it like fucking amateurs. There is no number high enough on the back of my hand to make me pull out of her tonight—not a chance in hell, and I've checked the odds on hell.
I'd pay a great deal more than a blistered hand for this hour. A burn like this is nothing, the cheapest thing I've ever given up for her, and the only one I've ever been glad to pay.
The pain doesn't ruin it. It makes itreal—drives a nail through the middle of it so it can't drift off into the branches with everything else. This happened. To my actual body. In the actual present tense.
She feels it go through me, of course she does, and her eyes fly open, and her hand comes off my back, scrabbling for mine.
"Felix, your hand, stop, the mark?—"
"Let it." My voice is wrecked. I find her fingers. "Let it burn."
I lace my hand through hers, the burning one, the half-moon raw and weeping against her palm, and I keep moving inside her, and I press the pain into her grip instead of away from it. She holds it. She holds my burning hand and she doesn't let go and she pulls me back down into her, and that, more than anything, more than the odds, more than the door, is the thing that empties my head all the way out.
"Come for me," I tell her, watching the branch arrive. "Right—now."
She does. She breaks open around me. Clenching, crying out, her whole body wringing tight on my cock. And the sight of her—alive, here, undone, my burned hand crushed in hers—takes the last of my count with it. I come so hard I see white. No card for it. No branch. Just her name in her throat,Everly,and nothing clever for once, nothing light. The mark throbs dull against her palm. The present tense holds. Just for this. Just for now.
