I press back. A fraction.
Her calf slides against mine, slow, and my cock throbs hard enough to shift my breathing. She keeps writing. Same expression, same steady hand. Her leg presses into mine, and I'm harder than seven years of medication should allow.
Gage can't see under the table. He can see the half-second where her pen stopped and my posture changed, and the flat expression he wears when he's working tightens by a fraction.
He's watching her now. Not me. His eyes track Hope when she leans forward and follow her hand when she reaches for the chart. When she laughs his eyes stay on her a moment too long.
Her pen rolls off the table. It bounces off the edge and lands by my foot, under the chair. She pushes back from the table and comes around to my side, crouches next to me with one hand on the table edge for balance, reaching under my chair with the other.
The angle of her neck as she reaches. The soft skin at her nape, exposed where her hair falls forward. The smell of her—coconut and burnt coffee and skin. Gage at the door, turned to check the hall, a guard passing behind him, three seconds of inattention.
Two ways this ends. I wrap my hands around her throat, or I let her live. The want to kill usually overrides everything else. It has for twenty years, every room, everyone within reach.
Letting her live is new.
Her fingers find the pen. She sits up, tucks her hair behind her ear with her free hand.
"Sorry. Butterfingers today."
"Don't be. It's fine."
She goes back to her notes. Her pulse holds steady at the base of her throat.
Gage turns from the hall. His eyes find Hope first, then me. He holds my gaze for two seconds and I hold his. His hands tighten against his forearms and he doesn't look away from me for the rest of the session.
He can't get rid of me and I can't kill him without removing her protection. The cuffs on my ankles mean I can't walk her to her car or stand between her and whatever moves through this place after dark. He can.
Hope finishes her notes and stands. She smiles at me and gathers her notebook against her chest.
"I'll see you in a few days."
"Can't wait."
She leaves. Gage walks her out. The room smells like burnt coffee and coconut lotion.
A guard unlocks the floor plate and walks me back to my cell.
The quiet holds through supper, through the shift change, through the hours where Ward C shrinks to four cells and the low electronic drone of a wing that monitors everything and hears nothing.
I lie on the bed and think about her. The thought isn't just a memory; it's a physical weight in my chest, a fire low in my gut.
It started with her calf pressing back against mine under the table. A deliberate move. A silent fucking answer to a question I hadn't realized I'd asked.
Every detail from the day room. Her hair falling forward when she crouched beside my chair, the back of her neck exposed. The strip of skin above her collar where her pulse held steady, even with her body inches from mine.
I picture peeling that tight blouse from her shoulders, one button at a time. The one she buttons one too high, hiding the shadow between her breasts. I want to see her tits, full and heavy, spilling from a lace bra I just know she wears. I imaginethe weight of them in my hands, the feel of my thumb scraping across her nipple until it's a hard peak.
My hand moves before the thought finishes, a slow drag down my stomach to the thick ridge of my cock, already aching behind the rough fabric of my pants. I wrap my fingers around the base of the shaftand the metal catches against my palm. Eight rungs of surgical steel along the underside, cold against the heat of my skin. The first stroke drags over each one andpulls a low groan from my chest I have to swallow. I've been hard as stone since her leg pressed back against mine and she didn't pull away.
The fantasy shifts, sharpens. I'm fucking her on that table while Gage watches. Her back pressed to the cold, unforgiving surface, her skirt hiked up to her waist. Her legs locked around my hips, pulling me deeper. My hand is wrapped around her throat—not to hurt her, not really. Just to hold her. To feel the frantic beat of her pulse against my thumb while she looks up at me with that same open, unafraid expression.
Her mouth. Her throat. I imagine the moans she'd make when I told her she was mine, when I buried my cock so deep inside her she saw stars.
My grip tightens on myself, my knuckles white. My breathing changes, turning harsh and shallow in the silence of the cell. I'm close, so fucking close. Behind my closed eyes, she's writhing underneath me, her head thrown back, her cunt slick and tight around me. I can almost hear her, the sounds she'd make, spilling my name from those lips like a prayer.
"Jude," she'd gasp. "Oh fuck, Jude…"
My pace quickens, my hips starting to buck against my own hand. My balls draw tight. I see her face contorting with pleasure, her eyes rolling back as I pound into her, again and again.
