I'd spent every year I could remember in the company of hard men and harder work, in places with no light and no mercy. I'd made my peace with the idea that this kind of thing happened to other men. Not me. Never me. And here it was, anyway.
Fuck.
She came first. I felt it move through her, felt her clench around me and shake and bite down on a cry. Then, she did something that undid what was left of me. She pulled forward, slid me out, turned in the dark, and climbed on.
Took me back inside her in one smooth drop and set both hands flat on my chest and rode me. And it changed. Whatever had been slow and tender went sharp and greedy. She moved on me hard now, sloppy, desperate, chasing something with her head dropped and her hair hanging and her breath coming ragged, taking what she wanted with no apology in her at all.
I gripped her hips and let her. Let her use me.
I'm a man who's controlled damn near everything his whole life, and there was nothing in me that wanted control of this—I wanted to be exactly what she was making me, which was wrecked.
I was no match for her. Not even close. She rode me right over the edge. I went, hard, with a sound torn up out of somewhere I keep locked, my hands clamping her down onto me while it ran through both of us.
For a while, she just lay there on my chest, breathing, our hearts going like two engines that couldn't find idle.
Then she pushed herself up. "I need water," she said, voice rough and sated.
I let her go and watched her cross the room.
The city glow came through the windows just enough, and she walked through it bare, unhurried, every line of her lit soft and silver—the dip of her waist, the curve of her, the long, clean shape of her in the dark. I propped up on one elbow and looked my fill with no shame about it, whatsoever.
Fuck, she's perfect.Not the polite word people throw around. The real one. There wasn't a thing about her I'd have changed, standing there in the half dark drinking from a mason jar like she'd lived in this room her whole life.
She drained the whole glass in one go, set it down, filled it again at the tap.
And the ache hit me. Low and deep and bigger than wanting. I'd wanted things in my life—wanted out, wanted quiet, wanted the noise in my head to stop. I'd never once ached toward a person like this, like there was a hook set behind my breastbone and the line ran straight across that room to her.
It scared me, same as her sitting in my lap had scared me, and I didn't care. That was the new thing. I didn't care.
"You want one?" she said, lifting the glass.
"Yeah."
She filled a second and turned and started back toward me across the dark room, a glass in each hand, the city behind her?—
—and my phone buzzed against the floor from inside my jeans.
Damn.
I knew before I moved who it was. I rolled, dug the cell out of the denim heaped by the sofa, and answered.
"Yeah."
"I need you." Tommy. No preamble, no light in it at all. "Now, Brock. Right now."
I looked across the room at Mary Catherine, standing there holding two glasses of water in the dark, watching me with the start of a question in her face.
"Okay," I said.
"Car'll come to you. It already knows where you are. Be ready."
The line went dead.
And then it was just the two of us in the quiet, the kind of quiet that comes right after a door's been kicked in, even when no door has.
"Who was that?" she said.
I could've lied. I lie for a living. But I looked at her standing there bare in the city light with water she'd poured for me going warm in her hands, and I found I didn't have it in me. Not about this part.
