Page 29 of Thunder

The fact that I'm here, that I let myself be here at all, that after all this time I've got my knees around this man in a bathtub and I want it so bad my hands are shaking.

"Look at me," he says.

I do.

And his face has gone soft and fierce all at once.

Dark eyes locked on mine, and he brings his wet hand up and lays it along my cheek exactly the way he did in the dirt by the gate, and this time I don't pull back.

"You're mine," he says.

Not a question.

"You've been mine since the Chicken and you're mine right now and you're gonna be mine after. Say it."

"Thunder—"

His hand slides back to my throat.

Gentle.

A promise, not a threat.

"Say it."

"I'm yours." It comes out broken and true and it cracks something open in my chest even as I say it. "God help me, I'm yours, I never stopped⁠—"

And he lifts me by the hip with one strong arm and brings me down onto him and we both groan.

Whatever I was going to say next is gone.

He sets the pace even from under me.

That's how he's always been.

Even like this, even the one whose body failed him, he's the one controlling it.

One hand on my hip guiding me down onto him slowly and deep ,and the other back around my throat.

His eyes never leaving my face, telling me how to move, how to take him, how good I'm doing, filthy, low, and constant.

"That's it. That's my good girl. Take all of it."

The water sloshes over the sides in waves and neither of us cares.

I've got my hands braced on his shoulders and I'm riding him slow because slow is what his hip allows.

Slow turns out to be its own kind of unbearable, deep and grinding and endless.

He uses his hand on my throat to pull me down to his mouth.

Thunder bites my lip and licks me and pulls back just to watch my face.

"Missed this." His voice is wrecked. "Missed you. Missed this tight little—" He groans as I clench around him.

"You feel me? You feel what you do? Pretending you didn’t want me and you still come apart on me the second I get inside you."

And that's when I see it.