Page 99 of Final Drive

“I know.” She takes my face in both hands and pulls me down. “Come here.”

I push into her, and my vision whites out at the edges. She’s tight and hot and she takes all of it in one stroke. The noise she makes goes straight down my spine into the base of me. I get an arm under her hips and fuck her hard, since gentle isn’t in the building tonight and she didn’t ask for it. The headboard hits the wall. She’s got her nails in my shoulders, saying my name in a register she’s never used on the water or anywhere else.

“I want to see you,” she says. “Don’t hide.”

I open my eyes and hold hers. It’s unbearable but I don’t look away.

“Where,” I get out.

“You know where.”

I do. I’ve known since a heat in the third week of February, when she leaned forward in the boat and her collar shifted and the hollow of her throat caught the light. I looked at it for the length of a full twenty and hated myself the whole time.

“Everyone will see it,” I say.

“That’s the point.”

My knot starts to build. She feels it and says my name.

The last time I heard that, she was in heat, and I had my teeth against her shoulder and made myself take them off her. She’s never once mentioned it but I’ve thought about it every day since.

She comes around the knot, arching, her whole body locking. I get my mouth to the base of her throat, set my teeth in the hollow above her sternum, and bite down.

The bond doesn’t ease into me. It breaks over me at once, cold water and sharp light, and everything I’ve carried by myself since I was nine years old goes somewhere else to be held. She takes it. Downstairs a chair scrapes back on the kitchen floor. They can feel it through her.

That’s seven.

She’s shaking under me. I lift my mouth off her throat. There’s blood on my lip and hers. Her eyes are wet and enormous.

“There you are,” she says.

Then her pupils blow out. Her head goes back against the pillow, and she’s gone for five or six seconds. She isn’t asleep. She’s somewhere else entirely. Her hands drop off my shoulders, her breathing goes shallow and fast, and every bond in the house lights up at once. Bo hits the stairs.

“Reese.”

She comes back and blinks at me, and her color’s wrong.

“I’m okay.”

“You blacked out.”

“Greyed out. There’s a difference.” She gets a hand up to my face, and it’s trembling. “Three in a day and a half. That’s a lot of new wiring.”

The door opens without a knock. It’s Bo, with Tyler behind him.

“She’s all right,” I say. “Give us a minute.”

Bo looks at her instead of me, and he doesn’t move until she nods. Then he shuts the door.

The knot has us where it wants us for another few minutes. I get my weight onto my forearms and put my thumb against the mark I just made, and she turns her face into my wrist.

“Say it out loud if it happens again,” I tell her. “To all of us. Not just me.”

“I will.”

When the knot finally lets down I move us both onto our sides, and she’s asleep before I’ve got the blanket over her. I stay awake most of the night with my hand on her throat, and I don’t decide a single thing.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE