Page 57 of Rogue’s Mark

"You don't talk about your people much," I say.

I feel him go still behind me, just for a second. A hairline thing, there and gone, but I've gotten good at reading the spaces between what people give you, and I swear I felt a crack.

"You’re right," he agrees. "I don't."

"Why?"

"Because some things you carry don't get better when you talk about them. They just get shittier." His arm tightens around me, and it sounds like that’s that. "Tomorrow's about your father, pretty girl. Not me."

I turn over in his arms so we're face-to-face.

"Rogue."

"Yeah."

"I don't want to think anymore. Make me stop thinking."

He searches my face in the dark, reading me the way he reads everything, making sure it's me asking and not just the fear. Whatever he finds, it works. His hand comes up to my jaw, thumb dragging slow across my bottom lip, and then he kisses me. It's nothing like the first time he kissed me months ago. That was a challenge. This is an answer.

He kisses me like we have all night, because we do. Unhurried, his hand slides under my T-shirt to spread warmth across the small of my back and pull me flush against him. I get my hands on his chest, then his shoulders. I feel the exact moment his control starts to fray, thanks to the low sound he makes when I press against the hard length of him through his shorts.

"Help me," I manage, pulling at the hem of my shirt, and he obliges, dragging it over my head and tossing it somewhere I’ll step on in the morning.

Then he just looks at me. In the dark, eyes adjusted, like I'm the only solid thing in a tilting room.

"There she is," he murmurs, and rolls me under him.

His mouth finds my throat, my collarbone, the curve of my breast, taking his time, and I arch up into him because the heat of his mouth is louder than anything in my head, which is just what I asked for. He drags his lips lower, down my stomach, and when he settles between my thighs and looks up the length of my body to catch my eyes, my breath stops.

"Watch me," he says.

I do.

His mouth on me is patient and filthy and devastating all at once as he tastes me from top to bottom and back. He works my pussy, the flat of his tongue and then the point of it, his hands holding my hips down when I press for more. The whole time, he keeps his eyes on mine like he wants me to know who's doing this, who's here. When he slides two fingers into me and curls them, I make a sound I don't recognize.

"Rogue—"

“Let go, baby."

I explode with my fingers fisted in his hair, and he works me right through it, easing up only when I'm shaking too hard to take more. Then he's moving up my body, and I reach for him, wrapping my hand around his cock and guiding because I need him closer, need the weight of him, need to not be alone in my own skin for one more minute tonight.

"Look at me," he says, and pushes in.

He sinks into me slow, watching my face the whole way, and the stretch of him, the fullness, the sheer thereness of him pulls a broken sound out of me that has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with being held down to the earth by the one person who paid for tomorrow so I wouldn't have to.

He sets a rhythm that's deep and steady and relentless, one hand braced beside my head, the other sliding under to lift my hips into him. I wrap my legs around him and hold on.

"Stay with me," he breathes. "Right here. Just here."

"I'm here," I gasp. "I'm here, I'm here⁠—"

It builds slow and then all at once, the pressure winding tighter with every drive of his hips, and when he gets his hand between us and presses his thumb to my clit, I shatter for the second time, clenching around him, dragging him over with me. He buries himself deep and groans into my neck and shudders, and for a few long seconds, the whole world is just the two of us breathing hard in the dark.

After, he doesn't roll away. He gathers me back against his chest, my head under his chin, his heart slamming and then slowing.

My terror's still there. I can feel it waiting at the edge of the bed for morning.

But it's quiet now. He made it quiet.