22. Rowe
ROWE
Wren makes a small sound in her sleep, and I surface from my doze for the fourth time tonight.
The chair is terrible for sleeping. I don't care. She's in my bed—in my bed—curled on her side with one hand tucked under her cheek and my spare blanket kicked down to her hips, and I've spent the night drifting in and out just so I can keep opening my eyes to this.
The bed is too small. The thought circles my skull at six in the morning like a moth around the lamp.
It's a bunk built for one man who never expected company, and she barely fits on it alone.
Silas gutted the back third of his trailer a few months ago and built a bed that takes up the entire space, wall to wall, big enough for him and Teddy and Nova, and soon, a crib bolted within arm's reach. I used to think it was excessive.
I'm going to build one. Tear out the bench, the fold-down table, all of it. A bed she can sprawl in. A bed with room for the distance we need and the closeness we're learning, and maybe someday no distance at all.
Nine days until the trucks roll. Eight, now. She's coming with us.
She's coming with us.
Her lashes flutter. Her eyes open, find me in the chair, and the smile that spreads across her face is slow and unguarded.
“You slept in the chair,” she murmurs.
“I slept great.”
“Liar.” She stretches, and my henley rides up her thigh, and I forget what we were talking about. “You could've woken me. I'd have taken the chair.”
“You're never taking the chair.”
“Bossy.” She props herself up on an elbow. Her hair is a disaster, and there's a crease from the pillow running down one cheek, and I catalogue it all, greedy, because I get to. “What time is it?”
“Early. Sleep more.”
She doesn't sleep more. She looks at me instead. Her gaze drifts—my shoulders, my chest, down my stomach, lower—and I watch her eyes go heavy-lidded and dark. She catches her bottom lip between her teeth.
My cock notices before my brain does, thickening against my thigh, and the jeans I never took off go tight.
“What are you thinking about?” My voice comes out rough with sleep and something else.
The blush starts at her throat and climbs. “Nothing.”
“Wren.”
“It's stupid.”
“Nothing about you is stupid. Say it.”
She sits up, tucking her legs beneath her, and worries the hem of my henley between her fingers. “In Nova's trailer. There were chains everywhere. From her act before she started showing.” Her eyes flick up to mine and away. “And I had an idea. Last night. While I was falling asleep.”
“What kind of idea?”
“The kind where I can't touch you.” The words come out in a rush, like she has to get them all moving before her courage runs out.
“You could tie me. Arms bound. Legs open and folded up, chained to my body so I can't move, can't reach for you, can't—my hands would be locked down, Rowe.
Completely. And then I'd just be—” she swallows, and her voice drops to almost nothing, “—available.
For you. However you wanted. And you'd know, the whole time, that I couldn't touch you. Not even by accident.”
The groan that comes out of me is involuntary. I drag the heel of my hand down the ridge of my cock through the denim, pressing hard, because the picture she just painted has me aching in the space of four seconds.
She'd be spread open. Held open. A body I could have without a single hand ever landing on my skin.
“Rowe?” she whispers.
I pull my phone out of my pocket.
“What are you doing?”
“Texting Silas.”
“What?” She grabs the blanket and hauls it to her chest like Silas is already in the room. “Rowe. It's six in the morning. You cannot text a man at six in the morning asking for—what are you even going to say—”
“He's awake. He's always awake.”
I type:
Need chains. Enough for a full tie. Now.
Send.
“And I'm not explaining anything. He'll know.”
“That's worse.” Her face has gone scarlet all the way to her ears. “That's so much worse. He'll know, and then Nova will know, and then—”
There's a knock on the trailer door.
Wren makes a sound like a teakettle and pulls the blanket over her head.
It hasn't even been three minutes. I cross the trailer and crack the door, and Silas is standing in the dawn gray with an armload of chain looped over one shoulder, padlocks threaded onto the links, a coil of softer welded chain in his other hand—the kind Nova uses against bare skin—and the single most insufferable smirk I have ever seen on a human face.
“These are the smooth ones,” he says. “No burrs. Nova checks every link herself, so they're safe.” He hands the load across the threshold without stepping inside, and his blue eyes flick past my shoulder to the blanket-covered lump on my bed. His smirk widens. “Morning, Doc.”
The lump does not respond.
“Have fun,” Silas says and walks back to his own trailer.
I shut the door. Set the chains on the table. They pour through my hands, cool and heavy, and behind me I hear the blanket rustle down.
“I'm never making eye contact with him again,” Wren says.
“He'll enjoy that.” I turn around. She's sitting in the middle of my bed, knees drawn up, face still pink, eyes on the chains—and there's no fear in her expression. There's the opposite of fear. “Wren.”
“Yeah.”
“Strip.”
Her breath catches. For a second, she doesn't move, and I brace for the retreat, ready to slow everything down to whatever speed she needs.
Then she rises to her knees and reaches for the hem of the henley.
She's shy about it. She does it slowly—not the practiced slow of a performance, the real slow of a woman who's never believed her body was worth watching—lifting my shirt over her head an inch at a time, her arms crossing over her breasts the moment they're bare, then forcing them down to her sides because she's decided to be brave.
Her underwear next, worked over her hips, down her thighs, kicked off the end of the bunk.
She kneels there in the lamplight, naked, all of her—the heavy sway of her breasts, the soft curve of her belly, the width of her hips, thighs I've dreamed about since day one—and my breathing has gone loud in the small space.
My hands hang at my sides, fingers flexing, and it takes everything I have not to close the distance and put them on her.
I can't. Not with hands. But there's another way to hold her, and it's coiled on my table.
“Lie back,” I tell her. My voice barely works. “Spread your thighs. Pull them open and up. Hold them there for me.”
She lies back against my pillow. Her hands slide to the backs of her knees, and she draws them up and apart, folding herself open, and the sight of her—glistening, flushed, offered—nearly ends me before I've touched a single link.
I start with the soft chain.
I loop it around her right thigh, high, and I'm careful—so careful—feeding the links over her skin without letting my fingers land, letting the chain do the touching for me. It glides across the inside of her thigh, and she moans, hips lifting, because the metal is cool and her skin is flushed.
“Okay?” I ask.
“More than okay.” Her voice is wrecked already. “God, Rowe. More.”
I give her more. Her calf folded to her thigh and bound there.
Her wrist drawn down, chained to her ankle.
Then the left side, matching, link by link, padlocks clicking shut one after another—and then the long wrap, chain crossing her body, cinching everything flush, her arms locked to her legs, her legs locked open, all of it snugged tight enough that when she tests it, straining, nothing moves but her breath.
She is spread open on my bed, and she cannot touch me. Not if she wanted to. Not if she forgot. Not even by accident.
The scream that lives under my skin is silent. For the first time in my life, standing this close to another body, it has nothing to say.
“You're shaking,” she whispers.
“I'm about to come in my jeans like a teenager. Give me a second.”
She laughs—breathless, delighted—and the laugh turns into a moan when I kneel onto the bunk between her bound thighs.
I don't undress. I want to. Someday I'll show her all of it, every scar, every line he left and every line I put over them—but not now, not in this moment, because now belongs to her, and I won't let him into this bed even as history.
I open my belt, my jeans, and pull my cock out, and I'm so hard the ink stands out stark along the shaft.
I line myself up against her heat and stop.
“Wren.” I'm frozen in place. “I don't have—there's no condom. I've never needed—”
“It's okay.” Her eyes are steady on mine, dark and sure. “You haven’t been with anyone. I haven't been with anyone in over two years. And I'm on the pill—for cramps, but it counts.” A shaky smile. “There's nothing between us that needs a barrier. Not this. Not anything.”
Nothing between us.
I push inside her.
The sound I make isn't human. She's tight and scalding and soft, softer than anything, and I sink into her one slow inch at a time while she moans beneath me, chained open, unable to do anything but take me, and my vision blurs at the edges.
Thirty-five years old, and I'm inside someone voluntarily for the first time in my life, and it's her, and she's wearing chains because she wanted to give my broken skin safety.
“You feel—” I bottom out and have to stop, forehead hanging over her, careful not to let it drop. “Fuck. You're wrapped around me like you were built for it. Like this pussy was waiting for me.”
“Rowe—”
“You can't touch me.” I draw back and drive in, and the chains sing against each other, and she cries out. “Can't grab. Can't hold. All you can do is lie there and get fucked, isn't that right? Lie there and be mine to use.”
“Yes.” Her head presses back into the pillow, throat arched. “Yes, use me, please—”
I stop being careful about the words after that.
I fuck her and I talk, filthy things I didn't know lived in me, how she looks stuffed full of my cock, how her tits shake with every thrust, how I'm going to keep her chained up and dripping every night from here to the next town and the town after that.
She sobs my name. The bunk frame knocks against the wall.
The padlocks chime against each other in rhythm, a sound I will hear in my dreams for the rest of my life.
I can feel her inner walls tightening around my dick, wanting to choke the cum right out of me.
“Come.” It comes out as a command, guttural. “Come on my cock, Wren. Soak me. Let me feel it.”
She shatters.
Her whole body seizes inside the chains, thighs straining against the links, and her pussy clamps down on me in rippling waves while she wails at the ceiling, and the flood of her drenches my thighs, my jeans, everything—and I let go.
I come inside her, and it tears through me like nothing I've ever felt with my own hand, pulse after pulse, grinding deep to give her every drop, chanting her name like the prayer it's become.
I don't pull out.
I pull back, slow, just far enough to watch, and there it is—my cum leaking out around my shaft, pearling at her stretched entrance, dripping down toward the sheets—and I rock forward and push it back into her.
“Look at that,” I rasp. “Look at what I put in you.”
“Rowe—” She's twitching with aftershocks, over-sensitive, moaning at every slow drag.
“I'm not done.” Because I'm not. I should be softening and I'm not, still hard inside her, twenty years of starvation deciding today is when the bill gets paid.
“You're going to take me again, and I'm going to fuck it all back in so deep it stays. You want that? Want to walk around later with me still inside you, sitting at breakfast with my family, full of me, and nobody knows but us?”
The picture does it. Her eyes roll back, and she comes again, just from the words and the slow grind, and I ride her through it, and then I stop holding back.
I fuck her for long minutes—unhurried this time, deep, the chains shifting and singing, her moans gone slurred and drunk—until the heat builds up my spine a second time and I bury myself to the root and flood her again, groaning into the air an inch above her collarbone.
Silence. Two heartbeats hammering.
“Hi,” she whispers, dazed.
The laugh comes up out of the deepest part of me.
“Hi,” I say back. “I'm building you a bigger bed.”