Chapter 25 – Bells #2
Even through the cologne and blockers and years of chemicals, he can smell me because I'm soaking wet and clenching around his cock and my body is doing what omega bodies do when their scent match is inside them for the first time.
Producing enough slick to drown a lesser man.
Rex isn't a lesser man.
Rex is barely a man right now. He's alpha stripped down to base code, running on instinct and need and years—years—of deprivation that's all crashing into this single moment on a foggy rooftop with a woman he hates.
"Rex—I need to tell you—"
"I said save it."
His hand drops from my mouth to my hip and he changes the angle, lifting me higher, and the first thrust at this new depth lights up my vision with bursts of light like fireworks are going off around us.
My nails rake down his back under his shirt, catching on his scars, and he hisses through his teeth but doesn't stop, doesn't even slow, just takes it and gives it back harder.
The scar on his shaft catches against my walls on every stroke. Every time, Rex makes this sound—half pain, half pleasure, all feral beast—that does things to my hindbrain no amount of suppressants can even hope to fucking block.
"Close," I gasp. "I'm—fuck—I'm close—"
"Already?" The bastard sounds smug even while barely holding himself together. His jaw is clenched, tendons standing out in his neck, sweat beading along his hairline. The mask is fogged at the edges from his breathing.
"Already implies you're not close too."
His eye narrows and his hips snap forward in retaliation.
I come harder than I ever have in my fucking life. My whole body locks up and my thighs squeeze his waist as my mouth opens on a silent scream because I can't even get enough air to make sound. My walls clamp down on him so hard he snarls.
"FUCK—" Rex's rhythm disintegrates. His hips stutter, grinding deep, and I feel his knot swelling against my entrance.
His whole body is vibrating with the effort of holding back, every tendon standing out, his arm shaking where it's banded around my waist. His instincts are screaming at him to push that knot in and lock us together and he's fighting it with everything he has because knotting me is too fucking intimate and we do not have time for that.
I'm gasping for breath so much I can barely speak. "It would be… it would be really fucking bad timing if you—if you knotted me and—" I choke on a laugh at the thought. "And Phoenix and Raf find us tied and—"
"Don't fucking talk about Phoenix and Raf," he snarls, his eye lighting with pure feral rage.
His whole body slams me against the wall, and he buries his face in my neck, his cock pulsing inside me as his knot swells to full size and the force of my clenching sucks it into my body. He empties into me in hot, thick bursts and each one makes him shudder and snarl against my throat.
His teeth find the collar.
For one terrifying, electric second, I feel the pressure of his bite through the leather, and I know exactly how a lamb feels in the teeth of a wolf.
Right over the crescent scar.
Right where—
He stops.
Pulls back.
His eye is glazed. Wild. Barely human. But somewhere in there, underneath the animal, he's still making choices. Still holding the line.
He didn't bite.
My heart is slamming so hard I can feel it in my eyeballs.
We stay like that. Pinned together, him still locked inside me, his knot throbbing between my thighs, both of us panting like wild beasts that just ran a marathon. The fog rolls across the rooftop and the city hums below and neither of us moves.
"Wow," I manage to croak. "Wow."
"Fuck," Rex pants, still holding me up even as his arm shakes and his free hand scrubs down his face and through his sweat-dampened hair.
I take a second to catch my breath. Then two. Then ten.
Rex's knot throbs inside me, thick and insistent, his cock still twitching with aftershocks. Every pulse sends a ripple through my oversensitive body that makes my toes curl inside my combat boots.
Which are, for the record, the only things I'm still fully wearing.
"So," I say.
"Don't."
"That was—"
"Don't."
"—really something."
His forehead drops against the wall beside my head with a dull thunk. His arm is still banded around my waist, holding me pinned against the brick. Not that I could go anywhere even if he let go. We're locked together.
Knotted.
On a rooftop.
With Carmine arriving in—I crane my neck to check the time on Rex's watch, since my phone is somewhere in the pocket of the jeans currently bunched around one of my ankles—
Thirty-seven minutes.
"Rex."
"What."
"We have a problem."
"We have several."
"How long does your knot last?"
Dead silence.
His chest expands against mine. Contracts. He angles his face away from me, staring at the fog.
"Rex."
"I don't know," he grits out.
I blink. "You don't know?"
"This hasn't exactly come up before."
Oh.
Oh.
Right.
Because he's never knotted anyone. Because his scars make arousal painful and his isolation made intimacy impossible and the decade of deprivation means he has absolutely zero frame of reference for how long his knot—
My inner walls clench involuntarily around him.
Rex's entire body spasms. His hand slams flat against the brick beside my head and a snarl rips out of his chest that I feel in my spine.
"Don't—" His voice is barely human. "Don't do that."
"I didn't do it on purpose!"
"Your body is literally squeezing my cock."
"It's an autonomic response! I can't control it any more than you can control—" I gesture between us at the general vicinity of where we're fused together. "That!"
He makes a growling sound through his teeth. His hips shift—trying to find a more comfortable angle, probably—and the movement drags his knot against my walls in a way that makes us both jerk.
"Stop moving," I gasp.
"I'm trying to—"
"Well don't. Every time you shift, it—"
"I'm aware."
We glare at each other from six inches apart.
His eye is still blown dark, sweat tracking down his temple, the mask slightly crooked from where his face was buried in my neck.
My legs are still locked around his waist. My hoodie is rucked up past my ribs.
The fog swirls around us like we're starring in the world's most pornographic horror film.
My phone buzzes.
From somewhere near my ankle.
I contort sideways, Rex cursing as the movement shifts his knot, and manage to fish my phone out of my crumpled jeans with two fingers.
PHOENIX
Carmine just pulled into the lot
Where are you guys??
"Fuck," I say.
"What."
I hold up the phone so he can read it.
Rex's visible eye goes wide.
"FUCK."
"That's what I said."
"How long have we—"
"I don't know! I lost track of time somewhere between you slamming me against the wall and the part where you knotted me!"
My phone buzzes again.
RAF
Phoenix is panicking
Carmine wants to see the stunt
where the fuck are you two
Bells
BELLS
I type back with one thumb while Rex breathes through his nose above me like a bull about to charge.
BELLS
on the roof. long story. we'll be down soon. stall carmine
RAF
define soon
BELLS
soon-ish
RAF
bells what the fuck does soonish mean
BELLS
it means soon but with plausible deniability
RAF
I swear to all the gods
are you two FUCKING up there???
I lock my phone.
"Raf knows," I say pleasantly.
Rex closes his eye. His jaw works. A vein pulses in his temple. For a moment, I think he might actually have an aneurysm, which would be a real shame given what just happened and the fact that I am definitely deeply fucking attached to this alpha.
Not just literally.
Fuck.
"This doesn't change anything," he grits out through his teeth.
I tilt my head. "Beg your pardon?"
"This." He doesn't gesture because both his arms are occupied holding me against a wall. "Us. Whatever the fuck you want to call it. This doesn't change anything. We still hate each other."
I stare at him.
He stares back.
His knot throbs.
A grin splits my face so wide it hurts.
"Thank the gods," I say. "I was developing a blackmail kink."
Something happens to his face.
Not a smile. Rex doesn't smile. But the tension around his eye cracks. Splinters. His mouth twitches—the corner that can—and a sound comes out of him that's dangerously close to a laugh before he murders it.
"You're clinically insane," he says.
"Probably."
My phone buzzes. And buzzes again. I ignore it.
"So." I shift against the wall, trying to find a position that doesn't grind his tip directly against my cervix. There isn't one. "Since we're stuck here for... however long this takes..."
"No."
"You don't even know what I'm going to say."
"I know exactly what you're going to say, and the answer is no."
"Rex." I reach up and place my fingertips against the temple of his mask. "We're rehearsing the stunt."
His eye flies open.
"Absolutely fucking not."
"You can't run away." I tap the mask with one finger. Clink. "You can't put me down. You can't even move without your knot doing—" I clench. He snarls. "—that. You are, quite literally, a captive audience."
"Bells, I swear to every god that ever existed—"
"Temple." My fingertip traces the first contact point. He flinches, but he can't jerk away without pulling both of us off balance, and his knot is still fat and locked inside me, which means any sharp movement is going to end badly for everyone.
"Cheekbone." Second contact.
"Don't you dare—"
"Jaw."
I pull.