Chapter 16 - Logan #2
I look up at her. Her face flushed even in the dark, her lips parted, her chest heaving. She was seconds from coming and I took it.
"I decide," I say. Quiet. Certain. "Not you."
She makes a sound that might be a curse. Her head drops back. One hand goes from my hair to cover her own face.
"Okay," she says finally. Barely air, barely a word. "Okay."
Her hips settle. She understands.
I give her a moment with it.
Then I move up over her body.
I finally free my cock and settle between her thighs.
She's looking at me. The fear still present in her eyes, still real, that bright animal awareness that runs through everything between us. And underneath it: the want. The two things woven together the way they always are with her, inseparable, each one feeding the other.
I push inside her.
“Take it. That’s my girl.”
She's tight and slick and hot and the sensation moves through me like a current — the release of it, the relief, everything I've been holding back for weeks finally allowed to be free.
She makes a sound that's not a word, her head tipping back, her whole body arching up to take me deeper. I hold there.
I watch her face while her body adjusts to mine.
The widening of her eyes. Her mouth moving around a breath she hasn't managed yet. And the fear still threaded through all of it — still present, still mine, still the gift she gave by running into the dark when I said to.
"Look at me," I say.
Her eyes find mine, and she doesn’t shy away from what she sees.
Something gives way in my chest.
I begin to move.
The rhythm comes easy — her body answering each thrust, hips rising to meet mine, hands finding my shirt and gripping the fabric with both fists. She's warm everywhere I'm not, her thighs against mine, her breasts against my chest when I come down over her.
I push deeper. She exhales a broken sound and her grip on my shirt tightens and her cunt tightens with it, clenching around my cock.
The pace builds. Her sounds multiply — small and helpless, sounds she can't manage because she doesn't have the capacity for management right now. I've taken it from her. Her head tips back and her back arches and her legs wrap around me, heels pressing into my back, urging me harder.
"Logan —"
I drive into her and she loses the rest of it.
Her eyes stay on mine. Even when they want to close — I can see the effort it takes, the moment she drags them back — she holds my gaze.
This is the most undone I've ever been. Her watching me while I fuck her, the fear still in her face along with everything else, refusing to look away from any version of what I am.
I bring a hand between us.
My thumb finds her clit and she gasps — sharp, like contact with something electric — her hips stuttering in the rhythm, her body suddenly too much and not enough at once. I keep the pressure steady and I don't stop moving and her sounds go from small to desperate.
"Please." The word breaks out of her. "Please —"
"Come for me," I say against her ear.
She does.
Her orgasm hits like the whole thing was waiting for permission and finally got it — her cunt clenching around me, tight and rhythmic, her whole body arching hard off the ground, her nails finding my back through my shirt and digging in.
The sound she makes belongs to the dark and the salt air and everything that got her here, weeks of fear and want, and her face in the middle of it is the most undefended I've ever seen her.
She looks like someone who has been given back something lost.
That's what breaks me.
Her face in that moment undoes the last of my control. I follow her over the edge with the next thrust, burying myself deep, my whole body shuddering through the release while her walls are still pulsing around me.
A sound comes out of me, low and wrecked, my forehead dropping to her shoulder. I hold there, buried in her, shaking slightly, which is something I don't do.
My breath comes back slowly. Her chest rises and falls beneath me, ragged at first, then steadying. The mangroves are dark above us. No wind — just the distant pulse of the city, so faint it might be imagined, and beneath that the smell of salt water and wet bark and the two of us.
I roll off her.
The cold air hits immediately, the absence of her warmth registering before anything else.
I lie on my back beside her, staring up at the interlocking branches overhead, breathing returning to something functional.
My shirt is damp with exertion. Her dress is somewhere to my left, silk in the dirt.
She's still bare beside me, still shivering in fine waves — the aftermath of fear and release all leaving the body at once.
The roots press into my back painfully, and I reach over and roll her on top of me, so I can be her mattress. The back of her head nestles on my shoulder and we both stare at the canopy above us.
Neither of us speaks.
Her hand finds mine in the dark. Not gripping. Just landing there, her fingers resting over mine, the lightest possible contact. She's not asking for anything. She's just choosing to be with me.
I don't move. The city hums its distant hum. The branches hold still above us. Her breathing slows and mine slows and the two of us lie in the cold dark.
Her body rises and falls with every breath I take.