Chapter 24 #2
Somebody behind me makes a noise. Cameron says, mildly, “Everybody out,” and to their enormous credit, they go.
I’ve imagined this since a morning in March when a woman I’d decided to hate corrected my catch timing in front of the entire boat and turned out to be right about it.
Every version I imagined had me in control of it.
I have her against the bedroom door before it’s finished closing. She hooks a leg over my hip. I take her weight and get her higher up the wood, and two months of deciding not to do this goes in about ten seconds. She bites my lower lip hard enough to draw blood, and I growl into her mouth.
“Don’t manage it,” she says against my mouth. “Not tonight.”
“I can’t.”
“Good.”
I get the t-shirt off over her head. She goes for my buttons, and when she’s too slow about it I take over and tear two of them loose. She laughs at me. Then I get my hand between her legs while she’s still against the door, and she stops laughing.
She’s soaked. She’s been standing at the bottom of those stairs since I called her and she’s soaked, and I have to put my forehead against the wood beside her head, since I’m not going to last thirty seconds if I keep looking at her.
“Gray.”
“Give me a second.”
“No.”
She gets her hand around me through my trousers and I say a syllable into her neck that doesn’t belong to any word.
I carry her to the bed and put her down harder than I mean to.
She comes up on her elbows to watch me get the rest of my clothes off, and nobody in my life has ever looked at me and wanted what she wants.
I put my mouth on her and I take my time about it, since it’s the one thing left tonight I can still be good at. She has her fingers in my hair inside a minute, pulling hard. She comes with my name in her mouth and her heel dug into my back.
Afterward I work up her body and put my mouth on every mark I can reach from here.
Jackson’s at her shoulder. Beckett’s above it.
Eli’s on the other side. Bo’s at her nape when I turn her head, still raw at the edges.
Tyler’s on the inside of her wrist when she reaches for my face.
I catch her hand, hold it still, and press my lips to it.
I’ve been counting them for weeks. Every time one of them put his mouth on her I stood in that kitchen and made myself be glad about it. I wasn’t glad. Tonight I don’t have to be, and the relief of that is so enormous it frightens me.
“You’re shaking,” she says.
“I’ve got nothing left. That’s not a figure of speech.”
“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.