14. Priming
Chapter fourteen
Priming
Lorelei
The new fleet takes up half the paddock.
I hear the crowd’s approval before I see what they’re approving of, low murmurs rolling through clusters of people in expensive jackets standing too close to cars they’ll never be allowed to drive.
Six new machines sit beneath the lights.
A matte-black GT anchors the display, its livery painted by hand across the doors and hood, the clear coat still smelling fresh, and two stripped-down bikes stand beside it, their chrome throwing the overhead lights back into the crowd.
Someone keeps starting the engines just to let people hear them. The GT comes alive with a low growl that travels through the concrete and into my feet, and conversation stops for three seconds. When the engine cuts, everyone starts talking louder.
For one minute, surrounded by people who don’t know a single true thing about me, I feel almost normal.
Almost.
Kiwi finds me beside the GT, arguing with a mechanic twice her age about torque.
“You look like you need a drink,” she says without looking away from the open hood.
“I look fine.”
“You look like a woman contractually obligated to attend her own execution with good posture.”
“That’s oddly specific.”
“I’m a nursing student. Specificity is the whole job.”
“That has nothing to do with cars.”
“I contain multitudes.”
“That’s Rafe’s line.”
“It’s community property now.”
The mechanic laughs. Kiwi points at something beneath the hood and tells him he’s avoiding her question, then looks at me, and the joke leaves her face for half a second.
“You good?”
“I’m great.”
Her eyes stay on mine while I smile wider.
“Okay,” she says, turning back to the engine.
She lets it go. I should know that doesn’t mean she believes me.
By the time the official show winds down, someone has already decided the night isn’t over, probably Zaconia, possibly one of the drivers with more money than sense.
Within twenty minutes, half the paddock has relocated to an old service road half a mile away.
Headlights line both sides of the makeshift strip, and someone has connected a phone to a speaker that was never meant to compete with engines and is losing badly.
The first two bikes pull up side by side.
There are no officials, no qualifying order, no Alistair deciding whose talent belongs to which branch.
A woman drops her arm, the bikes launch, and the crowd loses its mind.
I feel the sound in my teeth while engines scream down the road, people climb onto car hoods for a better view, and somebody spills a drink down my arm and apologizes by handing me the rest of it.
I take it.
Talia appears beside me while the next drivers line up.
“Better?” she asks.
“A little.”
“Not enough?”
I look at her.
She already knows the answer.
We end up at a villa an hour later. Whose villa, I don’t ask. The music is loud, the lighting low, and nobody is swimming in the pool despite at least three people already losing parts of their clothing.
Somewhere between the service road and the living room, Talia takes my hand. She doesn’t let go until we reach the bathroom.
“You look like you need this,” she says, locking the door.
I don’t ask what this means because I already know.
The first line burns clean. I’ve done this enough now that I don’t cough or complain, just wait through the sting and the drip, through one bright second when the room becomes too clear, until the rush catches up.
Marcus’s name doesn’t come with it.
That is the point.
Talia cuts another line while I check my nose in the mirror.
“You good?”
“Everyone needs to stop asking me that.”
“Noted.”
I do the second.
By the time we leave the bathroom, the villa has sharpened around me. The bass lands exactly where it should, every conversation seems worth joining, and everyone is funnier than they were ten minutes ago, including me.
Zaconia is laughing across the room. Kiwi stands in the kitchen with a cup she hasn’t touched, watching me over its rim.
I look away.
My pulse runs too fast, but at least it’s moving. Since the annex, everything inside me has felt stuck beneath candle wax and other people’s hands, and now I can breathe all the way down. I feel light, not empty and definitely not healed, just fast enough that none of it can settle.
“To new beginnings,” I announce, raising a cup I don’t remember filling.
“To what?” Zaconia calls.
“New beginnings. I’m serious.”
“Okay.”
“No, you don’t understand. Lorelei is tired.” I press one hand to my chest because apparently this has become a speech. “Lorelei is so fucking tired.”
Kiwi looks at Talia.
Talia doesn’t look back.
“Okay, dramatic,” Kiwi says. She smiles when she says it, but the smile doesn’t reach her eyes.
“Call me something else tonight.”
Zaconia sits forward immediately. “Like what… mine?”
I look around the room as if somebody might have written the answer on a wall.
Nothing.
Then a name comes out.
“Lark.”
“Lark?” Zaconia repeats.
“Lark.”
“Where did that come from?”
“I want to be free. Like a bird.”
“Yes, babe. I know what a lark is.”
“Then why did you ask?”
She laughs, and I do too, high and hard enough that I have to catch my drink before it spills.
“Lorelei’s dead,” I announce. “Lark’s free. Somebody get Lark another drink.”
Zaconia whoops, and the people nearest us pick it up because they’re drunk and high and it sounds like a game.
“Lark needs a drink.”
“Who has Lark’s cup?”
“Move, let Lark through.”
The name travels across the room without anybody asking permission, and I let it.
Lorelei belongs to the house, the church, the Offering, and every person who has ever decided what she can survive.
Lark is currently standing on somebody’s couch with one shoe missing.
Lark seems fun.
Rafe finds me a little after midnight. I know Kiwi called him before he says anything because he enters the room already searching, looking past the dancers, the drinks, and the man asleep beneath a decorative blanket until he finds me on the couch.
His face tightens.
“Hey.”
He crouches in front of me and rests his hands on my knees.
“You good?”
I laugh.
“What?”
“Everybody keeps asking me that.”
“Maybe there’s a reason.”
“I’m great. I’m so great, Rafe. You have no idea.”
“Yeah?”
His eyes move over my face, my nose, my jaw, the cup in my hand.
He knows what he’s looking at.
“Kiwi says you’ve been doing coke since you got here.”
“Kiwi’s a narc.”
“Kiwi’s worried about you.”
“Everybody’s always worried.”
“How much?”
“How much what?”
“Coke, Lo. How much?”
I look up at him too quickly and throw off my own balance. His grip tightens around me before I can stumble.
“No, Lo, it’s Lark.” I frown when his eyebrows shoot up. “Fine. Just a little.”
The giggle that comes out of me doesn’t help my case.
Rafe shakes his head, and something crosses his face — guilt, disappointment, fear, maybe all three. Even moving this fast, I know him well enough to recognize when he’s arguing with himself.
He’ll give me almost anything.
Even if what I’m asking for is another way not to think.
Rafe opens the door to an empty room and locks it behind us.
“Please, Rafe. I need you.”
He doesn’t move right away.
His jaw tightens while he looks at me, and I know exactly what he’s deciding: give me what I’m asking for, or do the responsible Rafe thing and get me water, sit me down, and wait until my brain belongs to me again.
I don’t want responsible Rafe.
Not tonight.
I kick off my boots and nearly lose my balance. His arm shoots out immediately, steadying me before I hit anything.
“See?” I tell him. “Perfectly fine.”
“That was a very convincing demonstration.”
“Shut up.”
I lift my shirt over my head and drop it onto the floor, then start on my cutoffs. The button becomes significantly more complicated than a button has any right to be, but I eventually win and shove the shorts down my legs, leaving me in my hot-pink bra and thong.
Rafe watches me for another long second.
I can practically see the argument dying behind his eyes.
Then his expression changes.
“Bed. Now.”
I grin.
There he is.
I hurry toward the bed, throw myself onto my back, and look up at him with every restless inch of me still demanding more — more noise, more speed, more anything that keeps the quiet from catching up.
The coke got me this far.
Rafe can take care of the rest.
Between the two of them, maybe I can keep my head empty until morning.
Rafe strips without any of my difficulty, boots first, then jeans and his plain black T-shirt. His boxers stay on for another few seconds before joining everything else beside the bed.
He climbs over me naked and already hard, the window light catching the edges of him as he settles between my legs.
His hand brushes my cheek.
That almost ruins everything.
I came in here wanting his mouth, his weight, enough sensation to wipe the last several weeks clean for an hour. Instead he touches my face like I’m something he’s afraid of breaking, and the gentleness gives me something solid to look at.
Him.
Just him.
For the first time since the second line, the room slows enough for me to stay inside one moment.
I turn my face and kiss his palm.
Rafe smiles for half a second before it disappears. Then he kisses my forehead and slides his hand between us, pushing my thong aside while I tug the straps of my bra down my arms, reach behind myself for the clasp, and toss it somewhere toward the floor.
My hands find his face.
“Rafe.”
His name is all I manage before his mouth closes around my nipple and my back arches. He takes his time, tongue first and then teeth, enough pain mixed into the pleasure to make everything in my head narrow again.
There.
That.
I can stay there.
He moves between my breasts, leaving bite marks behind before trailing softer kisses lower.
When he finally pushes inside me, the first thrust knocks the breath out of both of us.
I gasp against his shoulder while his moan lands warm against my skin, and everything blurs together: the rush still buzzing beneath my skin, his body over mine, the weight of him pinning me to one place when my mind wants to be everywhere at once.
This is what I meant when I picked the name.
This is Lark.
His little birdy, if I want to be.
Rafe fucks me slow and steady, finding a rhythm that makes it impossible to think more than one thought at a time. I clutch his back and pull more of his weight onto me because the pressure feels good.
Safe, almost.
I refuse to examine that word.
He kisses my cheek, then the other, before tucking his face against my neck, his fingers brushing my hair away from my ear.
“Let go and be free,” he whispers. “Let go, Little Birdy.”
Something inside me cracks without the courtesy of making a scene about it. The tears are simply there before I understand I’m crying, hot tracks down my face and onto his arm while I clutch him harder.
He doesn’t stop.
I don’t ask him to.
If he stops, I might have to figure out why I’m crying, and that is absolutely not what Lark came into this room to do.
He keeps the same rhythm while I hold on. The pressure builds until I can’t separate the pleasure from the relief of finally having something louder than my own head, and my orgasm catches hard, pulling a broken sound out of me as I tighten around him.
Rafe keeps moving.
He lifts his head to look at me, wipes the tears from my face, and kisses me softly.
Of course he has to be gentle now, when gentle is the one thing most likely to get through.
I’m still floating when I kiss him back harder.
I need him to understand without making me explain it: I want him here, I want this, and for these few minutes he has made everything else quiet enough that I can pretend freedom is as simple as choosing what happens to my own body.
My tongue meets his before I bite his lower lip.
Rafe groans loudly into my mouth, and his rhythm breaks for the first time.
Then he comes inside me.
We stay tangled together afterward, both of us breathing too hard. I’m high on coke, Rafe is apparently high on making terrible decisions with me, and for a few stupid minutes I feel every bit as free as I promised everyone Lark would be.
It won’t last.
I already know that.
Right now, I don’t care.
Near dawn, Zaconia finds me on the villa’s back patio.
I’m still catching my breath, staring at the pool nobody used all night. Cups and abandoned shoes surround it instead, and one of the underwater lights has burned out, leaving half the water blue and the other half black.
“Lark,” she says, trying the name more softly this time.
I look at her.
“That really stuck, you know. Everybody’s calling you that already.”
“Good.”
“You okay?”
“I’m Lark. Lark’s always okay.”
She studies me long enough to make the lie uncomfortable, then drops into the chair beside me.
“Somebody threw up in the downstairs fountain.”
“Classy.”
“They’re blaming the statue.”
“What did the statue do?”
“Looked judgmental.”
She laughs and keeps talking, and I let her. The sky above the pool turns gray-blue while the coke thins out enough for the edges of the night to start returning.
I can feel Marcus waiting underneath it, along with the annex, the cream folder, and Rafe’s pause before he followed me into that room.
None of it is gone.
It just can’t catch me while I’m moving this fast.