Chapter 18
Lucien
Afternoon melts into evening, and Branson keeps bringing me small portions of food that are, annoyingly, exactly what I feel like. Hungry doesn’t begin to describe my current state, so I wolf down everything he gives me, though my rage remains firmly intact.
Now and again, curiosity gets the better of me, and I take a brief hiatus from my silence.
“How long was I out for?” I whisper.
The day has been strange. It’s been very short. I think it was past noon when I woke up, but I’m not sure. I have no idea what time it was when I passed out, or even what day it was, so I’m struggling to piece things together.
“Um, ’bout seventeen or eighteen hours, I think,” replies Branson. “I was a little out of it, so I’m not sure exactly, but I woke up seven hours before you did, and I usually sleep for at least twelve hours after…you know.”
As he speaks, I’m sucked back in time with a dizzying whoosh.
I’m lying on the sofa in the past, like I am now.
The big difference is that in the vision, I’m naked, and I have the weight of a jacked alpha on top of me.
I’m on my back, with my legs wound around Branson, and the base of his dick is swelling inside me.
I’m begging for his knot. Pleading for it as it thickens.
So desperate that I keep asking for it even though he’s giving it to me.
I hear echoes of my voice, desperate and strident. “Please, alpha, please, alpha, please knot me.”
What he did to me felt unbelievable. Indescribable. His knot was so big. So thick that even now, during what I know full-well is a flashback, not the real thing, I can’t move a muscle as the memory of it consumes me.
The way my body stretched to accommodate him was beyond reason. Beyond words. There was pressure everywhere. Pleasure everywhere. More than pleasure. Whatever comes after pleasure, after euphoria, after nirvana—that’s what it was.
As my memory flits to the surface, I remember screaming when I came.
In my mind’s eye, I see it happening all over again.
I see the way my cock choked and spurted between us, and I see the way Branson looked down at me as he moved inside me.
He barely blinked. He panted and struggled through, his biceps and abs straining as he held back his own peak.
His groans were anguished, but his words, oh fuck, his words were so soft and sweet.
“Come for me, Lucy,” he said.
“Come for me, Lucy.”
“Come for me, Lucy.”
He said it over and over, and each time he said it, I did it. I came screaming. Shattering. Splintering into a million pieces as his knot fucked me open.
Afterward, when we were both spent, he sat up, taking me with him. He had to, I suppose, as we were knotted together. He sat on the sofa, with me straddling his lap. His fingertips danced up my thighs and around my waist. Every time he kissed me, his smile was a little more unguarded.
“I think I’m going to lose my voice,” I told him huskily.
Back in the present, Branson brings me a smoothie and a sandwich and sits on the floor with his back against the sofa. He is so close to me that I could stroke his hair if I wanted to.
“Is it okay for me to sit here?” His hand digs into the muscle on his chest, massaging deeply. “I kind of… I think I need to be close to you.”
“Is it the bond?” I rasp.
It might be my imagination, but I think he tenses at the sound of my voice. His shoulders raise slightly and a deep quiver shakes him from side to side.
No. It’s not my imagination. It happened.
This big, strong alpha has been reduced to a shivery mess in my presence. Why?
Another flashback bursts to life, picking up where the last one left off. We’re still on the sofa. I’m sitting astride Branson. His knot is still swollen inside me. I can’t lift myself off him. We’re knotted together.
“Oh fuck,” he panted, eyes heavy, lips curled into a ridiculous, lopsided smile, “I’ll be toast if you lose your voice.
” He stroked my face and my neck tenderly.
“I don’t think I’ll make it. Seriously, baby, just the thought of fucking you hoarse is almost more than I can take.
” His knot thickened when he said it, and for some reason, we both started laughing.
“I can’t even imagine what it would do to me to hear you like that, so fucked out that you can’t make a sound. ”
“Yes,” he says, here and now.
It takes me a second to remember what we were talking about. “Is that what the pressure on my chest is? Our bond?”
He nods and turns to face me. His eyes are lit up like they were during my heat and his pupils are extremely dilated.
Bonds are known to be more debilitating for alphas than they are for omegas in the first few days after mating. Biologically, alphas are programmed to stay close to their mate after a heat, to protect and take care of them when they’re at their most vulnerable.
“Yes,” he says again.
“What does it feel like for you?” I whisper.
He blinks slowly, eyes drooping slightly. He looks unsure whether he should answer, but he sighs and speaks all the same. “It feels like life when I’m close to you, and like death when I’m not.”
The band of pressure around my heart sparks painfully when he speaks. I don’t answer because I’m not sure how to. Instead, I lie on the sofa, assaulted by flashing images of my heat.
Branson’s body. Ripped muscle pulsing and beating.
Branson’s dick, thick and throbbing, thrusting into me.
Branson’s knot tying the two of us tightly together.
Brain-melting kisses and the sound of his laughter.
Screaming orgasms and soft brown eyes.
His hands on my face.
The taste of his tongue.
The stark, icy shock of waking up alone in my bed.
“But,” I mouth, “if it hurts to be away from me, why did you leave me to wake up all alone?”
“Because,” he says, looking down and then flicking his eyes up at me, hitting me with a look that makes my brain sizzle, “you’re my omega, Lucy.
I knew you’d be hurting when you woke up, and I wanted to try to help you.
You’re mine to take care of now. I’d rather hurt myself than let you go without something that could make you feel better. ”
From there, I drift in and out, spending most of the evening in a flickering, heated haze of disjointed memories.
If the flashbacks are to be believed, Branson knotted me a lot. That’s all I can say. Every time I open my eyes and let them land anywhere in the living room or the kitchen, I see another bone-melting image of Branson and me coupling.
The kitchen counter.
The living room floor.
The sofa.
God, the sofa over and over.
The memories of the fuck on the sofa keep swimming to the surface, hitting me like a cold splash of water to the face. “How long were we stuck together?” I ask when the not-knowing becomes too much to bear.
“Which time?”
Oh yeah. That’s right. He’s not in my head. We’re two separate people, even though it doesn’t feel like we are.
“The time on the sofa. When you were sitting over there.” I point my finger to the place where we were joined, where I sat on top of him and we couldn’t make ourselves come apart.
“Oh, um…” He nods thoughtfully. “I’m not sure.”
As he says it, I’m bombarded with an image of amber eyes, bloodshot and bleary. Lids hooded as helpless laughter ricocheted out of him.
His knot thickened and pulsed when he laughed, and it made me come. When I came, my hole spasmed, and that made him come.
We laughed and laughed as we came uncontrollably.
When the memory threatens to make my blood pressure spike irrevocably, I try to shake it off.
In doing so, I land on something completely different: Branson on the kitchen island.
Not next to the counter. Not near it. On top of it.
His feet planted on the marble, his posture that of a man built to fuck.
One leg was bent at the knee, and his hip and cock were cocked in my direction.
He was stark naked, his dick rock hard and dripping with precum.
He had a pink feather boa wrapped around his neck, and he was butchering a Mariah Carey number.
“Why were you on the kitchen counter, and why were you wearing a feather boa?” I ask, too befuddled by his attire to touch on the Mariah Carey situation.
Branson drops his head into his hand and a slow, amatory grin creeps up his face.
His lips part, pulling back and showing me a flash of teeth.
He shakes his head and swipes his hand across his forehead.
He looks at me, and there’s something so familiar, so comforting, about his smile that I’m grateful I’m lying down.
“You told me that if I did it, you’d invite me to join the Bad Bitches Getaway group chat,” he says.
As he speaks, a devastatingly soft, gravelly laugh reverberates out of him. I don’t hear it as much as I feel it. In my dick. In my balls. In my quivery, throbbing, bruised hole.
“And, and, is that something you want?” I splutter, taken aback.
He laughs again. Better and worse than before.
My vision blurs.
A smile wraps around his words and ties them in a bow. “It seemed…aspirational at the time.” He shakes his head at himself and scrapes his teeth against his lip to tamp down his laughter.
I giggle, though I don’t mean to. I giggle, even though I’m not even sure it’s all that funny. I laugh in an out-of-control way that my ass remembers. My dick too.
I sit up quickly, grabbing the pillow from under my head and placing it firmly on my lap as I realize with shock what’s happening in my pants.
Branson averts his gaze, fixing it on the fire that flickers steadily ahead of him.
“Maybe it won’t be that bad,” he says very quietly.
My head spins with rage, and I clamber to my feet, throwing the pillow back onto the sofa.
It won’t be that bad?
What the hell is wrong with him? We’re mated for life, and we hardly know each other. Of course it will be that bad.
I stomp out of the living room, the bond protesting strenuously as I move away from him.
I stop and pause microscopically to wait for Branson to follow me when I get to the hallway. It’s fine. I’m not doing it for me. I’m doing it for him. He’s only an alpha. His pain tolerance is probably very low compared to mine.
He yelps softly and clutches his chest as he trots after me, proving my point.
Getting ready for bed is an awkward affair that sees Branson whimpering at the bathroom door while I brush my teeth and wash my face a little more aggressively than strictly required.
When it’s his turn to use the bathroom, I don’t whimper at all.
I mean, yes, technically, it’s because I’m gritting my teeth and keeping a hand clamped over my mouth, but still.
“You may sleep here,” I say, gesturing charitably to the floor next to my bed when Branson emerges from the bathroom.
“Thank you,” he replies so earnestly that I almost start laughing again.
I don’t know what the hell is wrong with me. There’s absolutely nothing funny about this situation. I’m furious. I have no idea why I can’t stop laughing.
God.
I wonder if I’m still delirious.
Oh, that would be wonderful. Imagine if all this is a fever dream, and I wake up tomorrow, unmated and normal.
Yes, please, Lord, let that be what’s happening.