Chapter 1 #4
"This what you wanted, baby girl?" My mouth was next to her ear, nipping at her lobe. "You wanted to start a food fight, so I'd bend you over and wreck you in the kitchen?"
"Maybe." She was panting, her words broken up by each thrust. "Maybe I just. Wanted. Your attention."
"You always have my attention." I released her hair and wrapped my hand around the front of her throat.
My palm against her pulse, her heartbeat hammering against my fingers.
She leaned into it, trusting me with the one thing most people would never trust anyone with, but we'd earned this trust. Earned every dark, fucked-up inch of what we had.
Her hand reached back and grabbed my hip, pulling me into her, matching my rhythm. "I'm close," her voice cracked on the second word. "Cam, I'm so fucking close."
I reached around and found her clit, and rubbed circles against it while I fucked her.
The combination was too much for both of us.
Her walls clamped down around me and I gritted my teeth, fighting the surge building at the base of my spine.
I wanted her to come first. I always wanted her to come first because the way she came apart was the single most addictive thing I'd ever witnessed, and I'd witnessed a lot of shit that should have been addictive and wasn't.
"Come for me." I pressed harder against her clit. "Come on, baby, be a good girl and let go for me."
She shattered. Her whole body locked, her back arching into a rigid bow, her mouth open on a silent scream that took three seconds to find sound.
When it did, it was my name. Raw and holy in a way that nothing else in my life had ever been.
Her orgasm was in my bones, how her walls pulsed around my cock, milking me, pulling me in deeper.
I lasted two more thrusts before I buried myself as deep as I could, and came inside her with a groan. My forehead dropped to the back of her shoulder and I breathed her in. Coconut shampoo and flour and tomato and sweat and sex and Lakey.
The only smell that had ever meant home.
We stayed there for a minute. My chest pressed to her back, her hands still gripping the counter, both of us breathing too hard to speak.
Lakey spoke first as her breathing returned to normal.
"The pasta is fucked."
I laughed. "The pasta was fucked the second you started debating noodle aerodynamics."
"That's a valid field of study." She straightened up slowly, wincing as I pulled out of her.
She turned around and leaned against the counter, surveying the destruction.
Flour covered every surface. Tomato sauce had dried in streaks on the cabinets.
Olive oil pooled on the floor. Broken glass glittered near the base of the fridge.
The egg I'd forgotten about was crusting in my hair.
"We are never cooking together again," I said.
"You say that every time."
"I mean it this time."
"You say that every time, too." She pushed off the counter, completely naked and covered in food, and walked to the junk drawer by the fridge. She pulled it open, rifled through it, and produced a takeout menu. She held it up and shook it at me. "Thai?"
I looked at her. Standing in the bombed-out kitchen of our shitty apartment, holding a crumpled Thai menu, her hair a disaster of flour and tomato, bite marks on both thighs, my cum drying on her skin.
This was the person I would die for. Kill for. Had killed for. Would kill for again without hesitation and without regret and without a single second of sleep lost over it.
Not that I slept much anyway.
"Extra pad see ew," I said.
"Obviously." She grabbed her phone off the charger, and started dialing, then she stopped and looked at me. "Cam?"
"Yeah?"
"Cam: two. Lakey: two." She held up two fingers and smiled.
Not the dangerous smile. Not the one for strangers or marks or people who'd made the mistake of underestimating five feet and one inch of weaponized chaos.
The other one. The real one. The one that made her look like the girl I'd found in a foster home when we were kids, the one I'd looked at and thought, Her.
Whatever I am, whoever I become, it's her.
"Tied," I said.
"Always." She pressed call and wandered out of the kitchen, leaving flour footprints on the hallway floor.
I watched her go, then I looked at the kitchen, and thought about cleaning it.
Thought about putting on pants. Thought about the fact that somewhere in this city, there was a list with our names on it, and the people who kept that list didn't care about food fights or Thai takeout or the way my girl kept score.
I thought about a lot of things I couldn't change and one thing I could.
I picked up my butterfly knife from the counter where I'd left it, flicked it open and closed twice out of habit, and went to find my girl. The kitchen could wait. The mess could wait. Everything could wait.
Everything except her.
She never could.
* * *
If you enjoyed this short of Cam and Lakey, you can find the whole Shattered Souls series on KDP. Harbor’s instagram is missharborgraves.
Link to Broken Shadow: