Chapter 42 Wyatt
Wyatt
The change happens so fast I almost miss it.
One second Chris is behind me, inside me, his hands steady on my hips and his rhythm careful, controlled.
The next his hand is around my throat and he’s hauling me upright, my back against his chest, both of us on our knees facing the windows.
His other arm wraps tight around my torso, locking me against him.
Oh. Oh.
The angle is devastating. I haven’t been taken like this in years, and my body lights up before my brain catches up.
Every thrust drives up into me, hitting that spot that makes my thighs shake.
His fingers press into my windpipe. Not enough to cut off air completely. Just enough to make me feel it.
Fuck, that’s good. I didn’t know I wanted this until right now.
The plate glass reflects us back in the dim light: his shoulders broader than mine, the flex of his arm across my chest, the way my cock juts hard against my stomach with every thrust. We look incredible. Filthy and desperate and exactly what I needed after the tension of today.
“Chris.” It comes out strangled, but I’m grinning. “Jesus—”
His hand tightens. Cuts off the rest.
“Did I say you could talk?”
A wrongness I can’t name tinges his voice. The words are hot, dirty talk I’d normally lean into, but the delivery is off. Too flat. Too even. Like he’s reading from a script.
“Chris.” I try to keep it light. Playful. “Hey—”
His arm tightens across my chest, pinning me harder against him. Not an embrace anymore. A restraint.
Okay. That’s—okay. We’re playing. This is playing.
Except my gut isn’t buying it.
“Babe. Come on.” I try to turn my head, catch a glimpse of him over my shoulder, but the angle’s wrong. I can’t see anything but ceiling. “Talk to me.”
Nothing. Just that mechanical rhythm, his breath harsh and regular against my ear. Too regular. Like he’s counting reps at the gym. Like this is a task he’s completing. And every stroke hits me in a way that makes me not want to care. But the sense that something is off doesn’t disappear.
My gut says wrong. My cock says more.
In the window’s reflection, I let my gaze drift up from our bodies to our faces.
And every alarm in my body goes off at once.
His eyes are open but empty. He’s looking through me. Past me. At something that isn’t in this room, something I can’t see. His expression is slack in a way that makes my stomach lurch even as my cock twitches between my thighs.
“Chris.” Louder now. The word scrapes past his grip on my throat. “Chris, slow down.”
His grip on my throat shifts, fingers spreading wider. Squeezes.
I can’t breathe. Can’t get enough air to speak. The edges of my vision swim gray, and he’s still fucking me, still hitting that spot, and my cock is still hard, the fucking traitor, and I’m terrified and my body doesn’t care. My body is chasing the high while my mind screams.
“Touch yourself.” A command. “Make yourself come.”
My hand moves. I don’t decide to move it. It just goes, wrapping around my cock like someone else is driving. I’m still hard. Still leaking. The stimulation is relentless, and my hips are rocking back into his thrusts even as my throat burns under his grip.
I don’t want this.
I do want this.
I can’t think. There’s not enough oxygen and too much sensation and the man inside me isn’t Chris anymore.
In the window’s reflection, I watch his face. Watch for any flicker. Any sign that he’s still in there.
Nothing. Just that dead stare and the mechanical pump of his hips.
“That’s it.” His voice is someone else’s. Something learned, practiced, pulled from somewhere I can’t follow. “Good. Just like that. Take what I give you.”
My eyes burn. Tears or oxygen deprivation, I can’t tell. My hand keeps moving on my cock, stroking in time with his thrusts, and the pleasure is building despite everything. My body doesn’t know the difference between this and what we were doing ten minutes ago. My body just knows it feels good.
I’m going to come. I’m going to come while he’s gone, while someone else wears his face, and I can’t stop it.
“Come for me.” His hand tightens. Stars burst across my vision. “Now.”
The orgasm tears through me. I spill over my fist, my whole body clamping down around him. He groans, the first real sound he’s made, and buries himself deep, pulsing inside me.
For a long moment, neither of us moves.
Then his hand releases my throat. I double over, gasping.
His cock softens. Slips out of me.
And I hear him inhale, ragged and broken, like someone surfacing from deep water.
“Wyatt?” His voice is different now. Shaking. Present. “Wyatt, what—”
I can’t look at him. Can’t turn around. My throat is on fire and my ass aches and I just came harder than I have in months and none of it makes sense.
I pull away. Roll onto my side facing the windows. My eyes clenched shut.
“What did I—” Behind me, the mattress shifts. “Oh god. Oh god, oh fuck—”
“What the fuck.” My voice comes out wrecked. Scraped raw. “What the actual fuck, Chris.”
“I thought I could handle it.” He’s moving away. Putting distance between us. “It was good—I was there, I was with you, and then you said—and I just—I wanted you to feel good, I thought I had it—”
“You choked me.” I sit up. Everything hurts. My throat. My ass. The place behind my sternum where I think my heart just broke. “You pinned me to you and choked me and you weren’t even there.”
I can still see it. That blank stare in the window’s reflection. That slack face.
“Where did you go?”
“I don’t know.” His voice breaks. “You said harder and I just—I lost it. I couldn’t—”
He can’t finish. Can’t look at me.
I should say something. Tell him it’s okay. Tell him I understand, that I’m not angry, that we can work through this. That’s what the steady version of me would do. The version who holds everything together.
But my throat is swelling where his fingers dug in. I can still feel his grip every time I swallow. I came so hard I almost blacked out. And I don’t know what that makes me.
“You need to leave.” The words come out before I decide to say them. “Right now. I need you to go.”
“Wyatt—”
“I can’t—” My voice cracks. I drag in a breath that tastes like rust. “I can’t look at you right now. I need you to leave.”
His face is pale, his expression utterly blank, but his eyes are red-rimmed and glistening. He nods once, sharp and mechanical, and starts gathering his clothes. Pulls them on without looking at me. His hands are shaking so badly he can barely manage the buttons.
At the door, he stops.
“I’m sorry.” Barely a whisper. “I’m so fucking sorry.”
Then he’s gone.
But he doesn’t just go back to his own room like I expect. The front door opens and closes. The car starts. The engine revs, tires squeal on pavement, then it’s quiet once more.
I sit on the edge of the bed and stare at nothing.
Two doors down, Nina is asleep. Pain meds knocked her out hours ago. She didn’t hear any of this. She didn’t hear me gasping for air, didn’t hear Chris leave. And I should—
What? Wake her up? Tell her what, exactly?
Hey, our boyfriend just dissociated while he was fucking me. Choked me out. I came anyway. Not sure which part of that is the problem.
Our boyfriend. That’s what we decided, isn’t it? That this thing between all three of us was real. That Chris and I weren’t just fucking each other as a bonus feature of loving Nina, that there was something between us too.
And there was. Even in Denver, when Chris showed up unraveling and I spent half the night holding him together before we fell into bed. When I was inside him, he was there. Present. With me. He ghosted after, sure. Slipped out while I was sleeping. But at least during, I had him.
Tonight I lost him.
I scrub my hands over my face. They’re shaking. I tell them to stop. They don’t.
Get up. Clean up. Handle it.
I stand. My legs hold, barely. The en suite bathroom is five steps away and I make it there on autopilot, flipping on the light. I catch my reflection and stop.
The bruises are already blooming. A ring of red around my throat that’ll deepen to purple by morning. The shape of his hand, clear as a signature. I touch it and the pain flares immediate, sharp.
Chris doesn’t have empty eyes. Chris doesn’t say good like I’m a dog performing a trick. Whoever was behind me tonight—Cal Logan, the man Chris built to survive Vicente—I’ve never met him before.
My stomach heaves. I grip the edge of the sink and breathe through it until the Thanksgiving dinner stays down.
Washcloth. Clean up. Boxers. One task at a time.
The sheets are wrecked, but I can’t deal with that right now. I sink down onto the floor, my back against the side of the bed, facing the windows. The city glitters through the plate glass, indifferent.
Somewhere out there, Chris is driving. I should text him. Make sure he’s not hurtling his car off an overpass.
I can’t.
My throat aches every time I swallow and my body’s still tingling from the endorphin high of my orgasm. Part of my brain keeps reminding me that I liked what he did and I’d probably like it if he did it again.
A small chirp from the doorway, Nikita’s particular greeting, the one she saves for people she’s decided belong to her.
I look up, briefly panicked that Nina might’ve opened her bedroom door to let her out and heard something.
But I can just see Nina’s door through the gap in mine, no light spilling out from under it.
Nikita’s standing in that narrow gap, her green eyes flashing the dim light.
She studies me with that unimpressed cat expression, like she’s assessing whether I’m worth the effort.
Apparently I am, because she picks her way across the floor and hops up onto the bed behind me. Settles on the edge closest to where I’m sitting. Doesn’t try to climb into my lap or demand attention—just curls up and starts purring. A low, steady rumble that fills the silence Chris left behind.
“Hey, Nik.” My voice comes out rough.
She blinks at me slowly. Cat for I’m here, idiot. Figure your shit out.
I reach up and scratch behind her ears. She leans into it, purring louder, and I exhale for what feels like the first time in an hour.
I’m not okay.
I don’t know when I will be.
The worst part is that I’m positive Chris is not okay and I probably made it worse by kicking him out, even if it wasn’t my intention.
But there’s a cat purring three feet away and Nina sleeping down the hall and tomorrow I’ll find a turtleneck and figure out what to say and how to say it. Tomorrow I’ll be steady again.
Right now I just sit on the floor and let Nikita’s purr fill the space, her soft fur distract me from all the parts of me that hurt, not the least of which is deep inside my chest.