6. Scarlett #2
His cock springs free, thick and pulsing, and I let out a shaky breath at the sight of him. He is fully hard, leaking a bit of pre-cum at the tip. I reach down and wrap my fingers around him, squeezing tight. He lets out a guttural sound, his head snapping back as he shudders against my grip.
When he lifts me off the counter and carries me down the hall, I let him. When he lays me down on his bed and looks at me as though I’m holy, I let myself believe it. He strips me bare with a reverence that makes me want to cry, his eyes roaming over every inch of my body as if he is memorizing me.
He moves between my legs, his knees prying them wide.
He doesn’t just go for the goal. He spends time on me.
His tongue finds my clit, licking and sucking the sensitive bud until I am sobbing, my hips bucking off the mattress.
He drinks from me, his tongue swirling and flicking, driving me toward a peak I can feel humming in my blood.
I reach down, my fingers tangling in his hair, pulling him closer, begging him with my body to fill me.
“Please,” I whisper, my voice breaking. “Reid, please. Now.”
He rises up, his eyes dark with a raw, primal need. He positions the head of his cock at my entrance, rubbing it against my wet folds, teasing me for a heartbeat before he pushes inside.
I gasp, my eyes flying open as he fills me completely. He is large, stretching me open in a way that feels like a homecoming. He freezes for a second, his muscles locking, waiting for me to adjust.
“You okay?” he rasps, his voice strained.
“Yes,” I moan, wrapping my legs around his waist and pulling him deeper. “God, yes. Don’t stop.”
He begins to move, slow and deep at first. Every thrust is deliberate, a slow slide of friction that makes my toes curl.
I can feel every ridge of him, the way he hits my cervix, the way he fills every empty space inside me.
I wrap my arms around his neck, pulling him down so I can taste the salt on his skin.
The pace quickens. The slow slides turn into hard, rhythmic slams. The sound of our skin slapping together fills the room, mixing with the sound of the rain.
He is fucking me with a desperation that mirrors my own, his breath coming in ragged hitches.
I can feel the tension building, a coil tightening in my gut.
“Look at me, Scarlett,” he commands softly.
I open my eyes and see him watching me, his expression a mix of agony and adoration.
He thrusts harder, deeper, his cock hitting my sweet spot over and over again.
I start to unravel, the pleasure becoming too much to contain.
I dig my nails into his shoulders, my voice screaming his name as my walls clamp down on him in a violent, pulsing orgasm.
The feeling of me squeezing him is the final trigger. Reid lets out a loud, raw shout, his body stiffening as he thrusts one last time, burying himself as deep as he can go. I feel the hot, thick jets of his cum flooding my insides, filling me up, marking me as his.
This is nothing like my marriage.
Nothing done to me or expected of me. Nothing performed or endured or waited out. This is a thing I take with my own two hands, my own gasping breath, my own voice saying yes and more and please and meaning every word of it.
Reid watches my face the whole time, adjusting, responding, learning me the way you learn a language you want to become fluent in. When I arch up against him he makes a sound as though I’ve wrecked him. When I dig my nails into his shoulders he whispers my name, a prayer.
When I finally shatter apart beneath him, he follows me over the edge with his face buried in my neck, and the whole weight of the last years lifts off my chest and disappears into the storm.
Afterward, we lie tangled together in the dark while the rain softens against the windows. He doesn’t pull away immediately, staying inside me for a long time, his heart hammering against my ribs. He kisses my forehead, my eyelids, the tip of my nose, his touch light and protective.
His hand traces lazy patterns on my hip, and I can feel him thinking, the gears turning, the questions forming, but he doesn’t ask them. He just holds me, steady and patient, as though he’s got all the time in the world and no intention of rushing anything.
“I didn’t plan this,” I say. “When I proposed the deal. This wasn’t part of the strategy.”
“I know.” He presses a kiss to my shoulder. “For what it’s worth, I’m a terrible strategist where you’re concerned. Always have been.”
“That’s deeply unhelpful in a business partner.”
“I’ll put it on my next review.” His arm tightens, and his voice goes quieter, the teasing gone out of it. “It means you’re not alone in this. Whatever else it turns out to be, it means that much. You stopped fighting this war by yourself the second you let me catch you in that alley.”
I don’t have a clever answer for that. I just turn into him and let his heartbeat do the talking, and somewhere in the dark, with the storm finally spent, I fall asleep.
I dream about the ocean. About a dock under a starless sky and a boy who swore he’d come if I ever needed him.
Ten years late, soaked to the bone in a back alley, he kept the promise anyway.
Morning comes in gray and clean, and I wake by degrees, warm and sore in places I’d forgotten could be sore, Reid’s body curved around mine and his breath soft against my hair.
For one suspended moment, the world is small and quiet and entirely ours.
Then my phone lights up on the nightstand.
I should ignore it. I know I should. But years of being on call for a man who treated my attention as his property is a hard habit to break, so I reach for it before I’m awake enough to decide not to.
A clip is already playing, muted, autoloaded from some morning program. Vincent on a soft-lit set, freshly shaved, leaning toward the host with his hands folded in that earnest way he practices in mirrors. I turn the sound on against my own better judgment.
“...and honestly, my only focus right now is the future of the company,” he’s saying. “The work doesn’t stop because a marriage does. We’ve got three developments breaking ground this year, and I owe it to everyone who believed in this vision to keep building it.”
“It can’t have been easy,” the host murmurs.
“It hasn’t.” His voice goes soft, regretful, the patient man enduring. “Scarlett has been struggling for a long time. I tried to protect her from the pressure, I really did, but some people just aren’t built for this world. I think, deep down, she always knew that.”
A pause, a small sad smile aimed straight at the camera.
“And if she’s found someone to lean on through all this, truly, I hope it brings her some peace. She needs the support right now.”
My fingers go tight around the phone.
There it is, slid in so gently you’d miss it for kindness.
He isn’t accusing me of anything. He’s worrying about me, on a morning show, in front of the entire city, painting me as the fragile thing that cracked and ran to another man’s bed, and wrapping it in so much concern that anyone who defends me looks like they’re kicking a grieving husband.
And the worst part, the part that has me sitting up before I’ve decided to move, is that it’s working on me too.
For one night I forgot. I was a woman in a warm bed with a man who looked at me like I hung the moon, and I let myself believe the world had gone quiet. It didn’t. It never does.
Vincent doesn’t even have to be in the room to reach across the city and turn my one good morning into evidence.
Ten years I gave him, and he still gets to narrate me. Still gets to take a thing that is mine, this, Reid, the first full breath I’ve drawn in longer than I can remember, and spin it into proof that I’m broken.
The heat climbs up the back of my neck, and I don’t bother sending it anywhere small this time. I let it sit. I have swallowed this exact feeling so many times I barely recognize it now that I’m letting it stay.
“Scarlett?” Reid’s voice is rough with sleep, his hand finding the small of my back. “What is it?”
I turn the phone toward him without a word, Vincent’s sad face frozen mid-sentence on the screen between us, and I watch the warmth drain out of him the same way it just drained out of me.
So much for the morning being ours.