Chapter 38
Chapter thirty-eight
Poet
Becky
I’m dead asleep when a hand clamps over my mouth and another closes around my throat.
My eyes snap open, and I jerk up, hands flying, clawing.
“Shh, shh. Quiet,” he murmurs, easing off. “Even I’ll get in trouble if someone finds me here.”
“Carrson?” I squint through the dark until his face comes into focus above me.
Relief crashes in. I collapse back against the mattress, heart racing. “Jesus, you scared me.”
“Sorry,” he mutters, already crowding closer, his mouth finding mine in a rough, hungry kiss.
His hands slip under my shirt, fumbling up to my breasts, and I rise into that touch, instantly desperate.
He pulls back to trail his lips down my neck.
I shiver, my nipples sensitive to the pinch of his fingers.
“Why do you taste like gasoline?” I mumble, half-asleep.
“Thomson made me drink,” he says against my skin, voice rough, distracted. He nibbles on my collarbone until I squirm. “Seems like a damn choir boy, drinks like he’s got something to prove.”
“Wow,” I laugh quietly, “is the great Carrson Ashford admitting someone’s better at something than him?”
He growls against my neck, “Not admitting nothing.”
“So eloquent.” I run my fingers through his hair and smile when he practically purrs.
He draws back, staring down at me in the moonlight. “You want a poet?”
I expect a joke, but his hand comes out to caress my cheek, his touch devastatingly gentle. “How about I tell you how beautiful you are?”
I forget to breathe.
His mouth brushes my throat, the whisper of lips to skin.
“How I couldn’t sleep,” he continues, “because I couldn’t get you out of my head.”
There’s something raw in it. Too honest to be just the alcohol.
“How I’m a fucking addict,” he murmurs. “And my preferred drug,” he presses his nose to my neck and inhales, “is the sound you make when you come.”
“I think,” a laugh escapes me, but it comes out breathless, a little shaky, “I like drunk Carrson.”
He leans down and kisses my breast, right through the fabric of my nightgown. I moan softly.
He comes back up to nuzzle my neck while his hands move under my shirt, circling each nipple until they harden into pebbles. “I could tell you I think your tits are a masterpiece, and after I make you come on my cock I want to fuck them.”
I laugh, louder this time. “You were doing so good,” I croon, patting his shoulder, “until that last part.”
He drops his head to my chest and chuckles, like even he knows he pushed it too far.
Then we’re a blur of motion. He tugs my pants and underwear down.
I lift my hips, help kick them off. He undresses himself with one hand while his other is on my clit, stroking and rubbing.
I gasp, pleasure spiking all the way to my toes as his fingers slip into me, down to the knuckle. I raise my hips to drive him deeper.
“So wet,” he says hotly, then nips the lobe of my ear with his teeth, tugging on it until I groan. “So fucking perfect.”
He replaces his fingers with his cock. It nudges my entrance, demanding, and I widen my legs, hooking them over his hips.
He doesn’t enter me, though. Not yet.
Instead, his hand is back on my throat, squeezing gently.
“Is this okay?” His eyes practically glow in the moonlight.
I nod, anticipation blending with nerves until I can’t tell one from the other. It turns me on, the danger of it, yes, but more than that. It’s the way he’s paying attention. Like he won’t miss a single reaction.
A half-smile. “My girl, likes it dark,” he murmurs.
My girl.
I melt into the mattress.
Right now, he could do anything to me.
As long as he keeps calling me that.
His fingers flex, and my pulse jumps under them, a frantic rhythmic confession, as I wait for him to take what he clearly wants.
He doesn’t.
Carrson stares down at me, eyes wide, his grip loosening as his expression sobers into hesitation. “I’m—I’m.” He swallows. “I’m scared I’ll hurt you.”
That stops everything.
“I don’t always know the difference,” he adds, “between what feels good and what hurts.”
He looks away when he says it. That’s what gets to me. How he can’t meet my eyes.
“Hey,” I say softly, turning his chin back with my hand.
He ducks his head, uncertain in a way I’ve never seen before. Like he’s preparing for me to reject him or, worse, be repulsed by him.
I lift my hand slowly, giving him time to avoid me, but he doesn’t move. He watches as my fingers brush his wrist, the one resting at my throat. I wrap them lightly around it, not pulling him away.
No. I hold him there.
“You won’t,” I tell him.
His brow tightens. “You don’t know that.”
“I do.” I shift under him, so I can meet his gaze fully. No shadows to hide in. “Because you’re thinking about it. Worried. That’s how I know.”
The tension in his shoulders doesn’t disappear, but it loosens.
“I think about a lot of things, terrible things,” he says quietly. “I want to hurt people. People who deserve it.” His voice drops. “People who don’t.”
“I do too,” I answer. “All the time.”
He blinks, like he wasn’t expecting that.
“Wanting power,” I say, “wanting control…wanting to never feel small again. To be the one people are afraid of for once.” I hold his gaze. “That doesn’t make you him.”
His face crumples, just slightly. I reach up and caress his jaw, locked so hard it vibrates.
“We’re not good people,” I whisper, “but we can be good to each other.”
He presses his eyes shut, but not before I see how they glisten.
A single nod of his head, as if he’s reached a decision. “If you want me to stop, squeeze my arm. Hard. Okay?”
“Okay—” My word ends on a gasp as he slowly pushes into me and closes his hand around my throat at the same time.
His eyes are open, locked on me, gauging my response.
I suck in a breath that ends on nothing because he’s blocked my access to air.
Just as I’m starting to panic, Carrson lets go and pulls back.
He gives me a few precious seconds to catch my breath, then it’s his hand on my throat and his cock in my pussy, both pushing at once.
He holds the position longer this time until my lungs beg for air and I seriously consider using my out of squeezing his arm, but right before I hit my breaking point he backs off.
I suck air down, my chest tight, and he doesn’t move while I recover.
“Becky,” he says quietly. “You good?”
“Yeah,” I say, pride taking over.
He studies me a second longer, like he’s debating whether to believe me, then moves again.
This time, his grip is harder but his thrust quick enough that I get in a mouthful of air before he increases that constricting pressure around my neck.
His cock swells inside me as if he’s enjoying this.
He continues the pattern, gently choking me while he moves in and releasing as he moves out.
A burn starts in my chest, radiates to my clit, which is swollen and throbbing.
I reach down and stimulate myself only to have Carrson knock my hand aside.
“Let me,” he says in his bossy voice. Now he’s got one hand on my neck, the other on my clit, and he’s fucking me harder.
White spots dance before my eyes, and oh my god, what’s he doing to my insides because I’m so hot and dizzy and teetering on the edge of something I can’t stop, like a volcano about to explode.
He’s feeling it too. Carrson bites his lip, staring down at how his fingers wrap around my throat like he’s mesmerized. His hips pump, but his hand stays in between my legs. He flicks my clit with his fingernail, and I practically levitate off the bed.
“Still okay?” he gasps out.
“More,” I say and mean it. A strange warmth has taken over my body.
It blankets my mind so that everything blurs as my consciousness focuses where he’s touching me and how he fills me up completely.
He brushes his thumb over my clit in hypnotic circles, warmth radiating from there down to where he slides into me.
My muscles bunch and tremble, tension rising as his hand squeezes harder.
My vision tunnels, turns dark at the periphery, and there it is.
Fear.
Not the kind that makes me pull away like a normal person would.
The kind I lean into, that I’ve been chasing ever since Remi died.
The thought that he could take it too far, even though he won’t, I know he won’t, but the possibility of what if he does.
It’s that danger, that excitement, that pushes me higher, closer to release.
A few more thrusts, and everything blurs together, the pressure, the risk, that feeling of balancing on the edge, caught between life and death.
They all merge with the feeling he’s giving me.
It transforms into pleasure, erotic, and so intense that I come, screaming through a closed throat with my hands shredding down his back, so hard, I think I actually pass out for a minute.
True to his word, Carrson pulls out and slides up my body, straddling me. He puts his cock on my chest and pushes my breasts up against it, one on each side.
“Hold them,” he says gruffly, his eyes wild and his breathing erratic. I press my breasts together, so they squeeze his dick between them. Carrson watches through half-lidded eyes as he slowly and thoroughly fucks them until he comes with a muffled roar, soaking my chest.
Afterward he wipes me down with his shirt, then climbs into bed and repositions me so that my head is on his shoulder. I fling a leg over his waist for good measure. We snuggle closer and sigh.
“We didn’t have to worry about being quiet,” I murmur.
“Good,” he says against my hair. “Because you just about screamed the entire house down.”
I smack his chest. “I did not.”
“You did,” he murmurs, a quiet laugh rumbling under my ear. “And I loved it.”
“You’re insufferable.”
“Didn’t sound like that a minute ago.”