Chapter Twenty
Savage
T he way Micah is looking down at me—long shadows cast on his face by the little bedside lamp—is predatory. Which should probably make me nervous, but instead it just brings back a trickle of the arousal that fled me so abruptly before.
I don’t know what happened. Everything felt amazing. I loved the way he was watching me, and the unabashed way he had started the whole thing. I was worried he was going to force me into several mind-bending conversations about what this all means, but instead he let us go with the flow.
It was perfect. Until the stray thought crossed my mind about what would happen if my boner fled the scene. Which made me nervous. Which triggered an immediate cascade of sensations marked by panic and the curling, quivering shame that led to me wanting nothing more than to crawl away and hide so he couldn’t see my soft, useless cock.
But Micah didn’t freak out, like I expected. I’ve had girls have different reactions, and even though most of them at least try to be nice, they’re normally at best super uncomfortable, and at worst offended. Micah seemed to get it.
Although maybe that wasn’t so much because he isn’t a girl, and more because he’s him. He knows me already, inside and out, and isn’t some random stranger I dragged home.
And now he’s looking at me like I didn’t just ruin everything by being pathetic, and he still wants to do whatever it is—this new thing between us is.
Do you trust me?
He’s the only person I trust. I don’t even trust myself, but I trust him.
Micah leans over and fucks with a drawer for a minute, pulls out something I can’t really make out, and then quickly drapes his body over mine. I try not to look. I don’t want to know what he’s doing. If I know, I’ll think about what it all means, and then my brain will win.
I just want to feel. And to make him feel.
Micah kisses me again, just as deeply as before. His hips are in between my legs, and for some reason the fact that he’s fully dressed while I’m completely bare-ass naked isn’t making me feel exposed and vulnerable. It feels right.
Like I’m spread out for him to take whatever he wants. Which sounds fucked up when I articulate it in my head. But the thought of him taking gives me a deep sense of peace that I’ve barely even glimpsed in my previous life.
His kiss is heady and insistent. His hands run up and down my sides, and he grinds his hips into me a little as I let myself wrap my thighs around him and squeeze. We rut together like that until I’m breathless, and if he’s trying to overwhelm me with sensation, he’s succeeding.
Then he fucks with whatever he got out of the drawer again, his body still over me but his hands elsewhere, before leaning in to kiss me one more time.
He breaks away, his gaze intently boring into me.
“Just remember to trust me, doll. You deserve good things,” he whispers.
I furrow my brow as I try to work out what he means, but I don’t have time for thinking then because Micah’s fingers are roaming. He hitches one of my legs up higher around his waist before trailing cold, wet fingertips over the crease of my ass and finding my hole.
My breath stutters, because this is probably the most alien sensation I’ve ever experienced, but I focus on shoving all the big thoughts out of my head and letting him do whatever he’s going to do. And fuck me, he does. Micah doesn’t hesitate. He watches me intently the whole time, but I think something in him recognizes that the more space he gives me to freak out, the more likely it is that it’ll happen.
I trust him.
Micah’s fingers circle my hole briefly before pressing into it. Again, I feel like he’s trying to overwhelm me with sensation so I can’t think, and it’s working. I can’t think. All I can do is adjust to the vibrating need for more that’s already kicking up in my chest, even while my nerve endings deal with the insane combination of pleasure-pain-weird that he’s causing.
He gets one finger into me swiftly, making me gasp. It sends a tingling through my body everywhere, and I don’t know if that’s adrenaline or desperation or what, but I don’t hate it.
Micah fucks me with that finger for a while as he goes back to kissing me—big, messy, open-mouthed kisses that seem to hit me in every nerve-ending as well. Then he presses in a second finger. It burns as I adjust, but I’m used to pain. I can handle pain. It’s pure and simple. What I can’t handle is the confusing waves of something like pleasure that this is also bringing with it.
But not like the pleasure I’ve felt before. This is different. I’m used to pleasure that’s sharp and focused, but slippery. It lives in a point in your body, and you have to grab onto it with both hands before it wiggles away and escapes.
This is a low thrumming glow that’s setting up residence in every inch of my skin, spreading from where he’s touching me outwards. It’s making me tingle and quiver and look at the world in a hazy sort of way. Like I’m high or something. Not like after an orgasm, when you just feel relief. But like actual, genuine pleasure.
Then he touches something inside of me, and the hazy tingle turns electric. My legs jerk and my cock, which was interested, but still at half-mast, fills out. It’s like a lightning bolt of something rolls through me, and Micah keeps doing it over and over until I’m writhing on the sheets and rocking my hips to try to keep his fingers as deep inside me as possible.
I don’t think about what I look like. I don’t think about what it means. I think about the fact that this is Micah, and this feels better than any way I’ve ever been touched.
“That’s it, doll,” he whispers. “Fuck, I thought you might be responsive, but this is something else.” He reaches up with his other hand to brush some hair away from my sweaty forehead, and I can’t help it when a whine slips out of me as his fingers stroke what must be my prostate again and again. “You’re so fucking sensitive. Does that feel good?”
My thighs are fully quaking now, and my stomach is twisted in knots while my chest heaves. I don’t think I can talk, but I lick my parched lips and look him in the eye when I nod.
“Perfect.” His voice is practically a purr, and he’s looking at me with this weird kind of warmth I’ve never seen before. “You’re doing so well for me.” He moves his free hand down my body, stopping briefly to pinch my nipple and rub at it gently, which also makes me fucking gasp with a sensation I’ve never experienced. “Such a good boy, Tadhg.”
His words are surrounding me, filling me with just as much hazy pleasure as the way his gentle finger-fucking is lighting up my insides.
Micah leans down to cover me with his body, bracing himself on his other arm and finally slipping a third finger inside of me. I spread my legs as wide as I can and grab at his waist, trying to hold him as close to me as possible. To get him inside of me.
I don’t understand what’s happening. I don’t know when everything changed. But if I let my brain shut down and just feel—the way he wants me to—then it all makes a lot more sense.
I’m making the most humiliating noises that have ever come out of my mouth, breathy and desperate, choked out in time with him fucking his fingers into me, but I can’t help it. And every time he touches that spot, my whole body quivers.
Micah is breathing as heavily as I am, and he’s grinding his hips down over where his hand breaches me, holding me so close that to someone else it would look like he was actually fucking me.
“You’re so good,” he whispers in my ear. “So perfect. Just like this, spread out underneath me, getting fucked. A perfect fucking pussy.”
The words hit me in the same spot as his fingers, and I feel my dick throb, desperate for release. Micah just keeps pumping into me at the same pace, though. He licks a long stripe up my neck before he continues to whisper the same things in my ear over and over again.
Gorgeous.
So fucking sensitive.
I knew you would be.
I knew you needed this.
My perfect doll.
I’ll never make you fuck anybody ever again, you were meant to spread your legs for me.
Such a perfect little cunt.
My breath hitches, and everything in my body tightens. I need release more than I need fucking oxygen.
“Bambi,” I say on an exhale, my voice barely-there but still so desperate. “Bambi, please.”
He kisses me again, grinding his hips against me at the same time like before, my aching dick rubbing against his stomach where his shirt has rucked up.
Micah breaks the kiss but doesn’t move his mouth away, so close that his lips brush mine when he speaks, his forehead resting against mine.
“You can do it, doll,” he says, his hand moving faster as he fucks into me, still managing to hit that same spot over and over until white-out pleasure is threatening to burn through me. “Come for me. Be a good girl and come for me.”
My body clenches around his hand, trapping him inside me, as I finally pull an orgasm from somewhere deep, deep inside me. It seems to hit me in slow motion, taking a lifetime to crest, but when it finally does, I can’t even breathe. I think I can feel my cock pulsing cum over my bare stomach, but I don’t care. The full-body sensation gripping me is so much more than whatever shitty, anxiety-ridden climax I’ve clawed my way to before.
It also takes forever to ebb. Like the tide going out, it seems to tug and flow out of my body a little at a time. I’m strung bow-tight, still clenching around Micah’s fingers and gripping onto his sweaty, stretched-out t-shirt for dear life for what feels like hours. It’s probably only seconds, but who cares.
My world just lurched off its axis.
When the last of the pleasure finally spills out of my body, I let out a trembling exhale and force my muscles to relax. Micah is watching me with a smile that I could only describe as proud , even though that seems weird in this context, and still holding me close.
I hiss when he slides his fingers out of me and have a brief moment of panic at the weird, dysfunctional emptiness it leaves behind. But then I shake it away and focus on the warmth in his gaze.
“Look at you,” he says, with a weird hitch to his voice.
I don’t know what to say. I don’t know if I can form words now, anyway. Instead, a mewling noise slips out of me. His eyebrows raise, but then he chuckles.
He’s careful to keep one hand rubbing gently up and down my flank while he leans away and clumsily wipes his fingers on a wet wipe he pulled from somewhere. As if I need a point of contact with him or I might float away.
Or maybe he needs the point of contact. I don’t know. I’m buzzing too much right now to care.
Then he leans back over me and kisses me with the same hunger as before.
It only takes a second of me squeezing my thighs around his hips to remember that once again, he’s still hard, because I’m fucking selfish. I break the kiss. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do here, but I want to do something.
I reach for his crotch again, and he freezes. His hand comes to grab mine, and he looks at me with a tense expression.
“You don’t have to.”
I huff and find my voice. “I want to. Let me make you feel good, Bambi. Please.”
Again, please is always the magic word. He softens and lets go of my hand. Then, as if he had to think about it, he rolls onto his back. Like he’s giving me free rein.
I don’t know what to do. But I know what I want.
I want to taste him.
I’ve never wanted to put my mouth on someone’s junk in my life. I honestly thought it was something we were all just doing to each other out of politeness or obligation. But right now, with Micah staring at me through half-lidded eyes and his erection straining through the fabric of his sweats, I want nothing more than to know what his release tastes like on my tongue.
I know it would be the culmination of all this something that’s been building and building around us since last night.
There’s no sense in hesitating. I unceremoniously tug down his pants, freeing his cock abruptly enough that it slaps against his stomach. It’s swollen and blush-red at the tip, with a long string of glistening precum drawn between the slit and the spot on his stomach it just touched.
I crawl forward and situate myself between his legs. He’s watching me with a certain hesitance, but I don’t let any of that in. Instead, I wrap my fingers around the base of his cock—way too long and thick for his lithe little body—and then slide the tip into my mouth.
I shove as much of it as I can in there. My mouth waters immediately, and I’m choking and gagging, but I don’t quit. Because Micah—my Micah—is coming undone, cursing up a storm, his back bowing off the bed, his hands flying down to thread his fingers through my hair as he hisses “ Jesus fucking Christ, Tadhg” and then moans.
There’s not going to be any finesse here, so I just go for it. I’m relentless. I bob up and down on his dick, running my tongue along any part of it I can reach, tasting as much of him as I can. I let it hit the back of my throat over and over, filling the room with the sounds of my gagging and making Micah pull my hair and gasp every time.
“Fuck,” he hisses. “I’m almost?—”
But he’s not almost, he’s there. Barely a few minutes after I started my savage assault on his dick, it throbs in my mouth— which is a bizarre sensation that I don’t totally hate—and then I’m choking on his cum as well as his cockhead.
It’s a mess. There’s spit and cum everywhere. I’m sure I’m bright red and there are tears running down my face, and I’m still a little shaky from whatever fucking ass-magic he pulled on me a few minutes ago.
But I don’t care. Because not just seeing him come undone, but actually feeling it—under my hands, under my body, in my mouth—was incredible.
He’s breathing hard, his hips still jerking a little and his hands still tugging at my hair.
“Mother fucking Mary, Tadhg. What the fuck?” he breathes before letting go of my hair and collapsing backwards on the bed.
I don’t even try to hide the smile that takes over my face. That was one of the most satisfying things I’ve ever done. Even if I know I have a complicated knot of feelings and circumstances to unknot about it later. Right now, I just want to bask in the good.
“Come here, doll,” he says, making grabby hands at me until I move further up the bed. “Who’s my good little cocksucker?” he murmurs before pulling me unceremoniously over his body with more strength than I give him credit for and immediately shoves his tongue in my disgusting, messy mouth.
There are fluids everywhere . Neither of us gives a fuck.
Everything feels too good right now to care.
We kiss for a long time like that—sticky and debauched. Until Micah finally grabs the meat of my ass and jiggles it so playfully that I can’t help but smile, his face smiling back at me from only a few inches away.
I’ve never had this before. This weird bubble of something. Like we’re the only two people in the world that exist.
Although that’s not completely true, I guess.
“What?” he asks, reading the shift of my thoughts on my face.
“I was thinking about how this feels. It’s like the rest of the world is some unreachable distance away, and the only thing that matters is us.” Heat crawls up my cheeks, because I didn’t intend for that to come out with quite so much brutal honesty, but it’s too late to take it back now. “But that’s probably what normal people feel when they’re sleeping with someone, right? Except, the only thing it reminded me of is what it was like when we were kids, and we would be able to hide away together. The times when we knew Da was out and your mom was gone or in a good mood and we could just exist together for a while. That felt like this.” Safe. But I can’t bring myself to voice. “And I can’t figure out if that’s… fucked up or not, I guess.”
Micah’s lips part on the start of a vowel, but no sound comes out. He watches me for a moment, his eyes flicking back and forth to take in the different parts of my face like he’s searching for something I’m not saying.
Then his hand cups my cheek, and his thumb strokes over the arch of my cheekbone, and I don’t even bother to pretend I’m not pushing into the contact with a soft sigh.
His words are measured and careful when he finally replies.
“I think there are a lot of different kinds of intimacy, and some of them include sex and some of them don’t.” There’s a pause, and it’s weighty enough I know I’m not going to like whatever he says next. “It makes sense that when you have a fundamentally fucked-up relationship with intimacy and relationships—family relationships as well as sexual ones—it’s normal for those lines to feel… blurred. Or confusing.”
I wince, unable to stop myself. I already knew he saw me as a walking disaster because how could he not? But it still hurts to hear him say it.
“So, you think my dad beat the shit out of me instead of loving me and it fucked up my head so much I turned into some kind of incestuous freak?”
Micah’s eyes widen for a second, then he huffs and rolls them—hard.
“So dramatic,” he mutters under his breath before grabbing my face with his other hand and wiggling even closer to me on the bed. “No. Is that what I said? Because I think that’s really fucking far from what I said, Tadhg.”
His tone is snappy, but he pauses to take a deep breath, and I can see the way his eyes soften. There’s tension running through every inch of me, but it still doesn’t stop me from reaching for him, wrapping my hands around his warm, tight waist in the way I’m quickly becoming addicted to. I can’t get my fingers all the way around him—he’s slim but not that small—but I can hold enough of him that it feels anchoring.
“And I was talking about myself, as well as you,” he continues. “We had shitty parents. It fucks you up. That’s not rocket science. We were hurled together when we were little kids and had no one else to rely on, and it makes sense that we became a little codependent. It wasn’t sexual, because we were kids, but I think in hindsight it also wasn’t as familial as we maybe thought it was. It was just intense. Because it was all the intimacy we had going around. And now it’s shifted. It’s not incestuous .” He huffs again. “We’re still not—nor have we ever been—actually related. And you’re not a freak. You’re damaged. So am I. It doesn’t mean we don’t deserve to figure our shit out and be happy.”
The thought buoys something inside me, but it’s tremulous and I know that if I look at it too long, it’ll crumble under the inspection. So instead, I close the few inches between us and wrap my arms all the way around him, burying my face in his warm, solid chest and closing my eyes.
His hands come to my head on instinct, fingers threading through my hair and scratching gently at my scalp. I want to purr like a cat in a perfect sun spot, but I control myself.
“Honestly, Tadhg, I thought you’d be freaking out about the gay thing more than the stepbrother thing,” Micah adds, and I hatehatehate the piece of wall that starts chipping away at in my mind.
I have no intention of dignifying it with a response, so I growl instead and concentrate on the important thing—planting wet, open-mouthed kisses over every piece of skin I can find on Micah’s abdomen. He shucked his shirt at some point during our post-sex make out session, so I have plenty to work with, and I’m enthusiastic about exploring it all and turning the volume on my brain down to zero.
My cock is on board with this plan. I can already feel it thickening a little, and this is hands down more response than I’ve gotten from that little motherfucker since I went through puberty.
It figures that my cock would only be interested in whatever was the most inconvenient, weird situation I could put myself in. I couldn’t get turned on by normal shit, of course not…
Thinking of this—of him—as ‘not normal’ is a kneejerk reflex, but something about it doesn’t sit right with me. Even in the solitude of my own thoughts, it feels out of place. Like a crooked seam, or a shirt tag that’s impossibly itchy.
That’s another thing I can circle back to come to terms with never .
Micah lets out a breathless little giggle when I hit a particularly sensitive spot just above his hip bone. I can feel him getting hard too, but instead of escalating, he grabs at the broad expanse of my naked back and tugs like he’s pulling me toward him.
“Come on, big guy. We should probably eat something and drink water and brush our teeth and all the other shit functional people do. Even if it is the middle of the night. We can go back to bed after we’ve peopled for a little while.”
I groan but let him move me however he wants. I like how it feels.
Thirty minutes later, we’re cleaned up, half-dressed and sitting in the living room with plates of eggs and sausages that I cooked, while Micah watched me as if this was some sort of a miracle.
“See, I’m not a completely incompetent person,” I say around a mouthful of food, once we’ve started eating.
“Yes, dear.” Micah pats me on the head as he says it, and I’m still a little offended by how clearly he doesn’t believe me when I say I can function outside of the realm of gangster bullshit, but as soon as I started eating, I realized how fucking hungry I was and that became the priority.
I’m sitting on the floor in front of him, and he’s got a leg slung over each of my shoulders, so at least he can’t really see the way I inhale my food. I don’t really know why I sat on the floor when we came in here. Micah didn’t comment on it though. He just hooked his legs over me like a suit of armor, bracketing me in between him and the couch, and then used one hand to keep doing that absent scratching thing he keeps doing to my hair while he eats with the other.
My food disappears quickly, and the fullness lulls me into a hazy space of contentment. My mind drifts, and I let myself lean back against him while he picks at his meal. We don’t really talk, but we don’t need to. We talked a lot already, and I’m sure he’s going to make us talk about all the other shit later.
Right now, it’s nice to just be .
I’m so unnaturally calm that when someone knocks on the door, it takes four or five seconds for my body to react. But as soon as it snaps into focus, I fucking react.
It’s the middle of the night. We’re only awake because of how jacked the past twenty-four hours have been and the fact that we both work nights. No one could possibly be at the door right now for a normal reason.
I jump up, knocking my plate on the floor but deciding to worry about that later. Turning to Micah, I signal to him to go lock himself in the bedroom, but he rolls his eyes at me. Which was cute before, but it’s so fucking far from cute right now.
Instead of listening to me, he runs his hands soothingly down my bare arms and makes a shushing noise, like I’m a child. It makes me bristle, and I feel myself rising up to my full height on instinct.
His eyes narrow, and I get a weird thrill of premonition that I’m going to pay for this later. But unlike every other time in my life when I’ve felt that way, this is something that I might actually enjoy.
But now’s not the time. I shake the thought from my head and scramble for pants and a shirt, because we were both lounging around in boxers in the warm apartment. Micah follows me to the bedroom and also pulls on some clothes, but at a ridiculously slow pace.
“Calm down,” he whispers. “It’s probably just Tristan. He works nights, too. And I asked him to look into getting you some meds.”
I freeze, one leg in some dirty jeans and one leg still bare. The implications of that are too much to process in this moment and fracture through my mind, a mixture of anxiety that Micah included more people in my shameful—and potentially lethal, if Father finds out and loses his shit—secret, but also warm that he would care enough to try and fix something that’s patently unfixable.
“Stay here,” I hiss before shoving my other leg into the jeans and zipping them up, following them with a t-shirt. It must be his, because it’s way too fucking tight, but there’s more pounding coming from the door, so I don’t have time to find one of mine. At least I remember to snag my gun from where I left it in the bathroom before everything changed. Not my actual gun, of course, which has mysteriously disappeared, with Micah insisting he doesn’t know anything about it. But a gun.
Of course, he trails me to the door. I put a hand on his chest, keeping him at arm’s length as I look through the peephole and praying he’s right, and it’s his friend. I would even take Colm. Colm, by himself, would have the decency to not see whatever weird state the apartment and my face are probably in.
Jesus fucking Christ, do either of us have hickeys?
My stomach bottoms out, and I don’t let myself think about that anymore because I have to open the door, no matter who is on the other side.
It’s dark outside, so it takes me a minute for my eyes to come into focus. And another minute for my brain to catch up with what they’re seeing. I’m standing frozen for long enough that Micah pushes me to the side and looks for himself, letting out a little gasp of shock before he recovers himself.
I don’t know what expression I’m wearing, but I must look terrible, because he holds my gaze for just a second and mouths the word breathe .
Then he nods once, stiffly, like everything might be okay, and muscles me out of the way to open the door, adopting the stance I recognize as his no-bullshit posture.
“What the fuck do you want, Patrick?”
There’s a faint growl from the other side of the door, and my stomach would bottom out if it had anywhere else to go.
“Let me in, boy, before I knock this door down. It took you long enough to answer, what the fuck were you doing?”
The door creaks open slowly, like something out of a horror movie, and Micah is forced to move back to accommodate it.
“It’s 2am. Most people are asleep. I repeat, what do you want?”
Micah’s arms are crossed over his chest and his chin is tilted up, but there’s a very faint tremble to his voice that hopefully only I notice.
Then my father slips through the doorway, his eyes immediately locking on me and taking me in from head to toe. It’s like being scanned by a Terminator. I don’t know what he sees when he looks at me and I never have, but I have no doubt it’s not good.
His face is completely neutral as he closes the door behind him and crosses his own arms.
“Ah. Savage, there you are. Just who I was looking for.”
I swallow hard, because I don’t know what else to say. Words left me a long time ago, and every inch of my skin that’s visible to him feels like it’s screaming loud enough to be heard over any words that might come out of my mouth, anyway.
The silence is awkward, and Micah keeps looking between us like he wants to diffuse it but doesn’t know how. Finally, it’s Father that speaks.
“Shall we?” He points to the couch where I was sitting—no, snuggling —with Micah just a few minutes ago, and my stomach turns.
“Sure.” The sound squeezes through frozen vocal cords. “Sorry. Hello, Father. Please, come in.”