Chapter 2
I help her. Fish the condom out of my wallet before shoving my jeans and boxers down and kicking them off the edge of the bed.
Her hand wraps around my cock. I hiss through my teeth.
Her grip is uncertain, warm, slightly off-center.
The imperfection of it guts me more than expertise ever could.
She strokes once, twice, adjusting her grip like she's figuring out what makes me react.
I have to grab her wrist, pull her hand away because I will not last, and I need to be inside her more than I need to keep breathing.
She watches me tear the foil open, roll it on. The look on her face while I do it, intent, curious, a little flushed, makes my hands unsteady in a way they haven't been since my first field surgery.
I settle between her thighs. The trumpet outside has gone quiet and the only sound is our breathing and the building creaking around us like it's done this a thousand times before.
"Evangeline." Low and slow, every vowel given room. "Stay with me."
I line up and push forward and the head of my cock meets resistance.
Everything in me stops.
Not a tightness but a barrier, thin and unmistakable. The knowledge rolls through me, gut to ribs, and something in French nearly escapes before I bite it back.
Every flag I missed, every flag I didn't miss, every moment tonight that my hands knew what my brain refused to process.
She fumbled on the button. The curiosity on her face when I rolled on the condom.
The gap between the nerve that walked her through that hotel door and the vocabulary her body doesn't have yet.
I knew. The medic's been screaming it from inside that closet and I locked the door on him too.
First time. First cock inside her. Darcy's best friend, the senator's daughter, virgin, and mine.
My muscles lock, arms braced on either side of her head, hips frozen mid-push, the tendons in my forearms standing out like cables.
I have to stop. I know I have to stop. My body doesn't care, because what's filling me isn't guilt or hesitation or the careful clinical response of a man trained to do no harm.
It's hunger. Dark and consuming and so immediate it scares me.
She feels me hesitate. One heartbeat, maybe two. My hips locked, breath stopped, every muscle caught between pulling back and pushing through. Then her legs wrap around my hips, heels digging into my lower back, and she pulls.
"Don't you dare stop." Her eyes are wide open, voice steady, accent pure Louisiana. The senator's daughter just gave me an order with her thighs locked around my waist. "I picked you. I've been picking you. So don't stop."
I push through.
The give is small but real. She sucks in a breath. Her nails bite into my shoulders. Her body opens around me, tight and wet and mine. The word arrives in French, against her temple where my mouth has landed without permission.
"à moi."
I hold still. My lips still press against her temple.
"Breathe, chère." Barely a whisper, the French falling out before I can choose English.
Every nerve in my body screams forward, but I hold still because what she gave me when I pushed through is still vibrating in my chest and I need her body to tell me what comes next.
Her thighs are trembling against my hips and her breath is coming in shallow pulls, and her fingers have gone from digging into my shoulders to pressing flat, palms down, like she's trying to absorb me through her hands.
I shift my weight to one arm, slide the other under the small of her back, tilting her hips. Her breath catches differently, rounder, fuller. Her body softens, opens rather than bracing. I pull back slowly, push in again.
This time there's no resistance, just wet heat gripping me so tight my vision whites at the edges.
The noise she makes is new. Not pain. Discovery.
On the third stroke she exhales. Her hips tilt up to meet mine.
The fit goes from possible to inevitable, her body taking me deep enough that my forehead drops to hers and I have to breathe through it.
Her eyes open.
Brown and blown, looking straight into me. I know what she sees. She sees that the way I'm moving has changed, and she knows that I know, not because I said anything but because my body told on me just as hers told on her. And she doesn't look away.
My chest constricts, and what comes out of my mouth is so quiet I barely hear it.
"Dove."
The word lands against her cheekbone where my lips have drifted, and I don't know where it came from.
I pull back, push in. The angle is right because her whole body arches, cunt tightening around me in a slick pulse that hits my jaw and the backs of my knees.
"Chère." It falls out. Unauthorized, full Louisiana, the vowel warm and round and nothing I chose. The loss of English hits me as a loosening in my chest. The drawl gets into my breathing, my rhythm, my hips rolling against hers.
She gets wetter.
The slick heat increases around my cock, her body responding to my voice as it did to my hands, my mouth. She reaches up and cradles my jaw, her thumb tracing my lower lip, and she says the most dangerous thing anyone has ever said to me.
"Stay here. Stay right here with me. Don't go back behind it."
My voice thickens. Her body tightens around me and what comes out against her throat isn't English.
"Là... juste là..." Her hips roll up to meet me. More falls out, half-formed. "Comme ca, chère..."
She responds to that, wetter, gripping, her thighs pulling me deeper. I stop trying to control it. My hips settle into a rhythm that isn't careful anymore, not punishing either, just honest. My lips press to her throat. Her heart pounds against them fast and hard and alive.
The sounds seem to surprise her. The moan that breaks halfway through, the gasp that turns into my name, the low desperate noise when I hit the angle that makes her body clench and release in a rhythm that's building toward something neither of us is going to survive.
She's discovering what her body does. She tightens when I grind deep, flutters when I pull back slow. Her breath stops entirely when I press my forehead to hers, letting her see what she's doing to me.
She's close. Her rhythm goes ragged, and her fingers press into my jaw.
I slide my hand between us and press my thumb to her clit.
She jerks so hard she nearly un me. I press down in a slow circle, keep moving inside her until her body turns into a wire pulled taut, every muscle locked, her back arching, her mouth open and silent for one suspended second before it all breaks.
She comes around my cock and her cunt clamps down in waves that hit everywhere, my chest, the base of my skull. She says it against my mouth, breathless, shattered, certain.
"Tripp."
There it is.
The name she said at the door, the one that cracked me open in the hallway.
At the door it was recognition. Here, with her body clenching around mine, it's a taking.
The name of the boy who lived on St. Charles Avenue and hadn't learned yet that the world punishes you for telling the truth, and she says it like she wants that boy, not the man who replaced him.
My hips drive forward one last time, burying myself as deep as her body will allow. I come so hard that French pours out of me against her throat.
"T'es à moi, t'es à moi, je peux pas, chère, je peux pas te laisser..." Words I don't choose and can't stop, rough and broken.
My mouth is against her pulse and my hand shakes where it grips her hip. The French keeps coming even after the orgasm crests. Quieter, just breath and vowels against skin my mouth refuses to leave.
Her breathing slows before mine does.
I ease out of her, strip the condom and drop it over the edge of the bed. Her fingers loosen against my jaw and her legs slide down to the sheets. I press my face into her throat and wait for the English to come back.
It doesn't.
I roll onto my back and pull her with me, and she comes without opening her eyes, settling against my chest like her body already knows the geography.
The room is dark now. Just shapes and shadows, except where the streetlamp throws a stripe of amber across the foot of the bed.
Evie is asleep.
Her breathing changed first, the exhales going soft and even against my collarbone. Then her body went heavy against mine, the last conscious tension releasing, her fingers loosening until her palm was flat and warm and still over the tattoo on my chest.
She said something before she fell asleep. Half-conscious, the words dissolving into breath before they fully formed, her mouth moving against my skin.
"Don't leave before I wake up."
It's still sitting in my chest. Lodged there between my ribs where the knife scar is.
My thumb traces her collarbone. I didn't decide to start, but my thumb found the hollow where her shoulder meets her throat and settled into a rhythm, slow, back and forth.
The repetitive motion that soothes infants, animals, men who can't stop touching women they shouldn't have touched in the first place.
Darcy's best friend. Blanchard's daughter. The girl from the kitchen table, all grown up, and your hands are on her like you have a right to be here.
My thumb doesn't stop through any of it.
I try to pull my hand back, and it doesn't move. Just unwilling, as my fingers curved around the cap of her shoulder, thumb still tracing that slow arc over her collarbone. The greed that roared through me an hour ago has settled into something steadier. Less like wanting and more like keeping.
I get up carefully, her head shifting from my shoulder to the pillow without waking, her breathing holding its rhythm, and I stand at the window and look down at the Quarter stripped bare by the hour.
A streetlamp, a tabby cat on the wrought-iron balcony across the alley, jasmine climbing a drainpipe. A man walks below with his hands in his pockets and doesn't look up.
"Mais, what did you do."
It comes out Louisiana. All of it, every vowel round and open.
I reach for Saint, for Remy Black, for any version of me that handles situations like this.
There's nothing. Just the empty space where the tools used to be, and what's left is a voice I packed away in a house on St. Charles Avenue when I was twenty-four years old.
She broke something in my voice, and I can't fix it standing at this window.
I look back at the bed.
In the streetlamp's glow, the bird on her hip is a single unbroken line, bright against her skin where the sheet has fallen to her thighs. I move toward her. Back to the bed. To the slow breathing and the collarbone my thumb already misses.
I get back in bed.
I press my palm to her skin. My thumb settles into the hollow.
The slow arc resumes, and she shifts in sleep, pressing closer, her face turning into my shoulder, and she doesn't know.
Doesn't know my hand is on her, doesn't know my thumb is moving, doesn't know I'm watching her breathe in the dark with an attention that feels more like me than anything I've been in years.
That's the part I can't afford.
The streetlamp holds. The cat watches from the balcony. My thumb moves, doesn't stop. Morning is coming and I don't sleep.