Chapter 13 #3
“Fuck—Jules.” The untethered way he growls her name sends another blaze of heat between her thighs. “Don’t we need a condom, sweetheart?”
Mallory arches against him, delirious. “I’m on the pill. And I got tested this summer. You?”
He groans again, as if the thought of fucking her without anything between them might be his undoing. “Yeah, I was, too, but—are you sure? We can go back to my room, I—”
“Ezra,” she says, grasping his shoulders, his hair. “Please.”
It breaks something in him. His eyes darken to something wild and hungry, and he hauls her closer. “Please what?”
She moans instead of answering, so close to fluttering into release, but he holds her still.
“Use your words, Jules.” His nose brushes hers, fingers pressing down to dent her thighs. “I want to hear you say it.”
Mallory pants over his lips. “Please fuck me. Please, Ezra. I need you inside me, I—”
Ezra’s mouth crushes against hers again, and his kiss this time feels relieved. As if he’d feared that everything between them had been ruined before it even began, and now it’s painfully, agonizingly clear.
She was always going to let him have her.
Ezra unclasps her bra, leaving her only in her skirt and socks, the rosary beads still around her neck. She barely has time to tug off his sweater before he’s flipping them so the couch is squarely at her spine. He leans over her, gaze burning as he fits himself against her.
“Tell me when,” Ezra says, and she can’t hold back her whimper this time.
“Now,” she begs, and he brushes a soft kiss to her forehead.
For a moment, everything is still. Ezra’s stare is searing in the reddened dark, and when he slowly pushes inside, she can’t help the pointed gasp that follows. He inhales like he’s also noticing it—the way she stretches to make room, as though her body was built just for him.
“You’re so perfect,” Ezra breathes. “Can you take more?”
“All of it,” she replies, and he grasps her thigh for leverage to sink the rest of the way.
“I knew you could,” he says, hips rotating against hers as she somehow takes him even deeper. “That’s it.”
Without saying a word, Mallory guides his hand between them. He understands immediately, fingers skillfully stroking as he moves inside her with precision, and she bites her lip at the added jolt of heat.
“Are you going to say my name when you come?” he asks.
“If you let me this time,” she manages, “I’ll say whatever you’d like.”
“Such a good girl when you want to be.” Ezra presses harder with his fingers. “My name. If you can say anything at all.”
Mallory’s sighs turn to needy, high-pitched sounds, but she’s too wild with desire to care.
There’s a spirit in her, a poltergeist, something demonic and ethereal and so fucking alive alive alive.
She can’t believe she ever considered dying, not before she felt this, and at the same time, she could die right now.
Could bleed out all over this ugly couch, become bits of earth and flowers, and she wouldn’t even care, because Ezra’s touch, his mouth, him—he’s a drug, he’s another planet, he’s a dark room she wasn’t supposed to visit, but now never wants to leave.
She rocks against his hand as he fucks her, and when she tips her head back, he swoops in to drag his teeth along her throat.
Biting down, right below her collarbone.
Hard enough, she thinks, to draw blood.
“Ezra—”
Mallory shatters into what feels like a million pieces, heat widening and bursting inside her.
She’s so consumed by the euphoria that she doesn’t notice the sizzle of electricity erupting in the theater.
Doesn’t notice the lights sputtering on the stage as she falls apart with his name on her lips, just like he wanted.
“Jules—fuck—” Ezra follows right after her with a moan that vibrates against her teeth. She digs her nails into his shoulders as he fills her, convinced she’ll never feel empty again.
But then, out of the corner of her eye, a dozen rays of silver flash outside the booth. How? How? She unplugged it, she—
Mallory raises her head just in time to see every single light in the theater explode.
Bulbs burst like fireworks in a perfect formation of silver white and burnt orange. The lights burn brighter and brighter before disintegrating, sending a rainstorm of dusted glass onto the stage.
Crimson follows, somehow redder than before. Neither of them moves, the only sound their heavy breathing and a low, distant ringing from below.
“Oh no,” Mallory murmurs as a vision of Hendrix, Golden, and everyone else noticing the broken lights creeps into her brain. “Are we going to get in trouble?”
She scrambles to sit up, but he stills her with a firm hand.
“I think,” Ezra says, “we already are.”
Her mouth goes dry at his words, and she settles back against the couch. A glow widens in her ribs at the way he’s staring at her in the blood-soaked shadows, like she’s something he’s been looking for. Something he’s found.
Something he’s now terrified to lose.
Ezra doesn’t have to say it for her to know what he’s thinking.
You’re mine.