Chapter 3 Rhys #2
Something shifts in his expression. His eyes go wide. His nostrils flare and I watch his pupils blow open, the brown swallowed by black. He breathes in sharply and his whole body arches off the bed like he's been shocked.
"Oh," he whispers. "Oh no. Oh no no no."
He smells it too. He smells me the way I smell him and we both know what this is. This isn't a hookup. This isn't anonymous. This is fate handing us a live grenade and pulling the pin.
"I can't," I say, and I don't know what I'm saying I can't do because my hands are already pulling his underwear off and his hands are already on my belt and neither of us is stopping.
"This is insane," he says, and then he wraps his legs around my waist and pulls me down against him. The full-body contact of skin on skin with his scent flooding my lungs makes me groan so loud the room next door probably heard it.
He's wet. Soaking. Slick coating his inner thighs, the sheets, my fingers when I reach between his legs.
His cock is still hard against his belly, flushed dark and leaking onto his skin.
His body recognized me before his brain did and the evidence is everywhere, hot and slippery and obscene.
I press two fingers inside him and he clenches around me and cries out, his back bowing, his hands clawing at my shoulders.
"More," he gasps. "God, more, please, I need your cock inside me, I can't, I need—"
I shove my jeans and briefs down and push into him in one long slide.
He takes me so easily, so perfectly, his body opening around my cock like it was designed for exactly this, and the sound that comes out of both of us is something I'll hear for the rest of my life.
He's tight and hot and dripping wet. I'm buried to the balls inside him and my vision is blurred and nothing, nothing in my entire carefully organized existence has ever felt like this.
He grabs my face with both hands. Forces me to look at him. His eyes are glassy and wild and his mouth is trembling. "Move," he says. "Fuck me. Now."
I move. I fuck him deep and steady and he wraps himself around me, legs locked behind my back, nails scoring lines down my spine and over my tattoos, and he's loud.
Beautifully loud. Begging and cursing and telling me harder, there, right there, don't stop.
His cock is trapped between our stomachs, slick with precome, grinding against my abs with every thrust. I follow every instruction because that's all I know how to do right now.
His scent is everywhere. In my mouth, my lungs, soaked into my skin.
Every thrust pushes another wave of it into the air and I'm drunk on it, my alpha snarling mine with every heartbeat.
My knot starts swelling. I feel it building at the base of my cock, thickening with every stroke, and some distant, rational part of my brain says you should warn him, you should ask but he feels it too and his reaction is to pull me deeper.
"Don't you dare pull out," he pants. "I want it. I want your knot. Give it to me."
I push in harder and my knot catches on his rim. He whimpers, this broken, gorgeous sound, and then it's inside and swelling and locking us together. The pressure of it, the fullness, the way his body grips me so tight I can't move, makes me see stars.
He comes untouched. Clenching around my knot, his cock pulsing between us, his mouth open in a silent scream. And the sight of him falling apart on my knot while his scent wraps around me like a fist is what breaks me.
I come so hard my vision goes white. And in the middle of it, in the shaking, gasping, world-ending middle of it, my mouth finds the place where his neck meets his shoulder and I bite down.
Hard.
He screams. Not pain. Something beyond pain, beyond pleasure.
His whole body locks up and he comes again, or he's still coming, I can't tell, and my teeth are in his skin and his blood is on my tongue and the bond snaps into place like a steel cable pulled taut and I feel him.
Not just his body. Him. Bright and loud and terrified and brilliant and mine, mine, mine.
We lie there. Knotted and bitten and breathing like we just ran a marathon. I'm still inside him. I'll be inside him for a while, the knot thick and unyielding, and his face is pressed against my neck. I can feel tears on my skin but I don't know whose they are.
His heartbeat is against my chest. Fast and hard and gradually slowing.
I run my fingers through his hair, the copper and dark strands damp with sweat, and he lets me.
For a few minutes he just lets me hold him, and he feels so right in my arms that the thought of him ever not being here makes something inside me ache.
"That was..." he starts.
"Yeah."
"You bit me."
"I know." I should be panicking. I'm not panicking. I feel calmer than I've felt in years. Like something that's been slightly out of alignment my entire life just clicked into place. "I'm sorry. I didn't plan that."
"You can't unplan a claiming bite," he says. His voice is quiet now. Small in a way that doesn't match anything I've seen from him tonight. He traces the mark with his own fingers, feather-light, and I feel the touch echo through the bond like a plucked string.
"No. You can't."
Silence. His fingers trace patterns on my chest while we wait for my knot to go down. I want to ask his name. I want to ask everything about him. I want to bury my face in his hair and never leave this bed.
My knot releases. He shifts. I feel him pull away and something in my chest cracks.
He gets up. Finds his jeans on the floor. Pulls them on. His movements are quick, efficient, like he's done this a hundred times. The leaving part. He's practiced at the leaving part.
"Wait," I say. I sit up. "You don't have to go. We should talk about this. That was a claiming bite. That's not—"
"I know what it was." He pulls his shirt over his head. Picks up his jacket. He won't look at me. The bite mark on his neck is dark and angry and already bruising and he's covering it with his collar.
"Tell me your name," I say.
He pauses at the door. His hand is on the handle and his shoulders are tight and I can see the exact moment he rebuilds every wall I just took down.
"That wasn't part of the deal," he says.
He leaves.
The door clicks shut and the room goes quiet except for the hum of the AC and my own heartbeat hammering in my ears.
I sit in the middle of the wrecked bed. The sheets smell like him.
Like us. Like something permanent that just walked out the door.
My mouth tastes like his skin and my hands still feel the shape of him and there's a bite mark on someone's neck that has my name written into it except I don't know his name and he doesn't know mine.
I pick up my phone. Open KnotMe. His profile is still there. Anonymous. The same photo of a confident, faceless omega. Like nothing happened.
Except I can still feel him. A low hum in my chest, warm and insistent. The bond. Already alive. Already reaching for someone who just walked away without looking back.
I close the app. Drop my phone on the mattress. Lie back and stare at the ceiling that looks nothing like the one in my apartment, in the room that smells like the most important person I've ever touched.
He left.
My mate just left.
And I don't even know his name.