Chapter 24 Violet #2
"No." I push his chest, flatten my palm against his sternum, and ride him.
Hard. Hips lifting until just the tip of him is inside me and then dropping back down with enough force to make us both gasp.
Again. And again. Each time the impact reverberates through my whole body, sending shocks up my spine.
The wet sound of us filling the room in a way that should embarrass me but doesn't, hasn't, won't, because there's no space left in me for embarrassment.
Just this. Just the burn of him stretching me open.
Just the friction of his cock dragging against my inner walls every time I rise and fall.
His head is back, throat exposed, and my mouth finds his pulse. I bite. Not gently. His hips jerk up into me and the angle changes, hitting a spot that makes my vision blur. A moan rips out of me that I couldn't have held back if someone paid me.
This. This is what I'm losing. Not just the orgasms. Though let's be honest, the man fucks like he was put on this earth for exactly one purpose, and it wasn't running a crime syndicate.
But this. The way his body answers mine.
The way his breath matches my breath when we're close, the way we sync up like two instruments finding the same key after playing in different rooms.
His hands move to my ass, gripping hard, as he starts meeting my rhythm, driving up into me as I come down.
Every thrust bottoms out with a grind that hits my clit and sends a shock wave through me, building something at the base of my spine, something enormous and terrifying that I am not ready for, not yet, not yet. ..
I slow down. Push my hips forward. Roll.
Slow. Feel every inch of him drag against me, feel the ridge of his cock catch on every oversensitized spot inside me, and the slowness is almost worse than the speed because I can feel everything.
Every twitch, every pulse, every micro-movement of his hips as he fights the urge to take over.
"Fuck." His voice is destroyed. A single syllable dragged out of him by force.
My hands frame his jaw. My forehead presses against his. We are breathing the same air, and I am looking into his eyes from so close that the brown dissolves into darkness, and somewhere behind the want and the heat there is something so open, so undefended, that it—
I close my eyes. I take one breath. I come back.
And I start moving again.
Faster this time. Chasing the orgasm that's building like a wave, while the grief is building right behind it.
They're going to hit me at the same time.
I know it and I don't care. His thumb finds my clit, circling in tight, precise strokes that match my rhythm, and the way he reads my body, makes heat prickle behind my eyes.
"Look at me," he whispers, demanding.
My eyes open. And there he is. Unguarded. The mask gone. All of it gone. Just Elio, underneath everything, looking at me like I am the entire world and he's watching the sun come up.
I come apart.
The orgasm tears through me with a violence that matches everything else in this room.
The love and the hate and the grief and the rage, all of it cresting at once, my body clenching around his cock in waves that make him groan and drive up into me hard enough that a second peak hits before the first one finishes.
Stacking, rolling, endless. I bite down on his shoulder to keep from making a sound that would bring the guards running, teeth sinking into the muscle while my body shakes and shakes and shakes.
He follows. I feel the moment his control snaps. The surge of him inside me, as his arms lock around my back so tight I can barely breathe, his face buried in my neck, his mouth open against my skin. A sound comes out of him that I have never heard before, broken.
And my brain, my stupid, stubborn, architectural-restoration brain, does what it always does when the structure fails. Catalogues the damage.
That's the last time you'll hear that sound. That's the last time his arms will lock like that. That's the last time you'll feel him inside you. This is the final survey before demolition.
I press my forehead into the curve of his neck and breathe. Citrus and wood and leather, clean and sharp. The scent I tried to reconstruct from nothing on a thin mattress in a concrete cell. The scent I will never smell this close again.
We don't move. His arms stay around me, loosening by degrees as our breathing slows.
My cheek settles against his chest, ear over his still hammering heart.
His fingers trace absent patterns across my shoulder, the same shoulder where the bruises from the compound have finally faded.
I don't think he knows he's doing it. The tracing.
It's the thing his hands do when the rest of him isn't paying attention, when the control slips and his body does what it actually wants to do, which is touch me. Just touch me.
He presses his lips to my temple before he shifts me gently off his lap and onto the sheets. "Don't move."
The bathroom door closes behind him. Water runs. And I have maybe ninety seconds.
My feet hit the floor before the faucet's fully on.
The bag is the closet, right where I left it.
Unzip. My fingers find the small amber bottle I took from Elena's room three days ago, the bottle I've been carrying like a grenade with the pin half-pulled.
Two tablets into my palm. Zip the bag closed and slide it back.
The whiskey glass sits on the nightstand where he left it before dinner.
The amber liquid catching the lamplight barely covers the bottom.
Two fingers' worth, maybe less. I drop both tablets in.
They dissolve fast, the liquid clouding for a second before settling back to clear.
Elena's prescription. Elena's room. Elena's escape, repurposed.
I'm back on the bed, legs tucked under me, by the time the bathroom door opens and Elio comes back with a warm cloth. I keep my face soft, and my breathing even.
Once he's done taking care of me, he tosses the cloth toward the bathroom door and settles against the headboard, one arm behind his head.
His eyes find me with that possessive, half-lidded look that usually makes me want to climb back on top of him, and normally I would, normally I'd have a smart comment about his stamina or his ego or both.
But tonight I reach for the whiskey glass instead.
"Drink with me."
His eyebrow lifts. The faintest amusement at the corners of his mouth. I raise the glass to my own lips first, let the whiskey touch but not pass, then hold it out to him. His hand wraps around mine on the glass, guiding it to his mouth, and he drinks. A slow sip. His throat moves.
"To us," I say as i nod at him to continue.
Something soft flickers across his face. Not suspicion. More like the look of a man who is being cared for and doesn't know what to do with it. He takes the glass from my hand and drinks the rest in one swallow.
I take his face in my hands. My thumbs on his cheekbones. My forehead against his.
Seven minutes. Maybe ten. That's what the medical team told us when they first gave the sleeping pills to the survivors. Fast-acting.
His hand comes up to cover mine where it rests against his jaw. He turns his face into my palm and presses his lips there. The gentleness of it...
Don't.
I count his breaths instead.
One. Two. Three.
His eyes are getting heavier. The hand covering mine loosens by a fraction.
Four. Five.
"Violet." His voice is further away now, thicker, like he's speaking through water. His brow furrows slightly, confused, not alarmed. Just surprised by the heaviness, the sudden impossible weight of his own eyelids.
Six. Seven.
His body shifts against the headboard, sliding lower. His arm around my waist goes slack by degrees, the grip loosening the way it does when he falls asleep naturally, except faster. Much faster. His head tips back.
"I never..." He blinks. Slow. The kind of blink that takes a full second to complete. "I never believed in it. Love." His mouth barely forms the word. "Thought it was a lie people told themselves to justify doing stupid things."
Eight.
"But if it's real." His eyes find mine. Still brown. Still bottomless. But fading. "If it exists at all..."
Nine.
"...it must feel like this."
His arm falls away from my waist. His eyes close. His breathing changes. Deepens, evens, the controlled rhythm of a man who's finally stopped fighting unconsciousness.
One tear. Just one. It spills down my left cheek, warm, tracing a line to my jaw where it hangs for a second before dropping onto his chest. I don't wipe it. My hands are still on his face and I am not moving them yet because I need—
I need one more second.
Then the second is over.
I lay him down. Carefully. Pillow under his head, the way he sleeps. Blanket pulled up, because the nights get cold here. My hand hovers over his face. His jaw, his mouth, the sharp line of his cheekbone.
I don't touch it.
My hand falls back.
His phone is on the nightstand. I take his hand, warm, heavy, completely slack, and press his thumb to the screen.
It unlocks. Contacts. I scroll with one hand, the other still holding his, and find what I'm looking for.
I tear a page from the notepad beside the lamp, scribble the number down in handwriting that is remarkably steady for a woman whose whole life is detonating, fold the paper twice, and slip it into my palm.
The phone goes back. Same position. Same angle. Same distance from the lamp.
He doesn't stir.
I dress in the dark. Jeans. Boots. Sweater. The bag comes out from the back of the closet. It's light. Passport. A change of clothes. The folded notepad page. The napkin daisy, pressed flat between passport pages, the petals smudging into the ink of my own photographed face.
No cash. No jewelry. Nothing of his.
At the foot of the bed, I stop. My bag is on my shoulder.
The room is quiet except for his breathing.
Deep, even, chemical. The lamp throws gold across the sheets, across the shape of him under the blanket, across the face I have memorized down to the microscopic level, the face I rebuilt from memory in a concrete cell and swore I'd see again.
My hand lifts. Reaches.
If you touch his face, you will not leave.
My fingers curl inward. My arm drops.
I turn away.
The bedroom door closes behind me with a click so quiet it barely registers.