Chapter 8 #5
"Hands behind your back."
I pull them out from under the pillow.
He grabs both my wrists with one hand. Holds them at the small of my back. His other hand fists in my hair and pulls my head off the pillow, and I am bowed, arched, pinned, and so close to coming I’m silently sobbing.
"You're gonna come on my cock untouched, baby. Same way you did for Atlas."
"...how—"
"He’s my brother. I imagine he’s just as good at fucking you as I am."
He fucks me harder. I can’t breathe. My wrists are locked. My hair is fisted. My cock is dripping onto his sheets and every thrust hits the place inside that is both raw and lit-up and I am—
"Now, baby. Come."
I come.
Hands pinned, hair fisted, untouched, the ache turning the orgasm into something almost too much—I sob into the duvet, I cry out his name, my whole body locking and pulsing around his cock, my release striping his sheets under me.
He doesn't stop. He doesn't let up. He fucks me through the aftershocks while I am still shaking, still crying, still trying to breathe.
"That's one." He slams into me and empties the air from my lungs.
More? How could I possibly give him more? I already feel like my asshole is going to break… "Zero—"
"That's one, baby. We're getting another."
He fucks me through it.
Through the oversensitivity. Through the twitching.
Through the moment I try, weakly, to squirm forward and away from how much it is.
From how much he is. He holds me still by the wrists and just keeps going.
The ache becomes pleasure becomes ache becomes a new place I haven’t been, and Zero is talking the whole time.
Telling me how good I am. Telling me how filthy.
Telling me what he wants me to do for him tomorrow.
Telling me he could keep me here for hours.
I get hard again.
I swear I don’t know how. I don’t know how my body is finding the energy.
But I am, with Zero's cock still buried in me and his hand still in my hair and his voice still in my ear, hard and leaking again and shaking, and he laughs against the back of my neck because he knows I’m losing my fucking mind.
He’s revelling in it. "There he is. Greedy little thing. My own personal little slut."
When I come the second time it is with his hand finally between my thighs squeezing my cock, his teeth in the back of my neck, my whole body locked tight under his.
He follows me over.
He pulls out before he can knot—true to his word, even now—and comes on the small of my back in long hot stripes that he rubs into my skin with his palm, slow, deliberate.
Marking me. He bends down and presses an open kiss to the place where his come is, and I shudder under him from the tickle on my overly sensitive skin.
"There," he says. Wrecked. Low. Like not coming inside me ruined him just as much as it prolonged my needs. "There you go, baby."
I can’t move.
I’m face down on his ruined duvet, every bone in my body rearranged, my throat raw and my hips aching and my jaw a slow throb on one side. Zero pushes off the bed behind me. I hear him pad across the carpet barefoot, go into the bathroom. Water running. The clatter of a glass.
He comes back. "Roll, baby."
I roll. Slow. He's standing over me with a glass of water in one hand and a wet washcloth folded over the other. He hasn’t put any clothes back on and I swear his dick is getting hard all over again. He’s got a little dried come on the back of his hand and he looks faintly amused at himself.
"Sit up."
"...mm." I can’t even form a word. My brain is scattered and all I want to do is lay back, bask in the absolute bliss of having Zero’s full attention and the evidence of his touch all over me.
"Baby. Sit up. I'm not pouring water down your throat lying flat. I'd kill you."
I push up onto a shaky elbow. He gets a hand behind my back and props me against the headboard like a doll he is arranging. I am a doll he is arranging. His personal fuck doll.
He sits on the edge of the bed. Holds the glass to my lips. "Slow."
I sip.
The water hits my throat and I wince. He sees it. The corner of his mouth tips.
"Yeah. That's going to be a day, baby. Sip. Don't gulp."
I take another sip.
His thumb drags across a bit of water that dribbles down my chin. "You wrecked me, you know that?"
I huff a laugh. "...you wrecked me." My voice is all kinds of hoarse.
"Mm. We wrecked each other. Different ways. Sip again."
He works me through half the glass. Tilts my chin up with two fingers to check something about my face, sees something he doesn't like, sets the water down. Picks up the washcloth. Folds it again so the cold part is on the outside.
He presses it to the side of my throat.
I hiss.
"There it is," he says. Conversational. "I knew there'd be a mark."
"...is it bad?"
"It's going to be glorious. Margot's probably going to think you've got mono."
"Zero."
"I'm joking. Mostly." He shifts the cloth a little. Gentle. The way you press something cold to a kid's bee sting. "If she asks, you got hit in the throat with a football. Bane and I were horsing around."
"That's a terrible cover."
"You think of something better. You've got an hour."
He holds the cloth there. Not saying anything. His other hand is on my knee, thumb stroking slow. The bond between us is going wide and soft and golden, and I feel with my eyes mostly closed and my throat aching and Zero's hand on my knee, more cared for than I have words for.
He moves the cloth.
"Lie back, baby. Let me clean you up."
I lie back.
He spreads my thighs, gentle, like he is moving the limbs of a sleeping cat.
Wipes me down with the washcloth. He is methodical about it.
Belly, hips, between my thighs where the slick has run.
He does the place where I am sore last, and he does it with a degree of care I have not, in the last hour, had any reason to expect from him.
He goes slow. He works around the rawness rather than at it. He hums under his breath.
"Don't get used to this, baby. I will deny it under torture."
"...mm." My eyes flutter closed.
"Bane is the one who does the gentle nurse thing. I'm the cruel-and-then-gone guy. This is a one-time thing."
"...mm."
"You hear me?"
I smile and open my eyes to see his face, his reaction at me defying him. Challenging him. "...you're lying."
He laughs and shakes his head and tosses the washcloth at the laundry hamper across the room, makes it on the first try, sits back on his heels and looks at me with an expression I am not going to make it through if I keep looking at directly.
He’s so fucking beautiful I could cry.
His dark hair sweat-slicked and curling around his ears. Falling into his face and flirting with the top of his lashes. His cheeks are slightly pink, his muscles bulging like he just got back from the gym. He looks like a dark God and I can’t look away.
He gets up.
I watch him cross to his dresser. Pull a drawer open. Rummage. Come back with a soft worn-soft t-shirt of his and a pair of his briefs, both folded.
"Up. Arms."
I sit up as best I can and lift my arms. He pulls his t-shirt down over my head and works the sleeves onto my arms so delicately. The shirt is too big. It hangs off one shoulder, but it smells like him and I inhale.
He works the briefs up my legs. Has me lift my hips. Gets them where they need to go.
He stands back. Looks at me.
"Look at you in my clothes. Pretty thing."
"...what?"
"Wearing me."
He sits on the edge of the bed. Tilts my face up. Looks at me for one long beat with the same undone face I caught a glimpse of earlier that he’s no longer trying to fully hide.
He kisses my forehead. "Nap here, baby."
"...okay."
"I'm going to go be visible downstairs so your mother doesn't come looking for either of us. I'll be loud and obnoxious.”
I smile. "...thank you."
"Don't thank me, baby. Sleep."
He kisses my forehead again. Pulls the duvet up over me. The duvet, which is ruined, which we are both ignoring, which Zero is going to throw out and replace and pretend nothing happened to.
He goes to the door but pauses, then turns back. “Maxie?"
"...mm?" My eyes are fluttering closed again. His bed is warm and comfortable and my asshole ache is slowing down to a gentle throb that I can almost ignore.
"Don't disappear on me."
I open my eyes.
He's half-turned, hand on the doorknob, not quite looking at me. The bond between us is going warm and wide and a little frayed at the edges, like something that has been stretched out of shape for Zero.
"...I won't."
He nods and then shuts the door soft. I hear him pad down the hall in his bare feet but then I lose track of him.
The room settles. The bond settles. I’m in his bed, in his t-shirt, in his briefs, wrapped in a duvet that is going to need to be replaced, and the soreness in my hips and the rasp in my throat and the heavy used-up feeling in every muscle I have are all of them, somehow, good.
I roll onto my side. Curl into the warm spot Zero left behind. Pull the duvet up under my chin.
I have spent most of my life not being entirely sure I was in my body.
I was, in foster homes, mostly above it–watching down as my body was abused and hated.
I was, even those first months in this house, watching it from a small careful distance, the way you watch an animal you have been told you are responsible for.
My body was my own, but I was afraid of it.
Ashamed.
I am, right now, in it.
I am, right now, more here than I have ever been.
My throat aches. My hips ache. My jaw aches. The bond pulses warm in three different directions. I’m wearing my stepbrother's shirt and I am going to sleep in his bed and when he comes back upstairs he’s going to find me here because I told him I wouldn't disappear and I meant it.
I fucking meant it.