CHAPTER SEVEN #2
He moves toward me, settling between my legs and giving me a small, private smile. Then he pushes into me in one smooth stroke, long and deep. I groan at the sensation. The stretch. The heat. He grabs my hips and starts moving—hard, deep thrusts that fill every inch of me.
“Fuck, Max,” he groans. “You feel like heaven. So fucking tight, so warm. You’re gonna make me lose my mind.”
Rox kisses my neck, my shoulder. Strokes my hair.
“You look so fucking good like this,” she says worshipfully. “I love watching Maze fuck beautiful girls like you.”
Her mouth finds mine, and then she’s kissing me as Maze fucks me, his pace steady but relentless.
My hips lift to meet every thrust, desperate for more. For all of it. I’m so close again, my body is already unraveling.
“That’s it,” he pants. “C’mon, baby. Let me feel you.”
“Yes,” Rox whispers, pulling away. “Come on my boyfriend’s big cock. I wanna watch him come in you.”
It’s enough.
The words tip me over the edge, and suddenly I’m coming, clenching around Maze’s cock, and that’s all it takes. He groans, loud and rough, burying himself deep as he pulses, his whole body shaking.
He collapses on top of me, forehead pressed to mine, still thrusting and breathing hard. Rox wraps her arms around us both, her body warm and soft at my side.
Even after Maze stills, we stay like that, tangled together, for a long while. Just catching our breath. Finally, Maze rolls off to one side of me, and Rox drops her arm onto my belly.
My muscles are jelly. My skin tingles. The high from the Molly starts to soften, the sharp edges less jittery, and the oxy pulls at me gently, like warm water. I let it take me.
I stare at the ceiling for the longest time, body and mind floating, half-aware of the soft sounds of Maze and Rox on either side of me. None of us sleep, but we’re too peaceful to move. I memorize the rough plywood ceiling above us, my mind blessedly empty, too gone to think.
Time stops mattering.
I don’t know how many days pass. Could be two.
Could be ten. Everything blurs together.
Rox, Maze, and oxycontin. There are pills and joints laced with powder, and crushed lines inhaled up our noses with immediate effect.
Daytime and nighttime are indistinguishable.
Sex, too, happens with blurred edges. I become aware that I’m engaged in it with no memory of how we got there.
I wake up to Maze parting my legs and pushing into me in the dead of night.
It doesn’t matter. My main concern is the pills.
I want one all the time and begin to feel that Maze is withholding. “That’s enough for now,” he’ll say. “Trust me.”
I try to keep my eyes on the little key he uses to open his locked cabinet full of drugs, but he seems intuitively aware of my interest and always manages to hide it out of reach.
The high is never quite as good as it could be. Good but never perfect.
We eat when we remember. Mostly toast, cereal, leftover pizza.
I think I laugh. Or maybe I just remember laughing.
One time, I hear shouting in the hangar. Something about a drop gone wrong, someone getting caught. Maze closes the door and locks it, and then Rox paints my toenails glitter pink and tells me I have the prettiest feet she’s ever seen.
Another time, Billy knocks on the door. “She good?”
Rox answers, sweet as candy. “She’s perfect.”
She tells me that Peach is gone, that she left because of Billy, and I try not to listen because I don’t even want to hear his name.
I don’t want to exist in a world with Billy Manning in it.
One where Ryder is dead and Wyatt is one of the bad guys, no better than Silas.
I want to live in the world I’ve discovered above this one, hazy and indistinct, and accessible only by the pills that Maze gets more and more stingy with.
It’s hot out, the kind of muggy, sticky heat that makes everything feel heavier. Rox and I are headed back from the far side of the lot after tanning, and my high is wearing off. Rox is talking about her old apartment in Nashville. I’m only half-listening.
“It had these ratty blinds and a busted AC unit, but it was mine,” she says wistfully. “God, I used to lie on the floor just to feel cold.”
I smile faintly, and try to picture her in a world with windows. Then my heart stops.
Up ahead Wyatt is striding toward on us, a man on a mission, and just the sight of him makes my goddamn heart break.
I want to imagine that he’s going to wrap an arm around me and carry me away from all this; tell me that it’s all a mistake.
Instead, when he gets close to us, he flicks blue eyes over to me and tosses something in the air.
I instinctively reach out to catch it and fumble it.
“You said you were out,” he says coolly, without breaking his stride.
A pack of cigarettes bounces off my hand and drops to the ground. I blink down at it. Marlboros.
“You don’t smoke,” says Rox. And I don’t—but for some reason, I don’t want her to question this interaction. I wish she’d never seen it.
“Sometimes I do,” I bluff. The dumbest bluff in the world. I’ve never smoked a cigarette and would surely cough if I tried. But I pick the pack up and stuff it into my pocket. “C’mon,” I say. “Let’s go.”
“What’s the deal with you and him?” she asks, picking up her pace to keep up with me. “Listen.” She grabs my arms and turns me to face her. “Just tell me. I’m not going to say anything.”
“Nothing,” I say, turning to keep walking. “I just asked him to grab me some smokes.”
“When?”
I keep walking and she lets it go. For now.
When she leaves me alone in the bedroom to go use the washroom, I pull the cigarette pack from my pocket and slide it open. Inside, wedged between two smokes, is a torn scrap of paper.
6PM
far side of the storehouse
come alone
No name. Just the sharp, scrawled handwriting I’ve seen a hundred times on work orders at Leathernecks.
My hands shake.
I tear the note into tiny pieces and drop them into the trash can, then kick the pack of cigarettes under the bed, seeing the corner of his leather cut down there when I do so.
I never returned it to him, and he never asked.
Wyatt.
The biggest disappointment in my entire life. In a long list of disappointments. What could he possibly have to say to me?
It’s hours later when I realize I don’t know what time it is at all.
Maze pulled a package of “something new” out of his locked cabinet and handed it to Rox to run to a buyer, but he palmed two of the pills for us.
“It’s an old-school press,” he’d said, giving me one.
It hit hard. Hot in my chest, syrup in my blood. Reality blessedly melting away.
Now the edges are creeping back in, and all I can think about is time.
I’m alone with Maze, on my knees, his hand in my hair, his cock pushing into my mouth as he groans low. I’m trying to count backwards to when Rox left, to when she’ll be back.
6PM, I think, over and over. 6PM.
Maze’s grip tightens in my hair as he thrusts harder, and I let my jaw go slack, my throat open, wondering when we agreed to this. If we agreed to this.
What time it is.
The high’s gone sideways. The warmth in my veins is too thick, the buzz in my brain too loud. Everything is moving a beat too fast—or too slow. I can’t tell.
And underneath it all, like a splinter I can’t dig out, is Wyatt.
Waiting, maybe. Or not.
Maybe he wrote the note and walked away without a second thought. Maybe it was a trap. Maybe it was real.
Maybe I’m a fucking idiot for caring.
Maze grunts, breath hitching, and stills. His cum hits the back of my throat, sudden and choking.
I pull off, spit it into a Kleenex and toss it onto the floor. Then I get into bed and roll onto my side, facing the wall. I close my eyes and try to float again, but the drugs are too thin now, and my mind won’t shut the fuck up.
I picture Wyatt outside, waiting. Not Ryan, whose patched vest is still half-buried under this bed, but Wyatt, the steadiest man I knew. The one I ate dinner with. Watched TV with. Asked for advice. Trusted.
Until I got dragged to hell and found him dancing with the devil.