Prologue #3
I should step back and take a breath and look at her—really look at her, Penny, my best friend since birth, the girl whose hand I’ve held since before either of us knew what holding meant—and ask if this is what she wants.
If this is okay. If the last ten minutes of adrenaline and possessiveness and the taste of her mouth haven’t overwritten the part of both our brains responsible for decisions that can’t be undone.
I don’t stop.
I kiss her again. Harder. My hand slides from the wall to the back of her neck, gripping, tilting her face up to mine.
She makes a small sound—not a word, not a protest. Just air leaving her lungs like I punched it out.
Her hands find my chest. Not pushing. Not pulling.
Just… there. Resting on the bare skin above my sternum, her fingers cold from the October air outside.
My mouth moves from her lips to her jaw.
Her neck. That spot just below her ear where her pulse is hammering so hard I can feel it against my tongue.
I press into it. Taste the salt of her skin and the frantic rhythm underneath and the brand of sweetness that is Penny—that has always been Penny—since before I knew what sweetness was.
She tilts her head back against the wall. Eyes closed. Lips parted. The smallest exhale. “Xander…”
Just my name. Barely a whisper. Not a yes. Not a no. My name in the voice she uses when she doesn’t know what she’s feeling and is hoping the word itself will tell her.
My hands find the hem of her shirt. Push it up.
She doesn’t stop me. Her arms lift slightly—an involuntary accommodation, her body making space for what I’m doing even as the rest of her stays frozen against the wall.
I push the fabric up over her breasts. Her bra is plain—white cotton, no lace, the kind of bra that says she didn’t plan for this, didn’t dress for this, didn’t imagine that her Friday night would end with her back against a wall in a warehouse closet.
I push it up too. Don’t bother with the clasp.
Just shove everything above her breasts and look at her.
“Jesus Christ, Penny.”
She opens her eyes. Looks down at herself. Looks at me looking at her. A flush crawls up her chest and neck and cheeks—not arousal alone. Exposure. The vulnerability of being seen by someone who has known you your entire life but has never seen this.
I take her nipple into my mouth. Her whole body jerks—a full-body flinch, her back arching off the wall, a gasp that she swallows before it becomes a sound.
I circle my tongue around it. Suck. Her hand flies to the back of my head and grips—hard, desperate, the grip of a person who needs to hold onto something or she’ll slide down the wall.
“So fucking perfect,” I murmur against her skin. “Look at you. So goddamn perfect, Penny.”
I switch to the other one. Teeth this time—grazing, testing. She whimpers. The sound is so small and so wrecked that it goes straight through me like a current. I bring my hand up and cover her mouth. Not rough. Firm. The kind of pressure that says “be quiet” without giving her a choice about it.
Her eyes fly open. Wide. Looking at me over my own hand. She doesn’t pull away. Doesn’t bite. Just breathes against my palm in short, shallow bursts, her chest rising and falling under my mouth.
My free hand drops to the button of her jeans.
I pop it. Pull the zipper. My fingers slide beneath the waistband of her panties without asking, without pausing, without the hesitation that a better version of me would have.
My fingers find her—slick, swollen, hot—and the sound I make is animal.
Guttural. The noise of a boy who has been starving for something that isn’t pain and just found it.
“God, Penny. So wet. So fucking wet for me.”
She moans against my hand. Her hips shift—forward, involuntary, pressing herself into my fingers. I curl two of them inside her and her knees buckle. I catch her with my arm around her waist, pinning her between my body and the wall, holding her upright while my fingers work.
“That’s it, baby. That’s my good girl.”
The words come from somewhere I didn’t know existed.
Dark. Possessive. The voice of a boy who has been told his entire life that he destroys everything he touches and is, in this moment, choosing to touch anyway.
Penny’s eyes are squeezed shut. Her hands are on my forearms, fingers digging in. Not pushing away. Holding on.
I pull my hand out. She makes a sound behind my palm—small, bereft—and I feel it in my cock like a fist. I grab her jeans and panties and shove both down.
She doesn’t help. Doesn’t hinder. Just stands there shaking as I pull them to her thighs and she steps out of one leg, the denim bunching around her other ankle.
I turn her to the wall. “Hands on the wall, Penelope. Don’t move them.”
She puts her hands on the wall. Her fingers splay against the cold concrete. Her back is bare above her jeans—her shirt still bunched above her breasts, her spine a line of shadow in the dirty yellow light. She’s shaking. Not from cold.
I push my shorts down. My cock is hard enough to ache, the head slick, and when I step forward and press it against her from behind—sliding through her folds, nudging her clit—she drops her forehead to the wall and a sound comes out of her that she didn’t authorize.
A moan that starts in her chest and gets caught in her throat and dies somewhere between surrender and disbelief.
“You feel that?” I slide against her again. Slow. Deliberate. Coating myself in her. “Feel how hard you make me, Penny? That’s what you do to me. That’s what you’ve always done to me.”
“Oh my god.” It comes out fractured. Barely voiced. Her fingers curl against the concrete.
I line myself up. Press the head against her entrance. Push inside her. She goes rigid. Every muscle in her body locks. Her hand flies off the wall and reaches back, grabbing my hip, and I don’t know if she’s pulling me in or pushing me away and I don’t stop to find out.
I push deeper. She bites down on her own forearm to muffle the cry and the sound that makes it through—strangled, torn, a sound that lives at the intersection of pain and something past it—echoes off the concrete walls.
She’s tight. So fucking tight that the sensation nearly whites me out on the spot.
“Jesus Christ, Penny. Fuck.” I press my forehead between her shoulder blades. Hands on her hips. Holding myself still even though every fiber of my body is screaming to move. “You feel so fucking good, baby. So tight.”
She’s pressing back against me. Barely—a fraction of an inch—but enough. Her hand is still on my hip and it’s not pushing me away. Her body is adjusting, the tension in her spine slowly releasing, her breathing going from sharp and shallow to deep and ragged.
“Xander.” Against her arm. Muffled. My name wrapped in something I can’t identify.
“I know, baby. Just breathe for me.”
She breathes. I feel it—the expansion of her ribs against my chest, the slow exhale that carries some of the tension out of her body. I pull back. Slow. Push forward again. Slow. Watching for the flinch, the lock, the sign that I should stop.
She doesn’t flinch. Her forehead stays pressed to the wall. Her hand stays on my hip. And on the third slow thrust, she makes a sound that isn’t pain. It’s deeper. Throatier. The sound of a body discovering something it didn’t know it could feel.
The restraint I was holding onto snaps.
I grab her hip with one hand. The other wraps around her front—across her chest, palm flat between her breasts, pulling her back against me.
I thrust harder. Faster. The sound of skin hitting skin fills the closet—obscene, rhythmic, echoing off the concrete—and she’s making sounds now that she can’t control.
Small, broken, punched-out noises on every thrust that she tries to muffle against her arm and fails.
“So fucking tight, Penny. So fucking good. You have no idea how good you feel.” The words pour out of me. Dark and desperate and not carefully chosen. “You’re so goddamn perfect. Taking me so well. My perfect girl.”
Her hand reaches back again—finds my hair this time, fingers threading through, gripping. Not pulling me away. Anchoring. Her body has stopped fighting the rhythm and started meeting it—the slightest rock of her hips back into mine, tentative at first, then steadier.
I slide my hand down from her chest. Over her stomach. Between her legs. Find her clit and circle it with my thumb and her reaction is immediate—her whole body jolts, her grip in my hair tightens, and a sound comes out of her that is half sob and half moan and entirely, devastatingly real.
“Oh my—oh god. Xander. Xander—”
“Yeah. That’s it. Let go, baby. I’ve got you.”
I keep my thumb working while I thrust into her and I feel it building in her body before she does—the tension climbing, the muscles clenching, her breath stopping altogether for three seconds before she comes apart.
She slams her palm against the wall and her whole body locks around me and the sound she makes is muffled by her own arm but I hear it anyway—guttural, broken, a sound that’s ripped from somewhere deep and primal and completely beyond her control.
I follow her. It takes four more thrusts—maybe three—before my vision whites out and I bury myself inside her as deep as I can go and come with a groan I bite down on, my teeth finding the curve of her shoulder through her shirt.
My hips jerk. Stutter. I spill into her and the world goes silent for three perfect, devastating seconds where nothing exists except the grip of her body and the heat of her skin and the agony of being eighteen and broken and inside the only person who has ever made the noise stop.
Then it’s over.