Chapter 11 - Kaiden #2
Her neck. I take my time. I know what my hands do to her throat, how her body responds to pressure there, the way her pupils blow when my fingers close around it.
But right now I use my mouth instead—open-mouth kisses along the column of her neck, tongue tracing her pulse point, teeth grazing the tendon where her neck meets her shoulder.
She shivers. Full-body. Her hand fists in the fabric of my shirt.
“Kaid—”
“Shh. I’m getting there.”
I pull my shirt over my head. She watches me do it, and I watch her watch me—her eyes tracking across my chest, my shoulders, the tattoos that crawl from wrist to elbow.
She reaches out and traces one of them with her fingertip.
A vine. Thorns. The first one I got at fifteen, the one that covers the scar on my forearm from when I put my fist through a window after a nightmare.
She doesn’t ask about the scar. She traces the ink over it and says nothing, and the understanding in the silence is louder than any question.
I reach for the hem of her shirt—my shirt, the lacrosse one. I pause with my fingers on the fabric. Hold her eyes. She nods.
I pull it over her head. And her body is there—bare except for the shorts, every scar visible in the dim light. The burns across her ribs and stomach, textured and sprawling. The thin lines on her wrists. A constellation of damage that maps a life I can’t imagine and she’s lived every day of.
Her arms start to cross. Reflex.
I catch her wrists. Gently. Not pinning—holding. I lower my mouth to the burn scar on her ribs. Press my lips against it. She inhales sharply, her stomach muscles contracting under my mouth.
I move to the next scar. Then the next. Kissing each one the way you’d kiss a bruise on a child’s knee—not to fix it, just to say “I see it and I’m not flinching.”
Her hand comes to the back of my head. Not pushing. Holding. Her fingers in my hair, gripping tighter with each scar I find.
“Kaiden.” Her voice is thick. “Stop being sweet. I told you I don’t need—”
“I’m not being sweet.” I look up at her from where my mouth rests against her stomach. “I’m being thorough.”
Her breath catches. Something in her expression shifts—the tension in her shoulders releasing by a degree. Two degrees. Her body believing, incrementally, that my hands aren’t going to become something she needs to survive.
I move back up. Kiss her mouth again—harder this time. She responds immediately, her tongue against mine, her hands on my shoulders pulling me closer. The heat between us escalates fast—faster than I expected—like something’s been dammed up in both of us for weeks and the dam just cracked.
I pull her onto my lap. Her knees bracket my hips. My hands on her waist, her skin hot under my palms. She rolls against me—one experimental, devastating motion—and the friction makes my vision white out for a half-second.
“Fuck, Cat.”
She does it again. Watching my face this time, measuring the effect she has, and I can see the power of it registering in her eyes—the realization that she can make me come undone, that she’s in control, that my body is responding to her choices and not the other way around.
She needs that. I understand it on a level that doesn’t require words.
I run my hands up her sides. Over her ribs—careful with the burn scars, not avoiding them but not rough either. Up to her breasts. I cup them, my thumbs circling, and she arches into the contact and gasps and the sound goes through me like a live wire.
I lean forward and take one nipple into my mouth. Her hand flies to my head, fingers digging into my scalp, and the noise she makes is something between a moan and a sob—raw, involuntary, the sound of a body remembering how to feel pleasure without the cost of pain attached to it.
“More,” she says. “Kaiden, more.”
I flip us. Her back on the mattress, me over her, and I take a second to just look—her hair spread on the pillow, her chest rising and falling, the flush creeping from her cheeks down her neck to her collarbone.
She’s beautiful. Not the polished beauty she performs at school—the messy, undone beauty of a person who’s stopped pretending.
I kiss down her stomach. Over the burns. Below her navel. My fingers hook into the waistband of her shorts and I look up at her—one last check, one last moment for her to say stop.
She lifts her hips. I pull the shorts down her legs.
She’s bare underneath and the sight of her—all of her, every scar and every curve and the vulnerable openness of a body that has been used as a weapon against its owner for years—hits me somewhere primal.
Not just wanting. Something deeper. Reverence, maybe.
Or fury at every person who touched her without earning this.
I kiss the inside of her knee. Move up. Slowly. My lips against the soft skin of her inner thigh, and she’s trembling—not fear trembling, anticipation trembling, her legs opening wider as I get closer and her breathing going ragged above me.
“Has anyone done this for you?” I ask against her thigh. “With their mouth?”
She shakes her head. Fast. Eyes locked on mine.
“Then watch,” I say. “Watch me.”
I flatten my tongue against her. One long, slow stroke, and the sound she makes—holy fucking Christ, the sound she makes—is a broken, desperate cry that she tries to stifle with her hand and can’t.
Her hips jerk up. I press them down with my palm, hold her steady, and do it again.
Again. Building a rhythm that’s slow and deliberate because I want her to feel every second of this—want her body to understand that this is about her pleasure, her choice, her name on my lips and nobody else’s.
Her fingers find my hair. Grip. Pull. The sting of it makes me groan against her, and the vibration draws another sound from her that’s louder than the last.
I slide one finger inside her. Curl it. She arches off the bed, and I can feel her thighs tightening around my head, her body coiling toward something it’s never reached by choice.
“Kaiden—I’m—oh God—”
I add a second finger. Circle her clit with my tongue. She’s shaking—her whole body, the mattress, the headboard tapping the wall—and when she comes, it’s with my name on her lips and her back bowed off the bed and her hand fisted so tight in my hair that my eyes water.
I work her through it. Slow. Gentle. Until the aftershocks fade to tremors and her grip loosens and she lies there with one arm thrown over her eyes, chest heaving, a sound coming from her throat that’s half laugh and half something else entirely.
I kiss my way back up her body. She pulls her arm away from her eyes and looks at me, and her expression is wrecked and open and stunned—the expression of a person who just discovered something about their own body that nobody ever bothered to show them.
I kiss her. She tastes herself on my mouth and moans into the kiss, her hand pulling me closer, her hips pressing up against mine where I’m still hard and aching.
“Kaiden.” Against my lips. “I want—”
“Tell me.”
“I want you. All of you. Now.”
I reach for my jeans on the floor. Wallet. Condom. Her eyes follow every movement as I roll it on, and there’s something in the way she watches—intent, present, choosing to see every part of this—that tells me she’s rewriting something. Replacing a memory. Building a new one on top of the wreckage.
I settle between her legs. My hand finds her throat—instinct, the language my body speaks—and her eyes flare, and she nods before I can ask.
I push inside her slowly. Watching her face.
Watching for any sign of—Her mouth falls open.
Her eyes squeeze shut. Her hand grips my forearm where it extends to her throat, and the grip says “don’t stop” louder than any word could.
I pull back. Push in again. Deeper. She makes a sound that’s not a word—a gasp, a cry, something between pain and pleasure that exists on a frequency I didn’t know was real.
“Look at me,” I say. “When I’m inside you, you look at me.”
Her eyes open. Green. Wet. Blazing. She holds my gaze and I hold hers, and we stay like that—connected, locked, seeing each other in a way that has nothing to do with the physical and everything to do with what we confessed in this room an hour ago.
I move. She moves with me. Her hips meeting mine, her legs wrapping around my waist, her heels digging into my lower back with a pressure that sends me higher.
My hand tightens on her throat—controlled, measured, enough to make her eyes go black and her breath catch and her walls clench around me so tight I have to stop moving for a second or it’ll be over.
“Harder,” she says. Not a whisper. A demand.
I give her harder. My free hand grips her hip—tight, bruise-tight—and I drive into her with a force that makes the headboard hit the wall, and she’s not quiet anymore, she’s vocal, my name and profanity and sounds that don’t have translations, and I’m losing the thread of myself, dissolving into the feeling and the heat and the sight of her underneath me choosing this, wanting this, asking for more—
A flash. Not here. A different room. A different body over mine. The smell of concrete and—
I freeze. My rhythm breaks. My hand goes slack on her throat, and the room tilts sideways, and for a terrible second I’m not here. I’m twelve. I’m in the dark. I’m—
“Kaid.” Cat’s hands on my face. Warm. Steady. Pulling me back from the edge of something that has no bottom. “You’re here. You’re with me. Stay with me.”
I blink. Her face. Green eyes. Freckles. The scar at her hairline. Not the basement. Not twelve. Here. Now. Her.
“Do you want to stop?” she asks. No judgment. No alarm. Just the calm, practiced question of someone who knows exactly where I went because she’s been there too.
“No.” My voice is rough. “Stay with me.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”