Chapter 22 #3
“You sure? Because once I start, Cat, I’m not stopping.
I’ve been lying next to you every night for two weeks, watching you sleep, listening to you breathe, not touching you because I didn’t want to hurt you.
And every single night I’ve been going out of my mind.
So if you’re telling me to stop being careful—” His hand slides from my waist to my stomach.
Lower. His fingers tracing the edge of my underwear. “You need to mean it.”
“I mean it.”
His teeth close on my earlobe. His hand dips below the waistband. His fingers slide against me and my whole body jolts—the sensation after weeks of nothing is electric, overwhelming, every nerve ending firing at once.
“So wet.” His voice in my ear. Dark. Satisfied. “All night, Cat? While you were dancing on me? While I was pressed against you on that floor? You’ve been like this the whole time?”
“Yes.” Barely a whisper.
“Good girl.”
The praise hits the place it always hits—deep, somewhere between my ribs and my spine, the place that blooms instead of recoiling. He feels my body’s response—the clench, the sharp intake of breath—and his smile against my neck is dark and devastating.
His fingers circle my clit. Slow. Torturous. The pace of a person who has all the time in the world and intends to use every second of it. My hips roll against his hand—involuntary, chasing—and he holds my hip still with his other hand.
“Don’t move.” A command. “You take what I give you. When I give it.”
I whimper. The sound is undignified and I do not care. His fingers slide lower. Two of them push inside me—slow, deliberate, curling—and my head falls back against his shoulder and my mouth opens and a sound comes out that I will never be able to reproduce voluntarily.
He works me. Slow. Patient. His fingers inside me, his thumb on my clit, his mouth on my neck leaving marks that I’ll have to cover tomorrow and don’t want to.
The orgasm builds—not fast, not the frantic kind.
The kind that builds from the foundation up, layer by layer, his hand constructing it with the precision of someone who has learned my body and is using that knowledge deliberately.
“Kaid—I’m going to—”
“Not yet.” He pulls his hand away. I make a sound that is half protest and half murder.
He turns me around. Picks me up—hands under my thighs, lifting me, my legs wrapping around his waist. Carries me to the bed. Lays me down—not gently. The mattress hits my back and his body covers mine and the weight of him is the most grounding thing I’ve felt in weeks.
He kneels between my legs. Looks down at me. I’m in the black bra and the underwear and the bandages and the necklace and the heels that I haven’t taken off and his face—the way he’s looking at me—is worship and hunger braided together so tightly they’re the same thing.
“Leave the heels on,” he says.
He reaches behind me. Unclasps the bra. Pulls it away. His mouth finds my breast—lips closing around one nipple, tongue circling, his hand cupping the other, and the dual sensation makes my back arch off the bed.
Lower. His mouth trailing down my stomach. Kissing the bandages—not avoiding them, not pretending they’re not there. Kissing them. His lips on the gauze, on the tape, on the thin skin where the bleach burns are still healing. Claiming every damaged inch of me.
He pulls my underwear down. Off. Looks up at me from between my legs.
“I’ve been thinking about this for two weeks,” he says. “Every night. Lying next to you. Smelling your hair. Feeling you pressed against me. I’ve been losing my fucking mind, Cat.”
His mouth on me. Not gentle. Not the slow buildup.
His tongue flat against my clit, his hands gripping my thighs, spreading me open, eating me like he’s making up for every night he didn’t touch me.
My hand goes to his hair—pulling, gripping, the mohawk crushed in my fist—and the sound he makes against me vibrates through my entire body.
Two fingers inside me while his tongue works.
His free hand sliding up to my breast, rolling my nipple between his fingers.
Three points of contact. My hips are off the bed, pressing into his mouth, and he lets me—lets me use him, take what I need, ride his face with a desperation that has nothing to do with performance and everything to do with the fact that my body has been a thing people hurt for two weeks and right now it is a thing someone is worshipping.
The orgasm hits like a detonation. Not the building kind from his fingers—the sudden, shattering kind, my body clenching and my vision going white and his name coming out of my mouth in a sound that would be embarrassing if I had any capacity for embarrassment left.
He doesn’t stop. Doesn’t slow. Works me through it until the aftershocks become tremors and the tremors become shaking and I have to push his head away because the sensitivity is too much.
He rises. Wipes his mouth on the back of his hand. The look on his face—dark, satisfied, dangerous—makes my stomach flip even though I just came so hard I saw stars.
He stands. Unbuckles his belt. The sound of leather through loops—the particular sound that my body now associates with what comes next.
He pushes his slacks down. His boxers. He’s hard—achingly, visibly—and the sight of him is something I will never get used to.
The tattoos covering his torso. The muscle.
The scars underneath the ink that I know are there because my fingers have traced them in the dark.
He crawls over me. His body covering mine. Skin on skin—the heat of him, the weight, the particular feeling of being beneath someone who is bigger and stronger and is using that size to make you feel surrounded instead of trapped.
His hand finds my throat. I nod before he asks. His fingers close—the pressure I’ve taught him I need, firm enough to slow my blood, measured enough to be safe.
“Look at me,” he says. His eyes are black. The pupils blown. The grey nearly gone. “When I’m inside you, you don’t close your eyes. You stay here. With me.”
He positions himself. Pushes in—not slow.
Not the gentle first inch. Hard, in one thrust, filling me completely, and the sound I make is guttural and raw and so is the sound he makes and for a second neither of us moves because the intensity of it—the fullness, the heat, the skin-on-skin contact with nothing between us—is too much.
“Fuck.” His voice is destroyed. His forehead drops to mine. “Fuck, Cat. You feel—after two weeks of not—you feel—”
“Move.” I grab his hips. Pull him. “Kaiden. Move.”
He moves. And the careful boy disappears.
He pulls out. Slams back in. The headboard hits the wall—loud, and neither of us cares that his parents are downstairs and my father is down the hall.
He sets a pace that’s not gentle, not measured, the pace of a person who has been restrained for too long and the restraint has broken.
His hips driving into me. His hand on my throat.
His mouth against my ear saying things that would make the ice princess combust.
“You’re mine.” Thrust. “This body is mine.” Thrust. “Every sound you make. Every mark on your skin. Every scar and every burn and every inch that those fuckers tried to take from you—” His hand tightens on my throat.
His eyes bore into mine. “Mine. They didn’t get this.
They never had this. This is ours. Say it. ”
“Ours.” The word comes out broken. Breathless. His hand on my throat making it a whisper.
“Louder.”
“Ours.” Louder. My nails digging into his back. My heels locked behind his hips, pulling him deeper.
“Again.” He shifts the angle—tilts my hips up, drives in deeper, and the change hits something inside me that makes my vision fracture.
“Ours.” Not a whisper anymore. A declaration.
Said with my body arching off the bed and his hand on my throat and the headboard hitting the wall in a rhythm that matches his hips and I don’t care who hears.
Let them hear. Let the whole house hear.
Let the word exist in the air outside our bodies—ours, ours, ours.
He releases my throat. Both hands on my hips. Lifts me—adjusts, angling my body so he can drive in even harder, and the depth makes my eyes water and a sound come out of me that I didn’t know I could produce.
“Good girl.” Against my neck. “My good girl. Taking all of me. You were made for this, Cat. Made for me.”
The orgasm builds. Not slow this time—fast, urgent, a freight train of sensation that starts where we’re connected and radiates outward.
His thumb finds my clit. Circles. The added pressure combined with the depth and the pace and his voice in my ear saying “come for me, Cat, I want to feel it” sends me over the edge so hard my body locks and my back bows and his name tears out of my throat like something being ripped free.
He follows. I feel it—the way his rhythm breaks, the final thrust that buries him as deep as he can go, the groan against my collarbone that vibrates through both our bodies.
His arms lock around me—tight, crushing, the grip of a person who is afraid the thing in his arms will disappear.
He shakes. I shake. We hold each other through the aftershocks, our bodies trembling with the particular violence of two people who have been denied this for too long and have just consumed it in a single, devastating act.
He doesn’t pull out. Doesn’t move. Just lies on top of me—heavy, warm, his face in my neck, his breathing ragged. My fingers in his hair. The sweat cooling on our skin. The room settling.
After a long time—minutes, maybe—he lifts his head. Looks at me. His expression is something I haven’t seen before. Not the dark version. Not the careful version. Something new. Something raw and open and terrified in the way that only vulnerability can make a person terrified.
“Are you okay?” he asks. Quiet. Checking. Not because he thinks he hurt me—because the intimacy of what just happened was so enormous that he needs to make sure I’m still here.
“I’m here.” I trace his jaw. The mohawk destroyed. His lips swollen. “I’m here, Kaid. I’m not going anywhere.”
He presses his mouth to mine. Soft now. The gentleness that comes after—the version only I get. The boy under the king.
He pulls out. Rolls beside me. I curl into him—the position, the configuration our bodies have memorized.
His arm around my waist. My face against his chest. His heartbeat under my ear—fast, still coming down, gradually slowing to the rhythm I fall asleep to every night.
The Celtic knot necklace presses between us. The gold warm from our bodies.
“Kaid.”
“Yeah.”
“I missed you. Not just this. But this. I missed your hands on me in a way that wasn’t careful. I missed being wanted instead of handled. I missed being a body someone desires instead of a body someone is treating.”
His arm tightens. “I will never stop wanting you, Cat. Not when you’re healing.
Not when you’re breaking. Not when you’re covered in bandages or when the scars fade or when we’re old and none of this matters anymore.
You are the most devastating thing that’s ever happened to me and I will want you every day until the want becomes the thing I’m made of. ”
I close my eyes. His hand draws slow circles on my hip. The house is quiet. The October night presses against the windows.
Tomorrow the war resumes. Lawyers, court dates, press conferences, the machinery of consequence. Tomorrow I’ll be the girl who survived things.
But tonight I am a girl in a Celtic knot necklace with heels still on and a boy’s fingerprints on her hips and the word “ours” still echoing in the dark.
And that is everything.