Chapter Three
Another gray morning, the rain pattering the glass.
The dream goes before I can hold it, only a weight pressing me down and a wanting that follows me up out of sleep, and I shove the quilt off and stand into the chill of the room.
Jeans, the heavy sweater, socks. I drag my fingers through my hair and don’t let myself think, because I have decided not to think, and I head down.
The great room’s dim, the stove down to coals. I cross to the front door to throw the bolt and open up for the day.
He’s on the porch.
I see him through the side glass before my hand finds the deadbolt, standing under the eave with the rain coming down behind him, flannel soaked black across the shoulders, hair flat to his skull, looking at the door.
Not coming to it. Standing. And the second he sees me see him, his chest goes up and down on one long breath, and he takes a step toward the door.
I turn the deadbolt and open it.
He comes through.
No knock, no good morning, nothing. He moves through the door like a man who’s been standing at it half the night working out exactly this, and his hands are on me before I’ve got the door shut behind him.
One cold palm flat at my waist, sliding up under the sweater onto the bare skin of my ribs, and the chill of it punches a gasp out of me.
The other hand spreads at the back of my head, those long fingers in my hair, and his face is right there, his chest heaving, his pupils blown black in the gray light.
He kisses me.
His tongue is past my teeth and curled around mine before I can think, his mouth so unbelievably wet.
Like he’s salivating. Starving. The thought and the cold of it should be wrong, but I can’t make myself care.
I grab two fistfuls of soaked flannel and haul him closer.
The hand on my ribs slides around to the small of my back and crushes me against him.
The rumble starts up in his chest and goes straight into mine before it drops down low in my belly and sits there.
He drags his mouth off mine and down the side of my throat, and at the soft place under my jaw he breathes in, hard, a rough open-mouthed pull at my skin.
The fingers at my waist clench, and I feel five hard points dig in through the sweater.
Not fingernails. Something sharper. It pulls a sound out of me, half whine and half moan, and he answers it with that low rumble. His mouth comes back up to take mine.
He walks me backward two steps, and my back hits the wall by the door.
His hands drop to the waistband of my pants, nearly ripping my jeans and underwear down my legs. I have a brief moment to gasp, and then those cold, too-long fingers are wrapping around my thighs. He picks me up off the floor like I weigh nothing, and crowds in close.
He gets the front of his own jeans open one-handed.
The wet shirt’s against my belly where the sweater’s shoved up.
I feel the cold blunt length of him drag up the inside of my thigh, and then he’s there, and then he’s pushing up into me, and the sound that comes out of me bounces off the entryway walls.
He’s too big, and he’s too cold, and he goes in too easy because I am so wet for him it would be embarrassing if I had room left to be embarrassed.
He presses in and in deeper. So deep it aches, and I claw his shoulders.
He drops his face into my throat and breathes me in and growls.
My pussy clenches around him, and suddenly he’s fully seated.
I let out a ragged moan. My thighs are trembling in his grip, my pussy still fluttering in something like panic. His hands tighten on my hips, and he starts to move. It’s nothing like I’m used to.
August fucks me slow and deep and hard, the wall thudding against my back with every drive of his hips, the cold of him dragging out and shoving back into me like he is making a place for himself.
Like he’ll die if he can’t get deeper inside me.
My head drops back against the wall, and I squeeze my eyes shut.
His mouth is open on my throat, and I feel the points of his teeth.
Too many, too sharp. Not breaking the skin, just pressed to my pulse, and I push my throat up into them. Wetness coats the side of my throat, and I realize with sudden clarity that he’s salivating like a hungry beast. That maybe he is one.
“August.”
I don’t know I’ve said it till it’s out.
The rumble grows louder. His tongue drags a long wet stripe up my neck, and that feels just a little off too.
It’s too long and agile to be human. His hand comes off my hip and shoves down between us to where I’m gushing around him.
His fingers carefully explore, dipping alongside his cock for the briefest of moments.
Just enough to make me whine and frantically shake my head.
I’m stretched to the point of ruin, but I’ve never been wetter.
I can feel my own slickness covering him each time our bodies meet.
I imagine it’s dripping down his legs and I’ll find a puddle of evidence on the floor later.
His thumb finds my clit, so sensitive and swollen a single touch makes me almost scream.
His cold finger circles as his hips grind deep.
I come with an overwhelmed sob, my pussy clamping down tight and my eyes clenched tighter.
I come around the cold length of him with my heels locked at the base of his spine and my fingers fisted in his wet hair.
I clench over and over, the stroke of his fingers making me wail while he growls against my throat.
He does not come. He slows but keeps going until I’ve got no breath left.
Finally, he goes still, his face in my neck, his chest heaving against mine.
After a moment, he pulls out, and the cold drag of him leaving wrenches a noise out of me.
The world flips, and I’m on my back on the entry rug, knees spread around his hips while he kneels.
He strips the sweater off over my head and throws it somewhere.
I can’t do more than let him move me like a rag doll.
He’s still in the open jeans and the soaked flannel.
He looks down at me on the floor, his eyes gone black and shining.
His face has sharpened, the bones of it standing too close under the skin.
The teeth between his parted lips are wicked little points, more sharklike than human.
I look up at the man who is becoming something else, and I reach for him with both hands.
He puts his mouth on me.
The hollow of my throat. My collarbone. Down my sternum.
His cold mouth closes over my nipple, and his tongue rolls across it.
I buck up off the floor with the shock of it.
His teeth catch, drag, let go. He does the other one the same.
Then he’s working down my belly, open-mouthed, the wet little sounds of it loud in the quiet, the rumble going the whole time.
He sets his teeth in the soft flesh over my hipbone, a small careful bite, a catch and a tug of skin gone before it can hurt. Nuzzles the curls between my thighs, his nose finding my clit hard enough to make my hips jerk in his grip. He bites the inside of my thigh where the skin is thinnest.
He fastens his mouth there and sucks, hard, patient, and the cold of it blooms into a deep ache that climbs the inside of my leg, and his eyes the whole time are open and up on my face.
I’m watching him. He’s watching me. He doesn’t stop until I feel more slickness dribble out of me.
Then he lifts his head and looks at the mark he’s made with a small pleased smile, then moves to the other thigh and does it again, slower, taking his time about it.
I lie there and let him mark me, my pussy fluttering and clit so sensitive a single touch will make me come.
He drags his tongue up the crease of my thigh and settles his mouth over me.
His fingers tighten on my thighs as if he still half expects me to flee.
I’m far past that. His tongue slips between my folds and the first slow, cold drag of it makes me cry out.
He finds my clit and laps at it hungrily.
My thighs tense, but there’s no breaking his grip.
I squirm, moaning his name as he sucks my clit between his lips and draws on it hard.
I scream, the orgasm ripped out of me before I’m ready. His fingers lengthen, wrapping around my thighs fully as he suckles at my throbbing clit. Flicking with his tongue, drawing helpless little cries from me.
“August, please!”
I lift my head to cast a pleading look down my body.
The hands on my thighs are wrong. The fingers are too long, too many joints in them, and the nails at the ends are dark and curved. My heart lurches. He feels me see it. He lifts his eyes to mine, his mouth still on me, and drags his cold tongue down to my entrance.
His eyes are black. Not blown pupils, not dark gray in dim light. Solid, shining black like a shark. I should be screaming. There’s a shotgun in the cabinet under the radio fifteen feet away, and I should be crawling for it. I push myself up against his mouth in a wordless plea.
His tongue slithers into me, his claws dig into my thighs, and the wet sounds of it fill the room.
The sound drops lower, into something a creature makes over a kill.
The pleased rumble of a lion. He plunges his tongue in and out of me, and it is too long.
It reaches the end of my channel and prods there, cold and seeking.
I don’t stop him. I can barely breathe. I grab the wet flannel on his shoulders and shake while he licks at my cervix.
It’s a deep, overwhelming pleasure that blocks out everything else.
When his thumb sweeps over my clit, I scream.
His name tears out of me as I come so hard I feel tears on my cheeks.
I come, and I keep coming, and he won’t let it stop.
I’m sobbing wordlessly, my body trembling.
He lifts his mouth off me while I’m shaking and crawls up the length of my body.
He pushes back into me, and I cry out at the size of him.
He’s still so big, but there’s no fight left in me.
My pussy yields, hungrily pulling him deeper.
His hands close around my wrists and pin them to the floorboards over my head.
He settles over me, the whole cold weight of him, his inhuman face two inches above mine. He’s drooling. His mouth hangs open, and I feel it land on my throat, my chin. And the smell of him is everywhere now, wet dirt and old iron and the back of the smokehouse.
The rumble doesn’t stop. His hips work into me, deep and slow, and his face stays right over mine the whole time. He is looking at me, and there is no man left in the look at all. He is starving. He is looking down at me the way the marten must have looked at the bird.
And every animal part of me knows it.
The hair stands up all down my arms under his cold grip.
My pulse pounds in my throat right under where his open mouth is hanging, and he could.
I know in my heart that he could. One drop of his head and it would be done, and I cannot get my wrists free, and I cannot get out from under his hips, and I cannot move except how he’s moving me.
I have never been so wet. I have never wanted anything the way I want him to keep going. The fear and the wanting have run together into one single screaming live wire, and I am riding it with my hips lifting up to take him deeper. Chasing the thing that is going to kill me.
His parted lips hang over mine, dripping on my chin, and out of the rumble comes a word.
“Ashley.”
Low. Wrecked. Not his voice, the thing under his voice, old and rough.
“Ashley.”
I’m coming.
I don’t feel it start. I’m just in it, my back wrenching up off the floor into his cold body and my wrists fighting against his hands and a sound pulled out of me.
My pussy clamps down on him so tight it aches while the fear screams and the want screams louder.
His black eyes hold me through every second of it, and he does not look away, and he does not come.
He fucks me through it. Through the peak and down the far side. He keeps going, and I’m still shaking under him. I can’t tell anymore where I stop, and his cold weight starts. The pleasure keeps washing through me in long waves that won’t quit, as the edges of the room start to go.
The gray at the windows goes soft.
The cold of his hands on my wrists gets very far away.
I look up at his face hanging over mine, the black eyes, the wet, open mouth, the sharp teeth.
It’s there, but it’s also a mile off. The rumble is the only sound left in the whole world.
My eyes are falling shut, and I can’t stop them, and the last thing in front of me is the bottomless darkness of his eyes, and then there’s nothing at all.