Chapter 11
I wake up warm, and it takes me a second to understand why.
I stretch and inhale deep, twisting in soft sheets until I’m fully awake.
Then it hits me: it’s light outside past the half-drawn windows. These sheets smell like… Oh, my god. I fell asleep.
I fell asleep in Vincent’s bed and…
I sit up and it takes my head a second to process.
The other side of the mattress is empty, the covers thrown back, the sheets gone cool. He's been up a while. And I don't have to guess how it went—he woke up, found me still here where he left me, and got up and left rather than be in the room when I opened my eyes.
He didn't wake me. He just left.
It puts an ache under my ribs that I can’t explain.
Whatever last night was, it didn't survive daylight. I mean, it couldn’t have anyways.
I look around at his room now that it’s not shrouded in darkness.
It's all clean lines and dark wood. The bed takes up most of the floor space with one dresser along the far wall. The curtains are still half-drawn. There’s a watch and a folded paper on his nightstand, but everything else is squared away. Neat.
It's a nice room. It just feels empty now that he's not in it.
There's a shirt over the back of the chair by the window. One of his—white, worn soft, left there some night before this one. I slide out of his bed and go to the chair, my hands fisting at my sides. I can’t help myself.
I pick it up, and before I can talk myself out of the pathetic small want of it I bring it to my face and breathe in.
Cold wood. Whiskey-warm underneath. Him. It pulls my entire body tight and blood pools low in my belly. My cock jerks against Calder’s sweatpants as I shamelessly inhale again.
This is bad. This is so bad.
I put the shirt down. Make myself put it down, and get out of his room before I do something even more pathetic, slipping down the hall to my own on quiet feet.
And it's only when I shut my door behind me that I really feel the rest of it. The problem I woke up with and was too busy panicking to deal with.
I'm so hard. Aching, insistent, and it isn't going anywhere.
A whole night pressed against the heat of him, his scent in my lungs for hours—my body's made up its mind and it will not be argued with.
I press the heel of my hand against my cock and that only makes it worse, a jolt of want so sharp it steals my breath.
And there's something under it. Something new. A low heat banked deep in me, like a coal that's caught and just needs air—I can feel it the way you feel a storm coming. Not here yet, but close.
I need this gone before I can face anyone. Cold water, I tell myself. Cold water and it'll pass.
But when I strip out of Calder's clothes and step under the spray, cold isn't what my hand reaches for, and it isn't what my body wants. It wants him. It want… things it shouldn’t want. And I'm too far gone, too wound up, too full of that low banked heat to fight it anymore.
Just this once, I tell myself. Just to take the edge off. Just so I can breathe.
I brace a hand against the tile and give in.
My fist closes around my cock and the first stroke is already too much—slick and tight and almost painful with how hard I am.
The water runs hot over my shoulders, down my back, and I tip my forehead to the cool tile, eyes squeezed shut, trying to keep it mechanical.
Just friction. Just pressure. Just enough to make the ache stop so I can walk out of this room and pretend last night never happened.
It doesn’t stay mechanical very long.
The second stroke pulls a sound out of me I don’t recognize, low and rough, and the image lands before I can stop it: Vincent’s arm heavy across my body in the dark.
The solid weight of him. The way his breath had moved the hair at the back of my neck.
I feel it again—phantom heat, the press of a bigger body caging mine—and my hips jerk forward into my own hand like he’s still there.
I bite down on the inside of my cheek hard enough to taste copper.
Keep it simple. Keep it him and nothing else.
Just the memory of that arm, that chest, the low rumble of his voice when he’d told me to sleep.
I stroke faster, thumbing over the head on every upstroke, and the heat under my skin answers like it was waiting for permission.
It spreads, low and greedy, curling through my gut, and suddenly the fantasy isn’t just last night.
It’s what could have happened if neither of us had fallen asleep.
If he’d rolled over and pinned me with that same arm, mouth at my throat, teeth scraping the sensitive skin on my neck.
If he’d pushed my sweatpants down and taken what my body was already offering.
A broken sound escapes me. My free hand skids down the tile, fingers spreading for purchase as my knees threaten to buckle.
I hate how easy it is. How my mind supplies the rest without effort—Vincent’s mouth in my hair, the scent of him thick enough to drown in, the low praise that would have sounded almost like a threat. That’s it. Take what you need.
My cock throbs in my fist. Precome mixes with the water, makes everything slicker, filthier. I fuck into my hand harder, chasing it, and the coal in my belly flares white-hot.
Shame hits almost as hard as the pleasure.
I try to shove the images away—force it back to something clean, something I can justify—but the heat doesn’t care about my shame.
It feeds on it. The pictures keep coming: Vincent’s hand instead of mine, his weight pinning me to the mattress, the rough scrape of his stubble against my throat while he works me open.
Something feral under the want lifts its head and likes it.
Likes how desperate I am. Likes that I can’t stop.
“Fuck—” The word breaks on a gasp. My rhythm stutters, then turns frantic.
Water sheets down my face, into my open mouth. I’m shaking, thighs locked, every muscle drawn tight as the pleasure coils sharper and meaner. And an ache even deeper. Inside me… One I’ve never felt before.
But it makes the fantasy dirtier. Makes me stroke myself like I’m trying to punish the need out of my own body.
It doesn’t work.
When it hits, it hits hard enough to blank everything out for a second.
My cock pulses in my fist, spilling over my knuckles in thick ropes that the water immediately begins to wash away.
The sound that leaves me is raw, almost a sob.
My knees give. I catch myself against the tile with both hands, forehead pressed to the cool surface, gasping, shaking, still half-hard and oversensitive as the last aftershocks roll through me.
My heart is going insane in my chest, thumping so hard I think it may never settle.
The water keeps running.
I stay there longer than I should, chest heaving, desperately trying to get my heart under control, watching the evidence of what I just did swirl down the drain. The ache between my legs is quieter now. Manageable. But the coal under my ribs is still lit. Still breathing.
If anything, the orgasm only fed it—gave it a taste of what it wants and left it hungrier for the real thing.
I turn the water colder and force myself to stand under it until my skin goes tight and the shaking gets worse.
It doesn’t help the way I thought it would.
When I finally shut the water off, the silence in the bathroom feels too loud. I towel off with mechanical movements, avoid looking at myself in the mirror, and step out into the cooler air of my room. Vincent’s scent is still in my lungs. The low heat is still banked and waiting.
Just taking the edge off was a lie.
But I can't stand here all morning fixating on that, so I make myself move—do the next normal thing, and the next, because normal is the only thing holding me together right now.
My healing hand. I unwind the last of the tape and it's healed enough that I don't need the wrap anymore—the cut's closed to a thin pink line across my palm, tender but clean.
It'll scar, the doctor said. One more mark I won't explain to anyone.
Funny, almost: the wound I could see is closing up right as the one I can't starts splitting open.
I pull on Calder's clothes, since there always seems to be a supply of them in my dresser. They still don’t fit me, but something about having his clothes on my skin calms me down a little more than the shower did.
Then there's nothing left to do up here but go down and face everything.
Face… Vincent.
Half of me is dreading the sight of him. The other half is moving a little too eager out of the safety of my room.
I take the stairs slow, one hand on the rail, and round the corner into the hall that leads to the kitchen.
Three steps in, the smell hits me.
Hot copper. Smoke. Something scorched and restless underneath it, filling the whole downstairs. My body goes tight and strange all at once, the coal in my belly flaring before I even know why, and I stop where I am, one hand flat on the wall.
I know that scent. I've smelled it before—but never like this. Never so much of it, never everywhere at once.
Is it Killian… is he…
I step into the kitchen and there he is.
Killian.
He's at the counter with his back half to me, a glass of water in one hand, and even like this—rumpled, half-turned away—he's the kind of good-looking that isn't fair.
Dark hair pushed back off his face, still damp at the ends.
The long line of his back under a black t-shirt gone thin with washing, the sleeves stretched over his arms. He's built to fight, and it shows.
Then he shifts to set the glass down, and I catch the rest of it.
He's a mess. A bruise going green-yellow high on one cheekbone.
His lower lip split and healing dark, pulling the corner of his mouth into something meaner than a smirk.
And when he reaches across the counter his sleeve rides up on a fresh tattoo climbing his shoulder, the skin around it still raised and angry-red.