Chapter 14 #2
I swallow. My voice comes out small. “Don’t stop. I still want it. I’m just—”
“Scared.” He nods once, like he already knew. His forehead rests against mine and I get a little lost in his eyes. “You can be both. Ready for me to move again?”
A shaky breath. “Yes. Please.”
He moves again only after that. Slow. Checking my face with every shift of his fingers until the tension bleeds back out of my muscles and the pleasure starts climbing again.
My grip on his forearm loosens and he spreads his fingers, scissoring me open.
I inhale sharply and grind my ass down onto his hand, the sensation of him opening me up exactly where I needed it making my eyes roll back.
“Fuck, Sonny–”
Calder grunts as his hips buck at my side, his erection digging into my hip. Knowing he’s as fired up as I am has me feeling a lot less scared and a lot more brave.
“Cal,” I breathe out and lick my lips. “I need–”
“Yeah,” he says, like he read my mind. His pulls his fingers out of me slowly and the immediate ache that takes over is almost too much to bear.
“I know, I know.”
He rolls on top of me, still holding himself up, and reaches down to fist his cock. My gaze slides down until I see the thick girth of him and suddenly that bravery is fading away.
“Hey,” he snaps at me to get my attention. “Look at me.”
I do, swallowing hard as my pulse roars.
He leans down and kisses me hard, his tongue plunging deep until he’s stealing my breath and all I can think about is the delicious sweet taste of him. My mind goes blank as he grabs my legs and spreads them wide.
When he finally lines himself up, the blunt head of his cock presses against my hole, and the pressure is so teasing I almost cry out. But he does it the same way—quiet, deliberate, waiting.
“I’m going to push in. Tell me if it’s too much.”
I meet his eyes, my cock throbbing and my ass too empty. “I’m ready.”
The first press of him is slow enough that I feel every inch. The stretch burns, deep and overwhelming, and I make a broken sound that isn’t quite pain. He freezes halfway, breathing hard against my neck.
“Talk to me.”
“I...” I grunt and fist the sheets. “I’m… Full,” I manage. “It’s—a lot.” My hands find his shoulders, seeking the warmth of his skin, and hang on. “Don’t stop. Just… slow.”
He sinks the rest of the way in careful increments, pausing every time my breath catches, until he’s fully seated and both of us are shaking.
For a moment he just stays there, forehead pressed to mine, giving me time.
His cock is thick and hot inside me, stretching me open in a way that makes the heat roar.
It’s… sensational. The tension in my body, the pain, settles until all I can focus on is Calder’s cock deep inside me. Cal leans in, his nose dragging alone my neck as he inhales deep. His cock jerks inside me and I whimper, suddenly needing more, more, more.
“Okay?” he asks.
I nod against him. “Move. Please.”
He does. Unhurried rolls of his hips, deep and steady, angling until he finds the place that makes my vision white out.
I can’t stop the quiet, punched-out sounds that keep slipping out of me, or the way my fingers dig into his back, or the soft, half-formed pleas that escape when the pleasure spikes too sharp—little broken “don’t stop” and “please” and “Cal—” that I would never say if I had any control left.
He answers with short, careful words when I need them. “Still with me?” “I’ve got you.” “Breathe.”
He fucks me deep and slow, working me open more one thrust at a time.
I feel the slick drip down my ass as he pulls out and then buries himself back inside.
For the first time, I notice Calder’s reactions.
The tension in his jaw, the muscles popping in his shoulders, his eyes looking down between as he watching his cock slide in and out.
I can tell he’s holding back and my chest tightens, my stomach fluttering a bit.
He stays steady, fucking me on a gentle rhythm as the heat and pleasure swirl in my body and everything tenses up. Pressure builds at the base of my spine, my cock hard as a rock as I squeeze my ass around him.
“Fuck…” I whine I feel myself starting to surrender.
“Sonny?”
My mouth falls open as the sensation narrows and then explodes–sharp and sudden and so intense my whole body locks around his cock.
My voice goes high and thin, a series of whimpers as I slick even more and make the next few thrusts wetter, filthier.
He follows not long after, burying his face against my throat and holding himself deep as he finishes.
He stays inside me through the aftershocks, one hand stroking slowly up and down my side until my breathing starts to even out.
For a second, the world calms down. My body isn’t overheated. My senses aren’t overwhelmed. All I can think about is how good it feels to have Cal’s skin pressed against mine, feel his breath fluttering against my neck.
I float in the warm, heavy quiet of his body over mine and the scent of cut grass and the knowledge that I am, for the moment, not empty anymore.
For a long time neither of us says anything.
Then he eases out of me, slow, careful about it even now, and I make a small wounded sound at the loss that I'd be humiliated by if I had anything left to be humiliated with.
He drops onto his back beside me and reaches, and I go without thinking, boneless, until I'm tucked half onto his chest with my face in the crook of his neck and his arm heavy across my back.
His heart is slamming under my ear. Mine's finally coming down out of my throat. His hand moves slow up and down my spine like he's gentling something skittish.
And then, somewhere in all that quiet, my brain comes back online.
Oh, God.
Every single thing I said. Out loud. In this room, to this man—the begging, the please, the sounds I made, the way I ground down on his hand like—
Heat climbs up my neck that has nothing to do with the heat.
"Nope." Calder's arm tightens across my back. "Don't."
"I didn't say anything." My voice comes out thin, barely a whisper.
"You went stiff as a board." He shifts down, gets his face into my hair. "You're in your head. Come out of it."
"I said things," I whisper into his shoulder and wince.
"You did."
I shake my head. "Don't agree with me."
I feel him smile against my temple. "You want me to lie to you?"
"Yes. Please. Immediately."
"Alright." His hand keeps moving up and down my back, slow, warm. "You were completely silent and extremely dignified throughout."
A laugh punches out of me before I can stop it, and it turns into something wetter halfway through, and he just holds on tighter and doesn't say anything about that either.
I lie there a while and soak up how nice it feels to be attached to his strong body. But embarrassment creeps back in like claws around my throat as I run what just happened over in my mind.
At the end…
"Can I ask you something?" I mumble.
"Yeah."
"It's stupid."
"Ask me anyway."
I have to get a breath first. "I thought—when we were—" My face is on fire. Jesus Christ, I don’t even think I can say it. "I thought alphas..."
He waits. He doesn't fill it in for me, which is somehow worse.
"...you know." I can’t look at him.
"Knotted?"
I nod against his shoulder and shut my eyes.
He's quiet for a second. When he answers, there's something in his voice I haven't heard from him before—careful, almost bashful.
"That's not something that just happens," he says. "An alpha knots in rut. Or with a bonded mate. Only then."
"Oh."
"I've never—" He stops. Starts again. "I've never had a rut. Never been bonded to anybody. So. No." His thumb moves once against my ribs. "Never happened to me."
I lift my head off his shoulder. "Never?"
"Never." He isn't quite looking at me.
Something about that—this enormous man who put my whole body back together an hour ago, going shy over a thing his own biology has never done—makes my chest ache in a way I don't have a category for.
He licks his lips, his eyes going glassy as if he’s lost in thought. I take the opportunity to really look at him like this. Naked–in all his glory–post fucking me.
Calder’s got dark hair on his chest. It looks so soft across his built pecs, thinning as it goes down his stomach into a trail that disappears under the edge of the sheet. I have to make myself stop following it.
There’s a hard cut of muscle at either hip, angling down into a V. Partway down his forearms the tan just stops, a clean line from a whole summer of shoved-up sleeves, and past it he’s pale everywhere the sun never got at him.
And his thighs. God. I’ve had them between mine for the last hour and I still wasn’t ready to see them—thick, heavy, solid all the way through, one of them bigger around than my waist.
Which, apparently, isn’t saying much. With his arm wrapped around my back, his hand nearly spans the width of my waist.
As if he can read my mind, his grip on me tightens and I keep looking.
His hands are wrecked. Calluses across the base of every finger, a white seam of old scar over one knuckle, grey dust still ground into the creases of his palm from whatever he was doing before all of this started.
Those hands were inside me twenty minutes ago and they were so careful I could have cried.
There’s a flush high on his chest that hasn’t gone down yet, and a slow bead of sweat sliding down his sternum, and I watch the whole trip it takes, my mouth watering.
He’s… beautiful.
And underneath all of it, running through everything, there’s his scent.
It’s changed. That’s what I notice first. It used to be cut grass and cool clean air, the thing I caught off his shirts that gave me the strange sensation of being safe.
It’s still that. But there’s something under it now that wasn’t there this morning—darker, heavier, banked like coals.
Alpha. Actual alpha, undiluted, with nothing standing between it and me.
Almost like that part of him was hiding. Or perhaps lost.
It’s the best thing I’ve ever smelled in my life.