Prologue #2
He obliged. His tongue flattened against my clit, pressing and dragging, and he set a rhythm that was perfectly, infuriatingly precise. Like a metronome. Like he’d calculated the exact frequency required to take me apart and was executing it to spec.
I came the first time almost against my will.
It built in a sharp, tight spiral that he seemed to feel happening because he shifted his grip, pressed two fingers inside me — thick, rut-hot — and curled them forward, and the combination of his mouth and his hand and the cedar-smoke scent filling my lungs pulled me over with a sound I didn’t recognize as mine.
He didn’t stop.
“Micah — I just —”
“I know.” He kissed the inside of my thigh, wet and open-mouthed, and his fingers kept moving inside me, slow, stretching. “Again.”
The second orgasm took longer to build but hit harder, a deep rolling thing that started at my spine and moved outward, and he worked me through it with his tongue on my clit and three fingers inside me now, spreading me open, getting me ready.
When he finally pulled back, his mouth was wet, his chin was wet, and his eyes were so dark I couldn’t tell where the pupil ended and the iris began.
“Condom,” he said. “Nightstand.”
I reached for it because he was still between my legs and showed no interest in moving.
Found the foil packet, tore it open, and sat up to roll it onto him.
He was hot in my hand — rut-temperature, almost feverish — and when I gripped him he made that sub-vocal sound again, his hips pushing into my fist involuntarily.
“You’re close,” I said. Not the orgasm. The rut.
“Yes.” He took the condom from me, rolled it on with fingers that were shaking — barely, but I noticed — and settled between my legs. The blunt head of his cock pressed against me, slick with my arousal, and he stopped. Held still. Looked at me.
“Tell me if anything doesn’t work.”
“Micah.”
“Tell me.”
“Yes. I’ll tell you. Now fuck me.”
He pressed in.
The stretch was — significant. He was big, and even with the prep, even with two orgasms worth of wetness, the initial push required adjustment.
He went slow, controlled, reading my face with that analytical intensity, and when he was fully seated inside me he held still, his arms braced on either side of my head, breathing carefully through his mouth.
“Okay?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He pulled back and thrust in again, and found an angle that made me arch off the bed.
“There,” he noted, like he was marking a point on a map, and proceeded to hit it repeatedly with mechanical precision that should not have been as hot as it was.
But it was.
He fucked me like that for a long time — deep, thorough strokes that hit exactly where they needed to, his pace controlled despite the fine tremor running through his body, despite the way his breath came harder and harder with each thrust. His scent flooded the room, cedar and bergamot and cold-air mineral, and it wasn’t triggering any biological response in me because I was a beta and that wasn’t how it worked, but —
It didn’t matter. I didn’t need designation chemistry to feel the way his cock stretched me, didn’t need omega receptors to gasp when he shifted his angle and ground against my clit with every thrust. The biology was irrelevant. The man was enough.
“Avery.” His voice was strained, rougher than it had been all night, and his rhythm had started to falter. “I need—”
“Harder.”
He groaned — a real sound, uncontrolled, and something about that crack in his composure was what did it.
He gripped my hip with one hand, hauled me into a new angle, and started fucking me with the full force of his approaching rut, and I took it, took all of it, felt the third orgasm building like something tectonic.
“I can feel you tightening,” he said through his teeth. “Come. Come now.”
I did. Clenching around him, my back bowing, my nails digging into his shoulders hard enough to leave marks, and he followed — a deep groan, his hips stuttering, his hand fisting in the pillow beside my head as he came.
He collapsed. Not on me — he shifted his weight to the side, because even post-orgasm, mid-rut-onset, Micah Kent was careful. His face pressed into my neck, breathing cedar-saturated air back against my skin, and his arm came around my waist, heavy and hot.
“Comprehensive enough?” I said, eventually.
His laugh was quiet, rumbling against my throat. “Preliminary findings.”
“God help me.”
He wasn’t done.
We slept for maybe an hour. I woke to his hand between my legs, fingers moving in slow circles against my clit, his cock already hard against the small of my back.
“Micah —”
“Shh.” He pressed his mouth to the space behind my ear. “Just let me.”
He rolled me onto my stomach and fucked me from behind, slower this time, one hand in my hair and one arm hooked under my hips, lifting me into each thrust. The angle was deeper, more intense, and I buried my face in pillows that smelled like cedar and smoke and pressed back against him and forgot my own name for a while.
He came with his mouth on my shoulder, teeth grazing but not breaking skin — alpha instinct, the bite reflex, held in check because I was a beta and marking meant nothing and he was controlled enough to know that even now.
The fourth orgasm — my fourth, his second — wrung me out completely. I lay in his sheets feeling hollowed and remade and acutely aware that I was in trouble.
Because this was good. Not heat-rut-designation good, not biology-tells-you-it’s-good good. Actually good. Good enough to make you want to stay.
And I didn’t stay.
That was the foundational principle of my life. I didn’t stay. Not in apartments, not in relationships, not in the morning-after. I left. Cleanly, before dawn, before the coffee and the awkward conversation and the slow slide into something that would eventually hurt.
But Micah’s arm was across my waist, heavy and proprietary even in sleep, and his breathing had evened out into something deep and steady, and his cedar scent had mellowed into something warmer, almost sweet, as his body settled toward rest.
I closed my eyes.
I thought: In the morning, I’ll leave.
I thought: This was just a night.
I thought: I will not remember the exact weight of his arm for the rest of my life.
His arm tightened in his sleep, pulling me closer. His face pressed into the back of my neck, warm breath against my spine.
I fell asleep knowing I was lying to myself.
* * *
* * *