Chapter 2
Two
Sloane
Iwoke to rain pounding against the glass.
Gray light bled through the blinds. Peter was already hard against my hip, his breath hot on my neck, one hand pushing my thighs apart before I was fully conscious. No preamble, no tenderness—the unmistakable, persistent pressure of him entering as I remained half-asleep, still cozy and languid.
“Fuck,” he grunted, his voice rough with sleep.
“You’re tight this morning.” He pulled back out, pulled my wrists above my head and to my feet with one hand, and walked me backward to the window.
The cold glass hit my shoulders. Outside, rain streaked down the pane in long rivulets.
Inside, my skin prickled—from the sudden stretch of him, from the loneliness of being held against something cold while someone uses the word tight like a compliment.
He didn’t ease in. His hips surged forward in one brutal thrust that forced the air from my lungs, my shoulder scraping the glass.
I shifted, trying to find a better angle, something that worked for both of us.
He gripped my waist and yanked me up instead, fingers digging into my flesh with a possessiveness that had nothing to do with desire and everything to do with convenience.
My legs hooked around him instinctively. He used the leverage.
The wet slap of skin. The rain. His breathing, loud and purposeful and entirely self-directed—his own little performance.
“Take it,” he growled against my ear, teeth catching my lobe. “Fucking take it.”
I did. I always did.
My nails found his shoulders, dragging red lines he’d cover with a shirt in twenty minutes.
He liked the sting—liked just enough resistance to make it appear to be mutual.
So I gave it to him. I clenched around him and tried to chase what I needed, tried to angle toward the place he sometimes found when he was paying attention.
Today he wasn’t paying attention.
The glass fogged. Pleasure coiled tight and low and simply stalled—the pace too erratic, the angle all wrong, everything geared to his finish line and not mine. I was swollen, throbbing, teetering at the edge.
“Peter.” My voice cracked. “Slower, please, just—”
He didn’t hear me, or didn’t care to. His rhythm turned sloppy, and a groan tore out of him—low and satisfied—as he shoved in one final time and came, his fingers bruising my thigh, his forehead dropping to my shoulder while he rode it out in shallow, jerky pulses.
He was pulling out—too fast, too sudden.
He set me on my feet as if I weighed nothing. My knees shook, and the ache between my legs pulsed with a sharp, useless insistence, my body still waiting for a release that wasn’t coming.
He wiped himself on the edge of the curtain.
“Gotta shower,” he absently voiced. “Meeting’s at nine.”
I turned to the window and pressed my forehead against the glass, putting my palms flat against the cool glass.
I watched the rain dance down the other side in long, trembling rivulets while the warmth of him leaked down my inner thigh and my pulse hammered with something that had stopped being purely sexual several minutes ago.
The emptiness in my chest was familiar, so was the sum of it—the way it always added up to the same answer: Not enough. Never quite enough, not even worth the effort of slowing down.
I could finish it myself—two fingers, right here, while the city blurred gray beyond the glass. The thought immediately made it worse, which I didn’t particularly want to think about.
“See you tonight?” he called from somewhere behind me, casual, easy, like he hadn’t fucked me against a rain-streaked window and left me stranded three feet from shore.
“Yeah,” I said. My voice came out hoarse. “Tonight.”
The bathroom door clicked shut. The shower started its indifferent hiss. My hand drifted toward my thighs and then stopped and dropped away entirely.
I was too angry to want it now.
So I’d wait, and tonight he’d reach for me again—rough and fast—and I would let him, because the alternative was a lonelier kind of emptiness, because somewhere along the way I had confused being wanted in the wrong way with being cherished, and I had never quite figured out how to uncross those wires.
Every man who had passed through my life had left the same fingerprints—on my body, on my patience, on the shrinking space I’d once reserved for the idea that it could be different.
I watched the rain.
* * *
The front door clicked shut behind him, softer than the morning deserved.
His goodbye kiss was like a footnote—dry lips grazing the corner of my mouth, his keys already jingling, his mind already somewhere else, toward the day, toward everything that wasn’t me. “Have a good day,” said to the hall, gone before the words had left my lips.
I stood in the gray morning light and let the quiet settle around me.
My thighs were sticky. The ache between my legs still pulsed with frustrated insistence, steady as a second heartbeat, and about as useful.
I walked to the bathroom, flipped the light on.
The mirror reflected back: hair wrecked, cheeks still flushed with arousal and disappointment.
A faint red mark visable on my hip where his grip had been more possession than desire.
I looked like someone who had been wanted, if not briefly, in the way you want something you’ve already stopped valuing.
The shower he’d left running for me filled the small room with steam. I stepped under the spray and let it hit my shoulders, the back of my neck—hot enough to sting. I stood there and let it be.
My hand moved down on its own—palm cupping, heel pressing, feeling the throb answer back, not enough. Never enough when it’s your own hands.
I reached up and unhooked the handheld showerhead from its cradle.
Twisted the dial until the stream narrowed, sharpened, the kind of pressure that walked the line between relief and slightly too much.
I leaned back against the tile, shifted my feet wider, hooked one leg up on the built-in bench—open, exposed, ridiculous if someone was watching.
No one was watching.
The first contact drew a sharp gasp—too direct.
I angled it lower, let the jet work along my slit in slow, deliberate passes, washing the evidence of him away in pale streams that swirled toward the drain.
My free hand found my nipple, twisted with the kind of attention he’d stopped bothering with long ago.
A sound slipped out of me, swallowed by the hiss of water.
I brought the showerhead closer, found the exact angle, the precise point of pressure that made my vision go momentarily soft at the edges. My hips rolled forward involuntarily. I let them.
The fantasy arrived the way they always did—unbidden and a little humiliating.
Peter walking back in. His expression shifted as he took in the sight of me, legs spread, working myself under the spray with focused, unashamed intent.
In the fantasy, I’d meet his eyes, let him watch, let him understand exactly what he’d left unfinished.
I slid two fingers inside and curled them toward the place he always bypassed—the one that made my thighs shake, that made coherent thought temporarily impossible. My fingers pressed against the tile for balance.
The orgasm built fast and gracelessly. No slow build of pleasure—just a brutal coil of heat pulling tighter in my belly, hips grinding in small, desperate circles, water hitting my clit in relentless pulses while my fingers worked the spot he’d never cared enough to find.
“Fuck—Peter—”
His name tasted like a bad habit on my tongue.
My back came off the wall, thighs locking around my own hand, a ragged sound tearing out of me as my body gripped and pulsed and finally, finally gave me what the last hour had been promising and withheld.
I held the shower head against myself through the aftershocks, riding each one until they thinned into nothing.
I turned the water off.
Stood there breathing. Steam rising, the last of him disappearing down the drain in pale, dissipating streams.
Better, I thought.
Not what I wanted, but better than nothing.
I toweled off and stepped back into the bedroom, still smelling faintly of sex. My phone sat on the counter, screen lit with a notification.
Peter.
I stood over it without touching it. The message would be the same—the lunch plans, the casual check-in, the performative sweetness he deployed when he sensed, on some level, that he’d taken from me without giving anything in return.
Part of me wanted to throw the phone across the room.
Part of me hoped he was canceling tonight so I could be abandoned rather than voluntarily used. That was easier. Abandonment had clear edges. What we were doing had none.
But the part I hated most—the part that had survived every version of this, every man who had treated my patience like a renewable resource—that part was quietly, pathetically hoping he was asking me to come home early, offering to make it up to me, as if the phrase make it up to you had ever once passed his lips. I wouldn’t let him try, anyway.
I left the phone where it was.
Let him wait, I thought. For once, let him be the one waiting.
I knew I’d answer before I finished getting dressed.
But for right now, in this small moment—I let myself pretend otherwise.
* * *
It was still raining by the time I made it out of the downtown loft Peter and I leased.
Not a gentle mist, but a relentless downpour that saturates everything—fabric, spirit. The kind that bleached color from the cityscape and shrinks pedestrians into themselves. Growing up in Seattle had inoculated me against finding any romance in weather like this.
Six years ago, I’d fled across the country for my position at Bay City Aquarium, my second “adult” job and the first I’d truly fallen for, despite days like today when even breathing seemed like drowning.