3 #5
“Come on,” he urged, his pace turning frantic and brutal. “Come for me. I want to feel you let go. I want to feel you come all over my cock.”
He reached between us, his thumb finding my clit and pressing hard as he circled it in time with his thrusts.
That was it.
The climax ripped through me, violent and blinding.
I screamed into his mouth, my body convulsing around him and my inner muscles clamping down in rhythmic pulses that milked his length perfectly.
The pleasure was so intense it bordered on pain, a white-hot detonation that left me trembling and boneless.
With a guttural roar that was part triumph and part surrender, he followed. His thrusts lost all rhythm and became jerky and desperate. He buried himself as deep as he could go and held there, his whole body shuddering as he emptied himself inside me. Heat flooded me in a final, possessive claim.
He collapsed against me, his weight pressing me into the post and his breath hot and ragged in my ear. We stayed tangled, spent, and joined while the lake whispered beside us and the distant party played on a world away.
Slowly, his breathing evened. He softened inside me but didn’t pull out. He nuzzled his face into the curve of my neck, his lips brushing my skin in what felt like an unconscious gesture.
For a long minute, there was only the sound of our breathing and the water.
Then he let out a soft, breathless laugh. “Rules are fucking stupid.”
A weak, trembling sound escaped me that might have been a laugh or a sob. I wasn’t sure.
He finally eased back, his hands coming up to frame my face.
He looked down at me, searching in the dark while his thumbs wiped at what might have been tears or sweat on my cheeks.
He didn’t ask if I was okay, and there was no joke to be made.
He only looked at me, and in that look, I felt the careful fiction of tonight only crack down the middle.
He leaned in and kissed me softly and slowly, a kiss tasting of salt, satisfaction, and something dangerously close to tenderness.
When he pulled away, he gently tugged my bikini top back into place, his fingers surprisingly deft as he retied the strings. He smoothed the fabric of my bottoms back over my hip, his touch lingering for a second.
He stepped back, pulled up his trunks, and kept his eyes on me.
“Tomorrow doesn’t exist,” I said, my voice hoarse. I was reminding him and the frantic, hopeful thing beating behind my ribs.
He nodded once, a sharp, clean movement. “Tonight does.”
He held out his hand as an offer rather than a demand. I looked at it, then at his face caught between gold and shadow in the distant firelight, and took it.
His fingers closed around mine, warm and solid.
We walked back toward the party in silence, the sand cool beneath our feet and the ghost of his body still echoing in mine.
He didn’t let go until the glow of the bonfire touched our skin and we could hear Briggs laughing again, until we were no longer only us in the dark but two people among many carrying a secret that felt heavier than the lake.
He looked at me once more, his eyes saying everything the rules forbade.
Then he turned and walked toward the cooler, his team, and the world where tonight was only a summer memory.
I stood there feeling the ache between my legs, the tender scrape on my back, and the weight of his stare still warming my skin.
No tomorrow, I thought as I touched the place on my neck where his stubble had burned.
The hand he had held still felt empty, and I knew with sinking, terrifying certainty that I was already lying.
I blink, and the memory slowly loosens its hands from my throat, leaving me alone in my bedroom with my phone dimming against my chest and the ghost of lake air still moving over my skin.
That was the problem with thinking about Easton.
One memory never stayed one memory. It opened a door, and then all the others came rushing through like they had been waiting for permission—the lake, his room, my apartment, the back hallway at The Sin Bin, dark corners, locked doors, whispered warnings, and his hands on me like he knew exactly where I ended and every lie began.
My rules became a game between us, and I let him break them one by one.
The number of times that man took my body and broke my rules should have scared me more than it did.
No names, no lights, no getting me naked, no asking why.
I handed him the list like it could protect me from him, and every time he crossed one of those lines, it was because I had already moved it and trusted him to notice.
Some sick, terrified part of me trusted Easton before I ever admitted I loved him.
I was his in every way except the one that mattered.
I gave him my body, my trust, my nights, and the softness I only allowed myself when darkness made me brave enough to stop performing.
I gave him pieces of myself I had sworn no man would ever touch again, and then when daylight came, I acted like he had imagined the whole thing.
I pretended I had not been right there with him and treated him like he was pathetic for believing what I was too scared to say.
So I made the man I loved my enemy.
I made him hate me because I couldn’t tell him the truth.
I couldn’t tell him my fear had names, faces, and trauma that knew how to put its hands on my throat from years away.
I couldn’t tell him he was paying for another man’s mistake because that mistake had destroyed my life before Easton ever entered it.
Darian broke me while his friends raped me, rooting one another on and getting off along with him as I lay there helpless and unconscious, all of them knowing it was being recorded.
Bile rises, turning my stomach, and I force the hateful memory back down.
I rebuilt myself brick by brick with sharper edges, higher walls, better locks, and enough attitude to make sure no one ever looked too closely at the girl trapped behind it all.
I thought I was building something that would keep me safe.
I never thought it would be the thing that cost me him.