16. Fifteen #2
It built until my thighs quit and I was dropping onto him more than riding him.
I pressed my open mouth over his heart and felt his pulse against my tongue, quick as mine now.
He cradled the back of my head and pressed me into his chest, and he didn't guard himself.
Not one muscle in him braced against me.
"As hard as you need," he said.
I bit down as I came.
His blood ran hot over my tongue, and he groaned so deep it came up through his chest into my teeth, and his arms locked around me, and his hips drove up hard, and that shoved the orgasm through me all over again.
I spilled hot between us with his heart pounding against my teeth and his arms crushing me to him, and I held the bite through all of it.
Then I held it longer, because letting go wasn't something I'd been made to do my whole life, and I wasn't doing it now.
When it was over, I eased my jaw open and licked the wound clean.
The mark sat high on his left chest, deep, bleeding thin dark lines where my teeth had been. Mine. It would scar and it would stay under his shirt. However this ended, some piece of me got to stay on him.
He stroked my hair, and his chest heaved under my cheek. He was still hard inside me.
"You didn't finish, big man."
"Not yet." He gripped my hips and lifted me off him and laid me down on my back on the bedroll.
His breath caught when his ribs took the weight.
He did it anyway, and God help me, my spent cock stirred.
His weight came down after me, propped on one forearm, his knees pushing mine wide, and he slid back into me in one long push that arched me off the wool.
I was loose and slick and already wrung out, and he still filled me past where I had room for it.
He worked deep and took his time, and lowered his lips to my chest, to the same place, high on the left, over my heart.
"Here," he said against my skin.
I threaded my fingers through his hair. "Do it like you mean to keep it."
He kissed the spot first. That gentleness was all his, and I let him have it. Then his teeth set into me, testing, finding their place, and he bit down and kept going.
The pain went through me white and total and lit everything it touched.
I clenched hard around him and arched up into his mouth, and he rode me through it, driving deep, his teeth holding on, until the hurt and the fullness ran into each other and I couldn't tell them apart and didn't want to.
I set my teeth into his shoulder to keep quiet and whined into it anyway.
I was hard again, or still, trapped slick between our bellies.
His jaw flexed and my skin broke and he growled into the wound with his teeth still in me, mine, and I came a second time untouched, spilling the little I had left.
He groaned against the bite and drove in hard, twice, three times, and came inside me.
I felt every pulse of it. I clenched down and took all of it and wanted more, wanted it to stay, wanted to keep some of him inside me the same way I'd keep his teeth over my heart.
Greedy. Fine. I'd never had one thing of my own in my whole life, and now I had this. I was allowed to be greedy about it.
He unclenched his jaw and lapped the blood off the wound. Then he lifted his head and looked at what he'd done to me.
He rested his forehead on my sternum, beside the wound, and breathed there a while, still inside me, his weight braced so his ribs never touched me.
I lay there with my fingers in his hair and let myself have it.
All of it. The weight, the ache, the blood drying on my ribs, the big steady heart knocking away above my head.
Then I felt the exact second the doctor woke up in him. His head came up, and his eyes went from my face to the bite, and they changed.
"Don't," I said.
"Too late." He pulled out carefully and reached one-handed into the crate for antiseptic, gauze, and tape.
He cleaned my bite first. It stung worse than his teeth had, and I hissed.
He worked right through it and taped a dressing flat over his own teeth marks.
Then he sat back, handed me the bottle, and bared his chest.
I cleaned him the same way, kneeling over him, more careful with him than I'd ever been with anything. He watched my face the whole time and never once looked down at my hands.
"Keep it dry for two days," he said. "Both of them."
"Will it scar?"
"I know how to close skin so it doesn't." He pressed the tape flat over his heart with two fingers. "I did the opposite."
I wanted to bite him again just for saying it.
We washed up with water from the jug, and I wiped his stomach and mine.
His cum ran down the inside of my thigh when I stood, and I cleaned everything else and left that, because it was mine and I wasn't done having it.
Then we dressed against the cold coming in before morning.
I dragged my bedroll back to its arm's length, putting myself between him and the door, where I always slept.
Nimue left the horse blanket, climbed my arm, and settled loose at my collar, forgiving me.
John's breathing stretched out long behind me.
The dressing pulled over my heart with every breath, a small, good hurt.
If Zaroff got me anyway, I'd go into the ground with John's teeth over my heart.
That was a stupid thing to be glad about, with everything hanging over this place. I was glad anyway.
Sierra's voice woke me at sunrise.
"John!" he called from the house, flat and carrying. "John. Come here!"
I was off my bedroll with my knife in my hand before I finished waking, and John came up behind me with a hard catch of breath that meant he'd forgotten his ribs. Neither of us said a word crossing the yard. I was thinking, The fever came back. Let it be the fever.
The light in the guest bedroom was still on. Sierra stood outside the door with his back against the wall and his hands wrapped in his apron. He didn't say anything as we came in. He looked at John and tipped his head toward the room.
Miguel lay where we'd left him, the blanket still squared at his chest. The line was still taped to his arm.
The dressing on his thigh was flat and clean.
Nothing seemed off, except that his chest wasn't moving.
I could tell from the doorway that it wasn't sleep.
I'd seen enough bodies to know the difference in the first second.
I kept looking anyway, waiting for the sheet to lift.
John crossed to the cot and set two fingers on the boy's throat. He held them there a long time, longer than any count needed. Then his hand came away and hung at his side with nowhere to go, and something in my chest hurt.
Then he tipped the boy's head back and thumbed up one eyelid, then the other.
He drew the lower lip down, and I came to the foot of the cot and saw what he saw: fine red specks scattered through the whites of both eyes, and the inside of the lip bruised dark where it had been crushed back against his teeth.
"Somebody held something over his face," John said. "He was smothered. It wasn't the wound."
"I stepped out to walk Pearl," Sierra said behind me, holding himself level by force. "Half an hour. No more."
I'd stood over that cot and told the whole room nobody would touch him.
Then I'd walked to the shed and gotten held and marked and fucked, and I'd slept warm and fed and glad while steps away somebody pressed the life out of a kid whose whole crime was carrying water and a warning.
The shame came up my neck so hot that my eyes watered.
And then something colder came up behind it, and I put the shame away for later.
I looked around the room. Nothing missing, nothing shifted.
The window stood open two inches, and the sash had a fresh groove where a flat blade had pried the latch back a little at a time.
No splinters, nothing rushed. He'd known he had time.
One man in soft soles, in through the window and out the same way, and the curtain still hung straight.
"Zaroff," I said.
"Without us noticing?" Sierra frowned. "Who was supposed to be on watch last night?"
"Cruz and Joe, I think," I said, and shook my head. It didn't matter. Even if all of us had been up and walking the perimeter, they'd have found a way.
I clenched my fists. Zaroff was going to die slowly. I’d decided that already. But now I was going to enjoy it.