23. Diesel
DIESEL
Penny’s cruiser sits crooked in her driveway, nose angled toward the mailbox like she didn’t bother straightening it out before she went inside. Porch light’s off. Every window’s dark except the faint glow leaking around her bedroom curtains, blue-tinted, probably a lamp she forgot to kill.
I knock soft. Twice. Wait.
Nothing.
I knock again, a little harder this time, and still get nothing but the sound of crickets going off somewhere in the grass behind me.
Twenty hours since Pemberton’s basement.
Twenty hours since I put a bullet in a man who deserved worse, and I haven’t slept, haven’t really tried, because every time I close my eyes I see Addison standing beside that bed.
I need to see her. Not talk. Not explain anything about tonight, because there’s nothing to explain that either of us wants spoken out loud where it can be repeated later. Just see her. Breathing. Whole. Safe in a bed that isn’t a basement.
Her parents always kept a spare key under a garden gnome. I remember it from when we were seventeen, sneaking her out past curfew, sneaking myself in when her folks worked the night shift down at the plant. I chuckle when I see she inherited the habit.
Thunder meets me in the hallway, tail going before he’s even fully awake, and I crouch down to scratch behind his ears, murmuring low so he doesn’t decide to announce me to the whole street.
He leans his whole weight into my palm, satisfied, and follows me deeper into the house like he already knows I’m not a threat worth worrying about.
Her uniform’s on the floor of the hallway. Tossed there in a hurry, like she walked in exhausted and just started shedding layers before she even made it to the bedroom. I bend down and gather it up—shirt, pants, the whole thing—and fold it and set it aside.
That’s when I notice the cuffs still clipped to her belt.
I go still.
Standard county-issue, chain-link, the kind she probably puts on drunks twice a week without a second thought.
I run my thumb along the metal, and something in my chest shifts.
A different kind of want that’s got nothing to do with violence and everything to do with needing her hands on me, needing to feel something good after a night that had nothing good in it.
I unclip the cuffs from her belt and set the folded uniform on the hall table.
Her bedroom door’s cracked open, lamp still burning low on the nightstand, and Penny’s asleep on her side, one arm curled under the pillow, hair loose across the sheets.
She looks wrung out even sleeping—shadows under her eyes, mouth soft, chest rising slow and even.
She earned this. Whatever peace she’s got right now, she earned every second of it.
I strip out of my clothes quiet as I can manage, boots first, then everything else, laying it over the back of her reading chair instead of leaving it in a heap. The cuffs I keep in hand.
She doesn’t stir when I ease onto the mattress beside her. Doesn’t stir when I stretch out, when the bed dips under my weight, when I lie there a minute just looking at her in the lamplight, memorizing the shape of her face relaxed instead of braced for the next bad thing.
I close one cuff around my own wrist. Metal’s cold, snaps shut with a small, definitive click, and I lift both arms slowly, hook the loose end around one of the wrought-iron bars of her headboard, and let it hang there.
“Penny.” I say her name softly. Then again, a little more. “Hey. Wake up.”
Her eyes flutter open, confused, lashes catching lamplight, and it takes her a second to focus on me lying beside her, naked, one cuff around my wrist, the other hanging over a headboard bar.
“Evan?” Her voice comes out thick with sleep, rasping. “What—what are you doing?”
“Waiting on you.”
She sits up slightly, propping herself on one elbow, hair falling across her face, and her eyes drop to the cuff, then back up to mine, brow furrowing deeper. “Is that my—did you break into my house and steal my handcuffs?”
“Didn’t break in. Used the key under the gnome.” I lift my free hand, let the loose end of the cuff dangle from my fingers, waiting to see what she does. “And I didn’t steal them. Borrowing.”
“Evan, what is happening right now?”
“I want you to take what’s yours.” I keep my voice low, steady, watching every flicker cross her face while I say it.
“Last night was ugly. Real ugly. I don’t wanna talk about it, and I don’t want you asking me to.
I just want you to choose me. Use me. However you want.
No holding back, no worrying about being gentle with me. ”
Her breath catches, and something behind her eyes shifts—confusion sliding into something hotter, something that wakes her up faster than any amount of shaking would’ve.
“You’re insane,” she says, but there’s no real argument in it, just disbelief.
“Probably.” I dangle the cuff again, giving the chain a small jingle that sounds obscene in the quiet room. “Cuff me to the headboard, Penny.”
“This is—” She sits all the way up now, sheet falling away from her bare shoulder, and I watch her gaze drop to my body stretched out beside her, taking her time about it in a way that tells me exactly how fast her hesitation’s losing ground. “This is completely ridiculous.”
“So is everything else about us.” I hold her eyes. “Do it.”
She hesitates one more second. Then her hand closes around the dangling cuff, and she climbs up onto her knees, straddling my hips loosely while she reaches up and loops the chain properly around the headboard’s iron bar, working the second cuff snug around my free wrist until both arms are stretched up and locked in place, the short chain looped around the bar.
I’m hard before she even finishes tightening it.
Can’t help it, not with her weight settled over my thighs, not with the whole picture of her above me in nothing but an old T-shirt riding up her hips, hair a wreck, eyes gone dark and focused in a way I haven’t seen out of her since that bluff above Sutton Creek.
“There,” she says, breathless already, testing the cuffs with one tug to make sure they hold. “Happy?”
“Getting there.”
She sits back on her heels, studying me laid out beneath her, arms stretched taut above my head, and something predatory settles into her expression that I haven’t seen before—not from her, not from anybody, and it goes straight to my cock like a live wire.
“You don’t get to touch,” she says, dragging one finger down my sternum, over the old scar along my ribs, tracing lower. “Not until I say.”
“Wasn’t planning on it.”
“Liar.” But she’s smiling now, small and wicked, and she shifts down my body slow, deliberate, until she’s kneeling between my spread thighs, both hands braced against my hips. “Let’s see how long you last, Diesel.”
She wraps one hand around the base of my cock, and I groan low in my throat at the first slow stroke, hips trying to rock up into her grip before her other hand presses flat against my abdomen, holding me still.
“Behave,” she murmurs, and then her mouth is on me, hot and wet, and every thought in my head that isn’t her name gets burned clean out.
She takes her time. Works me with her tongue, her hand twisting at the base in counterpoint to the slow drag of her lips, and every time I get close—every single time my hips jerk and a rough sound tears out of my chest—she eases off, pulls back, lets me hover right at the edge without tipping over.
“Penny—” It comes out strangled, wrists straining against the cuffs, metal biting into my skin as I fight the urge to grab her hair and finish this myself.
“Not yet.” She licks a slow line up the underside of me, watching my face the whole time. “You said I should take what’s mine. I’m taking my time doing it.”
“You’re killing me.”
“Mm.” She smiles around the head of my cock before taking me deep again, and I throw my head back against the pillow, cursing at the ceiling, every muscle in my body locked tight, fighting off an orgasm she’s clearly not ready to let me have yet.
Just when I think I can’t take another pass of her mouth without losing it completely, she pulls off entirely, wipes her lips with the back of her hand, and crawls up my body instead, dragging the old T-shirt off over her head as she goes until she’s bare above me, straddling my chest now instead of my hips.
“Your mouth,” she says, low, “owes me something.”
She settles herself over my face without waiting for an answer, knees bracketing my head, and the first taste of her wrenches a groan out of me.
She’s soaked, has been for a while probably, and I chase that taste with everything I’ve got, tongue working deep, arms straining uselessly on the cuffs, because I want my hands on her thighs, on her hips, anywhere, and I can’t have any of it.
“Fuck, Evan—” Her hand fists in my hair, grinding down against my mouth, and I feel her thighs start to shake almost immediately, wound tight from teasing me for however long she just spent doing it. “Right there, don’t stop, don’t you dare stop—”
I wouldn’t dream of it. I work her clit with the flat of my tongue until her whole body goes rigid above me, and when she comes it’s loud, unguarded, a broken sob tearing out of her that she doesn’t even try to muffle, rocking against my face through every wave of it until she finally collapses sideways, panting hard, one hand still tangled in my hair like she needs the anchor.
“Christ,” she breathes.
“Not done.” My voice comes out rough, wrecked, cock aching where it’s been ignored through all of that. “Take what’s yours.”
She lifts her head, looks at me with something dazed and hungry both at once, and doesn’t answer with words.
She just crawls back down my body, straddles my hips properly this time, and reaches between them to line herself up, sinking down slow, inch by inch, until she’s fully seated and both of us are groaning at the fit of it.
“Fuck, Penny.” My wrists strain against the cuffs, every instinct screaming to grab her hips and move her, and I can’t, and that helplessness winds tighter than anything else has all night. “Move. Please.”
She braces both hands on my chest and rides me slow at first, testing the angle, and the sight of her above me, head tipped back, hair falling loose down her spine, does something to my chest that’s got nothing to do with how good she feels wrapped tight around me.
“Look at you,” she says, breathless, picking up her pace, grinding down hard on every downstroke. “All tied up. Can’t do a thing about it.”
“Wouldn’t want to.” I mean it. Whatever this is, whatever tonight cost both of us, this—her taking exactly what she wants off my body while I lie here helpless to do anything but take it—feels like the first clean breath I’ve had since that basement.
She rides me harder, faster, chasing her own release with a single-minded focus that has me straining every muscle in my arms just to stay still, to let her have this, to be exactly what she needs.
Her nails drag down my chest, over the ink there, and I buck up into her, unable to help it, and she moans, loud, grinding down to meet me.
“Gonna come again,” she gasps. “Evan—”
“Do it. Take it.”
She shatters around me a second time, walls clenching so tight I nearly lose it right along with her, and the sound she makes—raw, unguarded, my name breaking apart in her mouth—finally drags me over the edge with her, hips jerking up hard as I spill inside her, groaning something that isn’t even words anymore.
She collapses forward onto my chest after, both of us breathing hard, her forehead pressed against my collarbone, and I lie there, wrists still cuffed, entirely spent, entirely hers for as long as she’ll have me tonight.
“Key,” I manage eventually. “Kind of stuck here.”
She laughs, tired and warm, then reaches for the handcuff key I placed on the nightstand and works the cuffs loose, freeing one wrist and then the other. The second I’m loose, I wrap both arms around her, pulling her flush against me, chin resting against the top of her head.
Neither of us says anything about last night. About the basement, about Pemberton, about anything sitting heavy behind either of our eyes.
We don’t need to. Not right now.