Felix #2
"Your hand." Her voice doesn't waver. "And then I want you to stop running the odds and be here."
I give her the first one and lie about the second.
I get her shorts off and her back to the cold wall. My hand finds the seam between her thighs.
Fuck—she's already soaked. The first drag of my fingers through her pulls a groan up out of my chest.
"Christ, look at you." I say it against her jaw. "All this and I've barely touched you."
I push two fingers into her pussy, slow, and grind the heel of my hand down on her clit.
She keens, her head dropping back against the stone, her thighs already shaking around my wrist. I'm hard enough behind my zipper it's bordering on unbearable, and I don't let myself do anything about it yet, because this part isn't mine.
"Felix." Her hips chase my hand, greedy, no shame in it, and that's the thing about her I'd never get tired of. She wants it out loud. "More."
"I know." I curl my fingers. "I know exactly what you need. Watch."
This is the part I'm good at. Not the charm. This.
And here's the thing I'd cut my own tongue out before telling her: I'm running the odds even now. Can't not.
My fingers are buried knuckle-deep in her, and I'm sliding through every possibility at the same time—the exact angle, how hard, the half-second before she breaks—reading which way she's about to fall and getting there first. Not her pleasure bleeding into mine; that's Ren's trick, the blood loop, two hearts pulling on one rope.
Mine's colder than that. Hers is a shape I see from the outside and bend.
I find the branch where she comes hardest and I deal it straight to her.
And then the other branch shoulders in. It always does.
A stone table four floors under us. Her wrists laid open. Her eyes aimed at nothing. These same hands of mine, arriving an hour too late. It drops into the middle of all that heat like ice water down my spine. The sound I make isn't pleasure.
So I do the only thing that has ever shut the picture up. I fuck it out of my own skull. I curl my fingers hard, grind down on her clit, and chase her over the edge just to drown that cold dead branch in the noise she makes alive.
She comes apart on my hand. My name, wrecked, in her mouth. Her pussy clenching tight around my fingers. Her nails raking down my forearm. I take all of it—every sound, every shudder—because every one is proof she's here, warm, breathing, not on the table.
"Felix—"
"Got you." I pin both her wrists in my free hand, light, over her head against the stone. Her chest heaves. "Again."
"I can't—"
"You can. Already saw it. Stop arguing with the odds."
I turn her. Her palms flat to the cold wall, that spine arched, her ass pressed back into me.
Even like this—her face turned to the side, her hair come loose and sticking damp to the back of her neck, the long line of her back working with every breath—she's the best thing I've ever looked at in my life.
I fit my chest to her back and line up. I'm so hard it aches, have been for an hour, and the first slick drag of her against the head of my cock nearly finishes me before I'm even inside her.
I push into her in one long stroke.
Fuck.
She's tight, soaked, gripping my cock like a fist, and it's good, so good the heat of her whites out every branch in my head for one perfect second. No futures. No table. Just my cock buried to the root in her, the broken little gasp she gives me, and nothing else in the entire world.
My hips shake with the effort of not moving yet. I hold there a second too long, jaw locked, every muscle in me one long line of want I've spent a year pretending I could outrun.
Then I move.
Hard—not a guess. I've watched this exact stretch of her a hundred times, down a hundred branches, watched what her body does once she's done pretending she's polite about any of this.
One hand splayed flat low on her belly to hold her exactly where I want her.
The other sliding up around her throat—not squeezing, just there, just so she knows whose hand it is.
"This what you wanted?" I get it out against her ear, rough. She says yes, god, yes, and I give it to her.
The drag of her around my cock, that slick clenching pull with every stroke, is better than anything I've ever dealt myself down a hundred branches. Her back arches deeper, her ass working back to meet me, and I watch the muscles along her spine pull tight every time I bottom out in her.
My arms shake holding this pace instead of the one I want. Sweat runs down my spine. Every stroke drags a sound out of me I don't bother swallowing, because there's no one here to put on a show for and never has been, not with her.
And I'm cheating the whole time. Won't stop.
It's the one table where I always know the next card, so I deal her better than chance ever would—sliding branch to branch for the one where I last longest, where she comes again before I do, then greedy, the one where she comes a third time, stacking her pleasure up the way a crooked dealer stacks a deck.
Because if my hands are busy steering, I don't have to feel how far past wanting this I already am.
She knows. Course she knows.
She reaches back, fists my hair, drags my mouth to her ear. "Stop cheating," she pants, "and feel it."
Not fair. Not fair at all.
She does it anyway. And it works.
The odds go.
All of them. The field. The four threads.
The cold dead branch with her name on it.
Gone. There's only the drag of her around my cock, tight and slick and mine for exactly as long as she lets me have this, the ache climbing low at the base of my spine, her name breaking out of her one more time, and the undeniable, undefended, alive fact of her under my hands.
I come with my face shoved into her neck. Swearing. Mindless. Every muscle in my back locking up at once, the release tearing through me hard enough that my knees nearly go. For once I am exactly where I am and nowhere else at all.
It's the most honest I've been all year.
After, we slide down the cold wall to the floor because the bed's too far, my back against the stone and her sprawled across my chest, both of us wrecked.
The mark still burns low on the back of my hand.
I lace my fingers loose over her stomach and she covers them with hers, over the burn, like she did before, and I let myself have it.
The futures are coming back. They always come back. I can already feel the field starting to fan, the branches reaching out from this room toward all the ways tomorrow goes. I keep my eyes shut against them a little longer than I have to.
"You're doing it again," she says, half asleep.
"Doing what?"
"Leaving."
"I'm right here, Grey. Floor and everything. Romantic."
She huffs a laugh against my ribs, and it's worth more than most of the things I've seen.
There's a thing I could say. It's been sitting under my tongue since Kansas and it gets heavier every week.
The men say it different ways, or don't, but they've all got it.
I won't. I've watched what that word costs in too many branches, watched it turn into the exact lever they use, watched a man undone by it in a quiet hallway because he loved her enough to agree to the small reasonable thing.
I'm not handing anyone that lever. Not even her. Especially not her.
So I say the other thing.
"Don't say the thing," I tell her hair, light as anything, the grin back in my voice where it's safe.
"Wasn't going to."
"You were absolutely going to. I saw it. Branch with the talking."
"There's no branch with the talking."
"There's always a branch with the talking." I press my mouth to the top of her head. "I outran it. You're welcome."
She doesn't push. She just settles deeper, her breathing going long and even, sliding down toward sleep with my arms around her, and I hold the one branch where she does that—where she falls asleep believing, all the way down, that we all make it out of this building alive.
I don't tell her about the other odd. The one I never say out loud, the one that isn't about her at all. The swallowed stone behind my ribs, the number with my own name on it, the branch I've stopped checking because it never moves no matter how I deal it.
Tonight she gets to think we all make it.
That one I'll carry by myself.