Chapter 23
Robbie set her down just long enough to open the back door of the SUV and climb in, scooting ungracefully backward until his back rested against the opposite door, legs stretched out across the seat.
Nadja prowled over him, shaking and hungry.
Desperate. Craving him. Had that ever happened?
She knew the feeling of craving energy well.
It had been her constant companion for millennia.
But had she ever craved a person? The taste of one specific person’s energy crossing her tongue?
He was delicious. And he was smiling at her, his grin spreading from ear to ear, showing his teeth—even the crooked ones, unashamed—which made her smile back, because he had nothing to be ashamed of.
She closed the door behind her and kept crawling over him until she sat on his lap, knees on either side of his hips.
He reached for her immediately, one hand gripping her hip and the other clasping behind her neck, pulling her into him.
He kissed her ravenously, and she fell headfirst into the feeling of falling, feeling her body growing stronger on a cellular level.
She knew nothing about physics but couldn’t help thinking that whatever fusion was happening inside of her should be studied.
She could keep the lights of the world on if only Robbie would keep kissing her.
“Is this enough?” Robbie said against her neck, his lips dragging against her pulse.
Was it enough? To feed her, certainly. Being wanted by him, being wanted by him just as much as she wanted him was as electrifying as it was satisfying.
“It’s enough,” she said, kissing his tattooed neck, not wanting to push. Never wanting to push him for more than he wanted to give.
She felt out of her depth. When she’d hooked up with strangers out of necessity in the days before phone sex work, the encounters had always been quick and clumsy.
A means to an end. When she’d had sex with JJ, he’d been quietly in control.
She’d been able to turn her brain off and just be taken care of.
But it seemed that Robbie was letting her lead, something she had no clue how to do.
“Okay,” he said, squeezing her thigh. He closed his eyes and dropped his head back against the window, panting.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, her stomach falling. If he wanted to be done, she would climb off of him and they would never speak of this again. She’d never push him. If he—
“I’m trying to get myself under control,” he said, gripping her thigh now.
“What do you mean?”
He opened his eyes, the irises the color of whiskey on the rocks, bright and sharp and alive. Eyes that saw too much of her, more than anyone ever had.
Nobody asked the therapist how they were doing beyond the pleasantries at the beginning of a session. Nobody wondered how they were doing at the end. Unless you had family or close friends—which, except for Magda, she didn’t—nobody really wondered about you at all.
But Robbie did. He worried if she ate, always bringing her meals and leaving them in the fridge with little Post-it notes telling her what was in the container or foil.
He worried if she slept, if she slept too much.
If she was lying about any of the above.
How the fuck did he always know when she was lying?
It was like he had a direct line to her brain.
“I meant it when I said that I have never wanted anyone as much as I want you. I think about you all the time. I can’t stop.
And if this is enough, if this is all you need, I’m not gonna push you.
I’m gonna respect every boundary you’ve got, Doc.
I just need a minute to calm down, or I’m gonna come in my jeans. Then we can go back.”
She bit her lips between her teeth, stifling a smile. Oh.
“I said it was enough, Robbie.”
“I know. I know. I’m trying, Doc. Just give me a minute.”
Nadja slid her hand against the sharp edge of his jaw, tilting his face up to look at her. “I said it was enough,” she repeated. “I never said it was all I wanted.”
His eyebrows raised comically high, causing him to look a bit like a surprised owl. She grinned.
“Robbie?”
He swallowed audibly. “Yeah, Nadj?”
“Will you take your pants off?”
He was clumsy as his hands flew to the waistband of his jeans, digging his heels into the seat, lifting her bodily in the air atop him.
She banged her head on the ceiling as he shoved the offending garment over his ass.
He dropped back to the seat, his pants around his thighs now.
She found herself grinding experimentally over his groin, feeling the hardness of his erection through the thick cotton of her pants and the thin cotton of his boxer briefs.
He groaned, slamming his head back against the window.
“Fuck. Fuck!” Robbie said, gripping the back of his head with both hands, whether from pain or restraint she didn’t know.
But she didn’t want Robbie restrained. She wanted him wild.
For the first time in her eternity of existence, she wanted this for purposes beyond feeding herself.
Sex had been essential to her survival since the beginning.
It had been perfunctory. Basic. Uncomplicated.
Except that it was wildly complicated, or so she’d always found it.
And while she’d enjoyed herself a few times, while JJ had made certain that she had, she’d never felt this untethered, like the line holding her to the craft had been severed and she was now drifting away into deep space.
Foreign territory. New and terrifying and thrilling all the same.
It felt so simple now. He wanted her. She wanted him.
Not just to feed from him, though he was delicious.
She wanted him. She wanted him more than she had ever wanted anyone, in thousands of years of anyones.
And he said he wanted her more than he’d ever wanted anyone in…
well, significantly less time than that, but everything in life was relative, wasn’t it?
Nadja felt wild inside. Animal, in a way she never had. And beneath her was this man, this man who was very soon to become something else entirely. An animal. Wild, too.
So she ground her hips forwards and down again. Hard.
His hands flew to her ass, squeezing it in a rough, punishing grip. Let him leave bruises. She was past caring.
“I want to touch you,” he panted, using his hold on her hips to set her pace, moving her pelvis forward and backward over his cock in a slow grind that made her toes tingle. “Please, can I touch you?”
“Yes,” she whimpered, falling forward, bracing her hands on the doorframe.
He was lightning fast delving his hand into her sweatpants.
The angle was awkward, and the elastic waistband pressed the heel of his hand tight against her clitoris.
She moaned as his fingers penetrated her, hooking back and rubbing against her G-spot, something she’d known existed theoretically even if she’d never had any practical knowledge of it.
“Oh my gods, Robbie,” she keened.
She’d never felt anything like it. JJ had always made sure she climaxed. He’d been clinical and precise, which was what she had needed. This thing with Robbie was neither of those things. It was messy and uncoordinated and she was mere seconds away from a catastrophic detonation.
“I can’t move my hand any more unless you take these pants off, Doc.”
She shifted her hips with every intention of shoving the sweatpants over her hips, of climbing off of him so that she could remove them properly, but that movement only served to grind the heel of his hand harder against her clit, the strength of his fingers rubbing against that spot that made her see literal stars at the edge of her vision.
She did it again, and he moaned through a laugh.
“You like that?”
“Don’t stop,” she panted.
“Never,” he said, his voice just above a whisper, raspy and hungry. “That’s my girl. Grind on my hand. Take what you need from my hand. What did I tell you? You take what you need from me. From me, Doc. You hear me?”
There was that wild animal feeling again, grinding and riding his hand, the pressure against her clit so intense that her thighs shook on either side of his.
“Robbie,” she wailed, sucking in deep breaths, her lungs filling with air, her system filling with him, the smell of funnel cake so thick and cloying in her mouth that she could taste him.
“Don’t stop, baby,” he said, leaning forward to kiss her neck, to lick up the tendon that was tight and locked, his lips finally finding hers.
She met him, kissing him back, her arms tightening around his neck as she rode his hand.
And then she was spiraling, the orgasm so sudden and so intense that it was upon her before she could brace herself.
It had never been like that. She kept grinding, kept coming, so long that she sobbed her surprise into his mouth, feeling so electric, so full of power that she could have ripped the car apart at the welding if she’d needed to, if she’d needed to get to him.
She was vaguely aware of Robbie talking to her, whispering sweet things into her ear.
You’re so good. You’re so beautiful when you come apart like that. You’re so brave. I can’t believe you’re real. I can’t believe you’re here.
Nadja must have blacked out for a second because when she opened her eyes, Robbie had changed their positions.
He was sitting in the seat properly. She still straddled his lap, but his feet were down in the well.
With one hand, he stroked up and down her side.
The other hand, the one that had just destroyed her, was at his mouth.
He licked his fingers slowly, cleaning the taste of her off with care, as if he didn’t want to waste a drop.
She yanked his fingers out of his mouth, replacing the digits with her tongue. Robbie moaned and thrust upward with his hips. Nadja shrieked, her clit so sensitive that the graze of his cotton-covered cock had been almost too much.