Chapter 7
Chapter seven
Roan
Iwon't take her again without consent. But I can't let her suffer either. She's my fucking mate. I just need a sign. A greenlight signal, I wait. My cock is angry and throbbing. Just as fevered as she is.
She lets go of the bedpost she grabbed when I slid her down the bed.
What follows isn't gentle. It can't be. The bond has been pulling at both of us for three days, her suppressant is trash, and my control has been stripped down to wire, and when she reaches for me, it's with both hands pulling, and I go down to meet her with a sound in my chest that's been trapped there since the first night.
She hits the bed, and I follow, her thighs wrapping up around my hips before I've even gotten my hands under her, and it's all heat and desperation and the specific relief of a held breath finally released.
"Roan—"
"I have you." My mouth finds her throat, and she arches up hard, her whole voluptuous body a single responsive line.
She's slick before I've touched her properly, the bond's chemistry having done what three days of suppression couldn't stop, and when I finally get my hand between us and find the wet heat of her, she makes a sound against my ear that makes my vision go white at the corners.
I take her slowly despite every screaming instinct. Deliberate. Present.
She shatters the slow pace inside of two minutes, her nails raking down my back, her hips rolling up to take me deeper, chasing her own need with a lack of self-consciousness that destroys me.
She's stopped fighting herself. That's the shift — she's stopped making herself small inside the hunger and just let it be enormous, and I feel the difference in every place we're joined.
Her head tips back, her throat exposed, the pulse there hammering against my tongue when I press my mouth to it.
"Look at me," I say. Low. A request dressed as a command.
Her eyes open. Dark, and blown wide, and there's nothing defended in them right now — none of the armor, none of the measured distance she has spent ten years perfecting. Just her. Just Sharma, fierce and open and right here with me.
I move and watch her feel it.
The control shifts when she rolls me. It's a hard, decisive movement, her palm flat on my chest, and she's up and over me before I've processed the intention — sitting astride me, her hair loose around her face, and her expression is not soft.
It's determined. She rolls her hips once, slow and testing, watching my jaw clench.
The corner of her mouth curves with an ancient magic, something that has nothing to do with the bond and everything to do with the hard-won power of a woman who has spent years refusing to be underestimated.
"Don't look smug," I manage.
"I'll look however I want." She rolls her hips again, not testing this time.
She takes us both apart from there.
I'm barely breathing by the end. My hands are gripping her hips hard enough to leave marks, and I let them, because she's already left her own marks and I want hers and mine visible together.
The knot builds at the base of me, and she takes it — gasps, drops forward onto my chest, and takes all of it — and the bond locks into place so completely and so finally that the room seems to restructure itself around the fact of it.
The ache that has been sitting behind my eyes for three days lifts.
Gone. Like a key finally matching its lock.
Neither of us moves for a long time.
Her cheek rests against my rib cage. My hand is in her curls, and I can't remember putting it there. The ceiling fan turns steadily overhead, the sound of the water outside is constant and low, and the bond pulses between us warm and permanent and real.
I am not afraid of it.
That surprises me. I wait for the fear — the old reflex, the thing that has driven every joke and every dodge and every three a.m. decision to not think about what my father's face looked like those last months — and it doesn't come.
What comes instead is a deep, structural calm, like something load-bearing has been properly installed.
"You okay?" My voice comes out rougher than intended.
"Mm." One finger traces an absent pattern against my ribs. Then she stops. "Yes." More deliberately. "I'm okay."
I tilt my head down to look at her. "I need to say something."
She goes still against me, but she doesn't pull away.
"I know what I did to you." The words are harder to arrange than I expected.
Not because I don't know them, but because I've been assembling them for three days and now that the moment is here, the neat order dissolves.
"When we were kids. I thought — " A breath.
"I thought I was just being funny. I thought it was the kind of teasing that doesn't mean anything, that you shake off before lunch.
I never once thought about what it meant to you to have some arrogant sixteen-year-old making you feel like you weren't worth seeing. "
She is very quiet.
"I was a mess," I say. "That's not an excuse.
It's just the truth. By the time I was nineteen, I'd lost both my parents.
I couldn't figure out how to be a person anymore, so I made everything into a joke including — " The ceiling fan turns.
"Including a sweet little girl who didn't deserve any of it and grew up to become someone extraordinary in spite of me, not because of anything I ever gave her. "
Her finger has stopped moving against my ribs. The stillness is not cold. It's listening.
"I watched you grow up," I say. "I mean that the way it sounds.
Every time I came back to town and Viv would mention your name, or I'd see you for two minutes before I ducked out again — I watched something happening.
You were building something. Yourself, this whole entire self, and it was happening right in my peripheral vision and I was too busy being afraid of my reflection to look directly at it.
" My jaw tightens. "I spent years making you feel invisible.
The actual worst irony of my life is that you were never invisible.
You were the most visible thing in every room. I just couldn't let myself look."
She sits up. Not to leave — she moves slowly, the knot still keeping us joined, and turns so she can look at my face. Her eyes are dry. She's not crying, but her expression has shed its last layer of professional distance, and what's underneath is younger and much more honest.
"Do you know what I did with it?" she asks.
I wait.
"Every time you said something cutting and walked away laughing, I went home, and planned.
" Her voice is steady. Precisely steady, the way it gets when she's carrying more than she's naming.
"I decided I was going to be so good at what I did that nobody would ever be able to look through me again.
Not you, not anyone. I built my entire life on not being dismissible.
" A pause. "So I suppose technically I owe you something. "
"You don't owe me a goddamn thing."
"I know I don't." The faintest pull at her mouth. "I was being generous."
My chest cracks open in the best possible way. I bring my hand to her face, cupping her jaw, my thumb resting against her cheekbone, and I look at her — really look, the way I should have been looking for years.
"I want to earn it," I say. "Not the bond.
That's done; it's permanent; you're stuck with me biologically, and I'm sorry if that's not your first choice.
But the trust. The — " I search. "The right to be in your corner without you waiting for the moment I make it into a joke.
I want to earn that." My thumb moves once across her cheekbone.
"I will spend every day we have doing exactly that if you'll let me. "
Her eyes hold mine. The silence stretches long enough that my pulse logs three separate counts.
"You know you're going to have to actually do the work," she says. "Not just say it once beautifully and consider it handled."
"I know."
"I'm not a project, Roan."
"I know that too."
"And I'm not going to shrink myself to make you comfortable."
"Good." My other hand finds her waist, thumb pressing against the curve of it.
"I want you exactly as you are. I need someone that size in my life.
I've needed her for a long time without knowing her name.
" Her chin dips. I feel the small exhale against my chest. "You scared the hell out of me the moment you walked into that dinner.
Not just because of the bond. Because you looked at me and I knew you saw every single layer I was hiding behind, and you weren't even slightly impressed. "
"I wasn't," she confirms. A breath. Then quietly: "I am now."
I close my eyes briefly. Open them. "Then let me keep earning it."
She reaches up and covers my hand with hers where it rests against her face.
Her fingers curl around mine, and she turns her head just slightly and presses her lips to the inside of my wrist, warm and deliberate, and that small claiming act destroys anything that came before it. She didn't just accept. She answered.
The bond settles deeper. Both directions.
The shower is warm and the bungalow bathroom is cramped in the way island bathrooms always are — barely room to turn, the tile cold on the periphery and the water pressure better than expected.
I keep one hand at the back of her neck, working the shampoo through her hair, loving how her curls flatten and stretch.
Remarkable. She stands with her eyes closed and lets me.
It's the largest act of trust she's offered yet.
Sharma Kinsey doesn't let people take care of her.
Right now she's standing still under my hands with her eyes closed.
I don't say anything about it. Some things you don't name while they're happening.
"The South Asian pitch," she says, after a while. Her eyes are still closed. "The one we're supposed to start working on…"