Willow
NINETEEN
Xander’s mouth tastes like fucking fire.
It’s heat and cut glass, the metallic shimmer of blood and cinder under my tongue, and it jolts through me like a forced confession.
There’s no careful choreography here. He doesn’t wait for me to get my bearings, doesn’t even give a fuck if I do. Xander kisses the way knives are thrown. Hard, exact, aimed for maximum damage.
He tastes like a challenge, and I want to answer it.
We crash together in the darkened hallway, the edges of everything blurring around the perimeter of us.
He brackets my wrists above my head with one hand and presses me flat to the wall, all power condensed to the single line of his body.
My pulse is a stampede. I mouth at the seam of his jaw, drag my tongue up over the skin, and he growls into my mouth. His thigh comes between mine, the dead precise pressure of it, and my knees nearly fail under me as I grind down, chasing more friction than I’ve ever admitted to needing.
He lets me fight for every inch. I dig my nails into his shoulder, the bulk of him impossible to move, and Xander smiles like he’s already won.
Part of me wants to draw blood, just to disturb that composure, but he clamps down harder on my wrists and pins me for real, so that I have to arch and writhe and make a goddamn spectacle of myself to even get a breath.
We’re barely through the first doorway and already he’s laid waste to any pretense. When he surges forward, he lifts me clean off the floor, my thighs cinched around his ribs and my breath punched out in a single involuntary sound.
The feeling is atomic, a leftover pulse from when I was alone with Gabe. My brain is a whiteout. My only thought is more. I want to melt into his bones, fill the cracks. To see how close to the edge I can get before he loses that hard-stop control.
He spreads my knees wide, presses closer, a grind so brutal it refocuses every synapse in my body. He’s all leverage and unforgiving pressure and, when he finally lets go of my wrists, it’s not mercy; it’s a dare.
Like he wants to see if I’ll slap him, claw him, bolt.
I wrap both arms around his neck and haul myself up, the clench of my thighs so tight it must make his lungs ache and hitch my chin to force his mouth back to mine.
I lock him there. He’s strong enough to break me in half, but right now he’s just standing in the dark, unmoving, letting me devour him like there’s no tomorrow.
I run one hand across the back of his buzzed skull, the other into the collar of his shirt, and yank so hard he tilts off balance. His hip thunks the door frame. The noise is loud, embarrassing, perfect.
He shifts me up higher, his grip almost impersonal, and then pivots into the guest bedroom.
The lights are off. The door doesn’t even get shut; we’re just a tangle of motion above the piles of clean but unfolded laundry.
Xander dumps me on the mattress, hands still under my ass, and the bounce rockets me up. He pushes me down, the force of it a little savage.
The bedsprings creak with potential energy.
My chest heaves. I expect him to climb on, finish what he started, but he pauses with his hands braced on either side of me, just watching my face with a kind of furious concentration.
“Are you gonna kiss me again or stare at me like a dead thing?” I ask.
His face doesn’t move. “You want it rough or slow?”
I want both, but if I admit that out loud, I’ll lose.
“You think I can’t take rough?” I crook a finger at the front of his shirt, hook it, pop two buttons in one rip. “Try me.”
His mouth splits in a real smile. Then he’s on me again, eating the distance, stealing my breath.
He tastes like iron, like near violence; his kisses border on a kind of threat I crave but never admit to.
He bites just beneath my jaw, then circles it with his tongue, soothing nothing, and bites again.
My skin stings in the best way. I crane my head back, goad him with a moan I don’t bother to muffle, and he rewards me with a hand buried in my hair, fixing me tight, keeping me right there while he searches the borderland between pain and pleasure.
I grab at his shoulders, claw my way up the hard, tense line of his back, desperate for purchase, for control. He’s a fucking tank.
“Hey.” Damn, Julian’s voice again. Always at the worst moments. “It’s definitely my turn.”
Xander’s whole body goes taut, his hands rooting into the mattress on either side of my hips. There’s a flicker in him, animal and pleased, but also deeply, perversely competitive.
He lets the threat of release hang heavy between us, and I can feel the thud of my own heartbeat against his chest, wild and unfettered.
When he finally does look toward Julian, it’s with a predator shift, neck and jaw tense, tongue running over the edge of his teeth like he’s taste-testing violence.
Julian’s leaning against the doorframe, arms folded.
His shirt’s already off, belt already unbuckled, pants barely hanging onto his hips.
His eyes are mud-dark and bottomless, and he’s watching us with the kind of focus that makes my inner scaffolding collapse and rebuild itself, becoming stronger and much, much hungrier.
Xander doesn’t bother to move for me, or even glance away from my face. He just bares his teeth, dips to my throat for a hard, claiming bite, and then releases me like he’s making a point.
Julian’s approach is measured, not a single wasted motion. The way he looks at me is less like prey and more like a puzzle. Something to be solved, dismantled, and maybe, if I’m lucky, built into more.
He plants a knee on the side of the mattress and leans over, eyes flicking from my mouth to my collarbone to the crescent moons Xander just carved into my skin.
“You’re bleeding,” he says, and touches the spot with this clinical, almost sweet concern that makes my chest seize.
“Good,” I tell him, and spit a smile back at Xander just to play it both ways.
Xander’s face is flushed, a red splotch across his cheekbones.
Julian drags a thumb through the wet and wipes it away on the flat of his tongue, not breaking eye contact. I taste the blood a second after.
“Xander,” he says. “Move.”
Another time that would’ve turned into a pissing match, but tonight the rules are different and we all know it.
Xander gives a grunt, then drops onto the mattress next to me, one hand still latched on my hip, staking his territory.
Julian settles between my knees. There’s nothing soft in it. My legs are pried open, his hands running up the outsides of my thighs to my waist, and the first brush of his mouth at the inside of my knee is so hot it singes off the top of my brain, I swear.
He looks up at me over the barest hint of a smirk, and I could throttle him for it except it makes heat puddle inside me, an instant, liquid want. Everything after that’s simple physics and bad behavior.
Julian mouths at the inside of my knee, ghosting higher, then runs his tongue along the ridge of my thigh, where the skin goes paler and thinner and I’m most likely to bruise.
He uses teeth, but not for spectacle; it’s gentle, an intermittent pressure, leaving heat and a pulse behind. He’s methodical.
I try to arch up, to grind myself against the first available surface, but he’s already planned for that. Xander’s grip is still there too, thumb digging a bruise into the edge of my hipbone, a silent reminder that no matter which of them is in control, I’m not.
I want to scream, or argue, or bite someone, but all I can do is pant and gasp while Julian parts me with two fingers and taps just the edge of his tongue to the spot, teasing, not entering, just tasting.
I let out a sound that’s pure want, pinned and helpless, straining for more and getting nothing. I claw at the sheet, at the shirt barely hanging from Xander’s frame, at air. I’m a frantic, greedy thing.
I close my eyes, trying to find the edge of what I can stand, and open them when I feel the heat of his breath, so close to me it’s a hallucination. Julian smiles and finally, mercifully, slides his mouth against me.
He eats me out with the same ruthless attention he gives anything that matters, the kind of focus that strips me for parts.
At first, I try to stay quiet, let the building pleasure break in respectful increments, but Julian doesn’t allow it. He works me like an equation, tongue and fingers solving every resistance down to decimals.
“Gabe,” I just about manage to call out. “He needs to be here too. I want all of you.”
It’s a command. It’s a plea inside a dare inside a threat.
Xander doesn’t waste a second. He’s up and off the bed, already hauling his phone from the holster on his jeans, and I can hear the rough, ragged edge to his voice as he dials.
“Bedroom,” he barks into the speaker, and I swear I can hear every particle of Gabe’s molecules rearranging to get to me faster.
Julian flicks his gaze up at me, a brilliant slice of feral delight, and doubles down. His mouth never breaks pace. He’s caustic, precise, insatiable, but his hand finds mine, threading our fingers together in a way that betrays the sliver of real, fucked-up sweetness in him.
My nails dig into his skin. He just squeezes tighter, pinning me to the mattress from the inside. Xander’s other hand lands on my throat, thumb pressing just enough to send a black ripple through my vision.
My entire body rings like a tuning fork, nerves sparking. I thrash, not to escape but to shove them both deeper inside my skin, unsure whose touch I crave more but knowing with a savage certainty that I could die right here and feel it was enough.
The door rips open, a sprawl of too-bright light knifing across the bed. Gabe stands there, expression spun from equal parts horror and hunger, one hand already knifing through his hair in that self-soothing tic. I love that he sees me like this: ruined, wild, beyond recognition.
Julian glances up, tongue still working on me, a predator showing off its kill. Xander doesn’t even look, he just grinds his palm into my pulse, keeping me tethered to the now.