Chapter 14 #2
Her breathing wasn’t steady anymore. It hitched, just slightly, then smoothed out like she was trying to pretend she hadn’t done it. My hips shifted involuntarily. I cursed under my breath.
“Are you thinking about my mouth?” she asked, voice barely audible.
A low grunt escaped before I could stop it. I didn’t answer. I couldn’t have formulated a coherent sentence if I wanted to. I was already close, too close, but I forced myself to slow down. Pain sharpened me, grounded me.
“You’re not answering me,” she said, voice soft but pointed. The kind of tone that made you want to confess things you had no business saying out loud.
My breath ghosted across the speaker. I stroked slowly, wrist flexing, thumb grazing over the head, smearing slick across overheated skin. My spine arched off the wall, jaw clenched so tight my teeth ached.
“Are you imagining what I’d taste like?” she breathed. “How soft I’d be for you? How deep I’d let you—”
“Stop,” I growled and let my head fall back against the wall. The concrete was merciless against my skull, an anchor. I focused on the sting, tried to drag myself back into the cold, tactical world, where things made sense.
It didn’t work.
In my mind, she was still in that window, lit in blue, bare, and defiant. I could see her as clearly as if I had a scope on her: the tilt of her neck, the arch of her spine, the way her fingers might be skating over her own skin, unhurried, curious.
“Do you?” she pressed, quieter now. “Imagine it?”
“Yes,” I said finally, because lying felt pointless and she’d probably hear it anyway. The word scraped its way out of me, raw. “Yes.”
A soft exhale brushed my ear. Not quite a moan, not quite a laugh. Something in between that made my stomach knot.
“I liked when you looked at me like that this morning, but I couldn’t tell if you liked what you saw last night or not.”
I did.
The wind picked up, flinging grit against my boots. Somewhere, a siren wailed and faded. My whole world narrowed to a phone pressed to my ear and the girl on the other end.
“Tell me,” she whispered, “what it’s like right now.”
“Dangerous,” I said. It was the only word that felt safe enough to touch.
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know exactly what you meant.” My eyes closed again, not to sleep, but because it was easier to picture her that way.
It should have infuriated me, how casual she sounded. How she could pivot from fear to this. But under it was something tremoring and brave, the same reckless streak that had made her face down men who wanted her dead and yet still return to the café for work the next morning.
I’d thought that stubbornness would get her killed. I hadn’t planned for it to take me apart first.
“I don’t know what you’re doing,” I said, the words squeezing out between my teeth. “Is this you trying to prove you’re not scared of me?”
“No,” she said. “I am scared of you.”
The honesty hit harder than any lie would have.
“But right now,” she went on, “I think I’m more scared of how much I like the way you’re breathing.”
She had no idea what that did to me. Or maybe she did, and that was the point.
I shifted my grip on the phone, fingers slick against the cheap plastic, and somewhere in the mess of heat and shame and want was a thin, bright line of realization: she was steering the situation. At least a little. Testing how far I’d let her push.
She was not just some helpless civilian in my care. She was a person with teeth and a dangerous curiosity, and I was letting her sink it in.
She made a quiet sound on the line: not a moan, but a soft sigh that almost made me double over. I grunted softly, the sound slipping out unguarded. My hand pumped tighter now, thumb grazing the head of my cock, wrist flexing. Tension gripped every inch of me, a knot of violence, lust, guilt.
“What if I was up there? With you?” She mused out loud.
On her knees. The thought hit so fast it felt involuntary, like a reflex. I hated how easy it was to see, how badly I wanted it.
“Don’t,” I managed, word lilting in pitch.
Heat crested, sharp and urgent. I tried to pull back from it, to breathe through it, to regain even an inch of the control I prided myself in having.
My fingers dug into the cold concrete at my side, trying to anchor myself to the rooftop, to the job, to anything other than her voice and the pictures it painted.
On the line, she made another sound. Not loud. A small, bitten-off little noise that might have been a sigh, might have been the start of my name, and then a breathy laugh. “You’re close.”
“Yes.”
“Because of me?”
“Yes.”
Another pause. Then, very softly, like a secret she wanted me to keep: “So am I.”
That was it.
It shredded what was left of my restraint.
The tension snapped in a blinding rush, control tearing loose in a way I hadn’t felt in years.
My body locked, an involuntary sound I didn’t manage to smother in time, breath shuddering out of me in short, stuttering pulls.
Every nerve sang hot and electric, then frayed, then went slack by painful degrees.
I came into my hand with a quiet groan, head tilted back, jaw locked.
I forced myself to breathe. In. Out. Again.
My hand trembled. My stomach muscles ached from holding so much back, from trying not to make a sound she could weaponize later.
My pulse thundered in my ears, drowning out the quiet city.
I felt stripped clean and filthy at the same time, like I had just traded in a piece of my discipline and she had taken it without even asking my price.
She was quiet too, for a moment.
“You’re dangerous when you’re quiet,” she whispered.
I swallowed. My throat felt raw. I wiped my hand on my pants and then dragged the back of my wrist across my mouth like that would scrub the moment away.
“And you’re reckless when you think you’re safe,” I said. The words came out hoarse, scraped clean of anything but truth.
There was a heartbeat of nothing. Then the line clicked, dead. She’d hung up.
I sat there, pants still undone, skin cold and nerves rattled, wondering what the fuck I was doing anymore and what the hell she’d done to me.
I didn’t know what to think about her and these two opposite facets of her personality.
All I knew was that it was getting harder and harder to look at her like someone I could leave behind.