12. Everett
He comes back up with sandwiches on a plate. I watch him cross the room and understand that I am in enormous trouble.
I didn’t even last twenty-four hours. So much for willpower. This is what the Bureau wanted. It’s why they made us do this.
The heat I can live with, now that I’ve stopped fighting it.
The trouble is the man carrying the plate. He’s shirtless, barefoot, wearing the print of my teeth on one shoulder, and quietly pleased about every part of it.
“Eat,” he says.
The sandwiches are good, which annoys me. I don’t know why. He’s supposed to be a brutish asshole. He’s not supposed to towel-dry me and wrap me in a blanket when I’m cold and make good sandwiches.
I get maybe ten minutes of being a person. Then the wave comes back.
It starts the way they all start — heat at the base of my spine, fresh slick, his scent arriving ahead of my own pulse. This time there’s no fight left to lose. I put the plate on the nightstand and swing a leg over him.
His hands come to my hips on reflex. His eyebrows go up. “Already?”
He’s hard already — has been hard, was hard the whole time he watched me eat — and the blunt press of his cock against me steals whatever I meant to say next.
I sink down slow, just to watch what it does to his face. It’s the first real power I’ve had in two days and I intend to use it.
His jaw goes tight. His hands flex on my hips, hard enough to bruise, and he lets me set the pace anyway — all that strength idling under me, waiting on my say-so.
“Everett.” Strangled. “You’re going to kill me.”
“Eventually. Not today.” I take the last of him inside me and we both stop pretending to have a conversation.
I ride him the way the heat wants — deep, rolling, no hurry at the start and then all hurry, his thighs braced behind me, his hands everywhere at once. The angle is mine. The pace is mine.
He gives me both without being asked and keeps his eyes open the whole time, watching me take what I need with an expression that would frighten me if I had any fear left over.
“You should see yourself,” he says, hoarse.
“I don’t need to.” I roll my hips flat and watch his eyes lose focus.
“There,” I tell him, when I find it. “Right—” His hips punch up to meet me and the word breaks in half.
“There,” he agrees, low, and does it again.
It builds fast after that. Everything does, in heat. The wave stacks itself under whatever you’re doing and doubles it. I brace both hands on his chest and take us there, and when I clench down on him deliberately, just to hear what it drags out of him, the sound is so good I do it again.
“That’s it.” His voice has gone to gravel. “Take what you need. Come on my cock, let me feel it.”
I do. Without a hand on me, all over his stomach, shaking, his name in my mouth like it lives there now.
He follows me inside a dozen strokes, pulling me down by the back of the neck to groan into my hair, hips grinding up through the last of it, and the flood of him inside me gentles the wave the way nothing else does.
I stay where I am, sprawled on his chest, his heartbeat going hard under my ear, the pair of us glued together with sweat and worse. His hand moves up and down my spine in big slow passes. If I had a shred of self-respect left, I’d move.
“This doesn’t change anything,” I tell his collarbone.
“Course not,” he says, and pulls the blanket over us both.
We fuck again twice, fast and furious, and then the heat fades briefly, giving me a short respite.
He spends it being useful: water, the rest of the sandwich, and then, a bath I do not agree to right up until I’m in it.
“I’m fine,” I say, as he soaps my back. “I don’t need to be bathed.”
“Yeah, you do. You were all sticky.”
“Not my fault,” I reply.
“Fair.” He works shampoo into my hair with those enormous hands, and I abandon any arguing on the spot.
The bath is where the next wave finds me, because of course it is — warm water, his hands, his scent thick in the steam. I feel it coming and he smells it coming in the same moment. His hands go still in my hair.
“Bed,” he says.
“No.” I catch his wrist.
He rinses my hair first. Of course he does. Unhurried, thorough, tilting my head back with two fingers under my chin while I sit there in heat, wanting him, letting him finish the job — and by the time he lifts me out of the water I’m shaking again.
Slow, it turns out, is worse, but exactly what the heat needs to satisfy it, at least momentarily.
Slow is him laying me out on the clean side of the bed and starting at my ankle. Mouth, hands, the scrape of stubble on the inside of my knee. By the time he gets anywhere useful, I’m babbling.
“Brody. Brody, I swear to God—”
“Mm.” Against my hip. Infuriating. “I like slow.”
“You are driving me—” His tongue drags up the crease of my thigh, straight through the slick there, and my spine comes off the bed. “—insane.”
“Noted.” He does not go faster.
When he finally slides into me it’s one long unbroken push, both of us watching where we’re joined, and then his forehead comes down to mine and he moves the way the slow want asked for — deep and unhurried, each stroke rolling through me from the inside out.
Nobody has ever taken me apart like this.
Nobody has ever bothered. I hold onto his shoulders and let it happen, and if my eyes sting somewhere in the middle of it, the sweat covers for me.
“Look at me,” he says, when I turn my face away. I don’t obey.
The finish takes an age arriving.
I come with him buried deep and his hand wrapped around me, wrung out in long slow pulses, and he follows with his mouth pressed to my jaw.
Evening brings a meaner wave, and a discovery: I want him in my mouth more than I have ever wanted anything that wasn’t directly about survival.
He’s half asleep when I go down on him, and fully awake roughly two seconds later.
The size of him is absurd — jaw-aching, eye-watering absurd — but the heat doesn’t care. I take him deeper than sense allows and moan around him like the taste of him is something I’ve been rationed my whole life.
“Everett—fuck—” His hand hovers at my hair, asking. I take his wrist and put it there myself.
He watches me the whole time. I know because I look up, once, and the sight of him propped on one elbow, wrecked, reverent, that huge chest heaving, nearly finishes me without a touch.
He swears low and continuous, and when he tries to pull me off with a warning I stay exactly where I am and take it deeper.
“Come here.” He hauls me up the moment I let him, kisses me deep enough to taste himself, and flips me under him in one motion. “Your turn.”
His mouth on my cock is devastating and he knows it — slow and thorough where I’m frantic, one big forearm pinning my hips flat. When he adds two fingers into me, crooked exactly right, I come down his throat with a shout they probably heard at the arena.
I lie there panting.
He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, smug beyond all decency, and goes to refill my water like nothing happened.
Five minutes later, it rises again and he is hauling me astride him, inside me on the next breath, both of us gasping, furious, neither of us stopping.
At some point, I sleep, waking already begging. It’s fully dark, I’m on my front, slick through the sheets again, and the words are out of me before I consider my dignity.
“Please. Need you. Now.”
He’s there before I finish the sentence, a wall of heat down my back, one arm sliding under my hips to haul me up.
“Like this?” His mouth at my ear, his cock already sliding through the slick. Even now, checking. Even at three in the morning, with my scent shouting yes at industrial volume, he asks.
“Yes. Like this. Exactly like this.” I shove back against him to make the point.
He laughs into my hair and pushes in, and the laugh dies in both of us.
This one is nothing like the slow. He takes me the way the heat has been demanding all along — hard and deep, his forearm bracing me, his breath ragged at my ear — and I push up on my hands and meet him stroke for stroke, loud, past caring what I sound like.
The headboard hits the wall and I could not care less.
He gets a hand in my hair — asks first, a tug, a question — and when I push back into it he takes a proper fistful and holds me exactly where I apparently need to be held, and the noise I make into the mattress is one the heat will have to answer for, because I certainly won’t.
And here, in the dark, at the bottom of the wave, is where the heat plays dirty. His mouth crosses the back of my neck — a kiss, only a kiss — and the gland there aches, sudden and shocking, a want with teeth in it, and what comes out of me is: “Do it.”
He goes completely still, still buried in me.
“Everett.”
“I didn’t—” My own voice, wrecked, appalled. The want is still talking. I wrestle it down. “Ignore that. That was the heat. Shoulder. Use the shoulder.”
A long breath against my spine. Then his teeth close on the meat of my shoulder, hard and blunt, nowhere near the gland, and I come so fast and so violently that the room goes white.
He finishes with his face pressed between my shoulder blades, shaking, holding me through it, and when we collapse he pulls me back against his chest and puts his hand flat over the gland, covering it.
“Thank you,” I say, very quietly, to the dark.
His only response is his arm tightening, before the heat rises again and I am lost.