Chapter 25
Amy
Ifind my corner table in the library on a Wednesday afternoon and tell myself I am going to read for two hours without thinking about him.
I manage eleven minutes.
The library is quiet at this hour, the post-lunch lull before the late-afternoon rush, when the cubicles fill up with people who have deadlines and the desperate focus of students who have left things too long.
My corner is in the back of the second floor, behind the periodicals section that nobody uses, flanked by two tall shelves that create a pocket of privacy I have come to depend on.
I open my textbook. I read the first paragraph twice.
Then I hear her.
From somewhere near the stairwell, her voice carries in the library hush. Soft and directed at someone she is hoping to find.
She moves slowly through the stacks, checking the cubicles as she passes.
I know before I see her that it is the economics girl.
I know because the way she is looking for someone, lands in my stomach the way it has been landing since the common room. Something that I have been very scrupulous about not calling jealousy settles into my chest.
I look at my textbook, trying to push the thought away.
She moves into the periodicals section. I can see her now through the gap between shelves—dark hair, careful movements, her eyes scanning the cubicles one by one. Looking for him.
Coming toward my corner without knowing I am here.
I should say something.
I should cough, or move, or give her the normal social signal that the space is occupied, but I don’t.
I sit very still, and I watch her come, and I feel the thing in my chest that I am not calling jealousy do its precise, unwelcome work.
And then the air in my corner changes.
I feel it before anything else, the shift that my nervous system has learned to read as him.
The pressure.
The warmth.
The sense of something large and deliberate occupying the space directly behind me.
His hand comes to my hip.
I don’t startle.
I don’t make a sound.
My whole body goes very still and very aware at once, every nerve ending suddenly awake, the weight of his hand through my shirt, the warmth of him close behind me, his breath on the back of my neck.
“Don’t turn around,” he says. So quiet only I can hear.
I don’t.
Through the gap in the shelves, the economics girl is two rows away. Still looking. Her eyes move across the cubicles with the focused patience of someone who believes she will find what she is looking for if she is thorough enough.
Saint shifts closer behind me, so close now that I can feel the full warmth of him against my back, the chair between us the only thing maintaining the space.
His hand moves from my hip to the edge of the table, bracketing me, and he leans down so his mouth is at my ear.
“You were watching her,” he says.
It is not a question.
“I watched her look for you,” I say. My voice is very even. I’m proud of how even it is.
His mouth curves against my ear. I feel it more than see it. “And what did you feel while you watched?”
I don’t answer. I’ll never admit to him how much I hate that she is.
His hand moves.
It slides from the edge of the table to my waist, unhurried, and then lower, and I grip the edge of the table and keep my eyes straight ahead, where the girl is checking the next row of cubicles, getting closer and then turning away, rechecking.
“Amy,” he says. “What did you feel?”
“I felt…” I stop. Start again. “I did not like it,” I say.
“The words for that,” he says, very quietly against my ear, “is because you’re mine.”
Something goes through me at those words, but it’s not fear, not the Roman version of that word that lands like a collar around my neck.
His version.
The version that is a statement about him rather than a claim on me. What he feels. What I am to him.
My grip on the table tightens.
He moves my chair back an inch, smooth, silent, and he is behind me completely now, and his hands are at the waistband of my jeans, and the library is quiet.
We are behind a large row of shelves where no one can see us, and the girl is four rows away, still looking. I should say something, should stop this, should be a reasonable person in a library on a Wednesday afternoon.
I lift my chin.
He takes that for what it is.
Permission.
What follows is the most exquisitely controlled thing I have ever experienced.
He is precise in the way he is precise about everything, methodical, unhurried, attentive to every detail.
He keeps one hand flat on the table in front of me, something to hold, something solid, while the other manages the situation with the quiet efficiency of a man who is very good at not being heard.
I stare at the gap in the shelves. The economics girl is three rows away now. She checks a cubicle—moves on.
Saint’s mouth is at the side of my neck, barely touching, his breath warm and controlled while mine is the opposite, shallow and effortful. I swallow before it can become sound, my knuckles white against the table edge.
He finds the rhythm that makes my vision blur at the edges, and he holds it like a man who has learned exactly what he is doing and has decided thoroughness is the only acceptable standard.
My free hand comes up and grips his forearm where it brackets me on the table, and he lets me.
He always lets me hold on. His skin is smooth and hard.
Muscular in a way that screams raw power.
She is moving parallel to us now, her eyes scanning.
Saint presses his mouth to my ear. “Stay quiet,” he says. His voice is completely even.
The words should scare me. They do. But the fear moves wrong. It doesn’t send me away from him. It folds me tighter around the moment, around the table edge beneath my palms, around the impossible heat of him at my back.
The girl’s footsteps pause two rows over.
Saint stills. Completely. For one terrible second, he does nothing. He only breathes against my neck, slow and controlled, while my body keeps waiting for him. Wanting him. Hating that waiting feels worse than anything he has already done.
His mouth brushes the shell of my ear. “If you want me to stop, say it now.”
My fingers tighten around his forearm. The footsteps move closer. I should say yes. I should tell him to stop. Instead, I turn my face just enough for my lips to brush his jaw and whisper, “Don’t.”
His hand flexes once against the table. The sound he makes is almost too quiet to hear. Almost.
His breathing is controlled.
He is managing himself with the same discipline he brings to everything, using it now to take me apart in a library while the girl who has been looking for him is ten feet away and does not know it.
The territorial precision of what he is communicating without words tips me over the edge in a long, silent wave that moves through my entire body.
I press my teeth together, grip his arm, and stare at the gap in the shelves with my eyes wide open.
He pulls my jeans over my ass, panties with it.
He slides two fingers to see if I’m wet.
Tiny shudders rack my body as his fingers slide over my cunt. Testing. Teasing.
“I’m going to fuck you, Amy. Hard, deep, and fast.”
God help me I nod at his words.
“Spread your legs.”
I do as he asks without question.
She turns the corner at the end of the row.
Saint presses his mouth to my hair.
He doesn’t move for a long moment, just stays exactly where he is, his forearm solid under my grip, his breath evening out against the back of my head in the way it does when he’s bringing himself back from somewhere.
He pulls my pants down farther and slides his finger over my wet pussy from front to back deeper this time.
A shiver runs through my body as he slides my soaked panties lower.
He tests how wet I am like he is measuring how much I want him.
It’s obvious that I’m dying for him to slide inside me.
Then he steps back.
He adjusts.
The tip of his dick is soft. Testing how much I can take. Once he is sure, he grips my hip with one hand and takes me in one go.
My feet lift off the floor at the raw power of his thrust.
I suck in a breath as he stretches me.
He’s big, thick, and full, leaving room for nothing but the beat of my heart and the way he fucks me. Pure, raw, measured strokes, intimate and soft at the same time.
The soft slap of his thighs against me in a rhythm that causes my orgasm to peak so fast and hard, I hear the pounding of my own heartbeat. I watch the girl look for him one last time before she walks out.
He is fucking me fast. Too fast.
I hold Saint’s name from slipping out of my lips as I come hard.
“Mine,” he growls.
Once he comes and adjusts himself, he sits in the chair beside me as if he has simply arrived to study, pulling it close enough that his knee presses against mine under the table.
I look at my textbook. At the cum dripping between my thighs.
I feel him watching the side of my face.
“She was looking for you,” I say, when I can trust my voice again, like he just didn’t fuck me so good it erased anyone else before him.
“I know,” he says.
“You were here instead.”
“Yes, because it is where I want to be more than anything.”
“We didn’t use protection.”
He lowers his voice above a whisper. “Don’t act like care.”
I look at him.
His expression is unguarded, which I have learned to read as the closest thing to everything he does not say out loud. He pushes the cum dripping between my thighs inside my pussy.
“Put your pants up. Azriel will show up soon.”
I pull them up and turn back to my textbook, letting the shock of what I just allowed him to do settle.
I push the guilt of not resisting him, because how could I? There is beauty in the way he appears when I’m trapped in the darkest recesses of my mind. Like he holds the key to the door of the mental prison my past has locked me in.
I can’t manage to read a single word for the rest of the afternoon.
He stays beside me the entire time like a storm waiting to break, dark, heavy, and loud in all the ways silence can be. His presence hangs over me like promised rain, thick with danger.
The kind I should run from, yet I secretly crave.