Chapter 10 #2
"Still think you're winning?" he asks. He slips his hand between us and pushes two fingers back inside my slick hole, grinding his cock against mine at the exact same time. The combination—the internal pressure on my prostate and the wet friction of our cocks—is lethal.
"Come for me," he orders against my mouth. The cocky edge is back, but underneath it is something raw. Something that sounds like let go.
His fingers press deep. His hips grind down. I'm literally in the middle of calling him a smug piece of shit, and my body just detonates.
I come so hard my vision whites out. I spill over his hand, across both our stomachs, my hips jerking up against him in sharp, uncontrollable snaps.
My hole clenches around his fingers so tight he groans.
I'm spurting hot and messy between us, coating his knuckles, every muscle in my body locked.
The orgasm rips the insult right out of my throat, replacing it with a wrecked, high-pitched sound that lives somewhere between his name and a swear word.
I will deny making it until the day I die.
Knox holds me through it, his fingers still working inside me, drawing the climax out until I'm twitching, oversensitive, and shoving his hand away just to survive it.
When my brain finally reboots, Knox is lying next to me. His arms are casually tucked behind his head, his cock still fully hard against his stomach, and his face is a picture of absolute, unadulterated smugness.
"I win," he says.
I stare at the ceiling, my chest heaving.
My body is still trembling with aftershocks.
I want to smother him with a pillow. He played my body like he had the cheat codes, and he didn't even finish.
Lying there, victorious and rock-hard, like not coming is the ultimate power move.
And it is. I hate him, I respect the play, and I fucking hate that I respect it.
"Fine," I pant. "You won. I get my question."
A beat. Knox's smugness doesn't vanish, but something shifts behind his eyes.
"Ask."
I could ask anything. I could ask about the DMs, the alley, why he keeps showing up at my door like a stray dog that memorized the route. I could ask something easy and waste this on bullshit.
But I didn't rig a sex competition and lose just to ask him his favorite color. I have one shot. One honest answer. No deflection. I can play it safe, or I can ask the thing that's been burning a hole through my chest for months.
I turn my head to look at him. He's still watching the ceiling, the picture of post-game confidence. But a muscle in his jaw is ticking. He knew this was coming. He knew it the second he took the bet.
"Why did you leave that morning?"
The specific morning. The one after our first hookup. The morning I woke up to cold sheets and a deleted KnotMe profile, standing in my bathroom staring at the empty space where he'd been, wondering exactly how I'd managed to ruin it.
Knox's face changes. The smirk fades slowly, like a dimmer switch going down. His jaw locks tight. His eyes stay glued to the ceiling.
The silence stretches. It goes on long enough that I almost snap at him—a deal's a deal, asshole—but the quality of the quiet stops me. He's not performing reluctance. He's trying to figure out how to force something true into the smallest possible number of words.
"I got a call." His voice comes out flat. Stripped bare. "Family shit. I had to leave."
Seven words. He doesn't add a single syllable. His eyes remain fixed above us, but his fingers have gone completely rigid against the pillow.
I wait for more. More doesn't come.
"Family shit," I repeat. The words taste foreign in my mouth.
"Yeah."
The room goes quiet again. My come is drying sticky on our stomachs. We're lying in the messy aftermath of a sex game that just morphed into a minefield. Knox is staring upward, jaw clenched so hard I can see the bone, and I'm trying to sort family shit into a mental category. It doesn't fit.
The stories I've told myself for months—he got bored, I wasn't worth staying for—the lies that kept the anger clean and pointed in the right direction?
Family shit ruins them. It means there was a reason.
It means he didn't just leave because I was a disposable piece of trash.
And if I wasn't disposable, what the hell was I?
Collateral damage? An afterthought in the middle of someone else's crisis?
Is that better? I genuinely don't know. The not-knowing sits heavy in my chest, a jagged little pill I can't swallow.
I want to push. I want to grab him by the jaw, force him to look at me, and demand details.
What call? What family? Why couldn't you send one fucking text?
Just "I had to go" would have been enough.
He didn't owe me a novel, but he owed me a sentence.
I checked my phone four times that morning. He owed me five words.
But the look on his face stops me. He looks like those seven words physically cost him something. I've seen Knox perform. I've seen him lie. This isn't either of those things.
My anger is still there. I'm still furious he left, and I'm still furious he came back.
But there's a crack in the armor now. The story where Knox Rivera didn't give a shit has a seven-word fracture running straight down the middle.
I'm not ready to forgive him, and I'm not ready to trust him, but the ground under my feet doesn't feel the same as it did ten minutes ago.
My hand moves on its own. My fingers find Knox's forearm, where dark, intricate ink wraps from his wrist past his elbow.
I trace a line of the tattoo with my fingertip, following the curve of the design over the muscle.
I don't consciously decide to do it; my hand just drifts there, the same way it drifts to the bite mark on my neck when I'm not paying attention.
It's the first time I've touched him without it being a fight or a fuck. Just a touch. My finger on his skin.
Knox doesn't pull away. He stays perfectly still, eyes on the ceiling, and just lets me. Slowly, his rigid fingers relax against the pillow. His breathing shifts, the tight, held-in breaths giving way to something deeper.
We lie there. My finger traces the ink on his arm. His breathing evens out. The come dries on our skin, and family shit sits in the space between us like a door that just creaked open an inch.