Chapter 10 #5
We stayed locked together while the aftershocks rolled through us.
My cock twitched inside her, still half-hard, still nestled in the filthy heat of her.
Cum leaked around the base of me and dripped onto the sheets.
Her wings slowly folded, feathers brushing my arms. She clung to me, face pressed to my throat, breathing in shaky little bursts.
“I love you,” she whispered. “I wanted this. I wanted you.”
I kissed her temple, her cheek, the edge of the bruise. “I know. I love you too. And I’m done pretending otherwise.”
We didn’t separate right away. I stayed inside her until my cock finally softened and slipped free, a thick trickle of our mixed release following.
Only then did I roll onto my side and pull her with me, tucking her back against my chest, one arm banded around her waist, the other stroking the damaged feathers of her wing with careful fingers.
She was already half-asleep, the adrenaline crash and the orgasm combining into something heavy and peaceful.
“Stay,” she murmured, barely conscious.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
Her breathing evened out within minutes. I lay awake a little longer, listening to the quiet house, feeling the sticky heat of her body against mine, the slow drip of my cum from between her thighs.
She fell asleep like that. Tangled in my arms, her face against my chest, one hand still fisted in my hair as if she was afraid I might leave if she let go.
I held her, listening to her breathing settle into the slow, even rhythm of someone who had been through too much and had finally, finally found somewhere safe to put it down.
* * *
I woke to the peace of a man who had done something irreversible and was, for five seconds, too sleep-warm to care.
Early light filtered through Sabrina’s window in pale stripes across the rumpled sheets, turning dust motes gold.
Her body was pressed against mine, one leg thrown over my hip, her breast soft against my chest, her breathing slow and even against my collarbone.
My arm was around her, fingers resting on the smooth curve of her waist where the sheet had slipped down during the night.
The room smelled of sex. I could see the evidence on her inner thighs, dried white streaks against pale skin where my release had leaked out of her and neither of us had bothered to clean it properly because cleaning had seemed the least important activity available at the time.
Sabrina slept the way she did everything: completely, without halfway measures, her light blonde hair spread across the pillow in tangles that suggested my hands had been enthusiastic, her lips slightly parted, one arm curled beneath the pillow in a pose that managed to be both vulnerable and somehow still confident.
The bruise on her cheek had darkened overnight to a proper purple, and someone, me, probably, though I didn’t remember doing it, had kissed it gently at some point during the night, because there was a smudge of salve transferred to my lower lip that tasted of mint when I licked it away.
I should have been thinking about the consequences.
About Gabriella in her room down the hall, about the geometry of a farmhouse where two of the three women had now had me inside them and the third was Angelina, which was its own category of problem that I had been successfully not examining with the dedication of a man avoiding land mines in a field he himself had mined.
I wasn’t thinking about any of that. I was thinking about the weight of Sabrina against me, the warm scent of her hair, the way her body fit against mine with a rightness that felt earned rather than discovered, and for five perfect seconds the world was simple and warm and entirely contained within the boundaries of her narrow bed.
The door swung open. I jolted awake. Fully, completely, the veteran’s instinct firing from zero to combat alert in the space between one heartbeat and the next, my body tensing beneath Sabrina’s sleeping weight, my hand moving toward the knife that wasn’t there because I’d left it downstairs with the bloodied shirt and the bow.
Gabriella stood in the doorway. I saw her the way you see things in the moment after being startled awake: fragments, impressions, the brain assembling the picture from pieces that arrive out of order.
Her dark blonde hair, loose around her shoulders the way it had been when she’d climbed into my bed two mornings ago.
Her blue eyes, wide, taking in the room with the rapid, comprehensive assessment of someone whose brain was working significantly faster than mine currently was.
Her gaze moved from my face to Sabrina’s sleeping form to the arm I had around her waist to the dried streaks on Sabrina’s inner thighs, and I watched the calculation happen in real time, watched the pieces click into place with the precision of someone solving a puzzle they’d been working on for weeks and had just been handed the final piece.
Her expression did not collapse. It settled. Something passed across her face too quickly to name, and then her features arranged themselves into an expression I had never seen on her before and hoped never to see again: calm, composed, and utterly, completely shattered beneath the surface.
She did not speak. She did not need to. The door said everything, swinging hard against the wall, and the sound of it hung in the room like something that had physical weight.
Then she was gone. The hallway floorboards creaked, and then silence, and then the distant sound of the farmhouse’s front door opening and closing with a firmness that suggested it had not been gently latched.
Sabrina stirred against my chest, mumbling something unintelligible into my collarbone, her body shifting with the confused alertness of someone waking to a noise they can’t place. “Whazzat,” she mumbled. “Door?”
“Go back to sleep,” I said.
She settled, her breathing slowing again, trusting me in the way that people trust you when they have spent the night in your arms and have not yet been informed that the world has just rearranged itself in the hallway outside.
I lay very still. The early light continued its slow crawl across the sheets.
I had crossed a line. Then another. I had Gabriella, who had loved me since she was thirteen, who had written it in a diary I had no business reading, who had taken me inside her beside a lake full of crushed wildflowers and trusted me with the most vulnerable part of herself.
And I had Sabrina, who had waited six years, who had asked for time at the lake and gotten considerably less than she deserved, who had been taken because of me and rescued by me and was now sleeping in my arms with my release drying on her thighs while her sister walked out of the farmhouse into whatever morning awaited her.
Some men came home from war and built quiet lives.
They farmed, they loved simply, they raised families on solid ground.
I had come home and apparently decided that the appropriate response to six years of survival was to systematically set fire to every boundary that had ever existed between me and the women I loved, and then act surprised when the fire spread.