Chapter 17
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Aurora
The room is dark in that particular way that makes every ordinary sound feel suspicious.
The building settles. Pipes hum faintly. Somewhere below, old wood shifts like it’s remembering something. During the day, it feels rustic. At night, it feels conspiratorial.
I stare at the ceiling long enough to consider counting cracks.
Sleep is clearly not coming back for me.
With a quiet sigh, I tug on the oversized sweater I abandoned earlier.
It’s soft and warm and not technically mine, which is information I’m deliberately not unpacking at this hour.
Barefoot, I slip into the hallway and make my way toward the kitchen, drawn by the faint shimmer of light under the doorway.
Zane is exactly where I expect him to be. At the table, chair angled just slightly, back to the wall, line of sight clear to both the stairs and the door. There’s a mug near his hand, his phone face down, a knife within reach but not displayed as a threat. It’s just there. Practical. Prepared.
He looks up the second I enter.
“You’re supposed to be asleep,” he says quietly.
“I tried,” I reply, pushing a strand of hair behind my ear. “My brain declined the invitation.”
His gaze moves over my face, not my bare legs, not the sweater slipping off one shoulder. Just my face. Always my face.
“You okay?” he asks.
The automatic “yeah” rises to my lips and dies there under his patience.
“I mean… yes. No. It’s just loud in my head.”
He nods like that makes perfect sense.
“Coffee?” he offers.
“It’s two in the morning.”
“Tea, then.”
“Tea sounds like pretending we’re stable.”
His mouth curves slightly. “We can pretend.”
He stands and moves around the kitchen with that grounded efficiency of his, filling the kettle, opening cabinets without clatter, every motion economical.
I sit across from where he had been, tugging the sweater sleeves over my hands and watching him the way one might watch a lighthouse. Reliable, calming, quietly necessary.
“You always sit that way?” I ask, nodding toward his previous position.
“Yeah.”
“Back to the wall. Clear view?”
“Yeah.”
“That must be exhausting.”
He shrugs, pouring the water when it’s ready. “Habit.”
I wrap my hands around the mug he slides toward me, letting the heat anchor me.
“I hate that you’re on watch,” I admit. “That you have to be.”
“Why?”
“Because it makes it real. Like this isn’t just paranoia or small-town theatrics. It’s… something else.”
“It was real whether I’m awake or not,” he says gently.
“Don’t ruin my coping,” I mutter, and he huffs a soft, almost amused breath.
We sit in the low light, steam curling between us. The air feels different than it did earlier. Today we talked. We painted. We told stories about childhood and grief. It was vulnerable, yes, but it was safe.
This is standing at the edge of something.
“Why are you like this?” I ask quietly.
“Like what?”
“Like… constant.”
He leans back slightly, studying me in a way that is both direct and unthreatening.
“Because nobody was constant for me,” he says.
The simplicity of it undoes me more than any dramatic confession could.
I look at him, really look at him. At the steadiness in his shoulders, the intentional calm in his posture, the way he has positioned himself between every possible entrance and me, without making it theatrical.
“Zane,” I whisper.
He leans forward, forearms resting on the table, eyes fixed on mine.
“Don’t make that face,” he says softly.
“What face?”
“The one where you think you’re too much.”
My breath catches.
“I don’t—”
“You do.”
The certainty in his voice leaves no room for argument.
Everything shifts inside me. Earlier, we were opening up, learning about each other piece by careful piece. Now it feels less like learning and more like gravity. Everything we said today was a prelude to this moment, and neither of us can pretend not to feel it anymore.
“This feels different,” I admit.
“How?”
“This afternoon we were talking about childhood and paint colors and building something new.” I swallow. “Right now it feels like I’m about to be consumed.”
His gaze darkens with intensity.
“By what?” he asks quietly.
“You.”
He doesn’t move immediately. That’s what makes it unbearable. The control. The restraint. The way he looks at me, actively choosing not to cross a line.
“You should go back to bed,” he says.
“That’s not what you want.”
His jaw tightens just slightly. “You’re tired.”
“I’m not.”
The building creaks again. The air feels thinner.
I stand and walk around the table, each step calm and reckless all at once. When I stop in front of him, we’re close enough that I can feel the heat of him through the sweater.
“You’re very steady,” I murmur.
“Yeah.”
“It’s extremely inconvenient.”
A flicker of humor touches his mouth, but it disappears quickly.
“You’re shaking,” he says softly.
I hadn’t noticed, but I am.
Before I can deny it, his hand lifts and brushes along my jaw, thumb resting just beneath my ear. It’s a simple touch, gentle and measured, but it sends a shock through me. I’ve stepped into live current.
“You don’t have to prove anything,” he says quietly. “You don’t have to shrink.”
“I’m not shrinking,” I whisper, even as my pulse thunders.
“No,” he agrees. “You’re not.”
And then the distance between us disappears.
I don’t remember deciding to lean in. I don’t remember thinking at all. One second we’re breathing the same air, and the next our mouths collide like this has been waiting for a weak moment to take over.
His hands find my waist with instinctive certainty. My fingers curl into his shirt, pulling him closer as if I’ve been doing it forever. The kiss deepens instantly, heat surging between us in a way that feels less a choice and more a surrender.
When he pulls back for a breath, his forehead rests against mine.
“Aurora?”
“Zane.”
He kisses me again, deeper this time, and whatever restraint he’s been holding onto finally fractures. It’s not frantic or chaotic; it’s focused and overwhelming and entirely mutual. Days of glances and almosts and loaded silences collapse into this one undeniable point.
“Zane,” I hiss against his mouth. “I want you.”
My wisest idea? Hell no, but that isn’t going to stop me.
For a split second, I see his pupils blow wide, black nearly devouring the hazel, and then his mouth is on mine again.
He tastes of tea, of wanting, and deeply male, and I mean to tease him, to keep control, but he’s already reading my strategies and rerouting them.
He lifts me straight onto the table, not a hint of effort, not even breaking the kiss.
The ceramic mug clatters to the floor, a neat little implosion I feel in my bones, but I don’t care. I’m on the kitchen table, legs bracketing his hips, and he has one hand splayed across my lower back and the other in my hair, and both are necessary, both are urgent.
My sweater hitches up far enough to bare my thighs but not enough to shield the shivering. My skin is fire, my blood is static, and nothing he does can keep up with the frantic pace of wanting more, always more.
He palms my cheek, fingertips digging just enough to pull my focus.
“Is this okay?” he asks, and I want to tell him it’s critical—the only thing keeping me from dissolving.
Instead, I nod, too breathless for words, and seize his mouth again.
He licks into me, slow at first, then with a hungry tilt that makes me answer in kind.
I scrabble for his belt, desperate and graceless.
My hands tremble, but he steadies them with his own, weaving our fingers together before letting go.
He takes over, makes quick work of the buckle and zipper, and pushes his jeans just enough. He’s hard already, the press of him impossible to ignore, and even clothed, he fits perfectly between my thighs.
“Tell me what you want,” he whispers, and the sound of his voice almost undoes me again.
“Everything,” I say, and mean it.
He nods, taking it as a challenge. Drops to one knee, pulling me flush to the edge of the table. He pushes my thighs wider, mouth finding the bare skin just above the fold of my underwear, biting down and sucking gently until I start to shake, then kissing the mark he’s made.
I realize I’m holding my breath only when he runs his tongue along the waistband. Up, then down, then lower, so close to where I burn that I almost cry out.
“Fuck.”
The single word knives through the darkness, a plea and a threat and a fact. His mouth hovers there, at the edge of transgression, and I want, no, need, him to erase every boundary between us.
He looks up at me. In the scant light of the kitchen, his eyes are molten, almost animal.
All the cleverness and self-control from earlier is a thin, breakable shell.
I hook my leg around his shoulders, digging my heel into his back, urging him, and he laughs against my thigh.
An exhale, a vibration that goes straight through me.
He doesn’t rush. He maps me with his mouth, tracing a slow path up the inside of my thigh. I feel it everywhere. His mouth, his hands, the furnace blast of his intent tuned entirely to me.
“Please,” I say, or maybe just breathe, and he hears it.
He tugs the fabric aside so gently it feels almost overwhelming, then his mouth is on me, warm and wet and devastating. His tongue flicks once, testing, then he licks into me with a hunger that steals every bit of air from my lungs.
He eats me as if he’s been thinking about it for weeks. I fist both hands in his hair, knuckles whitening, and the only thing in the world is his mouth, the slide of his tongue, the guttural sounds he makes as he works.
My hips come off the table. I can’t help it. He holds me down, forearm braced across my thighs, and groans when I come apart, nearly arching off the table, and he moans as though my pleasure is a meal he’s starved for.
I feel the aftershocks in my knees, my throat, my goddamn teeth, and when he finally draws back his mouth is swollen, jaw set, almost feral. He looks like he wants to do it again, to keep going until I don’t remember who or where I am.
I blink, vision rimmed with static. He kisses my inner thigh, then my knee, then stands, sliding his hands over my hips as if to keep me from floating away.
I reach for his face and pull him up to me. I taste myself on his lips, on his tongue, and instead of embarrassment, I feel a primal satisfaction. His hands squeeze my hips. We’re both breathing hard, bodies locked together as if the world might split if we come apart too quickly.
"You good?" he asks, husky and cautious at the same time.
My laugh is a cracked-open thing, still shaking. "Are you?"
His fingers slip under the hem of the sweater, hesitating at my hips like he's asking rather than taking. I nod, a short, sharp movement, and he slides it up over my ribs, up my arms, off and away. I’m left in nothing but panties and the wild shock of my hair, and I should be mortified, but there’s no room for shame in this room.
Not with his hands on my skin, mapping me like I’m a country worth warring over, not with him using his hand to pull himself free.
He doesn't even let his own pants fall. Just pushes them down enough to bare himself, to line us up.
The quick jerk of his fist is all the warning I get before he tugs my panties to the side again and teases the head of his cock along where I'm still pulsing.
He watches my face the whole time, every micro expression, every stutter of my breath.
He seems to need the data as much as I need his hands.
"Tell me if you want me to stop," he says, and it's a command, not a courtesy.
I want to claw my way out of my skin instead, or maybe just into his veins.
"Please," I whisper, and it's so raw, so needy, I'm not even sure it's my voice at all.
He presses forward, the blunt hot head of his cock nudging into me slowly. His eyes lock on mine. He doesn’t look away from me, from himself, from the seam where our bodies finally join.
He pushes in all the way, impossibly deep on the first try.
My body bows into his, both hands fisting the edge of the table because I don’t trust my own arms to hold me up.
He doesn’t give me a second to recover, another thrust, slow but devastating, and I swear I see stars.
This is not a man who fucks to chase his own climax.
This is a man who seems personally offended by the idea of anything less than utter ruin.
He moves fast because he wants to break time. Every snap of his hips forces sound out of me. Little noises I can't control, ones I've never heard from my own throat. His hand is on my jaw, tipping my head up so he has to see my mouth, to see exactly what he’s doing to me.
I don’t even have the mental bandwidth for shame. Just lust and some kind of startled awe at how thoroughly he takes me apart. The table shudders with every movement.
I want to laugh, want to weep, want to keep him here in my orbit until the world burns down around us.
His mouth finds my collarbone, bites hard enough to leave a mark, and the sharp spike of pain makes me clench around him so tight he curses, low and savage, into my skin.
He doesn’t have to say my name; he owns the moment, every arch and tremor.
And when he finally lets go, head tipping back as he pulses inside me, I’ve never felt safer or more unrestrained in my life.
The crash that follows is chemical and complete. He doesn’t let go right away. He pants into my neck, riding the aftershocks, his heartbeat thundering against my chest.
He leans forward, trembling, both arms braced around me like I might disappear from underneath him.