No Storm. No Cover. No Break -Finn
Twenty Four
Aweek.
Seven days of watching the sky.
No storms. No cover. No break in the stillness that had settled over the city. Just more of them, and less of everything else.
I stood at the window, my eye pressed to the narrowest gap in the boards, gaze locked on the Suburban. It sat three houses down, exactly where it had been since the first day—untouched, unmoved.
The street had changed. The eerie quiet of the first couple of days had given way to slow, directionless movement.
Shapes drifted up and down the road as if they’d stopped searching for anything specific and simply claimed the space instead.
It felt like we were the ones who no longer belonged here.
We should have moved sooner.
But we’d made the right call. We’d worked with what we had, and what we had hadn’t been enough. No amount of replaying it would change that.
Behind me, the house was quiet. Fiona and Lily had finally crashed after their watch. Libby was on the couch downstairs, sleeping lightly, or trying to. Seven days into this now—nights belonging to Libby and me, days to Fiona and Lily. Nobody fully slept. Nobody fully relaxed. We just endured.
I shifted my eyes back to the street.
Then—
Nothing. Then another scream before a gunshot cut it short—a single, hard crack that the buildings threw back and forth until it had nowhere left to go.
I didn’t need to see it to understand. Someone had made a run for it, gotten caught, or decided to fight back. The ending was always the same.
“It needs to fucking rain,” I muttered through my teeth.
Without it, we had nothing.
We didn’t have time for frustration; we had a backup plan.
Rain or no rain, we were moving soon. The supplies should have lasted longer. They hadn’t—not because anyone had taken more than their share, none of us were eating enough for that—but four people were still four people, and the numbers didn’t care.
Libby and I had sat with it all the previous night, in the dark while the house creaked around us, and worked through the numbers in whispers.
“When we’re down to the last of it, we move,” I’d told her. “Storm or no storm.”
She nodded without hesitating. “We don’t have another choice.”
Listening to the last of those distant sounds fade, the weight of that decision settled harder against my chest. Moving without cover meant exposure—not a plan so much as a calculated gamble, and gambles had a way of collecting when you could least afford to pay them.
I understood death. I’d made my peace with it long ago, sitting with the idea until it no longer had the power to slow me.
The men I’d seen freeze were the ones who never returned.
This acceptance had served me well, keeping me sharp and functional through situations that broke others. I didn’t regret cultivating it.
But Fiona was different.
Our parents were gone. Our other siblings were scattered, their fates unknown and likely to remain so. She had only me, and that was a responsibility I could never set down.
Libby and Lily were becoming a liability to my focus.
I hadn’t allowed myself to confront it directly, but the feeling had taken root, nonetheless.
It wasn’t just the shared watches, but the way Libby had wordlessly handed me her canteen first yesterday.
A small gesture of trust, settling in my gut like a stone, a weight unrelated to survival.
All of it was dangerous.
Caring made things harder. More people to protect meant more variables, more ways to fail, more outcomes beyond my control, no matter how well I planned or how sharp I remained. And if something happened to any of them—
I cut the thought short before it had fully formed.
I couldn’t go there. When the moment came to act, I needed to be the version of myself that had brought people home before: cold, calculated, operating on training rather than feeling.
I opened my eyes and looked back at the Suburban.
One way or another, we weren’t staying here long enough to discover what truly running out of options looked like.
* * *
I woke from broken sleep to the wet heat of lips wrapped tight around my cock.
A low groan tore from my throat before I’d fully surfaced. Faint light filled the room—pale stripes cutting through the boards, somewhere between night and day.
It was Libby’s mouth. Hot, slick, and hungry, working me with a steady, deliberate rhythm that made my hips jerk before conscious thought caught up.
She’d started this a few mornings ago. Sweet, careful Libby had transformed into someone else entirely in this room, waking me with her mouth, her hands, the tight grip of her body before our watch began.
It was as if she needed to remind both of us that we still existed beyond mere survival, as if she needed proof that something worth having still remained.
I wasn’t complaining. Not even slightly.
My hand slid into her hair, fingers curling through the soft strands—not pushing, but holding her there, enjoying the way her throat contracted around me each time she sank deeper.
The heat of her mouth bordered on the obscene.
Her tongue slid along the underside of my shaft, tracing the vein that pulsed with every heartbeat as she took more of me, her throat constricting around the head in waves that pressed my toes hard into the mattress.
Her tongue traced the ridge beneath my cock, a slow, deliberate movement, as if memorizing its shape.
Then her lips sealed around me, the suction pulling just enough to make my thighs tense.
A wet click as she released, followed by the slick drag of her mouth sliding back down—deeper this time, her throat fluttering around the head.
The sound, thick and obscene, filled the room.
When she pulled back, a glistening thread of spit stretched from her bottom lip to my skin, catching the dim light before snapping.
The air hit the wet trail she’d left, cold against the heat of me, and my hips jerked without permission.
She hummed, the vibration traveling straight up my spine. My hips drove forward, pushing another inch past her lips, and I hissed through my teeth.
“Fuck… just like that, baby.”
Her eyes lifted to mine—glassy. And something in my chest went quiet. Not just hunger, but trust. This woman looked up at me as if I anchored her to something real. Her lips were swollen and shining, cheeks flushed, and her eyes remained steady on mine.
It only made me harder.
I flexed my fingers in her hair, tightening my grip until I held full control of her head.
I wasn’t forcing her down, but the intent simmered just beneath the surface.
She knew it, and she wanted it—her breath quickened.
I held her still for a long second, her throat working around me in frantic pulses, a choked whimper vibrating through me, a sound registering between protest and desperate plea.
When I finally let her pull back enough to breathe, saliva stretched between her lips and my slick cock.
She sucked in a ragged breath, her tongue already moving, tracing a meticulous path from base to tip, collecting everything as if she couldn’t tolerate waste.
The sight of it went straight to my dick.
“Christ, Libby,” I said, tracing the seam of her lips with my thumb. The words scraped out of me, raw and unguarded. “Taking me like this before the damn sun’s even set.”
Her answer was a needy whine as she tried to sink back down, held just out of reach by my grip in her hair. Her eyes pleaded, dark and glassy.
“Not yet,” I said, keeping her exactly where she was. “I want to watch you earn it.”
I guided her back down slowly, every inch disappearing past her lips—deeper this time—until her nose pressed flush against my skin and her throat bulged visibly around me.
I held her there, savoring the frantic convulsions of her throat muscles, the desperate dig of her nails into my thighs, the wet sounds escaping her lips.
This woman had gotten past every defense I’d spent years building, past the discipline and deliberate simplicity I’d constructed my life around. She’d done it without trying, without strategy, in the span of seven days.
And somewhere along the way, I’d stopped trying to close the gap.
“Fuck, Libby.” I lifted my head to meet her gaze. “That’s it.”
The sight of her undid me, piece by piece.
I thrust shallowly, testing. She moaned around me, sinking deeper—her nose at my base, tears welling in her eyes, not retreating an inch.
I pulled her off me with a wet pop sound that filled the room, and she gasped, tongue darting out instinctively.
“Up here, baby girl,” I said. “Now.”
She crawled up my body and I flipped us before she settled—pinning her beneath me in a single motion, the mattress dipping under our weight. Her legs fell open without hesitation, and I settled between them, my cock slick from her mouth and pressed insistently against her soaked pussy.
Drenched. Already dripping for me before I’d done a single thing to earn it.
I dragged the swollen head through her folds—slowly, letting the thick ridge catch against her clit on every pass.
Her hips bucked beneath me, desperate and seeking, trying to force me inside.
I kept control, kept the pace, gave her only the barest friction while her arousal coated me and dripped down to soak the sheet.
Her eyes locked on mine. Open. Unguarded.
I held her there—suspended in silence—because this moment mattered. She mattered.
“So fucking wet,” I murmured against her ear, lips brushing the sensitive shell before I nipped at her lobe hard enough to pull a sharp gasp from her throat.
I soothed it with my tongue. “You wake me up like a greedy little slut, sucking my cock before the sun’s even down, and you expect me to be gentle? ”
I rocked my hips and slid the full length of my shaft along her slit, grinding the head against her clit in slow circles until she whimpered and her nails raked down my back.