Chapter 13
Reilly
Morning-after heat was worse, not better.
I woke stuck to my own skin. I had washed his come off my stomach before I slept and my body had put the heat back like I had not.
I was swollen. Soaked. I put my hand down to check and my clit was so tender the first touch made me kick the sheet.
I rubbed anyway, two fingers, fast, and came in a thin jerk that did not clear anything.
I lay there pulsing and empty and angry at a rule I had said out loud on his floor.
No bite. No knot. No night.
I had gone down with a map. I had taken him standing and on the table and on the boards. He had pulled out when I told him and spent on my belly. I could still feel the ghost of the swell catching. I wanted it back in. That was the problem.
I dressed. Binding over nipples that would not go down. Clean pants that were not going to stay clean. In the kitchen Edward looked at my face and then at the path to the ridge and did not ask. Marshall looked at my throat and my belt and said, “You went down.”
“I took a map.”
“Reilly.”
“The cut still needs posts marked. Hillsford is going to miss two scouts. That’s the day.”
He wanted to put the cabin on the table in front of Idony. He didn’t. Idony smelled it anyway when I walked into the hall. She looked at me the way she had looked at the quartering line.
“You’re going to get caught,” she said, not loud. “Not by me. By a runner. By Pell. By Gareth’s next letter.”
“Then I won’t get caught.”
I lasted until noon.
The heat did not drop. It sat between my legs and at the base of my spine and every time the bond tugged I felt Owen on the cut, hard under his work, replaying the table.
I had to stop in the pantry and get my hand in my pants standing between sacks of thin grain.
Two fingers on my clit, other hand on a shelf, mouth shut.
I came with my forehead on a sack and bit the cloth.
It leaked down. I wiped my fingers on my own shirt tail and went back out.
Edward found me in the yard after. “People can smell the cabin on the contract. Now they can smell it on you.”
“Go help Marshall.”
“I’m not wrong.”
He wasn’t. I sent him anyway.
Night was worse.
I went to bed to keep from going down the path. Sleep lasted long enough to dump me into the dream.
Same cabin. He was knotted in me. Not on my stomach. In. Locked. His cock jerking, come with nowhere to go, my legs around him. I was saying the rite into his mouth while he thrust in the small way the knot allowed.
I, Reilly Landers, reject you.
He fucked the words back into me. I said his name in the rite and came on the lock.
He told me to say it again. I said it again with my nails in his back and my cunt squeezing a knot that would not let him out.
The yard was in the room with us. Idony.
Marshall. The moon. I kept saying the words and he kept coming and the bond laughed.
I woke already coming.
Hips off the bed, fingers cramping in my own cunt, sheets wet, the orgasm tearing through the dream and dying into the same unfinished throb as soon as my eyes opened. I gasped his name into the pillow. It was still dark. The hall was quiet.
The bond pointed at the river.
I did not call him. I put on yesterday’s pants and a coat and no binding and boots I didn’t lace.
I went out the side door. Marshall’s lamp was a thin line under a door I did not look at.
Cold hit my chest and my nipples went tight under the shirt and stayed that way.
I was already wet. The dream had left me pulsing, empty of a knot that had never been there, the rite still in my mouth.
The path to the water was familiar in the wrong way.
Every step rubbed. I had to stop once in the trees and put my hand between my legs over the pants, one hard press, not a finish, just to take the edge off so I could walk.
It didn’t take the edge off. It made me drop forward with my palm on a trunk and my breath loud.
He was in the shallows.
Pants open. Cock in his fist. Moon on the wet head of it. He was stroking slow, not hiding, like he had felt me leave the hall and come down. I walked into the river with my clothes on. Water filled my boots and then my pants and the cold made me hiss and did not kill the heat.
I didn’t speak. I put my hand on him.
He let go of himself and let me have it.
Thick. Hot against the current. Wet at the slit with more than river.
I wrapped him and stroked root to head and felt the swell starting at the base, the thing I had told him not to put in me on the cabin floor.
He made a sound that went across the water.
His hand went to the back of my neck and his mouth went to my throat, not my mouth, teeth not quite on, and I kept pumping him under the surface until his hips started to chase my fist.
“Reilly.”
“Don’t talk.”
He yanked my pants down. Not off. Mid-thigh.
The river rushed into the open cloth and against my cunt and I jerked.
He got his hand there from the front, two fingers straight in, thumb on my clit.
I was so slick the cold water didn’t matter.
He rubbed hard and curled his fingers and I came standing in the current in a few ugly seconds, biting his shoulder through the shirt, my fist locked around his cock while I clenched on his fingers. Slick and river ran down his wrist.
He didn’t take his hand out. He kept his fingers in me through it until I tried to twist, too much, and then he pulled them out and turned me.
My boots slid on the stones. He bent me toward the bank, one hand on the back of my neck, the other dragging my coat up. Shirt stuck to my breasts, nipples obvious through the wet cloth. He shoved into me from behind in one push.
I made a noise I hated. He was thicker for the cold and the dream and three years.
The water made every stroke loud. He held my hip and my nape and fucked me with our clothes on, my pants a band around my thighs that kept me from opening the way I wanted.
Short and deep. The head of him dragged out into cold and drove back into heat.
I reached down between my legs and found my clit and rubbed in sloppy circles while he thrust.
“Harder.”
He gave me harder. My tits swung in the wet shirt. He reached around and got a handful of one and pinched the nipple through the cloth until I swore. I came again on his cock with river up to my knees and my own fingers on my clit, a raw squeeze that made him curse and slam in and hold.
“This is the bond,” I said, when I could get air. “Not a claim.”
“I know.”
His voice didn’t know. Mine didn’t either.
He started moving again. The swell at the base was fatter now, catching on me in the water, stretching on every in-stroke. The dream slammed back over the real: knot locked, rite in my mouth, him not stopping. I felt myself open for it anyway.
“Don’t,” I said.
He froze buried in me, shaking. “Reilly.”
“Pull out.”
He pulled out. The empty was worse in the cold.
I heard him stroke himself once, twice, angry, and then he shoved my coat and shirt up my back and came on my spine, hot stripes on wet skin, pulsing, a groan against my shoulder blade.
I felt it run down into the waist of my pants, into the crack of my ass, into the river.
I reached back and gathered it on my fingers and brought it to my clit and rubbed his come on myself standing half-bare in the current until I got a third one, smaller, mean, legs shaking so hard he had to grab my hip to keep me upright.
He put his forehead on my back. Breath. Not a kiss.
I turned before I could lie down in the shallows with him.
He was still hard enough that the open pants were a joke. Moon on him. Come on his knuckles. I went to my knees on the stones in the water because the rule had been no knot and no night and I had not said anything about my mouth.
“Reilly—”
I took him in.
He tasted like river and me and the come he had just spent on my back.
I put a hand around the swell so he could not shove it past my teeth and I sucked the rest, deep as I could, the head hitting my throat, my other hand on his thigh.
He gathered my wet hair and didn’t push.
His hips wanted to. I felt the fight in him.
I worked him with my mouth and the circle of my fingers under the head until his breathing went ragged.
“I’m going to come.”
I stayed on him. He came in my mouth, less than on my back, still enough that I had to swallow twice with the river cold on my knees. I pulled off and wiped my lip with my wet wrist. He looked down at me like he wanted to haul me up and kiss me and like he knew we still weren’t doing that.
I stood. My pants were a sodden rope at mid-thigh. I dragged them up over the mess. Shirt stuck to my nipples. Coat heavy. His spend still a smear on my back under the cloth.
“You dreamed it,” he said.
“Yes.”
“The rite. With me in you.”
“Yes.”
“I had it too.” His voice was rough. “You said it while I was locked. I didn’t stop. I woke up in the cabin already spending. Then I felt you on the path.”
“That’s why I came to the water. Not to your door.”
“The water is not better.”
“The water isn’t a night. The water isn’t a bite. The water isn’t a knot.” I sounded like a contract. I was standing in a river with his come in my belly and on my back. “We keep the rule.”
“You just swallowed me.”
“I know what I did.”
He stepped in close enough that his coat brushed my chest. The bond was ugly and satisfied and not satisfied. I could have had him again. I could have shoved my pants down and sat on him in the shallows and let the knot happen in the dark where the hall could not see it.
I did not.
“Hillsford will move,” I said. “Gray is coming. You need the cut. I need the side door.”
“Then stop waking up on my knot and walking here.”
“Then stay out of the dream.”
He breathed out through his teeth. “Go. If I put my hand in your pants again I’m not pulling out a second time. I’m telling you that now so you can hate me for it on the path.”
I went.
I stopped in the trees where I had stopped on the way down.
This time I put my back to the trunk and shoved my wet pants down and put three fingers in myself, standing, river water and his come and my own slick, and I fucked my hand thinking about the knot he had not given me.
I came with my other wrist in my mouth and my eyes on the path I was supposed to be climbing. It was not enough. It was never enough.
I pulled the pants up. I walked to the side door with my boots squelching and my back marked and my mouth tasting like him.
Edward’s lamp was off. Marshall’s was on. I used the side door. I did not check if he heard.
In my rooms I stripped. River water on the floor.
His come on my back I had not cleaned. I stood at the basin and washed between my legs and it made me want the cabin.
I washed the small of my back and felt his spend go down the drain and wanted it in me instead.
I put a dry shirt on and no pants and sat on the edge of the bed with my fists on my knees.
This is the bond, not a claim.
I had said it in the water with him still twitching against my back. He had said he knew. The contract said no claim. The yard said no claim. My body did not care what we had written.
I lay down. Sleep did not come. The bond hummed. He was in the cabin, not the river. I felt him wash. I felt him take himself in hand once, unfinished, and stop. I felt the rule in his mouth too.
Near dawn I got up and bound my ribs and my breasts and put on dry pants. I looked like a Luna who had slept. I did not smell like one.
Marshall met me in the kitchen and took in the wet boots by the side door without comment for a full breath.
Then he said, “The river.”
“I walked.”
“You walked into Tillson.” He set a cup down harder than he needed to.
“Idony is drafting what we send Hillsford about the scouts. If you keep doing this, I am putting a watch on the path to the cabin and a watch on the water and you can call it a betrayal if you want. I am not letting Gareth Hills write whore on this hall because you cannot keep your pants closed for a rite you spoke yourself.”
I could have hit him. He was not wrong enough to hit.
“Put the watch on the cut,” I said. “That’s what I paid for.”
“I will. I’ll put one on you too if I have to.”
Edward came in on the end of it. He looked at my wet boots. He looked at Marshall. He poured grain and said nothing, which was its own sentence.
I ate. I tasted river. I went to Idony and approved a letter about two scouts and a clasp and no mention of an alder tree or a cabin floor or a river at three in the morning.
Then I stood on the ridge in first light and felt Owen walk to the cut in wet boots like mine.
The heat was worse.
Not better.
I put my hands where a council could see them and I did not go down the path, and the dream sat in me anyway, his knot locked, my mouth saying I reject you while I came on him, and the worst part was that in the dream I had not wanted him to stop.
The rule was still the rule.
The river had not made it true.