Chapter 16
Owen
The storm came in sideways off the west ridge and turned the cut into a ditch.
We had been walking a pair of Hillsford prints that did not belong on our dirt.
Fresh. Two men. Melanie had the north bend.
Huntington had taken Landers wolves toward the hall when the sky went black.
Reilly would not leave the line while the prints were still warm.
I would not leave her on it. That was the whole decision.
Rain hit like thrown gravel. Lightning showed the prints filling with water and then showed nothing.
The line shack sat off the cut where the old watch used to sleep in weather like this.
One room. One cot. A stove that worked if you cursed it.
We made it inside soaked. I barred the door because Hillsford “lost” scouts did not stay lost in a storm unless they wanted a roof too.
Reilly stood dripping on the boards and stripped her coat. Shirt stuck to her. Binding dark with rain. She looked at the cot, then at me, then at the door.
“No patrol,” she said.
“No.”
“No map.”
“No.”
Thunder rolled over the shack. The heat that had been sitting in me since her mouth on the bench last night went sharp.
She smelled like rain and cunt and the two hours she had slept on my chest. I was hard before I had the stove lit.
She watched me get the fire going with her hands on her belt and did not pretend she was here to dry paper.
“If they knock,” she said.
“Then we stop.”
We did not stop first.
I had her against the wall beside the door because the cot was three steps away and I did not take them yet.
Mouth on her throat. Hands under the wet shirt, binding yanked down, tits cold and tight in my palms. I sucked a nipple through the first heat of the room and she grabbed my hair.
I got her pants open and shoved two fingers into her.
Soaked, and not from rain. She pumped my hand and opened my belt and got my cock out and stroked it with a wet fist, rainwater and precome, rough.
I dropped to my knees on the wet boards and pulled her pants down and put my mouth on her standing.
She hooked a leg over my shoulder and I held her ass and licked her open, clit first, then lower, tongue in her, nose in the dark hair.
She came on my face with her knuckles in her own teeth and the storm covering the sound.
I did not get up. I turned her to the wall and spread her with my thumbs and licked her from behind until she swore and tried to climb the boards.
I pushed two fingers in while I sucked at her from that angle and she came again, dripping down my wrist.
Then the cot.
It was narrow and old. We wrecked it.
I got her shirt off. Binding off. Boots.
Pants. I stripped and she watched my cock slap up against my stomach, the swell already there.
I put her on her back and I put my mouth on the places I had missed three years ago because we had been too fast and too angry.
Collarbone. The underside of her breast. The line down her stomach.
The crease of her thigh. Behind her knee.
I sucked a bruise on the inside of her thigh and she pulled my hair and I went back to her cunt and licked her through a third one until she was crying in that same ugly way as the cabin and I still did not stop until she dragged me up by the ears.
She pushed me onto my back. The cot frame knocked the wall. She straddled me and took my cock in her hand and rubbed the head through her slick and sank down on it in one slow drop.
Hot. Tight. Rain still on her shoulders. She started to ride me, not frantic, deep, her hands on my chest. Her tits moved. I held her hips and then I didn’t, I let her set it.
“Look at me,” she said. “When I come. Look at me.”
I looked at her. I wanted my mouth on her mouth and I did not take it. I looked at her eyes and her wrecked hair and the wet on her lashes from my tongue or the rain or both. She ground down on the swell of the knot without taking it in and her mouth opened.
“Owen—”
“I’ve got you. Look at me.”
She came on my cock looking at me, clenching, thighs shaking, a broken sound.
I sat up into it and put my mouth on her breast because her throat was right there and I was not allowed to have her throat.
I sucked. I almost bit. Teeth on the swell of her breast, hard enough to indent, the claim trying to happen on the wrong piece of skin.
She slapped me.
Open hand. Cheek. Not playful. My head turned. The sting landed and my cock jerked inside her.
She pulled me back in by the hair and put my mouth on the same breast.
“Not the throat,” she said. “You want to bite something, you bite that. You put a claim on my neck and I will throw you out of this shack in the storm.”
I bit the breast instead. Not enough to wreck her.
Enough to mark. She hissed and rode me harder, and I held her ass and thrust up to meet her.
The cot split a slat. We didn’t stop. I sucked the bite and then the other nipple and she came again with her forehead on mine, still looking, still not kissing.
The knot started to catch for real.
“Don’t,” she said.
I lifted her off me. My cock came out shining, swollen at the base, and I almost shoved her back down on it.
I didn’t. She got on her hands and knees on the broken cot and I pushed into her from behind and fucked her like that until I was shaking.
When I pulled out the second time she turned and took me in her mouth, hand locked around the knot, and I came down her throat with a groan I could not keep quiet even under thunder.
She swallowed and kept her mouth on me until I twitched and pushed her off.
We did not sleep.
We lay in the wreck of the cot and listened to the storm and then I had my fingers in her again because she was still wet and still grinding on my thigh.
I rubbed her clit with my thumb and fucked her with two fingers, then three, and she came on my hand with her face in the thin mattress.
I got hard in the mess of it. She climbed on me again and took me in and we went slower because there was nothing else to do until the rain stopped.
No knot. I pulled out and spent on her tits and rubbed it over her nipples with my thumb while she watched me do it.
She used two fingers and brought herself off with my come on her chest and my cock softening against her ass.
Later I put her on her back and opened her legs and licked her clean and then not clean, because she got wet again under my mouth.
I stayed there a long time. The storm covered her.
My jaw ached. She pulled my hair when it was too much and pulled me back when it wasn’t.
I dragged my tongue over the bite on her breast and felt her shiver.
“This is still the bond,” she said, hoarse, to the roof.
“I know.”
The shack smelled like a claiming that had not happened. Sex. Rain. Woodsmoke. The bite on her breast instead of her throat. My knot never in. Hours of it.
Near dawn the rain thinned. I was on my back.
She was half on me. My cock was sore and still interested.
Her thigh was over my hip. I could have slept.
I didn’t. I watched the gray come under the door and thought about Hillsford scouts in some other roof, if they had found one, and about Huntington smelling this shack from the cut, and about the slap, and about how close I had come to putting teeth in her neck and ending the contract in one bite.
She sat up and hissed at the mark on her breast.
“Cover that,” I said.
“I know how a shirt works.”
She dressed in wet clothes. Binding over the bite. Shirt. Pants. Coat. I pulled my own on. The cot was done. One slat gone. Mattress stained. The room would tell on us to anyone who opened the door.
I unbarred it. Cold air. Cut running with mud. No Hillsford in sight. Prints gone.
Melanie was under the fir line with her hood up. She took one breath of the shack and of us and her face went flat.
“Lost scouts stayed lost,” she said. “Or they grew a brain and went home. Huntington’s on the hall path. I told him the storm ate the tracks.” She looked at the bite showing at the edge of Reilly’s shirt when the coat shifted. “Cover that better. And do not tell me you slept.”
Reilly walked toward the hall path without answering. I felt the bond stretch. I wanted her back on the broken cot. I wanted the throat. I wanted the knot. I had had hours of her body and none of the claim.
Melanie waited until Reilly was out of the trees.
“You almost did it,” she said. “I can smell the almost.”
“I bit her breast.”
“I know what you bit. I know what you wanted.” She started walking toward the bench. “Hillsford will send the letter today if the storm let a rider through. You need to be a watch, Owen. That shack smells like you married her and forgot the words.”
I looked back at the door.
It smelled like that to me too.
I followed Melanie through the mud with Reilly’s taste in my mouth and the slap still on my cheek and the rule still technically intact, which was a joke the stove and the broken cot and the mark under her binding were all in on.