Chapter 9 #3
The heat climbed fast, spreading through her body before it concentrated on rings of pleasure spreading out from her core. Faster and more urgent, something she simultaneously never wanted to end and now needed to bring to some kind of fruition.
She gasped out his name, felt his pleasure in the way he pumped and paused, feeling it, his head back now, his arms straight and muscles standing out, until he paused, an endless instant with back arched and head back, then drove himself into her, battering her, Cassi raising her hips and meeting his thrusts, rocking with him, urging them both higher until they came within seconds of each other, pulsing pleasure racing in a wave through her body, only releasing her slowly in little drops of pleasure, still tingling, still sparking as she gentled down.
Her back had bowed and now it touched the floor again.
Her hips had been thrust up and now they settled back down.
With every change, her folds flushed with excitement, her body tingled, her nerves raced with pleasure.
Until they lay spent beside each other, heads together, arms around each other, bodies only inches apart.
But separate.
Before the invasion and since, there'd been hookups but little else.
Jayce had been an exception, someone she'd loved spending time with, playing video games or hiking in the canyons above Los Angeles.
They went to movies and plays, they ran on the beach, they talked about sharing a place together but at the time she had a roommate and a lousy job as a bartender and he worked in a warehouse and it didn't matter, they were together as much as they could be, and the days in front of them were endless.
It had never been as passionate as what she'd just shared with Michael, or maybe it had been but only right at the beginning, that passion burning off fast for shared pleasures, intimacies that came of knowledge of each other but mixed with that expectation that they had time.
They hadn't. Jayce had died early in the end of the world when there were fewer rules and more of the Vampyren, before the war dragged the entire planet into conflict.
There were no rules yet, or none the humans could understand, everyone armed and dangerous and terrified.
Humans fought each other, stocking up on necessities and insanities as they prepared for what most thought would be hostilities but short lived.
Mankind had always somehow fought its way back from the brink. But then, the brink had always been a place humanity had been pushed by humanity itself. This time the threat came from without.
Jayce had rushed a vampire that had grabbed a small child, a little girl following her mother on streets already littered with broken buildings and shredded cars.
Her mother had never lost contact with her, never turned away, watching her daughter while she covered them both with a six-shooter Colt, warily defending a shopping cart of canned goods she needed to take somewhere.
The vampire had simply come out of nowhere, out of the shadows of the twilight that had settled too fast. One second on the street, only Jayce and Cassi and the mother and daughter and the other humans trying to make sense of what was happening, scrabbling for the means to go on existing.
The next the savage creature had the child and was biting her. She was already lost in that moment, too small and fragile to hold up against the brutish creature, but Jayce rushed him, swinging a Bowie knife, screaming about humans and life and humanity.
He slaughtered the Vampyren that had killed the child, spilled the stolen blood back out onto the street even as the mother screamed.
They tried and executed him on the spot. She had heard it but not seen it. Jayce had told her to run and nobody stopped her, she hadn't been involved and she was of breeding age. The gathering vampires let her go.
There was nothing she could have done. No way anyone could have saved him. The Vampyren even in those early days didn't allow the savage, uncontrolled attacks like the one that claimed the child, but they handled their justice themselves.
There was never anything she could have done. But telling herself that didn't ease the guilt and shame and pain that ached through her at night.
Now it washed free in a flood, her head against Michael's, her arms lightly around him, her hand resting on his ribs.
With Jayce there had been a more familiar pleasuring that existed in a shared belief they had time. With Michael it was a passionate coupling, intense pleasure with the knowledge there was no time. This was what they had.
It was all the more intense because of that. The desire more piqued because there would be nothing after it. She didn't expect she'd see him again. She didn't suppose without this pressure at their lack of time there'd be that much between them.
They were young, beautiful, scared, angry, passionate, attracted to each other, and had only one night.
Their eyes met. Mouths twitched into smiles, then came together. Hands began to stroke. Desire rekindled. Need drove them together. Again. And again.
Because there was only one night. And because one night was all they needed.