18. Sage
EIGHTEEN
SAGE
Brock
Missed me yet? Your throat looked so pretty in that noose. Let’s try again soon.
[delete]
“Oh fuck! Yes! Right there!”
Micah’s mouth is going to kill me.
Not the way everything else in my life is trying to kill me—with rope and threatening texts from dead men’s phone numbers. This is the good kind. The kind where his tongue swirls and sucks my clit and my spine arches off the mattress.
I make a sound that I’m fairly certain carries through the walls because I hear Milo shout, “GET IT, KITTEN!” from somewhere down the hall.
Micah laughs against me, which does things to my nerve endings that should be illegal.
“Ignore him, baby girl,” Micah murmurs, and presses his mouth back to where it was. I moan.
His hands are on my thighs, holding them apart, thumbs pressing into the soft skin where leg meets hip.
He’s taking his time, reading my body the way he always does.
I’ve got one hand fisted in the sheets and the other in his hair, and every time he flattens his tongue and drags it slow, my hips chase him and he pins them back down.
“Micah. Please.”
He hums. The vibration travels through me like a current, and I whimper. Then he adds his fingers—two, curling, finding the spot that makes my vision blur—and works me.
“Fuck, Micah! I’m gonna— I’m—”
I come with his name in my mouth and my hand twisted in his hair. Both legs shaking as he stays with me through it, gentling but not stopping, easing me down with soft, slow strokes of his tongue until I’m boneless and panting and staring at the ceiling.
“Fuck you taste so good, baby girl,” he says, crawling up my body, pressing kisses to my stomach, my ribs, the underside of my breast. His eyes are dark and liquid and a little smug. “Missed the way you pull my hair when you come.”
I reach up and tug at him until our mouths crush together.
I taste myself on his lips, which should be gross but isn’t, it’s fucking hot, and I let him know it.
He bites at my bottom lip, soft, then hard, and I wrap my arms around his neck, bring him down so all his weight presses into me.
He makes this sound, almost a growl, and grinds his cock against my thigh.
“Inside,” I whisper. “Now.”
Micah raises his head, grins, hair falling into his eyes. “Hard to say no when you ask like that, Sage.”
His hands bracket my head so he can watch my face while he pushes inside, slow at first, like he’s giving me a last out.
I don’t want out. I want everything, all the pain and want and fucking oblivion.
So I wrap a leg around his hip and hook my heel, pulling him tight.
Fuck subtlety, fuck the neighbors, fuck whatever it is inside me that thinks I’m still breakable.
“Jesus,” he breathes, squeezing his eyes shut as he bottoms out. “You’re—shit, Sage. Every fucking time—”
He doesn’t finish. He bends and kisses me hard, like his sole focus is the shape of my mouth, the way I taste, the way I catch his lip between my teeth and refuse to let go until he’s thrusting into me and the world tilts sideways.
The bed creaks, every movement driving the headboard into the wall with soft, regular thumps.
I dig my nails into his back. “More.”
He gives me more. Hooks my knee over his elbow, changes the angle, and drives into me hard enough that I shift up the bed.
His jaw is tight. His breathing ragged. This isn’t the way we normally fuck.
Micah is normally slow, loving, present.
But tonight he’s fucking like a man chasing away demons, and fuck, if that isn’t exactly what I need right now.
“Harder,” I gasp. “Please. You won’t break me.”
“Fuck, baby girl.”
His mouth crashes into mine and we stop talking.
The sex turns raw and mutual and necessary—two people using each other’s bodies to burn through the things they can’t say out loud.
His hand slides up my breast, fingers pinching my nipple, tight, bordering on painful, and I arch into the touch because I trust him, because he would cut off his own hand before he’d hurt me, and because right now I need to feel someone’s strength without it being a threat.
He comes with a groan that vibrates through his whole body into mine, his face buried in my neck, his arms locked around me like he’s afraid I’ll disappear if he lets go.
I follow him over—a second, quieter orgasm that rolls through me in waves while he’s still inside me, still holding me, still shaking.
We lie there. His weight on me. Our breathing evening out. Somewhere in the house a door closes and I hear the low murmur of Knox’s voice saying something to someone.
He pulls out gently and settles beside me on his back. One arm behind his head, the other hand finding mine between us. And that’s when I feel it—the ridges across his knuckles as our fingers lace together. I turn his hand over in the dark.
The skin’s healing but not healed. Faded green-yellow bruising spread over the joints, one knuckle still raised, a thin scabbed-over line where the skin split and knit back wrong.
Weeks old. Old enough that whatever did this happened while I was still in a hospital bed and nobody mentioned it in the weeks I’ve been out.
I run my thumb across the damage. “What happened to your hand?”
He’s quiet a second too long.
“Tyler.”
I go still. “Tyler came after you?”
“No, baby girl.” He lifts our joined hands to his lips. “We went after him. Picked him up while you were still in a coma. Asked him some questions. When it was clear he didn’t know anything, we cut him loose.”
“Questions don’t damage a hand so bad there’s still evidence a month later.”
A pause. “No. They don’t.”
I turn my head and look at him.
Moonlight from between the blinds catches on the planes of his face—soft mouth, long lashes, the kind eyes that always make people underestimate what lives underneath them. He stares at the ceiling like it might volunteer the rest for him.
My skin is still humming from sex. My body is loose and warm and used. But my brain sharpens all at once.
“How hard?” I ask quietly.
Micah exhales through his nose. “Sage.”
“How hard did you hit him?”
His jaw works. “As hard as he deserved.”
I prop myself up on an elbow so I can see his face. “Micah. What did he do?”
“It’s not what he did.” His hand goes still in mine.
“It’s what he said. About you.” His eyes find mine, then slide away, like he can’t look at me and repeat it in the same breath.
“I’m not putting his words in your head, Sage.
You’ve got enough living in there. But I heard them, and I put my fist through his face.
And even after Holden said to cut him loose, I went in and beat him until the rage inside me slowed.
And I’d do it again right now if he walked through that door. ”
There are multiple marks on Micah’s body directly tied to me.
A scarred-over bite mark, the knife slash, and now his knuckles.
My stomach gets hot and tight knowing this beautiful man is willing to put his body on the line for me, over and over again—that gentle Micah split his knuckles open on a man who was talking shit about me.
I should probably feel something other than what I feel.
What I feel is: good.
Glad.
“Okay,” I say quietly.
Micah’s eyes come back to me, searching. “Okay?”
“Okay.” I lift his hand and press my lips to the ruined knuckles, one by one. “I’m not going to pretend I’m sorry he’s hurt.”
He exhales, long and slow, but then his eyes catch on the back of the door, where Eli’s jacket—the one that’s been traded back and forth between us since the night everything started—hangs on a hook.
His demeanor shifts and he looks at the chair by the window, where the gray hoodie is folded. The one I took while Eli was using the bathroom. The one I sleep in when the nightmares get bad and I need to smell something that my brain registers as comfort.
For some reason, Eli’s always been that for me.
“Why do you still have those?”
The question is quiet. Not accusatory. But there’s a bite underneath it I haven’t heard from Micah before—a blade inside the velvet.
“They’re just clothes.”
“They’re not just clothes, Sage. That jacket has been your comfort object since the beach. And his hoodie—you took it to feel close to him. You wear it every night.”
“Not every night.”
“Most nights.”
Only until it stops smelling like him.
“Why is he still here?” Micah asks. His hand has tensed in mine. “In this house? Making you coffee every morning like some kind of—”
“Because he saved my life.”
“He also broke it.”
His words settle somewhere in my ribs.
“You’re upset with him.”
“Upset?” Micah sits up. The sheet falls to his waist. He swings his legs over the side of the bed and stands, and when he turns to face me, there’s nothing self-conscious about his nakedness. “Sage. I’m fucking furious.”
Micah holds the line when Knox wants to destroy. Micah is the one who says let’s think about this.
Right now, he’s furious.
“He hurt you, Sage. With his words, his actions. He put you in danger and you almost lost your life.”
“Micah,” I whisper when he starts pacing the room, wanting him to come back to bed, to sit and let me offer him comfort the way he’s offered it to me.
“Don’t, baby girl. Don’t sit there and tell me it’s okay because he saved you.
You should never have been in that position in the first place.
I was right there with you. And I stepped away because of him.
Because he was so fucking selfish that he thought he could make decisions for the group.
For you!” He lets out an agitated grunt, dragging his fingers through his hair while he continues to pace.