37. Sage
THIRTY-SEVEN
SAGE
He leans over me, the mattress giving under his weight, blue eyes level and serious.
“Let me see.” The words are nothing like his usual commands—they’re soft, a request more than anything, and for once, I’m grateful.
My body is heat and ache and a kind of messy horror only people with uteruses can truly understand, but before I can protest, he’s already moving the covers, sliding down until his head is level with my hips.
Pushing the hot water bottle to the side, Holden hooks his fingers inside the waist of my sleep shorts and underwear, then peels them down my legs. He folds the blood-soaked pad into my underwear and sets the bundle aside.
“We’re going to make a mess of this bed,” I tell him as he returns to his position between my legs and his eyes darken at the mess of me.
“Fucking gorgeous, wildcat.”
I’ve seen his reaction to the sight of blood before, saw that exact change in my kitchen when I cut my finger. The sudden focus. The rougher breathing.
A pulse beats low between my legs.
“You like that,” I whisper.
His eyes lift to mine.
“You already know I do.”
“A cut finger is different from this.”
“Blood is blood.”
“Period blood has . . . ” I wave vaguely toward my lower half. “Other things in it.”
“Are you trying to ruin this for me?”
“I’m trying to make sure you understand what you’re volunteering for.”
Holden looks almost offended.
“Wildcat, there is nothing your body can do that’s going to scare me.”
“That’s deeply unromantic.”
“You’re bleeding, sore from another man and still trying to climb into my lap.” His hand closes around my hip. “Romance was never our lane.”
Fair point.
I glance toward the bedroom door. Jamie, Amy, Eli, and Milo are all somewhere on the other side of it.
“Do you want an audience?”
Holden reaches back and turns the lock. “This is just for me.”
His head drops, mouth at the inside of my thigh.
Kiss soft, nibbling. But then his tongue is on me, tracing upward, and my whole body wakes up, skin torched in a line that follows his mouth.
I brace for some hesitation, some flinch, but he doesn’t give me a second of it.
Just parts my legs, hands sure and steady, puts his mouth on me . . . and groans.
I’ve never felt sexy during my period. It’s heavy, and I spend most of my time trying not to leak or cry.
But Holden licks through it, tongue slow and thorough, and I make a noise I’ve never made before—less moan, more surprise.
He eats me like it’s the first time, like he’s been starving, and every so often he glances up.
Eyes locked on mine. Daring me to look away.
“Holden!”
He pushes two fingers inside me. When he pulls them out, crimson slicks his fingers to the second knuckle. He brings them straight to his mouth. Licks clean and slow, and he’s not performing for me. He’s just . . . enjoying it.
“A fucking feast for my benefit,” he groans, diving right back in.
I’m about to shatter.
The pressure of his fingers and his mouth and the knowledge that it’s this—the ruin of me, the mess and the pain and the ugly animal part nobody is supposed to love, let alone crave—that gets him desperate. There’s no judgment. Just hunger, and every second it builds, I split wider.
I want to hide, and I want to let him keep going until the world fades to red static and relief.
He sucks at my clit, massages my inner walls with his tongue, then pushes his fingers in deeper, curling.
My thighs jerk and I gasp, the lurch of pain like it might ruin the whole thing, until it doesn’t, and I realize it’s just the new baseline—I exist in scar and ache and the aftermath of violence, but there’s still pleasure in it. Maybe more than ever.
“Don’t stop,” I say, and my voice is so raw I barely recognize it.
He answers by flattening his tongue and working it in slow, brutal circles, then flicking the tip against the side that always gets me fastest.
I buck, fists gripping the comforter, the dark behind my eyelids turning liquid.
Holden groans into me, and the vibration sends a shudder up my spine. I open my eyes and he isn’t even pretending at detachment—his own cock is out, hard, and he jerks himself off while he works his mouth, the look on his face like he’s taking sacrament.
It makes me want to say, “thank you,” but that’s the one thing that would actually offend him. He pulls his fingers out, holding them up to the light, inspecting the streaks of blood, then spreads me wider with his thumbs, looking like he might tear me open on purpose.
The drag of his stubble, the heat of his mouth—he laps at me until my thighs tremble and I come with a violent, ugly sound that I know the whole apartment can hear. I don’t fucking care. He lets me ride it out.
“Feel better?” he asks, looking up at me from between my thighs.
“Almost,” I say, reaching for him.
“You don’t have to ask me twice, wildcat. I cannot wait to get my dick inside you.”
He shifts up the bed, but instead of pushing inside me, he drags the head of his cock through the mess between my legs.
“Tell me what you can take.”
“All of you.”
His eyes hold mine. “That wasn’t the question.”
“Slow at first,” I whisper. “Then I want you to fuck the pain out of me.”
“That I can do.”
He pushes into me one devastating inch at a time. When my breath catches, he stops.
“Good pain or bad?”
I roll my hips, taking him deeper. “Good. Now stop treating me like I’m breakable.”
He pulls back then thrusts into me, and I shriek at the stretch of it.
“Oh, fuck!”
For a second, it’s too much and then Holden is kissing me, open-mouthed and deep, and I taste myself and the tang of blood and whatever new thing I’ve become.
He starts fucking me, hard and steady, one hand at the back of my head and the other bracing my hip so I can’t back away even if I wanted to. I claw at his back, my nails dragging over tattooed skin, and I arch up into each thrust like I want to fuse with him.
“You’re an animal,” I moan. Holden drives into me again, harder, the mattress shifting beneath us. Every stroke pushes warmth through my abdomen, replacing the deep ache with something I can use.
He reaches between us and brings his fingers up.
They’re streaked red.
“Open.”
I part my lips.
He presses two fingers onto my tongue. Copper. Salt. Me.
His eyes go black as I suck them clean. “Fuck, wildcat.”
I bite down lightly, and his hips slam forward. The headboard cracks into the wall and I laugh around Holden’s fingers. Then he pulls them from my mouth and closes his hand around my throat.
“You like that?”
“I love this,” I gasp, his thumb pressing against my pulse. “Love it when you show me this side of you.”
He fucks me harder.
The room fills with the slap of skin and every sound I’m no longer trying to hold back. Blood slicks the place where our bodies meet. It smears over his thighs and mine, ruining the sheets and coating the base of his cock.
Holden looks down.
His rhythm stutters.
I catch his jaw and drag his face back to mine.
“Does that get you off?”
“You know it does.”
“How much?”
His grip tightens fractionally. “Ride me and find out.”
He rolls us before I can answer, and I land above him, hands braced against his chest. His cock is still buried deep, blood marking his stomach where our bodies pressed together.
Holden puts both hands behind his head.
“Cover me.”
The command drops straight through me and lands low. I lift myself up on shaking thighs, then sink back down onto him in one slow, slick glide. The sharp inhale that tears from his throat is the only warning before his hands clamp onto my hips, his control shattering.
“Fuck, yes,” he groans, guiding my movement, pulling me down harder each time. I ride him until blood smears between us. His chest rises and falls beneath my palms, his eyes fixed on the mess coating my skin.
I drag my fingers through it and paint a red line over his chest.
His cock jerks inside me.
“Oh,” I breathe. “You really like that.”
He catches my wrist and brings my hand to his mouth. His tongue sweeps over my palm.
Then he drags me down and kisses me.
I taste blood on his tongue. Mine from his mouth, his lip where I bite it, all of it mixed together as his hands take control of my hips.
He drives up into me.
Once.
Twice.
The third stroke catches exactly right.
I break the kiss with a cry, sitting upright, chasing it. Holden’s thumb finds my clit and circles hard.
“Come on, wildcat.”
My muscles pull tight.
“Bleed all over me.”
The words tip me over.
I come around him, hard and messy, nails raking down his chest. Holden swears and thrusts deep, holding me down as his body shudders beneath mine with a roar.
For a few seconds, neither of us moves.
Then I look down.
It really is a crime scene.
The sheets are wrecked. There’s blood on his stomach, my thighs, his hands, and mine. A red smear marks the corner of his mouth.
I start laughing.
Holden opens one eye. “What?”
“You look like you ate someone.”
“I did.”
“That was terrible.”
“You still came.”
“Twice.”
“And it was glorious.”
He helps me off him before my legs give out. The moment I’m on the mattress, another warm trickle runs between my thighs.
Holden watches it happen. His expression darkens again.
“You cannot possibly be ready for more.”
His eyes darken. “Give me ten minutes.”
I shove weakly at his shoulder. “Clean me up, pervert.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
He returns with a warm washcloth and cleans the blood from my thighs, then my knees.
He leans in and presses a slow kiss to the hollow just above the bruise at my inner thigh, like he’s marking the spot for later.
When he reaches my face, his hands cup my cheeks, his thumbs brushing gently over the flush there.
For the space of a single heartbeat, I want to cry.
“All clean,” he says, setting the washcloth aside and reaching into the bag Eli left in here earlier. “I’m thinking super for that flow. Right?”
“Yeah. That’s the one.” I reach for it, but he kneels between my legs, blue eyes fixed on mine. Challenging me to flinch before he does.
“Let me,” he says, and he’s already tearing the wrapper, businesslike, as if this isn’t one step beyond every line I’ve ever drawn.
I let him.
He does it slow, his palm warm behind my knee as he bends my leg, propping my ankle on his shoulder. For a moment, he just looks, his thumb stroking the inside of my thigh.
“There.” He presses a kiss to the inside of my knee then helps me into clean underwear and a baggy T-shirt and sweatpants. “You want socks?”
I shake my head, and he just grins at me then strips the bed and bundles it into a pile at the door. Returns with fresh linens and remakes the whole thing while I sit there, loose-limbed and light-headed. My body aches, but the pain is background noise now.
“You want in?” he asks when he’s finished, and I climb in.
“Thank you,” I say as he tucks the blankets around my shoulders. The gentleness would hurt if it wasn’t so perfectly balanced by the bruises on my hips, the raw scrape along my thighs from his stubble.
“You need the heating pad?” he asks.
I think about it. Roll my hips, testing. “Surprisingly? No.”
His mouth quirks. He kisses me again, softer than before, but not shy. Not ever.
“Next month, wildcat,” he says. “You call me first.”