Chapter 4 Storm Shelter #3
I find her mouth again, kissing her hard, teeth grazing lips, tongue tangling. My hand slides from her back to cup the base of her skull, holding her exactly where I want as my hips drive into hers with increasing force.
Laughter bubbles up, wild, half-mad. I cut it off, finding her clit again with my thumb, pressing in the exact rhythm of my thrusts. Her body bows, muscles clenching around me.
"Again," I say, low, demanding, unable to look away from her even as my own control frays at the edges. "I want to watch you again."
"I can't—"
"You can." My hand is still cradling the back of her head, anchoring her, holding her gaze with whatever's left of my composure. "Look at me when it happens. I want to see you."
She doesn't argue. I watch the pressure build in her face, sharper this time, faster, my thumb relentless and my cock dragging against exactly the right spot with every thrust until the whole thing crests and breaks at once, violent and consuming, her entire body locking around me as she shatters.
The world detonates around us.
Pleasure crashes over her, tearing a shout from her throat that dissolves into the rain. Muscles clamp down around me hard, pulsing, dragging me deeper with each contraction.
Dimly, through the roar, my own cry reaches my ears. My thigh tightens under her leg, hips jerking as my rhythm breaks. I drive in once, twice more, and then freeze, buried deep, shuddering as my orgasm rips through me like a storm, wild and raging and raw.
It's everything I ever imagined and more. It's Nora in my arms, Nora coming and clenching around my cock, Nora I'm spilling into, with her body cradled in my arms, and my soul bared to her.
Nora, Nora, Nora.
I cry out her name and collapse against her, heavy and real, chest heaving. Her arms go around me instinctively, holding me, lovingly caressing me through my aftershocks. Tension slowly drains from my muscles, leaving them loose and boneless.
The rain keeps pounding, indifferent. Her heartbeat slows against my chest, syncing gradually with mine.
"Is this real?" she asks eventually, looking up at me with those big, round eyes and a tenderness I don't quite expect.
I cup her cheeks, smoothing the wild strands of hair back from her face. "This is the most real thing to ever happen to me."
Color rises up her neck, but it isn't embarrassment. There's no room for embarrassment in what just happened in this six-foot gap of rock. "I don't usually do... this. On work trips. In emergency shelters." She grins sheepishly.
"Good." I place a gentle kiss on her forehead, reveling in this moment. "Then I get to be the exception."
She closes her eyes briefly and lets out a shaky laugh. "You have no idea how unlike me this is."
"I have some idea." I don't look away. "I've been obsessed with you for long enough to have noticed."
She arches one brow at me. "Is that a thing you say to all the women you get trapped in storm shelters with?"
"You're the first." There's no hesitation in it at all. I am bare to her. "And the last. I mean the only..." It's my turn to feel sheepish.
"Okay," she concedes, quieter.
I kiss her again, slower this time, less urgency and more dangerously close to claiming, like I have all the time in the world now, even though we both know we absolutely do not.
Eventually, practicality taps on the inside of my skull like the world's least romantic reminder.
"We should... probably..."
"Regrettably, yes." I rest my forehead against hers for one more second, not wanting to pull out of her, not wanting this moment to ever end. "Worst part of my day."
***
Nora
The slow pull of him leaving my body is both relief and a small spike of loss. My muscles protest, then relax as he slides fully out and immediately moves, rolling to one side with a muted groan.
I stay where I am for another beat, catching breath, cataloging the new aches with a strange sense of satisfaction.
Then sitting up is non-negotiable. The rock is unforgiving; my back muscles complain as they straighten. My shirt, torn at the neckline now, clings cold and ruined when it falls back into place, clinging damp and cool around my tender nipples.
"Status check," he says, voice steadier. "Physically."
"Sore," I say. "In a way, I will be thinking about it for the rest of this trip. You?"
"Same." A flicker of heat crosses his face again, then he gets it under control. "We should eat. We don't know how long this storm is going to last or when we'll catch up to everyone else."
He hands me a water bottle and a crushed protein bar, and our fingers brush during the handoff, sending a small, ridiculous jolt up my arm that my body answers with embarrassing enthusiasm. Apparently one—two—orgasms are not a permanent cure for wanting him.
He moves toward the front of the overhang, staying low under the rock line, hand going automatically to the radio clipped to his pack. Static answers him, useless. He tips his head back, scanning what little sky shows through the canopy gap, jaw tight in calculation.
I watch him for a second—the line of his shoulders, the seriousness settling back over his face now that the storm of us has passed and the storm of everything else reasserts itself—and then something at the edge of the shelter catches my eye.
A scrap of color, bright against the mud. Wrong. Out of place in all this green and brown.
I'm moving before I finish deciding to.
"Nora?" Santi calls, already turning. "Careful, the lip—"
I brace one hand against the rock and reach down into the thorny growth at the overhang's edge, where runoff has carved a shallow muddy channel. Leaves slap against my wrist, cold and sharp. My fingers close around fabric.
Yellow, torn, and filthy with mud, but unmistakably the same high-vis yellow as the vest Mateo wore over his shirt this morning. One corner still carries the ghost of the Waku logo, half a blue W visible under the dirt.
My heart stops, then slams back into motion, hard.
"Santi." My voice comes out thin, barely surviving the rain. "You need to see this."
He's beside me in two strides, one hand steadying my waist on the treacherous slope, the other closing around mine to study what I'm holding. When his eyes register the fabric, sharp certainty crosses his face.
"He was here," he says, no hesitation in it at all. He turns the scrap over, showing the frayed edge where it caught and tore on the thorn. "Recently. Before us."
Adrenaline floods back in, burning off whatever softness was left from a few minutes ago.
"This isn't random," I say, mind already building the model. "This is a path. He came through here, specifically, on a route someone chose."
Santi's gaze lifts from the fabric, tracking the angle of the runoff channel, the subtle line of disturbed undergrowth beyond the shelter's edge. His jaw sets.
"Toward the northwest," he says quietly. "Toward the restricted tepuy access."
Thunder answers him, low and long, like the jungle agrees.