2. Aster #2
“Don’t.” My voice doesn’t sound like mine. It sounds like the voice on the 11 PM voice notes—lower, more honest than I intend. “We shouldn’t?—”
“We should.” His hand pushes the dress up. His thumb hooks into my underwear. He pauses—barely, half a breath—and finds what I already knew was there, what my body has been announcing since his hand went flat on the car door.
“You’re soaking,” he says.
I have nothing to say to that. My mouth says don’t. My hips move forward. Both things are true and I hate myself for it—I pull him closer by the shirt and say stop with my legs wrapped around him. That’s when I feel it.
Him. Hard against the inside of my thigh through his trousers—the shape of him, the heat of him, how much he means this. My brain says now and my hips press against him anyway, one roll I don’t choose, and he exhales sharp through his teeth.
“Your mouth says stop.” He drops his head until his brow is against mine. “Your hips just moved.”
“I’m—”
“Your legs won’t let go.”
“I hate you.”
“I know.” His hands leave me. I hear his belt—the buckle, the slow drag of leather through loops—and the sound is so deliberate that every part of me understands it.
My hands are still in his shirt. Not reaching for my phone.
Not pushing. His trousers open. He steps closer. He pulls my underwear aside.
“Say it again while I’m inside you.”
The first press of him—blunt, certain, not yet inside, just there—and I drag in a breath.
Then he pushes in. The burn hits: the stretch of him filling my pussy—deep, too much all at once—and I can’t find words, can’t find breath, can only grip his shoulders while he goes still with his forehead against mine.
The parking lot is quiet. I can feel my pulse behind my eyes. His breathing is as wrecked as mine.
“Okay.” His voice is low and rough. Not a question—he’s reading me. He already knows.
“We should stop.” My voice sounds like someone else’s. “This is?—”
He doesn’t stop.
His cock moves inside me and my body answers before I’ve authorized it—hips rolling, thighs tightening, my pussy taking him on every stroke.
I’m wet enough to hear it, the slick sound of him moving in the empty parking lot.
The shame of that is enormous. It runs right alongside the wanting, neither one beating the other—both true at once, both mine.
“The bedroom camera,” he says against my neck. Low. Moving inside me. “Smoke detector angle, slightly left of center.” His cock drives deeper and I gasp, my back hitting the car door hard. “Nine weeks of Thursdays.”
“Stop.” I say it. I mean it when I say it. My legs tighten around him at the exact same moment I say it—the word and the legs, both happening in my body, both real, and I cannot explain how that’s possible. “Rye. Stop.”
“Your legs just pulled me closer.”
“I know they did.” My voice cracks on it. “I’m telling you to stop anyway.”
“I know what you’re telling me.” He doesn’t stop.
His cock fills my pussy on every thrust and my hips roll to meet him without asking me first and his mouth is at my ear, low, certain.
“And I know what your body is telling me. I’ve been listening to your body for eight years. I know which one is honest.”
“That’s not—” He drives in harder. The breath goes out of me. “That’s not?—”
“Your right hand. Nine weeks of Thursdays. Same rhythm every time.” His thumb finds the spot above my hip—the exact one, the angle I use on myself, that I have never told anyone—and my hips roll forward and I hate them, I hate myself, I hate how thoroughly he has learned me from a server room and a smoke detector and three terabytes of footage I never consented to.
“I know the sound you make when you’re two minutes out.
I have it in the recordings. I have nine weeks of that sound and the real thing is going to be better.
You’re going to hate how much you like it. You’re going to let me anyway.”
“I hate—” My pussy clenches around his cock. My fingers are in his hair and they’re not pushing. “I hate that you know. I hate that you’ve been watching. I hate—” My hips move again, forward, greedy, nothing to do with my brain. “God. Don’t stop.”
“I know.”
“Don’t make it a thing.” The shame is still there—it hasn’t gone anywhere, it’s running right alongside the wanting. Neither one winning. I stopped waiting for one to. “I hate this. I want you to stop. Don’t stop.”
My legs are wrapped around him. My hands are in his hair. My hips are moving forward to meet every thrust and I say we shouldn’t be doing this and my body has already voted. His thumb finds my clit—the right pressure, no adjustment, like he already knows—and my pussy clenches hard around his cock.
“Say my name,” he says.
“Rye—”
“Again.”
“Rye.”
His hand goes over my mouth when I come.
Flat palm, warm, pressing—muffling the sound I make, which is his name and other things, fragments, none of it protest. I bite his palm.
Hard. He makes a sound against my neck that isn’t patience, that isn’t the controlled man from the restaurant and the dinner tables and the years of watching from a distance.
He drives into me—my pussy clenching around his cock, wet and tight—and then again.
His hips stutter. He follows me over with his forehead on my shoulder.
His cum hits deep. Nothing between us. He fills me and I know exactly what that is—I know exactly what he’s doing, claiming me from the inside, leaving the fact of himself in my body—and I don’t say a word about it.
His forehead drops to mine. He breathes hard against my mouth and doesn’t pull out.
We stay like that. The parking lot is empty. Overhead light buzzes.
My dress is around my waist, my back against my car door. I am absolutely certain I will never be a person who had a normal first date again.
“You were inside my messages for six weeks,” I say.
“Yes.”
“You built a fake profile.”
“Yes.”
“You sat at table twelve and waited for me to walk in.”
“Yes.”
“You need to explain everything.” My voice is steadier than I am. “Everything. Starting with how.”
He lowers me slowly. Straightens my dress with both hands—careful, deliberate—and it’s the most disorienting thing that has happened in the last twenty minutes, which is saying something.
“Come back in,” he says.
“You owe me an explanation.”
“You’ll get one.” He steps back. His eyes are on my face—still reading, still that confirming look, but warmer now, or different. “And then I’m going to tell you what eight years means.”
I should get in my car. I should drive home. I should call my sister and describe this entire situation using the word insane repeatedly until it starts to make sense.
I follow him back into the restaurant.
I am still full of him—his cum inside me, warm, proof at every step—and I should be horrified by that and I’m not. What I am is closer to relief than it has any right to be. Closer to the message I sent at 11:47 that I thought I was sending to a stranger.
Rye holds the restaurant door open.
I walk through.
I haven’t been a stranger to him for eight years and I’m just now starting to understand what that means.