It’s hardly the gentlemanly position I imagined taking when trying to talk things through with the woman I’ve loved for over a decade.
But it’s also clearly exactly where Harper wants me.
And when her mouth closes around my ballsack and her tongue starts to play with my left ball, gentlemanliness, and reason go out the window.
“Fuuuuuuuck,” I groan.
“That’s right,” Harper whispers, breath warm on my balls. “So back to that teenage fantasy. I’d climb into your bed,brother, and get my mouth around you. I always wanted to drive you so crazy, you’d forget your morals and how we ought totalk things through reasonably,” she mocks, “and every other damn thing in the universe besides the fact that we’re animals who just need tofucksometimes.”
Then she takes some of the slick moisture from her pussy to lube her fingers. Right before she slips them into my ass—just the barest bit, finding my prostate with ease as her mouth closes greedily around the bulbous head of my shaft again.
I bite down on my own biceps so I don’t wake the kid with my shout of agonized pleasure as I thrust forward once and shoot a fountain of cum down his mother’s throat.
TWENTY-ONE
HARPER
I joltawake to the phantom sensation of a gun barrel pressed against my ribs.
My heart is hammering so hard I can feel it in my back teeth, and it takes three full seconds in the dark to remember where I am.
Not Z’s bed.
No, the man sleeping beside me has never once in his life touched me like he hated me.
Caleb.
My racing heartbeat slows down as soon as I recognize his familiar shape.
He’s sprawled on his stomach with one arm thrown across my pillow, face turned toward me, features completely peaceful.
I sigh looking at those ridiculously thick, dark eyelashes brushing against his cheekbones. The chiseled jaw I've been fantasizing about since I was seventeen is slack now. All the careful control he carries in his waking face is just—gone. He looks like someone who’s never had a reason to brace himself.
I look at him for a long moment and try to slow my breathing to match his.
The nightmare is still right there, coating the inside of my skull. Z’s voice, slurred and mean in the dark.
You always close your eyes when I fuck you. Is it so you can pretend I’m him?
My stomach turns with the specific nausea of a memory you’ve spent years not looking at directly, because looking at it directly means accepting the full shape of it.
Z’s weight at my back at three in the morning, shoving down my underwear without bothering to slow down enough to ask.
My own stillness—not consent, just survival math. The cold calculation that submitting was quieter than arguing, while Bruiser was asleep in the next room with nothing but particleboard between us.
Condomwas the only word I always managed.
My one pathetic flag planted in the ground.
Z’d slap my ass like that was the funniest thing he’d heard. Like my one attempt at self-preservation was cute.
I press my palms against my eyes until I see red.
The memories don’t care. They keep coming. Z’s too-rough hands. The way he’d sometimes grunt some casually cruel remark about my body at the same time he was using it. Then the particular viciousness at the end, the kind he knew would hurt, like he wasn’t really satisfied until I was crying, only then finishing almost immediately.
Every time. Like hurting me was the point, and everything before it was just the setup.
You’d have to hate someone to do that to them. Or never see them as a person at all. After ten years, I still don’t know which is worse.