I don't let up. I watch him come apart under me. Insults dropping to fragments. Fragments dropping to sounds. His body is doing the opposite of his mouth—getting wetter, tighter, clawing my shoulders. Sayingmoreandcloserandstay.
A flash of the park cuts through—Benji's face in the golden light. I shove it away and fuck harder. I'm not doing this right now. I don't do feelings. Sex is what I'm good at. I don't need it to be anything else.
Except my hand goes gentle on his hip. My thumb traces the bone instead of gripping it. Benji's eyes flick to mine. Something passes between us. I yank my hand back to rough and pretend it didn't happen.
Benji feels it before I do. The stretch, the pressure building at the base where my knot is thickening. His eyes go wide. His mouth opens on a sound that isn't a word. I feel his body tighten around the swell of it. A beat of panic. Locked together.
His hands grab my hips and haul me forward. "Don't you dare pull out." It’s not a request.
The knot pops past his rim. We lock. The world goes quiet.
The banter, the insults, the headboard—cut like a power line. We're sealed together. My knot is swollen inside him. Every small movement sends sensation through both of us so intense my vision swims. I can't thrust, just grind in slow, deep rolls. The intimacy is unbearable. Face to face. No rhythm to hide behind. No performance. Just his eyes and mine and heavy breathing.
There's no casual exit from this. No pulling on my jeans while he's half-asleep. We're locked. I can feel his heartbeat, hisbreath. The part of me that always has one foot out the door realizes there is no door anymore.
Benji tries to say something sharp. It comes out as a shaky exhale. I try to grin. My mouth won't cooperate. His hand finds his cock, starts stroking. Our foreheads drift together. I didn't decide to do that. I open my mouth to say something cocky.
What comes out is his name. "Benji." Cracked and quiet.
He opens his mouth to fire back, but it's just a sound. His hand speeds up. His body tightens around my knot in waves. I'm close too.
Benji comes first. His back arches. He spills over his hand and across his stomach. His body clamps around my knot so hard my vision whites out. His face—armor gone, sarcasm gone, freckles standing out against the flush. He looks like the most honest thing I've ever seen.
I come. Blind, overwhelming. Bigger than any orgasm I've had in my life. My mouth finds the curve of his neck where it meets his shoulder. My teeth sink in deep enough to break skin.
I taste blood. His scent floods my mouth. Something locks into place inside me like a key turning.
Mate.
It settles into my bones. Permanent. Irreversible. A door slamming shut on every version of my life that doesn't include him. It terrifies me.
My teeth are still in his skin. My hands are shaking. The swagger is gone. Wiped clean. What's left is a guy with blood on his lips who just put something permanent on the one person he was trying to keep things casual with.
I lift my mouth slow. I can see it. My mark, teeth-shaped, red, blood beading in the crescents. It's going to scar. It's going to be on his skin for the rest of his life because my body did the one thing my brain spent twenty-six years avoiding.
Benji's hand goes to the mark. His fingers touch the broken skin. He flinches. His eyes are wide, wet. Overloaded. He touches the mark like he's checking if it's real. Tracing the shape of my teeth. His face cycles through fury, shock, awe.
I try to speak. Find a joke, a deflection. "I didn't—" I start. It dies. Didn't mean to? My body meant every second. Didn't plan it? That's worse.
Benji grabs me by the hair. Yanks my face down to the bite. Not to kiss me. To press my mouth against the wound. He holds me there with his fingers tight in my hair.
"Too late," he says. His voice is thin and wrecked. "You already did it."
It sounds like an accusation and a life sentence. I don't have a single thing to say back because he's right.
We lie there, knotted. My face pressed to the claiming mark, his fingers in my hair. My arms are around him. I don't remember deciding to put them there. His heartbeat is fast under the mark, steady against my lips. Mine is matching it without my permission. The knot holds us together in the quiet. I'm lying here with my mouth on the wound I made, arms around the person my whole life was designed to run from.
His pulse against my lips is the only sound in the room. I am his and he is mine, and nothing I've ever been has prepared me for that.
Benji
Jude has been staring at my neck for the entire car ride, and if he doesn’t stop, I’m going to strangle him with his own seatbelt.
"I’m not talking about it," I say for the fourth time, glaring out the window at the passing storefronts. My fingers twitch toward my neck. I force them down into my lap and pretend the phantom itch isn't there.
"You have literal teeth marks on your neck," Jude says, twisting fully around in the passenger seat like traffic laws are a suggestion. "Alpha teeth. Claiming-bite teeth. And you'renot talking about it?"
"Correct."