I'm out of the chair before the nod finishes. Three steps and I'm standing over her, closer to another human being than I've been by choice in twenty years, close enough to smell her—clean sweat and something floral and the dark salty scent of how wet she is—and my hand is working my cock right in front of her and neither of us is pretending anymore.
Her eyes go back and forth. My face. My fist. The ink blurring under my grip. Her fingers are a frantic rhythm against her clit now, no more shyness, her hips grinding up off the bench, and she starts to moan. Soft ones first. Then more. Then constant, a rising string of sound with my name tangled in it, her chest heaving, her breasts shuddering with every gasp, and I memorize all of it because I need this burned in deep enough to last the rest of my life.
“Look at you,” I rasp. “Look at you, Wren, god, you're?—”
“Rowe—” Her spine bows. Her thighs clamp around her own hand. “Rowe?—”
Her whole body locks. Her head tips back and she keens my name at the ceiling, high and broken, and the sound of it snaps the last thread holding me together.
I come.
Harder than I've ever come in my life—harder than last night, harder than any watched night in any dark corner, my vision whiting out at the edges as the first pulse lands across her breasts. Then the second. The third. I'm painting her, marking her, spurt after spurt striping her flushed skin, and I hear my own voice from somewhere far away, chanting.
“Wren. Wren.Wren.”
Like a prayer. Like the only one I've ever meant.
She's still shaking through the last of her orgasm, little aftershock tremors rolling her hips, and she looks down at herself—at what I've done, my release glistening on her chest, dripping slowly between her breasts—and instead of reaching for something to wipe it away, she just breathes. Lets it stay.
Lets me see her wear it.
My knees nearly go boneless.
I brace one hand on the wall above the bench, careful, so careful, a full foot of air between my skin and hers, and we stay like that. Her looking up at me. Me looking down at her. Both of us gasping like survivors of the same wreck.
“Hi,” she whispers.
A laugh punches out of me—rusty, disbelieving, real.
“Hi,” I say. “You’re fucking amazing, Wren. And I’ve never come harder in my life.”
And I mean every word.
12
ROWE
She smelled like hay and my cum when I walked her to her car.
She'd cleaned up in my tiny bathroom, buttoned her blouse crooked and fixed it laughing at herself, and we'd talked for another hour about nothing—Brutus's dental chart, the octopus documentary she keeps threatening to make me watch, the laundry chair. And then she said she had work at seven, and I walked her across the dark lot with ten inches between us, and at her car door she turned and looked up at me with her glasses catching the midway lights.
I wanted to kiss her so badly my throathurt.
I stood there with my hands fisted in my pockets and my whole body leaning toward hers like a plant starved for sun, and I couldn't. Couldn't bridge ten inches of night air. She saw it. I know she saw it, because she pressed two fingers to her own lips, held them up in the space between us, and got in her car.
I stood in the gravel until her taillights disappeared.
Now it's two in the morning, and I'm in the van with aduffel bag of spray cans between my boots, and Logan won't shut up.
“So.” He steers us down a street lined with sleeping craftsman houses, headlights off, running on moonlight and memory of the route Silas drilled into us. “The pretty veterinarian stayed late.”
“Drive.”
“I am driving. I'm driving and talking. I contain multitudes.” He takes the corner slowly, engine barely above idle. “Her car was still in the lot at midnight. I know because I walked past it. Twice.”
“Stalker.”
“Concerned brother.” His grin is all teeth. “Concerned,supportivebrother who noticed your trailer light was on and your curtain was shut, which in twenty years has meant exactly nothing until tonight.”