The words come down over the board, wrecked and raw.
“Please. I can't see you, but I need to know. Touch yourself while you—” His hips flex, careful, shallow, the barest push into my mouth. “I want you getting something. Not just giving. Tell me you are.”
I moan around him, and the board shudders with whatever that does to him.
My hand dives under my waistband, no teasing, no ceremony, fingers finding myself soaked and swollen, and the first press against my clit nearly breaks me. I set a rhythm that matches my mouth, and the two sensations braid together until I can't tell which one is driving me toward my climax faster.
“Are you?” he demands, gravelly and desperate.
I pull off him just long enough to gasp, “Yes—God, yes—” and take him back in deeper than before.
The sound he makes is a raw growl.
His rhythm picks up, though he’s still careful, so I press forward and take as much of him as I can.
“Wren—I'm—it's close, I'm close, if you don't want?—”
I moan around his cock and dig my fingers harder into myself, and my own climax starts gathering low in my belly, and I stay exactly where I am.
He erupts.
His weight hits the board, and he pulses against my tongue with a groan that comes out strangled, my name tangled through it,Wren, Wren, Wren, like yesterday, like a prayer, and the sound of him coming undone tips me over with him. I moan around him through my own orgasm, shaking on the cushion, my hand trapped between my thighs, taking everything he gives me and swallowing it down. I keep him in my mouth until he starts softening.
For a long moment, the only sound in the trailer is two people breathing hard on opposite sides of a knife board.
Then, from above me, hoarse and dazed, I hear Rowe’s voice. “Hi.”
A laugh bubbles out of me. I press my cheek against the smooth wood.
“Hi,” I whisper back.
16
ROWE
The gravel crunches under our boots, and I keep my hands in my pockets so I don't reach for her.
“Same time tomorrow?” Wren asks at her car door. Her lips are still swollen. Every time I look at them, my brain short-circuits.
“Peanut will be devastated if you don't show,”I say.
She narrows her eyes.“Just Peanut?”
I smirk. “Pip's grown attached too.”
Wren narrows her eyes at me, fighting a smile and losing. Then she opens the door, tosses her kit onto the passenger seat, and pauses with one hand on the frame. She presses two fingers to her mouth again, but this time she pulls them away and blows across her fingertips. Sends it to me on the air with eyes sparkling.
I stand in the lot long after her taillights turn onto the county road, and I catch myself rubbing my knuckles over my sternum like I can work loose whatever's lodged behind it.
It's just a drive into town. Ten minutes. She'll be back tomorrow afternoon.
And in eleven days, the trucks roll, and there's no tomorrow afternoon after that.
The thought lands like a fist. I picture the convoy pulling out, Thistlewood shrinking in the side mirror, her standing in this same gravel getting smaller and smaller, and my chest cramps so hard I have to breathe through it.
Would she come with me?
The question is insane. She has a license in this state. An apartment with a sentient laundry chair. A friend named Paige and a career and a whole life, and I'm a man who lives in four hundred square feet, who plans murders in a meeting trailer that smells of burnt coffee, who can't hold her hand. What do I say?Leave everything. Come sleep three feet from a man you can never touch. The lion's friendly, the schedule's brutal, and sometimes we bury people.