I vaulted onto the porch, landing lightly on the balls of my feet to pad around the edge of the cabin and press my body tight against the rough wooden exterior.
The front door opened and she stepped outside.
I’d been so careful these last few days. Overly cautious about when and where I watched her, but each time it was as if she could sense my presence, her haunting green eyes drawn to my exact location.
Except in sleep.
In sleep, I could stand by the foot of her bed, watch her chest heave and her lips part. I could imagine those lips around my cock as I stroked myself, pumping into my fist. She didn’t wake up when I rubbed the tip over her lips, depositing little spurts of my seed into her mouth. Claiming her as mine even if I wouldn’t have her.
I couldn’t have her.
Not in the way I wanted.
Owning a person wasn’t the same as having one devoted to you. Possessions could break. They could be bought and traded, borrowed and bent. They could be lost.
I couldn’t lose what I didn’t have.
“Ruarc?” she called into the night, my name in her mouth like a siren’s song. I closed my eyes, cursing silently as my stomach twisted and my cock thickened in my pants.
My breath burned in my lungs as she walked across the porch and down to the grass.
This was a bad idea.
Every passing day, I thought this would be the day that I forgot her.
The last time I came here.
It would be the day that I didn’t care anymore. Where she wouldn’t be the first thing I thought about in the morning. That thoughts of her wouldn’t linger in my mind when everything was still.
Her hollow steps retreated and I chanced a sidelong glance around the edge of the cabin to watch her walk back inside, her head hung low. The door shut behind her, but she didn’t lock it. She never locked it anymore.
I clenched my teeth so hard it hurt, willing myself not to read into that.
This was the woman I took from her home and held against her will. Whatever I felt and whatever she felt were not the same things. There was a gulf between us and there wasn’t enough sex in the world to fill it in and make it solid ground.
Drawing the image into my mind sent a rush of blood to my cock.
I moved away from the wall, inhaling sharply, the clean pine air filling my lungs.
Go home, I told myself.
Leave.
I had shit to attend to. Delirium still stood on shaky ground and there were still a few more strings to pull to have Nixon released so that I could give him the ending he’d earned.
Leave, you bastard.
My hands raked violently through my hair, unable to force my feet to move.
Like my wiring was shoddy. Nothing connecting as it should.
My mind would tell my feet to move and they wouldn’t.
I would try to keep my mouth shut but words would pour out anyway.
My thoughts got loud like a roar of rain hitting a tin roof in a thunderstorm.
I just want to see her.
That would be enough. Five minutes and I could leave.
I cringed at how pathetic I sounded but it didn’t change my mind. I waited until her lights were off, and then I waited a little longer, just in case.
When I was near certain she’d be asleep, I crept across the porch, ducking low to peer into the windows for any sign of life.
Emily’s cabin was extremely easy to get into for anybody who wanted access. A fact that bothered me to no fucking end even if I’d taken advantage of it more than once.
Even if she hadn’t left the door unlocked, it was an old key-handle type. The ones anyone with half a brain and a hairpin could pick. The windows slid open easily enough as well since she never locked those anymore, either.
I pushed my way inside, lifting the door slightly to avoid the worst of the creaking hinges and the way the warped bottom sometimes dragged noisily across the floor. I froze, my muscle tightening at the sudden creak of the hinges.
The cabin’s interior was warm, sheltered from the wind outside. I sucked in a deep breath, the hair on the back of my neck standing up. Her scent had a growl sticking in my chest, my eyes rolling back. Fuck. If I could, I’d fucking drown myself in it.
Almost in a trance, my feet carried me across the creaky floor to her bedroom, memory helping me avoid all the noisiest spots. My pulse pounded so strongly, I felt it in my fingertips.
I wanted to see her. That was it.
Five minutes, I reminded myself. No more. And then never again.
The darkness of her room swallowed me up, and it took my eyes a minute to adjust as I stood at the foot of her bed.
The suffused moonlight filtering in from the gauzy curtains was just enough for me to make out the lines of her body under the covers, slowly rising and falling with her breath.
She was so fucking beautiful. Even in sleep, when the lines of her face softened, I couldn’t imagine another person ever being as perfect as her.
A slow smile spread across my face before I could banish it away.
My hands shook. The visceral need to get closer, to touch, to taste, commanding every nerve ending.
Several long, silent moments passed and even with my mind signaling that time was up, my feet wouldn’t move. They might as well have been glued to the floor. I was a bystander, watching from somewhere above, removed, apart. Unable to do anything to stop myself.
My little lamb moved suddenly, shifting under her covers and sighing softly.
Seeing her wasn’t enough. It was never going to be.
Her soul called to me, beckoning me into the light.
Emily ruined me just as surely as I ruined her.
Why the hell did I ever think I could let her go?
Home felt empty without her.
I craved her voice, to feel her body in the bed with me.
Emily didn’t buckle and fold under me, she fit into all my grooves and empty parts. She fought it hard, this thing between us, but ultimately, she accepted me, even broken and covered in blood.
She gave in willingly. Trading a piece of her soul to the devil in exchange for life. For feeling. To make that heart beat like it never beat before.
Being among the dead so long and so often, I had to wonder whether she’d ever felt alive before our eyes connected in the basement of the mortuary. It would be so easy to fall into a mind-numbing routine of work, sleep, eat, and repeat out here in the trees.
Was that it?
Did she only crave my darkness because it felt better than nothing?
I clenched my jaw, watching her legs slide over one another beneath the covers as she rolled onto her back and rubbed her cheek against her pillow, making little cooing sounds that made me rock hard.
My vision narrowed to a single-minded purpose, focused on her face in the dark.
It was more than that, I told myself as I dropped to my knees, feeling along the edge of the bed to pull the covers from her.
…I’d prove it.
The comforter whispered over her mostly bare skin as I slowly drew them down, tugging them from her body and off the bed to drop them in a pile next to me.
I marveled at her lithe body, dressed in nothing with simple black panties and an oversized shirt.
My throat constricted. My shirt. The one she’d been wearing in the office when I’d bent her over my desk and had my way with her, needing one last taste of her before I could send her away.
Carefully, I reached for her hips, pulling her panties down. She stirred, but didn’t wake, trying to draw her legs closer to herself for warmth.
Uh uh, little lamb.
Holding her legs apart, I slipped onto the bed between them.
I shuddered as I bent my head between her thighs, my tongue flicking out to taste her.
I groaned as her sweetness coated my tongue and a soft sleepy moan fell from her lips.
Pressing my tongue flat against her clit, her back arched, pressing her pussy into my mouth.
Her taste… her scent…
I was going insane. She was driving me to madness and was boarding the bus willingly, urging her to hit the fucking gas.
I’ll have her tonight. One last time.
A lie. And not even a good one.
The goalposts kept moving and I let them. It would never be enough.
Sucking her clit into my mouth, I let my teeth skim over the supple flesh while pressing my fingers inside her.
She jerked in her sleep, wriggling under me, her fingers twisting in the sheets as she came up from dreamland. Slowly at first, with little whimpering moans and then all at once with a yelp as I began to fuck her with my fingers.
She pushed at my head, but I hooked an arm around her thigh, locking her to me as I kept up my assault with my fingers and tongue.
“R-Ruarc?” she stammered, her hands no longer shoving at my head. Instead, her fingers pressed into my hair, gently at first, in wonder as if she thought perhaps she was dreaming, but as I sunk another finger into her sweet cunt and flicked my tongue wickedly against her clit, those fingers twisted. She gripped handfuls of my hair, moaning loudly into the dark.
She fell back on the bed, her back arching. Her moans sliced through me like a knife. My cock swelled.
I felt her clench and pulse around my fingers as she began to move, thrusting her hips, fucking my mouth, bucking like she might combust if she didn’t find release. Her moans grew louder, into shouts, and I licked her through it, violently stroking that sweet spot inside with hooked fingers.
“Ruarc,” she screamed, coming around my fingers with a watery sob.
Her body convulsed and trembled and when it was finished, she sighed.
I pulled back, but her fingers in my hair tightened, holding me close. “Don’t,” she begged. “Don’t go.”
Her voice was sleepy and full of lust and I could not fucking deny her. Even if I wanted to.
I climbed over her body, kissing a line up her thigh, biting the supple flesh just above her knee. I pushed up her shirt, kissing and teasing until I had her breast in my mouth, making her cry out again.
Her arms and legs wrapped around my body like she thought I was going to disappear. I groaned against her tit in my mouth and she shivered as I released her, moving to take her lips.
She whined against my mouth, her body clenching as I kissed her hard, an almost painful ripple tearing through my abdomen, drawing a moan from my lips. I pushed in with my tongue and she opened for me, her broken cries swallowed up with every stroke of my tongue.
“Please,” she begged when I pulled back for air. “Please.”
I groaned, reaching between us and freeing my cock from my pants. I was hard enough to crack.
Her fingernails bit into my lower back, pulling me into her as I thrust my hips, burying myself so deeply in her tight cunt that I saw stars.
She screamed, throwing her head back.
Her tightness took me, stretching and yielding for my length and I knew I’d never find another cunt that took me this good. Not in a hundred years. Not in a thousand women.
My Emily.
My perfect little lamb.
Mine.
Going slow wasn’t an option. I fucked her like it was life and death.
Because knowing I’d still need to walk out that door when this was over made me feel like I would die and if I did I wanted this to be the last memory that chased me to my grave.
Her mattress bent and flexed with every brutal thrust, bouncing her on my cock, bringing me close to the edge already.
Not yet.
I wrapped a fist around her pretty throat, knowing what it did to her. She whimpered, her eyes rolling back in ecstasy as she lay there and took that dick like a fucking pro.
I allowed her a little gulp of air and she gasped, her walls clenching around me. “I’m not on birth control anymore,” she said in a rush before I could go back to doing the devil’s work around her neck.
“Fuck,” I hissed, my body responding in a way that shocked me to my fucking core. The primal need to plant my seed, to breed her, to claim her in a way that couldn’t be undone had me seeing stars.
I squeezed her neck, silencing her as I savaged her pussy and pressed my mouth to hers.
She whimpered, trying to wriggle free as she came on my cock. Her ecstasy spurring my own. I let her take a full breath and watched in awe as twin tears streaked from her eyes at the raw pleasure wracking her body.
“Damn,” I groaned, blind with lust.
Her eyes met mine in the dark and I gritted my teeth. Her lips parted, recognizing how close I was to my own end and wanting to watch me get there.
I groaned.
“Ruarc, pull out,” she muttered, her hands pressing on the bones of my hips, making me fight against her to continue my bruising pace between her thighs.
“Ruarc,” she insisted as I hit my apex, throwing my head back in a silent howl.
“Ruarc!”
I barely made it, jerking out of her slick folds to come onto her abdomen and thighs. The loss of her warmth like a slap in the face as my body wrung itself dry on her skin.
I should have buried my seed in her. Buried it so deep that she couldn’t claw it out no matter how hard she tried. I should’ve hung her upside down, ensuring every fucking drop made it to that place deep inside that would bind her to me in a way that couldn’t be undone.
Why?
Why hadn’t I taken it? Taken her?
I pushed back, off her body, shifting from the bed as the high leveled out and I realized what I’d almost done. What I’d almost allowed to happen.
My nose wrinkled, upper lip twitching in disgust as I adjusted my pants, searching the floor for a lost shoe.
What was I thinking?
I wasn’t.
Another side effect. What was next?
“Where are you going?” she demanded, rolling from the bed to clean herself with a towel from the floor.
“Home.”
“What? No.”
She bolted forward like a fawn on unsteady legs, grabbing my arm as I turned to leave.
I cut her a glare. “Emily—”
“No. You can’t just come here and do… whatever that was and then just walk out like it never happened.”
My jaw tightened. “What do you want?”
“I’m not your whore, Ruarc.”
My brows lowered, seeing the fire in her eyes. The one I’d seen that first night in the mortuary, burning bright.
She still didn’t get it.
She was the furthest thing from being my whore.
She was the only woman I ever fucked more than once. The only one whose name I not only remembered but woke with on my lips in the dead hours of the night.
It was because she wasn’t my whore that I needed to keep her at a distance. I had to push her away before she could decide to withdraw from me herself. If she did, I wasn’t sure how I’d react. There were so many nights I imagined my mother returning. Some nights, she would come sweeping in and I’d hug her tight. Other nights, I’d put a bullet between her eyes.
Emily couldn’t leave me. Not if she never had me to begin with.
It was the only way to keep her safe.
“I know,” I admitted, my voice barely cutting through the space between us. I was fucking scared, did she want to hear that? I wanted her so much; I was afraid I wouldn’t know what to do when she walked away. “I won’t come back. You have my word.”
She cocked her head at me, her eyes narrowing to angry slits. “Is that what you think I want?”
“You should.”
Her jaw flexed. “I left the door open because I knew you were still out there, even when I couldn’t feel you.”
“You wanted me to come.”
“Yes, you idiot.”
So reckless, my little lamb. Rude, violent, tender, she never held back, even when the glimmer of fear was so bright in her eyes.
“I need you to hear this, Ruarc.”
“Mmm?”
I blinked, flinching as she settled a warm palm against my chest.
“The little boy in here who’s been building walls his whole life…”
My stomach twisted.
“I need him to understand that I’m not going to leave him. He can fight and he can roar and he can go on building his walls, but I’ll just keep climbing them. He can’t keep me out.”
Fire. It burned in my chest. In my eyes. In my throat. I forced it down. Out. Away.
“Stay with me,” she said. It wasn’t a question. Numbly, I let her lead me back to the bed, sitting heavily on the squeaking mattress.
Emily took off my shoes, setting them neatly next to the bed before retrieving the covers from the floor. She removed both my blades, the one from my belt and the other from my ankle, patting me down for any other weapons before crawling into bed next to me.
I’d fallen asleep beside her before, but this was different.
Emily curled into my side and a lump formed in my throat as I pressed my lips to her dark hair, inhaling her.
The cracks in us, the ones I put there, broke wider. Letting voices of dissent pass through, reminding me that everything I loved turned to ash on my tongue. And that I’d killed the part of myself capable of that emotion a long time ago.
I couldn’t have her.
There was a world she belonged to before I pulled her into mine. One that didn’t do the shit I did to her. She had people who loved her. A future that didn’t involve violence and blood and pain.
I wasn’t alone because people left. I was alone because anything that came too close died. Starved for sunlight in my hollow darkness.
I won’t be the death of her.
I won’t let her be the ruin of me.
Sleep came in short, uncomfortable bursts until the darkness in the windows began to brighten.
Sliding out of her bed and getting dressed, I let myself out, the tight ball in my chest unfurling as clean air entered my lungs, untainted by her scent. Allowing me clarity of thought.
Would she think it all a dream when she woke?
Something pulled uncomfortably in my chest.
Eventually she would see, all nightmares ended with bright mornings, and they faded just as quickly.
