“No.”
One word, but it contained multitudes. Promise. Threat. Confession.
The door sealed behind me. No escape now. No retreat into numbness. My body hummed with awareness, of him, of the space between us, of the precipice I stood on. Jump or step back. Feel or die slowly.
I moved to the table, started setting up my station. Muscle memory, something to do with hands that wanted to reach forhim. The cards scattered when I fumbled them. They fell like my excuses, my reasons for staying numb, my carefully maintained control.
“Leave them.”
His voice came from directly behind me. When had he moved? I had not heard?—
His hand settled on my hip, and years of ice cracked. The heat of his palm burned through fabric, through skin, straight to the marrow. I froze, bent over the table, my body screaming for something I had forgotten how to want.
“Varrick—”
He spun me around, lifted me onto the table. Cards crushed under me as he stepped between my legs, his hands gripping my thighs hard enough to bruise. I wanted the bruises. Wanted evidence that this was real, that I could still feel, that I was not just a ghost.
“No more games.” His voice scraped raw. “No more pretending. No more control.”
When he kissed me, it was not careful. It was not questioning. He kissed me like he wanted to crawl inside my skin and live there. Like he wanted to consume me. Like I was the only real thing in a station of illusions.
I kissed him back with years of suppressed hunger.
My uniform jacket tore when he yanked it off. The sound of fabric ripping and buttons hitting the floor was permission. Permission to want. To take. To be something other than empty. His shirt followed, my nails catching skin as I pulled it away, drawing thin lines of blood I could taste when I bit his shoulder.
He snarled, actually snarled, and the sound went straight to my core. This was not human. This was not safe. This was not anything I had known before. His hands were everywhere, leaving trails of fire on skin that had been numb for so long.When his mouth found my throat, when his fangs grazed without breaking skin, I nearly came from the threat alone.
“If you want to stop?—”
“Shut up.” I wrapped my legs around his waist, pulled him against me, felt him hard and ready through our clothes. “I have not wanted anything in five years. Let me want this. Let me want you.”
My pants disappeared. Underwear torn away like tissue paper. The cool air hit heated skin and I gasped, then gasped again when his mouth replaced the air. He dropped to his knees and devoured me. No other word for it. His tongue was rough, textured differently than human, and when it swept over my clit I saw colors that did not exist.
I slammed my hands against the table, cards flying, something glass breaking in the corner. I did not care. I could not care. Not when he was doing that with his tongue, not when his fingers joined it, not when he found that spot inside that made me buck against his face.
The first orgasm hit like drowning in reverse. Like breathing for the first time. Like every nerve ending I had shut down suddenly firing at once. I might have screamed. I might have sobbed. I might have said his name like a prayer or a curse or both.
He did not stop. He worked me through it and straight into building another, until my thighs shook, until I was pulling his hair hard enough to hurt, until I was begging in words that did not make sense.
When he finally stood, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, I saw myself reflected in his red eyes. Wrecked. Alive. Burning.
His pants hit the floor and, god. The stories were true. All of them. Larger, thicker, that broad triangular head already slick with precum. The soft ridges along the shaft that would createfriction in ways human anatomy never could. My body clenched, empty and aching and ready despite the size difference that should have scared me.
“I will not hurt you,” he said, positioning himself at my entrance.
“I am not glass.” I looked him in the eyes, let him see everything, the hunger, the need, the years of nothing I wanted him to fill. “Break me if you have to. Just make me feel.”
He pushed in slowly, watching my face. The stretch burned, god, it burned, but it was perfect. I felt every ridge as he entered, each one catching and dragging and sending sparks up my spine. When he bottomed out, when I could not take another inch, we both stopped breathing.
I felt split open. Pinned. Claimed without the bite.
“Move,” I demanded, rolling my hips. “Please, Varrick, move.”
He did. Long, deep strokes that had me seeing stars, that had me clawing at his back hard enough to draw blood, that had me making sounds I had never made before. Each withdrawal dragged those ridges against my walls, each thrust seated him impossibly deep.
Five thrusts. Ten. Then his control shattered.
He grabbed my hips, held me in place, and fucked me like the world was ending. Like he would die if he did not get deeper. Like I was the only thing anchoring him to sanity. The table cracked under us. I did not care. I was too busy falling apart, too busy feeling everything everywhere all at once.
