Axel stood, stretched, and fished in his pocket for a crumpled bill. He tossed it on the table, then looked at me.
“You need a ride home?”
I shook my head. “I have a system.”
He waited.
“My dad’s house has a window that never locks. I go in that way. He’s usually passed out by midnight.”
He nodded, then took my phone from the table and tapped in his number.
“In case those college boys come back,” he said, handing it over.
Our fingers brushed, lingered. I didn’t let go right away.
He looked at me, and I saw it, the urge to say something real, something that would ruin everything. Instead, he just pulled away, slow.
Outside, the world was freezing. He started his bike, and the sound was thunder in the dead of night.
“It’s a bad idea,” he said. “But I want you to come with me.”
He was right, but I climbed onto the bike anyway.
11
Darla
By the time we got to The Rusty Chain, my skin felt scalded, and my heart was spitting curses into my bloodstream. I wanted him so bad my teeth hurt, but there was another part of me—the good girl in the choir robe—that was already rehearsing the lies I’d feed Dad tomorrow morning. “Library night,” probably. “Study group.” He’d never buy it.
Axel unlocked the side door with a key that said nothing about “Royal Bastards” but everything about the kind of person who never forgot a back way. Inside, the smell shifted instantly to stale beer and cigarettes. The main barroom was technically closed, but you could hear the ghosts of every brawl, fuck, and shattered glass echoing between the bottle-lined shelves and the ratty pool table. Axel didn’t even look at me as he led the way, his boots thudding slow up a set of steel stairs welded to the cinder block wall. He waited at the landing and watched me climb,his eyes flat and hungry, his left hand already undoing the top buttons of his shirt.
He had a room at the top, a ten-by-ten cell that looked like a crime scene set designer’s wet dream. There was a twin bed with a mattress that sagged so hard in the middle it formed a grave, the sheets on it balled and half-off. Motorcycle boots lined the wall like a firing squad. A metal desk with a clutter of parts and bent cigarettes and a Glock half-hidden. The only light was a bare bulb, naked except for a string of red Christmas lights thumbtacked in the shape of a dick above the headboard.
He closed the door behind us, twisted the lock, and leaned on it with both hands. “You sure you’re not going to regret this?” he asked, his voice a gravel road in January.
I stepped out of my boots, letting them fall over, and tried to match his stare. “Pretty sure I’d regret not doing it more.”
He grinned, the left side of his mouth twitching up. “Atta girl.”
That’s all the warning I got before he moved—just one stride and then his mouth was on mine, bruising and whiskey-bitter, his beard rasping my chin, his hands already snaking under my shirt. He tasted like burnt caramel and salt and the inside of a confession booth. He didn’t waste time. My shirt was up over my head and gone before I remembered how sleeves worked. His leather cut—the club vest—hit the floor with a weighty thud that made me shiver. His hands mapped every inch of me, but the way he did it felt more like searching than groping, as if he was counting ribs for evidence.
He pushed me back, slow, until my knees hit the edge of the mattress. I reached for his belt, but he caught my wrist in one big paw and pinned it behind my back, using the other to tip my chin up until my neck stretched. For a second, he just looked at me, eyes running over my face like he was memorizing where every tiny vein ran under my skin.
“You want to do this, you tell me now,” he said. The words were soft, but the pressure of his grip wasn’t.
I nodded. “Do it. Please.”
He released me and, in the same motion, shoved me down onto the mattress, crawling on top before I could catch my breath. I didn’t need to. My lungs didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except the heat coming off his body and the way the bedsprings screamed in protest.
He was out of his jeans with a practiced jerk, boots and all, and I made a mental note that Axel didn’t fuck around with laces. I got my own jeans halfway down my thighs before he gripped the denim and peeled them off, not gentle, but not rough either—just impatient, like he wanted the obstacle out of the way. His fingers found the waistband of my panties, and he tore them off with one clean motion, the sound of ripping lace loud enough to drown out the jukebox I could hear muffled through the floorboards below.
I was naked but for my cross necklace, and somehow that made it worse. Or better. I couldn’t decide.
He hovered over me, arms bracketing my shoulders, and dropped his head to kiss down my collarbone, then my breast, sucking until the skin snapped cold in the air. His hands were everywhere—flat against my stomach, kneading my thigh, wrapping around the back of my neck to pull me in harder. I got one hand between us and felt him, hard as a steel pipe and slick with sweat. I jerked him just to see what he’d do, and he hissed, biting my shoulder so hard I gasped.
“Don’t start something you can’t finish,” he growled into my ear, and that was it. I shoved him back and rolled on top, straddling his hips, pinning his wrists above his head with my own smaller hands. He didn’t fight me, just grinned wider and flexed under me, the veins in his arms ridged like steel cables.I could feel the heat of him pressing up, eager, but he waited, watching me, testing if I’d chicken out.
I didn’t. I gripped him at the base, lined myself up, and eased down, letting the ache spread until I could barely breathe. The stretch hurt at first, but the way he watched me—eyes locked on my face, not the way a guy watched a porno but the way a starving man watched a roast—made it feel holy. I started moving, slow and awkward at first, then building a rhythm as the pain slid into pleasure. The whole bed rocked, and the metal frame squealed with every bounce. I let my head fall back and rode him, hair sticking to my sweaty back, nails raking his chest hard enough to leave marks.
