“One more,” I murmur, breath fogging. “And then I’ll be back with you, little dove.”
Trees stir wildly behind the greenhouse. Lightning flashes through the night sky as I walk back to my car. I clutch the vial until my knuckles ache. The wind shifts, sharp and sudden, carrying the faintest trace of smoke.
It leads me west, through the trees, across a frozen stream to a copse of thorns.
They look wrong, curling along the scorched ground on writhing black ivy. The air tastes bitter like charcoal,
My eyes roam over the brambles, and I spot a thorn that looks different than the rest. It sits half-buried in the rubble, hanging from a charred branch. When I reach for it, the tip splinters, revealing a faint pulsing glow—the color of a dying ember. It‘s hot, searing through the callouses on my thumb—a piece of the fire she needs to keep her warm.
“Found you.” I smile.
The last ingredient. The piece that ties this all together. Maybe it’s the wind through the blackened branches, or the way the hunger is starting to make my head light, but I swear I hear her voice. A soft, fractured ‘Hurry’ that vibrates in my ears.
“I’m coming, angel,” I whisper, cradling the thorn like my life depends on it.“Just one more night, and we'll be whole.”
I drive with one hand white-knuckled on the wheel, the other twitching like a severed nerve. My palm still reeks of charred earth and the black thorn’s bitter smoke. It slides down without permission—over my thigh, pressing hard against the ache that’s been building since I left her.
I should wait. Save it all for her. But God—I can’t stop seeing her face in the bathroom. The way she looked when I spoke to her through the window. I could hear every breath, smell the soap on her skin, and practically taste the heat rising from her skin.
I made her cum with just my voice. I wasn’t even touching her. But oh, how I wanted to. I wanted to burst through that window and show her what it would feel like if I were really there. If it were my hands instead of hers. My mouth. My body pinning her against the floor while the water ran cold, and she forgot anyone else ever existed.
I’ve memorized every sound she made. The little hitch in her breath. The way she tried to stay quiet... and failed. The broken gasp when she finally let go.
And I wasn’t even in the fucking room.
My breath stutters. Fingers digging into denim, friction sparking through the fabric, not nearly enough—it’ll never be enough until it’s her hand, her body, her pitiful little gasps in my ear instead of being separated by his fortress of magic.
My hand moves without thought, rougher now, chasing the phantom of her. The zipper bites into my knuckles as I shove my jeans down my thighs. My cock springs free, thick and aching, and I wrap my fist around it like I’m trying to strangle the need out of my own body.
It doesn’t work. It never fucking works.
The black thorn pulses faintly on the passenger seat in sync with my heartbeat—or maybe hers. Maybe we’re alreadyconnected. Maybe we always have been, and this is just nature’s way of letting me know what my soul’s known all along.
“Soon, angel,” I rasp into the empty car, voice cracking like something inside me is splitting open. “So fucking soon.”
I stroke myself harder, faster, imagination filling in what my hands can’t give me. Her underneath me. Her eyes wide and wet, mouth falling open as I push inside her for the first time—the only time that will ever matter because every other man before me will be erased.
Overwritten.
She’ll forget she was ever touched by anyone else.
The highway blurs. My hips jerk up into my fist, chasing the edge, and for a moment I can almost feel it—her heat, her tightness, the way she’d clench around me like her body was made to hold mine,
Her name fractures on my tongue as I cum, vision blurring, hand slick and trembling as the car swerves hard onto the shoulder. Gravel sprays everywhere.
For five seconds, there’s nothing but her.
Her face in the bathtub.
Her voice calling the name I gave her.
The hallucinatory sensation of finally—finally—being inside her instead of being on the outside looking in.
Then reality drags me back.
The empty car, the dark road, loneliness.
Fuck.
