I tried to laugh, but it turned into a sob. He caught it with his mouth, kissing me with the kind of ferocity that left bruises. I clawed at his shirt, desperate to get closer, to feel something other than the panic chewing up my insides. His hands dropped to my waist, lifted me until my boots dangled off the floor. I wrapped my legs around his hips, not caring if the world burned down on top of us.
He turned, slamming me back into the wall. The cinderblock left gritty imprints on my ass, but I barely noticed. All I could focus on was his tongue, his teeth, the way he bit my lower lip and sucked the pain out of me. He shifted me higher, using one hand to hold me up, the other tracing fire along the inside of my thigh. I bucked against him, gasping when I felt the line of him through his jeans.
I fumbled at his zipper, nearly ripping the teeth apart, and shoved his jeans down just enough to free him. He wasalready hard, angry and hot in my fist. He grinned against my neck, his breath a furnace.
“Fuck, Mel,” he muttered, and pushed my jeans off, his fingers not even pretending to be gentle.
I braced myself, thinking he’d fuck me right there against the wall. Instead, he hooked my thigh with his arm, carried me across the hall, and kicked open the first door he found. We crashed into the storage room, knocking over a stack of cardboard boxes and a crate of bar glasses. He set me down on the old steel workbench, spreading my legs wide.
He tugged off my panties—torn, useless now—and ran his tongue along my slit, slow and thorough, like he was trying to memorize the taste. I moaned, loud, not caring who heard.
He had this stubborn, asshole intensity—like every inch of me was a tactical objective he'd studied his whole life. Augustine licked me flat and slow, teasing up the slick mess he’d made, mouth burning hot and beard rough against my thighs. He shoved my legs up, knees to my chest, and sucked my clit until my spine tried to leave my body. I grabbed for his hair, pressed his skull hard to my cunt, just needing—needing, god, just needing.
“Say it,” he demanded, his breath vibrating on my skin.
“I love you,” I gasped, because words were the only thing I had left that could hurt him back. My fingers ached from clutching his hair, and my thighs trembled with wanting as he tongued me into a state so deep I forgot about everything except the violent, wild hunger of his mouth.
He growled, actually fucking growled, and flattened his tongue against my clit until I thrashed and nearly bit through my own lip. When I broke, when the orgasm hit, it was a white-hot, animal thing, my back arching hard enough to send half the stacked boxes crashing to the floor. Augustine didn’t stop, just kept lapping at me, drinking down everything I gave, refusing to let me come down.
And then he buried himself inside me in one deep, punishing stroke.
It was rough, not sweet. He fucked me like he was trying to claim every inch, his hands gripping my ass so tight I’d have finger-shaped bruises for days. I raked my nails down his back, scored red lines through his cut, and bit his shoulder to keep from screaming.
I came again, hard, shuddering around him, and he didn’t stop, just kept pounding until he lost it too, every muscle in his body going taut before he spilled inside me.
Augustine’s breath was still ragged as I dropped to my knees among the debris, the cold, cheap linoleum biting through my skin. I didn’t even bother to brush the hairout of my face—my only focus was his cock, still angry and twitching, streaked with both of us. For a second, I was weirdly proud that he was so fucking hard after everything, like I’d managed to make him feral. I wrapped my hand around the base and didn’t ask, didn’t tease—I just took him in my mouth, all the way, tasting salt and iron and whatever it was that made Augustine taste like a god.
I gagged a little at first—he was thick and hard. I wanted to swallow him whole, punish him, love him, whatever the fuck you call it when your throat is raw, and your mouth is full of a bastard who keeps breaking your heart open and then taping it together with his own busted parts.
Augustine tangled a hand in my hair, shoving his cock deeper, slow at first, then guiding the rhythm like he was teaching me a lesson. I took him deep, letting it hit the back of my throat, holding for a beat just to feel his knees buckle. Every time he hit that spot, I could taste the sweetness at the tip, the edge of surrender he kept hidden under all that endless, punishing drive. I moaned around him, letting him know I liked it, pulling back only to suck hard at the head, swirl it with my tongue, and then take him again, deeper, until my nose was buried in the rough patch of hair at his base.
His breathing changed—those little gasps, a grunt every time I squeezed the base tighter. He tried to pull free, to saymy name, say stop, but I didn’t let up. I wanted to taste him surrender, to own every ounce of control he pretended was still his. I swallowed around him, hard, and he lost it, a full-body shudder that ended with a spurt of hot, salty come across my tongue. I drank it down, messy and greedy, then licked him clean, slow, watching his face go slack and vulnerable for the first time since I’d met him.
I stood, and we kissed long and deep before I buried my face in his neck, breathing him in.
“Still want to run?” he asked, voice fucked up and hoarse.
I shook my head, too raw for words.
He squeezed me tighter, as if he could fuse us together and keep us safe that way.
We sat in the dark, surrounded by the wreckage, and let the quiet be our apology.
“We’ve got a war to win,” he said. “And you’re not fighting it alone.”
He reached for the storage room door, locked it from the inside, then turned back to me.
“Come here,” he said. “Let’s make the most of the time we’ve got.”
And I did.
We fucked again on the storage room floor, this time slow. Not lazy, not soft, but like every move was an act ofmemorization. The room was thick with the stink of our sweat and spilled bourbon from a busted box on the shelf. Somewhere in the main room, a prospect was tuning a bike and cussing out the carburetor, but in here, it was just the slap of our skin and the kind of breathing that bordered on prayer.
Augustine stretched out on his back, shirt bunched up as I climbed on top of him. His hands found my hips and pulled me down, grinding us together until I gasped. He was leaking from the last round, and it slicked the way for a perfect slide. I rode him, thighs burning, eyes never leaving his face. Under the club tattoos and the scar tissue, he looked like something you’d find in a crime scene photo—bruised, jaw clenched, so damn alive it hurt to look at him.
I dragged my nails down his chest, raking over the eagle on his pec, and watched the muscles twitch underneath. He didn’t moan, not the way I did, but his breath came faster and his hands shook a little on my waist. It made me want to see how far I could push him. I leaned forward, kissing the sweat from his upper lip, nipping at the salt until he growled, low in his throat.
“You wanna go again?” he asked, but it wasn’t a question.
