"Then stop talking and hurt me."
Something breaks behind his eyes. The last thread of the leash he's been holding since the hotel room—the restraint built from guilt and apology andI won't touch you again—it snaps. I watch it go. Watch the careful Zero dissolve and the real one surface—raw, feral, ravenous.
He tears my shirt over my head. Grabs the hem and pulls, and the fabric catches on my chin and I'm still blinking the collar out of my eyes when his mouth finds my chest. Not kissing. Biting. Teeth closing on the muscle above my nipple, hard enough to sting, hard enough to mark, and the pain lights up my nervous system like a circuit completing.
"Fuck—"
"That's the idea."
His mouth drags down. Teeth and tongue and the scrape of stubble. My stomach, my hip bone, the crease of my thigh through my pants—every point of contact a small detonation leaving aftershocks. He's not gentle. Doesn't pretend to be. His hands grip my hips hard enough to bruise and I want the bruises.
Want proof this happened. Want to press them tomorrow and feel him.
He pulls my jeans down in one rough motion—boxers and all—and I'm naked under him and the air hits my skin and his eyes move over me and the look on his face isn't the old hunger. Not the predator sizing up prey.
It's reverence wearing teeth.
"You stopped taking the suppressants," he says. Not a question. He's known for weeks—smelled the shift at the pond, watched my scent thicken day by day across dinner tables and in hallways. But his hands flex on my hips and his eyes pin mine and I can feel what he's doing. Making me say it. "Why?"
"You know why."
"Say it." His grip tightens. His voice drops into the register I feel in my spine. "Tell me why you stopped taking them, Max."
My face burns. My cock aches. And the truth sits right there on my tongue where it's been sitting for weeks.
He reaches between us and squeezes my cock so hard I nearly scream, his other hand covering my mouth before I can.
“Tell me, Max. And I suggest you tell the truth.”
He lifts his hand off my mouth and I’m panting, my entire body burning up for him.
"For you." It comes out barely above a whisper. "I stopped taking them for you."
Something detonates behind his eyes. His nostrils flare. He leans in—close, closer—and inhales against my throat. Deep. The kind of breath you take when you're trying to pull something into your lungs permanently.
"Fuck," he breathes against my skin. "Vanilla. Honey. And something underneath—like smoke. Like burnt sugar." Another inhale, his mouth dragging along the column of my neck. "You have no idea what you smell like right now. What you've smelled like for weeks while I stood across rooms pretending I couldn't feel it in my teeth."
The sound he makes is low and wrecked and barely human.
His jaw works. Something shifts behind his expression—not hunger, something underneath. Something that looks like a man who's been handed a gift he spent his whole life believing he didn't deserve.
Then he puts his mouth on my cock and I stop thinking.
∞∞∞
Zero
He tastes like the end of something and the beginning of something else.
I've had people before. Bodies. Warm, willing, anonymous—hotel rooms and back seats and bathroom counters where the bass was loud enough to cover the sounds. I've fucked without looking. Without caring. Without remembering names because names make it real, and real is complicated, and I don't do complicated.
This is real. And it's going to ruin me.
Good.
Max arches off the mattress when I take him deep into my mouth—spine bowing, fists clenching in my sheets, a sound tearing out of him that's half my name and half something animal. His cock hits the back of my throat and I swallow around him and his hips jerk so hard I have to pin them down. His hand finds my hair. Grips. Not guiding—holding on. Like I'm the edge of a cliff and he's deciding whether to fall.
Fall. Idareyou.
