“Sophia, fuck. Your cunt’s squeezing…it’s too much.” He leans down, teeth scraping my throat, breath hot against my ear. “You better come before I do. It’s gonna be the first time I feel a pussy come around my cock.”
That tips it. That pushes me straight over the edge, and the orgasm rips through me so violently, I scream his name as my core spasms around him, gushing slick down his cock and soaking the sheets beneath us. My whole body convulses, back arching off the bed, wrists straining uselessly against his iron grip.
And he doesn’t stop.
He fucks me through it, chasing his own release with deep, erratic thrusts until his rhythm breaks. One final slam and he comes inside me, and I feel it—not just in the flood of heat that fills me, but in the wild eyes above me, the way his entire body shakes with the force of it, every muscle pulled tight and trembling, like even now he’s fighting to hold the universe together just a second longer.
His hands clamp tighter around my wrists, and for a heartbeat I’m nowhere, nothing, just raw nerve as the world fizzles out into static.
Finally, his grip softens, thumb tracing the delicate bones before settling on my pulse-point, then gently guiding them down to my sides. I wrap my fingers into the sheets because the urge to touch him burns brighter now in the aftershock of it all.
Spent, he settles his weight on top of me, leans his head down on my chest, over my heartbeat. For a minute, we don’t move, our bodies twined together, sweat cooling across our skin, the afterglow so thick I could live in it.
“Your name,” I start. “I recognize where it’s from, but what does it mean?”
There’s a long pause, his warm breath brushing my wet skin. “Guardian.”
My heart constricts, spasms, then cracks open quietly.
Guardian.
Beyond the glass, sunlight breaks through the clouds, and I feel the word move through me like something looking for somewhere to land and finding nothing solid, just this vast, aching space where the injustice of it lives.
Someone named him that. Looked at a boy and saw something protective, something that stood at the threshold between safe and unsafe, and gave him a name that meanthe will keep watch.He will be the thing between the vulnerable and the harm.
And then nobody kept watch for him.
My fingers curl tighter into the sheets. I don’t trust my hands right now. So I claw the sheets and I hold the feeling, just letting it have its full shape in silence. A tear tracks down the side of my face into my hair. I don’t make a sound. I don’t move. And for the first time I’m glad he won’t tell me everything.
Reth was right. He doesn’t want me to carry that kind of darkness for him…because he knows I’ll never survive it.
26
RETH
The house smells like her now.
That’s the thing I notice sitting on the couch watching her argue with Ian in the kitchen about whether muffins count as dinner. But while I’m listening to their banter, my mind is reeling with what happened between us.
This morning. In her bedroom. Her bed. Nothing I could have ever imagined or fantasized about came close. Her taste—Jesus Christ, her taste. Addictively sweet. I could lick this woman’s cunt until it blinds me. And it almost did, because the way I came without a single thread of friction against my cock, just her taste on my tongue and her body a quivering mess, I didn’t think I’d ever get a hard-on again after that. That’s until I dragged my dick through her wet slit and my cock became steel all over again.
Somehow, this woman took years’ worth of mindfuckery and silenced it, leaving this mind-blanked, glassy clarity that I ride like some lunatic wave all day.
Being inside her is its own kind of high. There isn’t a drug on the planet that could hit me like the syrupy rush of her pussysqueezing every bit of my soul out through the slit in my cock. And the way she said my name? Nazareth. Not Reth. It felt like she was giving it back to me.
I’ve become so used to Valeria using my full name, I forgot what it sounded like when someone said it without cruel intent. Somehow, someway, Sophia found a way to make it mine again.
Nazareth Hale.
I’ve spent thirteen years making myself nothing. Flat. Manageable. A thing without edges that couldn’t be used against me because there was nothing in me worth using. She undid that in a morning. One afternoon. Three extraordinary, mind-blowing times. Ever since we dragged ourselves out of her bedroom, I’ve just been trying to get her back into it. But the woman’s hungry, and right now Ian is on the wrong side of that.
“They have eggs in them,” she says, pointing at the muffin in Ian’s hand with the solemn authority of a lawyer. “Eggs are protein. Protein is dinner. Case closed.”
“Eggs are a supporting cast member,” Ian retorts. “Not the lead.”
“You’rea supporting cast member.”
“I’m the lead of every room I walk into, and you know it.”
