I laugh and bury my face against his shoulder. “I’m good.”
“Are you?” He feels between my legs, sliding a finger inside me.
My pussy instinctively squeezes.
“I don’t think you’ve got enough yet.”
He fucks me with his fingers and rubs my clit with his thumb until I have one more orgasm, smothering the sound of my release in his shirt.
My clit is throbbing so intensely it’s almost painful, and my muscles have finally fully relaxed. “That’s enough,” I gasp. “Thank you. That’s enough.”
“Okay.” He brushes kisses into my hair. “Do you feel better now?”
“Yeah. I feel really good,” I admit.
“This is what you’ve been needin’, and you were feelin’ like shit cause you wouldn’t let me give it to you. We can keep it secret if you want—I don’t care either way—but don’t push me away like that again.”
I sigh. He’s right. I know he’s right. It’s a lot more complicated than a physical release, but that doesn’t mean he’s not right.
“You hear me, baby?”
“Yes. I hear you.” I straighten up and see that he’s searching my face. Smiling, I tell him the truth. “I still think we need to be careful for a lot of reasons, but I won’t push you away again.”
18
Almost exactly seven years ago,after I’d walked out on Chad and said goodbye to Teresa, I ran away with Ben to the wilderness.
He’d come to the Capitol of the Central Cities to observe. Out in the wilderness where he was raised and where his family still lives, they’d regularly get scattered reports on the largest established government in the known world. The story that the wilderness is filled with nothing but violent, uncivilized barbarians is false, made up to scare citizens into staying inside safe borders. In reality, the people in the wilderness mostly live in secure, orderly communities, regularly moving in and out of their towns and the independent city-states on the border—Saint Louis being the closest—and so it’s not like they’re unaware of the larger world or completely isolated.Rumors would always come thick and fast, but rumors can’t always be relied on.
The communities in the wilderness were all much smaller—locally governed and less developed—but they’ve been safe and stable for decades, life passing in slow, peaceful seasons. But the more news trickled out from President Vincent’s actions in the Capitol, the more worried the leaders of the wilderness communities became.
From the beginning of history, rulers like Vincent remain hungry no matter how much land and power they gobble up. There have already been some skirmishes between the Capitol and some of the border city-states, usually ending in tenuous truces, and there’s nothing to say Vincent won’t one day decide he wants to sweep out to the east and invade territory that’s been self-governing since the asteroid hit.
Ben, after working through his twenties in security and protection in his family’s community, got restless and volunteered to live and work in the Capitol for a year to get a better sense of life and sensibilities there in the hopes of understanding and predicting future actions.
I knew none of this when I first met him. I only knew him as the bodyguard Chad hired to keep me safe and also keep me in line. But when Ben decided it was time to go home, he told me the truth of his purpose in the Capitol and invited me to travel with him as a means of escaping my husband.
I wanted an escape desperately, and although I didn’t know him well, I trusted Ben a lot more than Chad. So I went with him, deeply relieved by the chance to get away from a life that had never done anything but chain me down.
On the night I said goodbye to Teresa, Ben had arranged a transport to get us past the border undetected. Huddled next to Ben in the dark, tight back of the transport, I asked him why he invited me to come with him.
“I’m not looking for another man,” I told him, hoping he wouldn’t be hurt or disappointed.
“I know that. That’s not why I asked.”
“Then why? I’m just a random, regular woman who made a bad choice in a husband.”
“That’d be reason enough for me to help you. No one should be trapped in a situation like that. But there’s nothin’ regular ’bout you. Been watchin’ you for months now. And, in some people, you just see it.”
“See what?”
“That… that spark.”
The word startled and unsettled me at the same time they washed me with pleasure. “What spark?”
“Don’t really know. Just somethin’ that says you’re not done yet.” Sitting in the dark, I couldn’t see his face. I had no idea what he was feeling beyond his laid-back, conversational tone.
I snorted softly, thinking about what I’d just told my sister about wanting to change things, make the worldbetter the way our father always tried to do. “Done? I’m not sure I’ve even started yet.”
