Page 233 of Slashed Bonds

This feels good. Strange. Satisfying in a way I don’t have a file for.

To dance the night out in a room full of people who are also trying to escape. That’s what this is, under the lights. Nobody here is celebrating anything. They’re running, the way he said in the car, from the pain of whatever they’ve lost, and the running looks like this. Hips, bass, a cup in the hand.

Because life’s hard.

It’s threatening you from every corner, every day, with notes under rocks and uniforms at the door, and if you can shut the whole world out for one hour and move your body and feel the fact of being alive, feel it in your hips and your spine and the sweat running down your back, then that’s the best thing on offer. That’s the only church there is.

His arm comes around.

Across the front of my waist, pulling me into him so there’s no space left, so I can feel the whole length of him against my back, and his mouth goes to the side of my neck. Sucking. Slow. Down the tendon to the collarbone, and then to the shoulder, the spot where it meets the neck that he’s decided is his, the spot he bit in a shower under a blindfold, and he closes his mouth over it and pulls.

I moan.

Into the music, where nobody hears it but him, and I grind back against him, and his grip tightens.

We’re being filthy. On a dance floor. In front of a hundred people. And not one of them gives a single fuck, because they’re all doing the same thing or wishing they were.

We’re here for the vibes. That’s all. Nothing else.

His mouth finds mine.

I’ve turned in his arms without deciding to, and we’re kissing in the middle of the floor with the red light coming through my eyelids and his hand on the small of my back where the dress isn’t. Whisky on both of us. Salt. The mint ghost of that stupid plastic thing.

How strange. To find someone you can be with and not think.

Not think. Not map. Not count exits or price the moment or run the arithmetic on who’s watching and what it’ll cost. I had it in a shower with two of them. I had it on a frozen grave with the third. And here it is again, on a dance floor with the one who reads walls, and I’m starting to understand that it isn’t the room. It’s the men. The right people, lining up in my orbit one at a time, so that wherever I am with one of them I’m somewhere I can breathe.

We’re breathless when we pull apart.

My arms around his neck. My body against his. His hand’s dropped to my ass and is gripping it the way he grips a stick, and he leans down with his mouth at my ear.

“I think I’ve got sight of who I’m looking for.”

Go, then. Do your thing. I’ll do mine.

I grin.

“Go do your thing, Daddy.”

He arches an eyebrow.

Then he kisses me. Hard, nothing gentle in it this time, the kind of kiss that has teeth behind it, and he mutters against my mouth, “I can see Nik’s appeal with that shit. Fuck. I need you calling me that while you’re riding my cock.”

“Can be arranged.” I wink. Badly, I think. Whisky makes a wink a whole-face event.

One more kiss.

A slap on my ass, sharp, that turns a head beside us, and then he’s gone, slipping through the crowd with his shoulders turned sideways the way a man moves through a room when he doesn’t want to be remembered moving through it, and I’m dancing alone.

I don’t mind my own company.

I never have. Five years of it taught me that a woman alone on a floor is a woman nobody has to be watched for, and I move the way I move, and I feel the thing he’s done to me as I do it.

My scent.

It’s changed. I can smell it on myself, the frost and ozone of me laced through with iron and cold, with him, laid on thick along my neck and my shoulder where his mouth was. He’s been dosing me for an hour. Marking. Every pass of his lips another coat of mine for any Alpha on this floor to catch and think twice about.

Clever bastard. Leave the Omega alone on a dance floor and make sure she smells like a threat.