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“Yes,” I said. “Yes, yes, yes.” I punctuated each affirmation with a thrust of my hips. August wrapped his hand around his cock and stroked it in time with my thrusts, our eyes locked together. I wanted to watch him come first, but I’d already held off too long, my orgasm slamming into me.

I came for a long time, spilling my load deep inside August and taking a primal pleasure from it unlike anything I’d ever experienced before. I came back to myself to find my nose buried in August’s sweaty neck, his breath a hot whisper on my ear. “Did you come?” If he hadn’t, I was going to feel like the worst lover in the world.

When August shifted beneath me, I took the non-verbal cue and gave him some breathing room, levering myself off him to lie at his side rather than crushing him with my weight. “Yeah, I came.”

I hid my relief by heaving myself up against the pillows—yeah, actual pillows—to lean against the wall. Closing my eyes, I replayed the entire thing and luxuriated in it. When I opened my eyes, August was watching me, propped up on one elbow.

“You really like to fuck.”

“Doesn’t everyone?”

He gave a one-shoulder shrug before rolling onto his back. Silence reigned between us for a few minutes. Not an uncomfortable silence. Quite the opposite. It was the silence of two people who didn’t need to make meaningless small talk. But then we’d started from such an antagonistic place we’d never really done that. Maybe we should have. It was almost a shame to break the peaceful lassitude, but now we’d worked the restless tension out of our bodies, I had questions.

“So you were brought up here?”

August lifted his now mostly limp cock, extracting it from the puddle of cum it lay in before letting it drop with a wry smile. “I was.”

“And what about your parents? You’ve never mentioned them. Not unless you were making up stories that weren’t true, anyway.”

The sigh that escaped said it wasn’t a comfortable subject for him. “My mother died shortly after childbirth, so I never knew her. She bled to death. I survived. She left me with a name and not much else.”

“And your father?”

“He got himself killed when I was ten.” I waited, sensing this was a touchy subject and unwilling to risk August clamming up if I pushed too hard. “He wasn’t immune, and he got himself bitten.”

“I’m sorry.”

August turned his head to snare me in his gaze. “I don’t blame him for that.”

“No?”

“He didn’t turn straight away. He came back.”

“Okay.”

“There was a rainstorm one night. A red rainstorm. He’d been out farming that day, and he’d left tools outside. He was concerned about them getting rusty, so he went out to get them. It was stupid. He should have known better. I should have gone out to get them, or we should have just left them out there. They were tools. Since when are tools more important than people?”

“They’re not,” I agreed.

August shook his head. “He turned. One bite. One rainstorm. That’s all it took for him.” I winced, the truth cutting deeper because of my infection status. His eyes narrowed. “How many times have you been caught in the red rain?”

I did a quick calculation. “Three.”

August nodded. “Most people last six or seven exposures from what I’ve been told. Did you know that?” I shook my head. “And he got one. Just one. He had a kid. You’d think he’d have been more careful, right? Especially when he was the only parent I had left.”

“You had your grandmother.”

August’s voice softened. “Yeah. And she was both mother and father to me.” His hand lifted to his throat, fingers closing around the chain there. “Her parents gave her this on her thirteenth birthday while they were escaping London. When I told her I wasn’t going to stay locked inside these walls forever, she gave it to me. Said it would keep me safe, that it would always bring me back to her.”

“And it has,” I pointed out. “You’re alive. Whole. Still in one piece with all your limbs intact.” It might have sounded like an offhand joke, but it wasn’t. Escaping biters wasn’t simple. Sometimes they latched on, and the choice came down to dying or losing whatever limb they had hold of. Most people chose to die. “Who killed your dad? You?”

The look August gave me was scathing. “I was ten.”

“And I imagine you were just as capable then as you are now.”

His jaw tightened. “No. I didn’t do it. I couldn’t.”

I didn’t push, sensing his patience fraying. “That’s why you let me in that night. Out of the rain. Because of what happened to your father.”