Chapter 5: mourning sex
The morning light was a pale, invasive thing, slicing through the gap in the curtains and across the rumpled sheets. Marcus was already awake, propped on an elbow, watching her. His gaze wasn't hungry now, but analytical, tracing the lines of her body like a map of a newly conquered territory. Kate felt it, the weight of his scrutiny, before she even opened her eyes.
She shifted, the ache between her thighs a vivid reminder of the night—the counter, the pool, the slow, devouring pace he’d set right here in this bed just before dawn. His hand came to rest on her hip, his thumb stroking the bone.
“Sleep well, Captain?” His voice was a low rumble, free of teasing. It was a genuine question.
She turned her head on the pillow. “Surprisingly, yes.” It was the truth. The exhaustion had been absolute, a complete systems shutdown.
His hand began to move, not in a rush, but with a deliberate, exploring patience. He traced the dip of her waist, the curve of her rib cage, the underside of her breast. His touch was reverent, but it was the reverence of a collector for a rare artifact, not a lover for a beloved. It sparked a slow heat in her belly nonetheless.
“You have a scar here,” he murmured, his finger following a thin, faint line along her lower abdomen. “Appendectomy?”
“Knife fight,” she said, the lie coming automatically, a leftover reflex from keeping her past buried. Then she corrected, softer. “Appendectomy. Age fourteen.”
He made a small, acknowledging sound. His palm slid over her stomach, warm and heavy, then down to the junction of her thighs. He didn’t push. He just let his hand rest there, a claiming weight. She was already slick, her body betraying her with a readiness that had nothing to do with emotion.
“Tell me something true,” he said, his eyes locked on hers.
Her breath hitched. “Right now?”
“Right now. Something you didn’t tell him last night.”
She looked away, at the city slowly coming to life. “I thought about him. When you were inside me. For a second, I pretended it was him.”
Marcus didn’t flinch. His fingers began to move, a subtle, circling pressure through her folds. “That’s honest. Now think about me.”
He moved then, with a fluid strength that rolled her onto her stomach. The sheets were cool against her front. He positioned himself behind her, his knees nudging her legs apart. His hands gripped her hips, lifting her slightly, adjusting the angle. She felt the broad, blunt head of his cock press against her entrance, already wet and open for him.
He didn’t ask. He pushed in, a single, deep, devastating stroke that filled her completely. The air left her lungs in a sharp gasp.
“You’re so fucking beautiful like this,” he growled, his breath hot against the nape of her neck. He began to move, not fast, but with a deep, relentless piston rhythm that seemed to reach into her very core. His hands roamed over her body as he fucked her—palming the curve of her ass, sliding up to grasp her shoulder blades, then down to cup her breasts, his thumbs rough on her nipples.
Each thrust was a statement. This is what you took. This is what you are now.
“Tell me how much you love being mine,” he demanded, his voice gritty.
The command, the sheer arrogance of it, should have made her rebel. Instead, a dark, shameful part of her sparked to life. In this room, under these hands, she wasn’t Captain Kate Beckett, she was a body being used exquisitely well. The simplification was a relief. She pushed back against him, meeting his thrusts.
“I love it,” she moaned, the words torn from her, thick with a need that was purely physical. “I love being yours. Just like this. Fuck… just like this.”
He rewarded her with a harder, deeper plunge, making her cry out. He kept that pace, the room filling with the wet, rhythmic sound of their joining, the creak of the bed, their ragged breaths. She felt the climax building, a tight, screaming coil in her lower belly. He sensed it. One hand slid down her stomach, his fingers finding her clit, rubbing hard, fast circles that shattered her control.
She came with a choked scream, her body clenching around his invading length, waves of pleasure so intense they blurred her vision. He followed immediately, his rhythm breaking into short, brutal thrusts. With a final, guttural groan, he buried himself to the hilt and came, pumping his release deep inside her. He collapsed over her, his weight pinning her to the mattress, both of them slick with sweat.
Time blurred. He eventually pulled out and rolled aside. Kate lay face down, the scent of sex and him overwhelming. The truth she hadn’t told him vibrated in her silent chest: I didn’t just think of Rick. I missed him. And that’s worse.
She rolled onto her side, facing the window, feeling the slow, warm leak of him between her thighs. Marcus was silent, but she felt the vibration of his breathing. The implicit transaction felt heavier than his body had been. Her question sliced through the thick air. "What do you tell her?"
His response came after a loaded pause. "Victoria? I'll tell her you were everything I expected. And less."
Kate absorbed the intended sting. It was clean. She could accept that. She pushed back the sheets. "Shower's all yours."
Breakfast was an exercise in excruciating politeness, served in a sun-drenched private room with a dizzying view. The clink of silverware was deafening. Kate watched as Rick’s hand, its familiar knuckles and the specific way he held his fork, brushed against Victoria’s as they reached for the same artisanal butter dish. He didn't flinch. He smiled at her, a real one.
"Sleep well, dear?" Victoria asked Kate, her tone carrying the precise administrative warmth of a senior officer reviewing a subordinate’s report.
"Surprisingly sound." Kate kept her eyes on her poached eggs, their perfect yolks like mocking eyes. She felt, rather than saw, Rick’s attention snap toward her. He was listening for the crack.
"What about you two?" Rick volleyed back, his writer’s curiosity a well-disguised probe. "Conquer the city that never sleeps?"
Marcus sipped his black coffee, meeting Rick’s gaze squarely. "We found some worthwhile sights." He set the cup down. "Your wife is an exceptional woman, Castle. Intensely focused."
Kate felt a hot flush rise on her neck. The words, a public debriefing of their private night, made her eggs congeal on her tongue. Rick’s foot found hers under the table, a single, fleeting press. A lifeline.
The drive home in Rick’s convertible was wind-whipped and silent. The Hudson River blurred beside them, a gray ribbon. Only when their brownstone came into view, its familiar brick facade a promise and a prison, did he finally speak. He didn't turn off the engine, his hands gripping the wheel at ten and two, staring straight ahead.
"The taste of him," Rick said, his voice flat."On you. In the shower, that first time. I almost threw you against the tile and fucked it out of you. I thought about my tongue on you while you were still wet from him."
Kate stared at his profile. The muscle in his jaw pulsed. Her own heartbeat filled the cramped space of the car. The visceral truth of his confession, his jealousy stripped bare, was more shocking than any of the previous night’s acts.
"You didn't," she whispered.
"No." He finally cut the engine. The silence was profound. "Because part of me… the sick, twisted part I write about… wanted to know. I had to picture it. All of it." He turned to look at her, his eyes raw. "When he had you from behind, was he rougher than I am? Did he make you come harder?"
His words were scalpel-sharp, dissecting their unspoken contract. Kate felt laid open. She reached out, her fingers touching the tense back of his hand on the gearshift. "He was different. He wasn't you."And Gates?" She finally asked the question they’d danced around all morning. Her stomach churned. "You were gone a long time."
A grim smile touched his lips. He looked back at the steering wheel. "She fucks like she commands a precinct. All tactics and control." He released a breath that shuddered his whole frame. "That bathroom counter? That was for you. To make you see. To even a score you didn't know we were keeping."
They sat in the metallic quiet. The memory of Richard's tongue on Victoria Gates, his face buried between the Deputy Chief's thighs while she lay in Marcus's bed, solidified into a nauseating image. It hadn't been fantasy; it had been a synchronized campaign.
"So what now?" Kate’s voice was hoarse. The excitement, the dangerous thrill, had curdled. Only the uneasy residue remained.
"Now," he said, unfastening his seatbelt. "We go inside. And we don't lie. Not about anything we saw.Or heard. Or felt."
As they walked up the steps, he took her hand. His palm was damp, his grip tight and unforgiving.
Later, in the hushed dark of their bedroom, their home silence pressing in, he undressed her slowly, this time by the moonlight. He ran his hands over every inch of skin Marcus’s had claimed, inspecting it, reclaiming it. His head dipped. His tongue flicked a scar, traced her ribs, dragged a hot, wet line down her stomach. He paused where the hair was still damp from her shower.
He breathed her in deeply, his face pressed to the skin of her lower belly. “It’s gone,” he murmured, more to himself than to her. A savage, painful hope laced the words.
When he rose to kiss her mouth, the taste was a complicated braid of coffee, toothpaste, him, and something else new and shared. The kiss deepened, turning hungry and desperate. Hands clawed at clothing until nothing was left. He pushed her back onto the bed, not onto her stomach, but onto her back, her face fully in the light. “Look at me,” he ordered.
He entered her in one sharp, unyielding thrust that made her gasp. It wasn’t a reenactment. It was an assertion. His eyes were open, boring into hers, missing nothing as he began to move, a steady, brutal pace as overwhelming as everything that had come before. It felt different. Possessive, grounded, frighteningly necessary. He cradled her head in his hands, thumbs on her jaw, tilting her face to his.
Her husband fucked her, his pace unrelenting, a physical testament to love that had survived a day in hell. She was bruised, sticky with him from another location, profoundly weary in her soul. She finally slid a trembling hand between their bodies.
He said, “Stop.” His fingers twined through hers, pinning her hand to the bed.
Kate fell over the edge first. She started to cry as the orgasm tore through her—it was real, it was a watershed, a language she’d almost forgotten. The shuddering release had nothing to do with revenge or seasoning. It broke something open inside her chest.
Her cries triggered his own climax. He followed with a choked groan of her name, his head dropping to her shoulder. His release felt endless, a deep internal surrender. They lay there, soaked and trembling, the storm passing. The silence now was different. It was shared territory, newly charted, frighteningly uncertain.
“Jesus, Kate,” he rasped into her skin, his breath hot.
“I know.” She wrapped her arms around him, holding him tight against the anchorless feeling. The hotel felt like a place from a map that had been burned. The future was a single room and four choices, all terrifying. Marcus’s clinical praise—intensely focused—replayed in her mind. She had been. Focused on the feel of someone else’s hands to stop from thinking about her husband’s on another woman.
She focused on the weight of him now, the smell of their own sheets, the pounding of their two heartbeats gradually syncing. This was their negotiation now, in the dark. This was where it would be decided. He stirred against her, his fingers finding hers again, lacing tightly. No one had slept in this part yet.
No one had slept in this part yet. The space between them in their own bed felt vast, a canyon carved by the ghosts of other hands, other mouths. Rick’s breathing eventually evened into sleep, but Kate lay staring at the ceiling, the feeling of Marcus’s final, claiming release a phantom warmth between her legs. Her own husband’s climax had been a furious overlay, a territorial correction. She could still smell the hotel’s cloying jasmine soap on her skin, beneath the sweat.
Two days passed in a strange, suspended silence. They moved around each other with a careful politeness that was worse than any argument. He brought her coffee. She did his laundry. They talked about case files and overdue edits. They did not talk about the taste of other people. The memory was a live wire dropped between them in every room.
On the third evening, he was at his desk, staring blankly at a blinking cursor. She stood in the doorway, watching the tight line of his shoulders. “It’s not going to work, this quiet,” she said. Her voice sounded too loud.
He didn’t turn. “What do you want me to say, Beckett? That I keep picturing him spreading you open on that counter? I do. All the time. It’s on a loop.” He finally swiveled the chair. His eyes were bloodshot. “Tell me one thing. Did you kiss him?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
She leaned against the doorframe, crossing her arms. A defensive posture. “It felt… more intimate than the rest. Stupid, right?”
“No.” He looked down at his hands. “It’s not stupid. Gates kissed me. It was… administrative. Like she was signing a form with her tongue.” He gave a short, humorless laugh. “Her skin tasted like expensive gin and department-issue hand soap.”
Kate walked into the room, stopping in front of him. She put a hand on his cheek, forcing him to look up. The pain in his face was naked. “We opened the door, Castle. We can’t just pretend we didn’t walk through it.”
His hand came up, gripping her wrist. Not to remove it, but to anchor it. “I know what we did. I suggested it. I fucking authored it.” He pulled her down onto his lap, the chair groaning. His arms locked around her, his face buried in the space between her neck and shoulder. He was hard against her thigh. The shift from anguish to arousal was instantaneous, a brutal gear change. “I want to fuck his memory out of you. I want you to fuck hers out of me.”
He stood up with her, lifting her, and carried her to the rug. There was no tenderness in it. It was a collision. He shoved her sweater up, his mouth closing over her nipple through the lace of her bra, biting down just shy of pain. She cried out, her fingers tangling in his hair. “Yes,” she hissed. “Do it.”
He stripped her, his movements hurried and rough. He peeled his own clothes off, his cock springing free, already fully erect and leaking. He didn’t guide her. He pushed her onto her back and mounted her, one hand pinning her wrist beside her head. He notched himself at her entrance. She was wet, her body treacherously ready for this exorcism.
“Tell me you want it,” he growled, his hips stuttering, holding back.
“I want it. I want your cock. Not his. Yours.”
He drove into her with a single, punishing thrust that shoved her body up the rug. She gasped, the air knocked from her lungs. He set a ruthless, deep pace, each stroke a jolt. “Where did he touch you?” he demanded, his voice ragged. “Here?” He squeezed her breast, hard.
“Yes.”
“And here?” His hand slid down, fingers digging into the flesh of her inner thigh.
“Yes!”
He shifted, hooking her leg over his shoulder, bending her nearly in half. The angle was devastating, deeper, a brutal invasion. “And did he fuck you here, Kate? Right in this same spot?” He was pounding into her now, the wet, slapping sounds obscene in the quiet study.
“Yes! God, yes, he did!”
“Did you come for him?”
She couldn’t lie. The truth was a weapon they both needed to feel. “Yes!”
With a roar that was pure anguish, Rick pistoned into her, his control shattering. His release was a violent, pulsing flood inside her. He collapsed, his weight crushing her into the wool pile. They were both slick with sweat, shaking. He rolled off, staring at the ceiling, his chest heaving. “I came in her,” he said, the words flat. “In the shower. Against the tile. She asked me to. She said Marcus likes the reminder.”
Kate turned her head, looking at his profile. The jealousy was a cold stone in her gut. She pushed herself up on an elbow. “Get up.”
“What?”
“Get up. Now.”
A flicker of surprise crossed his face. He stood, his body gleaming in the low light. She rose, pushing him back until his legs hit the arm of the sofa. “Sit.”
He sat, watching her, his expression unreadable. Kate knelt on the rug before him. She took his soft, spent cock into her hand. She leaned forward and took him into her mouth. He jerked, a sharp intake of breath. “Kate… you don’t…”
She ignored him. She worked him slowly, meticulously, with her tongue and lips and a gentle suction. She tasted herself, and him, and the salt of his skin. She was cleaning him. She was reclaiming him. She felt him begin to stir, thicken, against her tongue. It took time. Her jaw ached. He tangled his hands in her hair, not guiding, just holding on.
When he was fully hard again, she rose, straddled him, and sank down onto him, taking him back inside her with a slow, deliberate roll of her hips. She braced her hands on his shoulders. “My turn,” she whispered, her voice low and rough. “Look at me.”
He did. His hands gripped her hips.
“She had you here,” Kate said, beginning to move, a grinding, circular rhythm. “In a shower. I’m having you here. In our home.” She leaned down, her lips at his ear. “Did she suck your cock after? Did she swallow you?”
He moaned, his hips bucking up to meet her. “No.”
“Good.” She sat up, riding him harder, driving him deeper. “This is mine. This feeling. This fucking… wreck of us. It’s ours.” Her orgasm built, a tight, coiling spring. “You think about her when I’m like this? You think about her taking what’s mine?”
“No,” he gasped, his eyes wide, fixed on hers. “Only you. It’s only ever been you, even when it wasn’t.”
The sincerity in his broken voice undid her. She came with a shattered cry, her inner muscles clenching rhythmically around his length. He followed, his head falling back against the couch, a guttural shout tearing from his throat as he emptied himself inside her again.
The shout echoed off the study walls, a raw sound that seemed to hang in the air long after his body finished shuddering beneath her. Kate stayed there, impaled on him, their sweat-slicked skin sticking together. She felt the hot, wet proof of his release inside her, a second claim overlaid on the first. His breathing was a ragged saw against her collarbone. Slowly, the world seeped back in: the pile of the rug imprinting her knees, the dim light from his desk lamp, the faint smell of their sex now thick in the room.
He went soft inside her. She didn’t move. His hands, still on her hips, slid around to the small of her back, holding her there. A placeholder embrace. “I can still smell her shampoo,” he muttered into her skin. “It’s in my fucking nostrils.”
“I know.” She finally lifted off him, a separation that felt physical, almost painful. The cool air hit her wet skin. She saw him wince as he slipped out of her, a mix of oversensitivity and something else. Shame, maybe. They were a mess on the rug. He reached for his discarded shirt, handing it to her wordlessly. She wiped between her legs, the cotton coming away stained. The act was too intimate, too married, a stark contrast to the brutality minutes before.
“We’re broken,” he said, watching her. It wasn’t a question.
“We’re something.” She stood on unsteady legs, avoiding his gaze. She walked to the window, looking out at their quiet street. “We asked for a spark. We got a furnace.”
He got up, moved behind her. He didn’t touch her. His reflection in the dark glass was ghostly. “And now we’re standing in the ashes.”
The next week was a phantom limb. They functioned. Kate drowned herself in a cold case, the files spread across her desk at the precinct like a bulwark against memory. A young officer brought her coffee. His name was Alvarez. He had warm brown eyes and a deferential smile. When his hand brushed hers passing the mug, she flinched. He apologized. She stared at the point of contact on her skin long after he’d left. It had just been a brush, accidental. It had felt like a brand.
Rick’s typewriter sat silent. He’d sit before it, fingers poised, and see only Victoria Gates’s stern mouth saying Harder, Castle, her legs locked around his back in the steam of that alien bathroom. He’d see Kate’s face, not under him, but under Marcus, that expression of shattered focus. He started drinking earlier. Single malt, neat. It didn’t help.
Marcus called on Thursday. Rick stared at the buzzing phone on the kitchen island, the screen flashing GATES, M. It felt like a bomb. Kate watched from the doorway, a dish towel in her hands. “Don’t,” she said, her voice tight.
“Why not?” He picked it up. “Castle.”
“Marcus. Hope I’m not interrupting.” The voice was calm, congenial. A colleague checking in.
“Just contemplating the void. The usual. What’s up?”
A low chuckle. “Victoria’s planning a dinner. Saturday. Our place. She thinks… well, she thinks it would be good to normalize things. Break bread instead of… other things.”
Rick’s knuckles went white around the phone. He caught Kate’s eye. She shook her head once, a sharp motion. “Normalize,” Rick repeated, the word tasting of acid.
“Exactly. Seven o’clock. Casual. I’m grilling.” A pause. A beat too long. “Kate’s invited, of course.”
Rick’s mouth was dry. He saw the trap, elegant and inescapable. Refusal was an admission of damage, of a wound too deep to sit across from. Acceptance was walking back into the fire. “We’ll be there.”
He hung up. Kate threw the towel onto the counter. “Goddamn it, Rick.”
“What was I supposed to say? We’re too busy unpacking our psychological trauma?”
“Yes!”
“That’s what they want to hear!” He slammed his hand on the granite. “They want to know it worked. That they got under our skin. That we’re sitting here, picking at the stitches.”
She walked to him, her movements stiff. “Maybe we shouldn’t pick at them. Maybe we should just… let it scar.”
He laughed, a hollow sound. “It’s festering, Kate. We’re sitting in a room that smells of them and pretending it’s potpourri.” He leaned in, his voice dropping. “You jump when the phone rings. I can’t write a sentence. We fuck like we’re trying to kill a memory. That’s not a scar. That’s an open wound.”
Saturday arrived like a sentencing. The Gates’ home was a sleek brownstone in Brooklyn, all minimalist art and disciplined order. Victoria greeted them at the door, her smile professional, her handshake firm. She wore a simple linen dress. Kate wore dark jeans and a knife-sharp blazer, armor plating. The men shook hands. Marcus clapped Rick on the shoulder. “Glad you could make it.” His eyes, though, held a familiar, assessing glint. He looked at Kate. “You look well.”
“Thank you,” she said, her voice perfectly flat.
Dinner was a study in surreal normalcy. They ate steak and asparagus off expensive stoneware. They discussed precinct politics, the mayor’s new initiative, the tedious plot of a popular streaming show. The wine flowed. Victoria was a sharp, witty hostess. Marcus played the affable grill master. It was a flawless performance. It was a waking nightmare.
During a lull, Victoria turned to Kate. “Marcus tells me you’re working the Bryant cold case. A fascinating puzzle. The potential bleach burn on the ligature marks was always the sticking point for me.”
Kate froze, a piece of steak halfway to her mouth. Marcus had told her. Of course he had. They were in each other’s heads now, their lives bleeding into each other’s marriages. “It’s a detail,” Kate managed. “We’re exploring alternatives to household bleach.”
“Industrial cleaner,” Rick cut in, his eyes on Marcus. “Like the kind used in commercial laundries. It’s a thread.”
“A thread you’re pulling, no doubt,” Marcus said, raising his glass to Rick. The smile didn’t reach his eyes. The subtext vibrated between them: I know your wife’s professional curiosities. I know other things, too.
Later, on the patio under a string of bulbs, Rick found himself alone with Victoria. She leaned against the railing, swirling a glass of brandy. The city sounds were distant. “You’ve been quiet tonight, Castle. Plotting your next novel?”
“Trying to remember how to write one,” he admitted, joining her. The space between them hummed.
“It’s difficult,” she said, not looking at him, “to re-enter a world of fiction after living in something so… starkly real.” She finally turned her head. Her gaze was direct, unflinching. “You think we’ve broken your toy.”
The vulgarity, coming from her, was a shock. “Kate’s not a toy.”
“No. She’s a sophisticated piece of equipment. And you’re worried her calibration is off.” She sipped her brandy. “Marcus is the same. He runs diagnostics now when we’re together. Comparing metrics.”
Rick felt a surge of hatred so pure it tightened his throat. “Is that why you suggested this? To run more tests?”
She set her glass down with a precise click. “I suggested this because the energy in that hotel room was unfinished. It’s lingering. It’s poisoning two otherwise functional marriages.” She stepped closer. The scent of her gin, her soap, invaded his space. “You want to purge it? Purge it. But half-measures leave ghosts.”
Inside, through the glass door, Kate watched Marcus loading the dishwasher. His sleeves were rolled up, his forearms corded. He moved with an economical efficiency that was familiar, that she had felt in the dark. He looked up, caught her staring. He didn’t smile. He just held her gaze, then deliberately, slowly, ran his thumb along the edge of a water glass. The memory of that thumb on her skin, inside her, was a physical shock. She looked away first.
On the drive home, the silence was a suffocating weight. Rick drove faster than he should. “She told me we have unfinished energy,” he finally spat. “That we’re poisoning things.”
Kate stared out at the blurred lights. “He looked at me tonight like he was remembering the exact shade of pink my skin turns when I come.”
Rick swerved the car onto a side street, braked hard, and threw it into park. They were in a shadowy alley behind a row of closed shops. He turned to her, his face a mask of anguish and fury. “What do you want, Kate? Do you want to go back? Do you want to ‘purge the energy’?”
“I don’t know!” she yelled, the sound echoing off the brick. “I want to not feel his fucking eyes on me when I’m trying to eat! I want to not hear her voice in your head!” She fumbled for her door handle. “I need air.”
She got out, slamming the door, and walked a few paces into the dim alley. He followed. The sounds of the city were muted here, just the distant hum and their own harsh breathing.
“She’s right, you know,” he said, his voice lower now. “It’s unfinished. We opened a door and then tried to slam it shut on our own fingers.” He leaned against the grimy wall, tipping his head back. “He wants you again. I see it.”
She turned, her back to a faded mural. “And Victoria?”
A long, terrible silence. “Yes.”
The word hung between them. The permission, the confession. The next step.
He pushed off the wall and closed the distance. This kiss wasn’t tender. It was a collision of teeth and desperation, a transfer of poison. His hands grabbed her ass, grinding her against the hard line of his erection through his jeans. Her hands clawed at his shirt. “Here,” she panted against his mouth, the fight gone, replaced by a frantic need. “Now. In this fucking alley.”
He spun her around, facing the wall. He yanked her jeans and underwear down to her thighs in one rough motion. The brick was cold and rough against her palms. He freed himself, the sound of his zipper loud in the stillness. He didn’t tease. He spat into his hand, slicked himself, and drove into her from behind.
The entry was brutal, a dry, burning stretch that made her cry out. He was bigger than Marcus. The thought was involuntary, a filthy betrayal that sent a new jolt through her. He fucked her with short, savage thrusts, his body slamming into hers, pinning her against the wall. His breath was hot on her neck. “Is this purging it?” he growled, each word a punch. “Is this fucking them out?”
“Harder,” she gasped, the command ripped from her. It was what Victoria had said.
He obeyed, his hips pistoning, the impact shaking her whole body. The pain melted, transmuted into a blinding, unbearable pleasure. She was being taken, claimed, vandalized in a public alley by her own husband. It was the most honest thing they’d done in weeks. She came with a muffled scream into her own arm, her climax a violent convulsion that ripped through her.
He followed, his release hot and deep, his body shuddering against her back. He stayed there, inside her, for a long moment, his forehead pressed between her shoulder blades. His weight was the only thing holding her up.
When he pulled out, the chill of the air on her wet skin was shocking. He gently pulled her clothes back up. His hands were trembling. They didn’t speak. They got back into the car. He started the engine. As they pulled onto the main road, his phone, connected to the car’s system, lit up. A new text message preview flashed on the dashboard screen.
It was from Marcus.
The reminder was appreciated. V thinks we should discuss terms.
Kate stared at the glowing words. Terms.
Rick’s hand found hers on the center console. His grip was vise-tight. He didn’t look at her. He watched the road ahead, his face set in grim, terrified lines. The purging had failed. The furnace was still burning. And now, someone was bringing more fuel.