Chapter 13: Drunk on Love
The city lights were a distant, glittering galaxy below the 28th floor. Up here, in Dre’s world, the only sounds were the whisper of central air and the soft clink of her fork against the china plate. Three months of normalcy had built a fragile, beautiful shell around them.Tonight was its celebration.
“Two years,” Dre said, raising his glass of bourbon. The low light caught the facets of the crystal, casting tiny rainbows on the tablecloth.“My most profitable investment.”
She smiled, the expensive red wine warm in her belly. “Is that all I am?An investment?”
“The best kind. Appreciating daily.” His eyes, dark and possessive, scanned her. She’d worn the emerald green dress he liked, the one that clung to her hips and plunged just enough in the front. Her hair, a cascade of sleek, honey-brown waves from a fresh sew-in, fell over one shoulder. He’d commented on it the moment she walked in, his thumb brushing the synthetic strands with a strange reverence. “You look like a fucking dream, Niyah. A dream I own.”
The dinner had been catered: seared scallops, a filet so tender it yielded to her glance, asparagus with shaved truffle. He’d talked about legitimate things—a property deal, a friend’s new club, the expansion of his “security consulting” firm.The words were clean, corporate. They built a lattice of normalcy over the abyss she’d decided not to look into. Kev, or one of the other quiet men, had been outside the restaurant door when they left. She’d barely noticed.
Now, in the elevator soaring to his penthouse, his hand was on the small of her back. “You’re quiet.”
“Just happy,” she murmured, leaning into him.It was mostly true. The wine, the food, the two-carat diamond pendant cool against her sternum—they were layers of sedation. When he kissed her, deep and slow as the elevator climbed, she tasted the future they were constructing, and it was potent.
The master bedroom was awash in moonlight filtered through sheer, steel-gray curtains. It painted monochrome stripes across the vast platform bed, the minimalist furniture, the polished concrete floor. He locked the door behind them with a soft, definitive click. The familiar scent of him—sandalwood cologne, clean cotton, and that darker, indefinable base note—wrapped around her.
He turned her to face him, his fingers tracing the line of her jaw. “You know what tonight is?”
“Our anniversary.”
“It’s a reset,” he said, his voice low and thorough. “Everything before tonight was the old story. Everything after…” He leaned in, his lips brushing her ear.“This is the first page of the new one. Our story.”
His words, intended to reassure, sent a fine wire of tension through her spine.A reset meant erasure. She pushed the thought away, drowning it in the physical present. His hands were on her dress, finding the hidden zipper.The fabric pooled at her feet. He stood back, drinking her in: the lace bra and matching thong, the new hair, her skin glowing in the silver light.
“On the bed.On your back.”
His command was quiet, absolute. She obeyed, the cool duvet soft beneath her.He undressed slowly, deliberately, a warrior peeling off his armor. His body was a testament to control, every muscle defined, the faint silvery scars on his torso like cryptic runes of a history she’d agreed not to read.He didn’t join her immediately. Instead, he went to the side table, poured a glass of water, and drank it slowly, watching her.The anticipation coiled tight in her lower stomach.He was pacing the moment, owning it.
Finally, he knelt on the bed, his knees parting her thighs. He kissed her stomach, her inner thighs, his stubble a delicious scratch against her sensitive skin. His fingers hooked into the sides of her thong and pulled them down. He blew a cool breath over her exposed pussy, and she shivered.“Always so ready for me,” he murmured, his voice thick. “Soaked already.” He pressed a single finger inside her, curling it.“Fuck. Hot as hell.”
He replaced his finger with his tongue, lashing her clit with flat, broad strokes before sucking it into the heat of his mouth.Her back arched off the bed, a broken cry escaping her lips. He pinned her hips down with his forearms, holding her in place for his feast. He ate her pussy with a relentless, focused intensity, like he was drawing poison from a wound or drawing out a confession.The pleasure was immediate and overwhelming, a direct line to the core of her. Her fingers twisted in his waves, and he groaned against her, the vibration pushing her higher.
“Dre… I’m gonna…”
“Come,” he growled into her slick flesh. It was an order.She obeyed. Her climax ripped through her, a sharp, blinding convulsion that made her thighs clamp around his head. He took it, drank her down, didn’t let up until the last tremor subsided and she was a gasping wreck on the sheets.
Before she could recover, he was moving up her body, his weight settling over her. He spat into his palm, slicked his hard, thick cock, and rubbed the head through her drenched folds. The eye contact was paralyzing.In the moonlight, his eyes were black pools, full of a terrifying ownership.
“This pussy is mine,” he stated, not a question, a declaration of fact. “This mouth is mine.This heart.” He pressed the blunt head against her entrance. “Mine.”
He pushed in.Not in a savage thrust, but with a slow, inexorable pressure that stole her breath. He filled her so completely, stretching her, claiming every inch. He held there, buried to the hilt, his body trembling with restraint. The fullness was a sweet ache, a possession so total it felt like annihilation.
“Say it.”
“I’m yours,” she whimpered, the words torn from a place beyond thought.He began to move. A slow, deep grind, rotating his hips to rub against her deepest, most sensitive spot with each retreat and advance. She could feel every vein, every ridge of him.It was an agony of pleasure, drawn out, lavish.
“You feel that?” he grunted, his forehead against hers. “You feel how deep I am?I’m in your guts, Niyah. I’m home.”
His pace remained agonizingly deliberate, each stroke a ritual of ownership. She felt herself fluttering around him again, a second climax building from the sheer, sustained intensity of his possession. He read it in her tightening muscles, her fractured moans.Then he changed.
He pulled out almost completely, and with a brutal snap of his hips, slammed back into her. The slow burn erupted into an inferno.The deep grinds became hard, driving pistons. The bed, a solid, expensive frame, began to knock a steady, protesting rhythm against the wall.Thud.Thud. Thud. He fucked her with a focused, pounding rage that felt like it was scouring her soul clean.“Take this dick,” he snarled, his voice guttural. “This is what you’re for.To get fucked by me. To come on my dick until you can’t see straight.” His hands found her wrists, pinning them above her head.The vulnerability was total.She was a vessel, a sacrifice on the altar of his will.
The orgasm that tore through her was a cataclysm. It wasn’t a wave; it was a detonation, white-hot and shattering. She screamed, a raw, unfiltered sound that seemed to come from the city streets far below. Her body convulsed, clamping around him in a series of violent, rhythmic spasms.It triggered his own release. With a roar that was more animal than man, he drove into her one last time and held, his body rigid. She felt the hot, urgent jet of his come flooding her, pulse after possessive pulse, marking her from the inside. He collapsed on top of her, his sweat-slick skin pressed to hers, his heartbeat a frantic drum against her chest.
For a long time, there was only the sound of their ragged breathing mingling with the distant hum of the city. He finally rolled off, but pulled her with him, wrapping her in his arms, her back to his chest. His grip was iron, even in satiation.
“I love you,” he whispered into her hair, his voice hoarse.“You’re my fucking life, you know that?”
She nodded, wordless, spent. The new story.His story.She was writing it in her flesh, in her surrender.
She must have drifted off.When she blinked awake, the moonlight had shifted. Dre’s breathing was deep and even behind her. But his arm was still a band around her, and one of his hands was splayed possessively over her lower belly, where his spend was slowly leaking from her onto the sheets.A different need surfaced, mundane and human. Gently, she tried to extricate herself from his embrace.His arm tightened instantly. “Where you going?” His voice was alert, no trace of sleep.“Bathroom,” she whispered. “Just need to pee.”
He hesitated for a second, then his grip relaxed. “Hurry back.”
She padded across the cool floor to the master bathroom, switching on the soft vanity light.She avoided her own gaze in the mirror. In the quiet solitude, the visceral memory of the night replayed—the ownership in his eyes, the brutal finality of his release.A shiver ran through her that wasn’t entirely unpleasant.
As she turned to leave, her eyes flicked to the walk-in shower, its glass door slightly ajar. On the tiled shelf, next to his expensive body wash, sat two items that shouldn’t belong together: a bottle of industrial-strength bleach, and a box of latex gloves. They were placed neatly, purposefully, as integral to his routine as his razor or his cologne.
The sight was a cold splash of reality.The new story had footnotes written in bleach. The shell of normalcy, so carefully constructed over three months, felt paper-thin in that moment. The abyss hadn’t gone anywhere.It was right here, domesticated, sitting on a shower shelf.
She turned off the light and walked back into the dark bedroom.Dre hadn’t moved. The space beside him was a chasm of cool sheets.She slid back into it, into his waiting heat. His arm immediately cinched around her, pulling her tightly into the curve of his body. He buried his face in her new hair.“Missed you,” he mumbled, already sliding back toward sleep.
She lay there, eyes open, staring at the moonlight stripes on the far wall. His breath warmed her neck.His heartbeat steadied against her spine. He was her sanctuary, her protector, her addiction. And his story, the one she had agreed to live inside, had a scent she could never quite wash away.She closed her eyes, breathing him in, and chose the story again. For tonight, it was the only one she had.
For tonight, it was the only one she had. Dawn came not with gentle light but with the sharp, insistent pressure of his body behind hers. The room was a deep, soft gray, the city’s hum still a low blanket of sound. She was floating in that warm, fuzzy space between sleep and waking when she felt him.He was already hard, his erection pressing against the cleft of her ass. His arm was a heavy bar across her ribs, his hand cupping her breast. His breathing had changed; it was awake, purposeful. “Morning,” he murmured into the back of her neck, his voice rough with sleep. His fingers plucked at her nipple, sending a bolt of sensation straight to her core, which pulsed in immediate, sleepy response. She was already wet, a slick heat gathering between her thighs, her body anticipating him before her mind could form a protest.He didn’t ask. He shifted, his knee nudging her legs apart. His hand left her breast, slid over her hip, and gripped the swell of her ass. He spat into his own palm, a crude, practical sound in the quiet room. She felt the head of his cock, slippery and hot, nudge against her soaked opening.He pushed in. Not slow, not fast, but with a single, unbroken stroke that filled her completely, a claiming made effortless by her body’s readiness. A low groan escaped him, vibrated through her.“Fuck, Niyah. Woke up swimming in you.”
He began to move, a languid, deep rhythm that was all about the grind. His pelvis rolled against her ass, each inward drive a slow-motion invasion that stretched and satisfied. One of his hands anchored on her hip, the other tangled in her expensive sew-in, pulling just enough to tilt her head back. The dull ache in her scalp was a counterpoint to the pleasure blooming deep inside her. He fucked her with this patient, thorough cadence for a long while, his breaths hot on her shoulder, his rhythm hypnotic. She was molten, pliant, a puddle of sensation beneath him.Then his angle changed. He shifted his weight, pulled her torso up slightly, and the next thrust landed differently. It was a precise, devastating impact on a spot so deep and sensitive it made her vision blur.A sharp, gasping cry tore from her throat. “There,” he growled, a note of triumph in his voice.“Right there.” He did it again. And again.Each perfectly aimed stroke sent violent, electric tremors through her legs. Her thighs began to shake uncontrollably, a helpless, involuntary quaking that spoke of her total lack of control. He owned this reaction, he had orchestrated it.
His pace quickened, the lazy grinds transforming into sharper, more urgent snaps of his hips.The bedsprings protested. She could feel the tension coiling in his body, the telltale tightening in his balls pressed against her. He was getting close. With a ragged breath, he started to pull out, the head of his cock catching at her rim.
“No,” she heard herself moan, the plea clawing its way out from a place of pure, desperate need.“Dre, no.Don’t pull out. Please.” She pushed her hips back, impaling herself on him, taking him deep again. “I want it.Give it to me. Cum inside me.” The words were filthy, foreign, and absolutely hers.He froze, buried to the hilt, a shudder wracking his frame. Her plea had disarmed him, breached some final protocol. “You sure?” His voice was strangled, a fight against his own rules.“Yes.Please. I need to feel it.” She was begging, shameless, nothing but a vessel for his will and her own hunger.
He surrendered with a guttural sound. His hips pistoned, his thrusts becoming wild, unfocused, a race to the finish.The slap of skin was loud in the morning quiet. “You want my cum in this pretty pussy? You wanna be full of me?”
“Yes!”
“Fuck.” He drilled into her, his rhythm fracturing. She could feel his climax building, a furious pressure at her core. In the berserk height of it, his mouth against her ear, he asked the question.It wasn’t gentle. It was a primal, snarled demand against the shell of her ear.“You want my baby in there?Huh? You want that?”
In that moment, the world collapsed to the point of their connection. There was no future, no consequence, no bleach on a shower shelf. There was only the exquisite friction and the seismic release clawing its way up her spine.She would have agreed to anything. “Yes!” she screamed, the word ripped from her very center.“Yes, I want it! Give it to me!” It was a covenant sealed in sweat and sensation.It shattered them both. His roar was muffled by her hair as he slammed home and erupted. She felt the hot, pulsing flood of his release, jet after possessive jet filling her, a liquid brand. It triggered her own climax, a violent, convulsing counterpoint that wrung her dry and left her blind. Her legs shook through the final waves, her nails digging into the sheets.
He collapsed over her, his weight driving her into the mattress, both of them slick and breathing in shattered gasps. For a long minute, there was only the sound of their exhaustion.Slowly, he softened inside her, but he didn’t withdraw. He lay there, a possessive weight, his lips moving against her shoulder blade. “Gotta go,” he finally murmured, voice thick.“Business.”
He pulled out slowly, a slick, leaving sound. The sudden emptiness was a shock.He slapped her ass once, a stinging, familiar punctuation. “Stay in my bed.Savor it.” She heard him move to the bathroom. The shower kicked on.She didn’t move. Her body thrummed with spent energy, her mind a blank, white screen.The water ran for a precise eight minutes. When he emerged, he was Dre again: sharp dark-wash jeans, a gray Henley, the scent of clean skin and that cologne.He was a man going to work. He leaned over the bed, kissed her temple.“Love you.We’ll talk tonight.” His eyes held hers, searching for something. He seemed satisfied with what he saw—the drowsy satiation, the surrender. He straightened his watch.“Kev’s outside the building. He’ll drive you later.”
And then he was gone.The lock engaged with a solid thud. She lay in the warm depression of his body, feeling the slow, cooling trickle of him on the inside of her thigh. The morning sun had finally breached the window, painting the room in harsh, honest light. It fell across the rumpled sheets, the empty space, the gleam of the bathroom tile beyond the open door.
We’ll talk tonight. The words echoed in the new silence, a simple sentence that now felt loaded, a door to a room she had just blindly agreed to enter. She closed her eyes, the phantom sensation of his final, claiming pulse still echoing inside her, a ghost already taking root.
She closed her eyes, the phantom sensation of his final, claiming pulse still echoing inside her, a ghost already taking root. The day passed in a haze of sticky sheets and distant traffic sounds. Kev drove her to the store in silence. She worked her shift, her body a secret archive of the morning, every movement a subtle reminder of his occupancy. Leo asked if she was feeling okay, and she nodded, forcing a smile that felt painted on.
The store’s familiar rhythms—the ding of the register, the rustle of pages—failed to anchor her. Her mind replayed his snarled question. You want my baby in there? Her own screaming, frantic yes. A flush of heat, part shame and part a dark, thrilling pride, would rise up her neck each time. She’d excuse herself to the back room, leaning against the cool wall, trying to slow her breathing. The bleach bottle in his shower, glimpsed hours before his question, now felt like a monstrous punchline.
She closed the shop early, pleading a migraine. Kev, a silent monolith in the driver’s seat, took her back to Dre’s building. The elevator’s ascent felt like being pulled up through a deep, still column of water. The penthouse was empty, impeccably clean, sterile. She stood in the center of the living room, the city’s panoramic glitter feeling like a lie. She took a shower in the guest bathroom, scrubbing until her skin was pink, but the feeling of him remained, a deep, internal signature.
He didn’t come home for dinner. No call. She picked at leftovers, the silence a physical weight. She watched the clock, her anxiety a live wire replacing the morning’s sated languor. The two realities—the man who brought her carbonara and the man with the bleach—began to blur and fracture in the waiting. At 10:47 PM, the lock disengaged.
He entered like a weather system, a shift in barometric pressure. He shrugged off his jacket, his movements precise, his face unreadable. He looked tired, a deep weariness in the set of his shoulders that had nothing to do with sleep. He didn’t go to her. He went to the kitchen island, placing a small, plain white paper bag on the marble.
“Hey,” he said, finally looking at her. His voice was flat.
“Hey.” She stayed on the sofa, tucking her feet beneath her.
He nodded toward the bag. “You need to take that. Now.”
She knew what it was. The instruction was clear, cold. A correction. The covenant of the morning was being amended, in ink, by him. She uncurled herself and walked to the island. The paper crackled as she opened it. A single box. Plan B One-Step. The clinical name felt like a judgment.
“Dre…”
“Take it, Niyah.” He opened the fridge, pulled out a bottle of water, and set it next to the box. His motions were methodical, devoid of the passion that had fueled his earlier command. “What I said this morning… that was in the moment. That’s not the plan.”
“The plan,” she repeated, the words tasting like ash.
“The plan is you finish school. The plan is we build something solid, something real, before we bring a kid into it. The plan,” he said, finally meeting her eyes, “is we control what we can control.” He paused, his gaze unwavering. “You think I don’t remember what you saw? What you know?” He didn’t name the bleach, the gun, Malcolm. He didn’t have to. “A baby isn’t a reset. It’s a hostage. To everything. To the past. To the future. To me.” He said the last part quietly, a raw admission that hung in the air between them.
Her hands trembled as she tore the box open. The pill was a small, white oblong. A stop sign. She popped it from the foil blister pack. It looked insignificant. He watched her, his arms crossed, a sentinel ensuring compliance. She placed it on her tongue, bitter and chalky, and washed it down with the cold water. The gulp was audible in the quiet room.
“Good,” he said, the word exhaled like relief. The tension in his shoulders eased a fraction. He came around the island then, standing before her. He lifted a hand and brushed his thumb over her cheekbone. The gesture was tender, incongruous. “Don’t look at me like that. This is me protecting you. Protecting us. You think I want to bring a child into my world? This world? You’re better than that. We’re better than that.”
“It felt real,” she whispered, the confession escaping. “This morning. It felt like a promise.”
“It was a feeling,” he corrected, his thumb still stroking her skin. “This,” he said, gesturing to the empty box, “is a promise. My promise to you that I’m thinking three steps ahead. That I’m not just some animal following a fucking instinct.” His eyes searched hers, desperate for her to understand the logic, the brutal calculus of his care. “I love you too much to be that simple with you.”
He pulled her into him then, wrapping his arms around her. She buried her face in his chest, inhaling the scent of the outside—night air, car exhaust, the faint, smoky trace of something she couldn’t name. His heartbeat was a steady, reliable drum under her ear. This was the duality, perfectly contained in one embrace: the man who eliminated problems with bleach and bullets, and the man who bought the morning-after pill to shield a hypothetical future from the contamination of his present. Which was the protection? Which was the violence? She could no longer tell the difference.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured into her hair. “For saying it like that. For getting lost in you. It’s my job not to get lost.”
She didn’t answer. She just held on, the chemical of the pill already a cold, sinking presence in her stomach, a counteragent to the ghost of him she’d carried all day. He was erasing a possibility, and it felt like a surgical procedure, precise and necessary and utterly hollow.
Later, in bed, he didn’t initiate anything. He just held her from behind, his palm spread over her lower abdomen, as if monitoring the nullification he’d ordered. His breath evened out into sleep. She lay awake, staring at the city lights. The phantom pulse was gone, chemically supplanted. All that remained was the outline of his hand, a brand over the emptiness, and the clean, antiseptic truth of his control. It was absolute. It was terrifying. It was, for now, the only thing holding her world together. She closed her eyes and let the artificial silence of the pill and the solid reality of his arm pull her under.