Chapter 4: Chapter 4
I’m
The choice wasn’t a thought. It was a current. Gage reached past her, his arm brushing against the swell of her breast, and twisted the cheap lock on the laundry room door. The click was definitive, a period at the end of a sentence he couldn’t take back.
He turned to face her. The air between them didn’t just hum; it cracked.
Tori didn’t smile in triumph. Her breath hitched, watching him, a flicker of something like fear in her blue eyes. It was gone in a second, swallowed by the heat. This was what she wanted, but now that the door was locked, the reality of it seemed to hit her too. Them. Here. Now.
“Gage,” she started, but he was done talking.
He closed the distance, one hand cupping the back of her neck, the other finding her hip. His mouth crashed down on hers. It wasn’t gentle. It was salt and heat and the shared taste of his own skin on her tongue. She moaned into him, her hands flying up to clutch at the shoulders of his t-shirt, her nails digging in through the cotton.
He walked her back until her shoulders met the shuddering metal of the dryer. The heat from the machine seeped through her damp shirt. His body pressed against hers, pinning her there, and she gasped, arching into him. Her round belly pressed between them, a firm, undeniable truth.
His mouth left hers, trailing down her jaw to her throat. He could feel her pulse hammering against his lips. “This is fucked up,” he whispered into her skin, his voice ragged.
“I know,” she gasped, her head rolling back against the dryer. “God, I know.”
His hands slid under the hem of her soaked t-shirt, his rough, calloused palms skating over the smooth skin of her sides, the heavy, swollen curve of her belly. He pushed the shirt up. She raised her arms, a silent command, and he pulled it over her head, tossing it onto the pile of sorted laundry.
She stood there in just her denim shorts, her breasts bare and heavy in the fluorescent light. They were fuller than he’d ever seen, veined with pale blue, the nipples dark and peaked. Beautiful in a way that was almost shocking. A single droplet of moisture beaded at the tip of one.
He stared, his chest tight. “Tori…”
“Don’t,” she said, her voice soft. She took his hand and brought it to her breast. The skin was fever-warm, impossibly soft. “Just don’t think.”
He lowered his head, taking her into his mouth. The taste was complex—salt, skin, a faint, sweet hint of milk. She cried out, her fingers tunneling into his hair, holding him to her. Her other hand fumbled between them, popping the button on his jeans, shoving them down over his hips.
The dryer thumped rhythmically beside them, a frantic drumbeat. He hooked his thumbs into the waistband of her shorts and underwear, pushing them down her thighs. The dark stain was there, a damp patch on the cotton. She stepped out of them, kicking them aside.
He lifted her, his hands under her ass, and she wrapped her legs around his waist, her arms locking around his neck. Her weight, the new weight of her, was profound. He turned and set her down on top of the washing machine. The lid was cold against her skin. The machine beneath her was still, a dormant beast.
He stood between her legs, looking at her. Really looking. The vulnerable curve of her stomach, the fiery triangle of hair between her thighs, the defiant, hungry look in her eyes. She was the most beautifully complicated thing he’d ever seen.
“Look at me,” she commanded, her voice husky. “I want you to see me. All of me.”
He did. And then he was pushing into her, a slow, inexorable slide. She was so wet, so ready, that there was no resistance, only a shocking, velvet heat that drew him in completely. Her head fell back, a sharp cry tearing from her throat that was part pain, part profound relief.
He stilled, buried to the hilt, shuddering. His forehead dropped to her shoulder. The feeling was obliterating. Every nerve ending was screaming, every loyal thought scorched away.
“Move,” she begged, her voice cracking. “Please, Gage.”
He began to move. A slow, deep rhythm at first, each thrust rocking her body on the metal lid. Her moans were low, continuous, punctuated by soft, hitched breaths. Her nails scored his back. He could feel the tautness of her stomach against his, the life inside her a silent, third presence in the room.
The pace quickened. The washing machine lid started to rattle under their combined weight and force. Bang. Bang. Bang. Against the wall. It was a loud, obscene metronome, drowning out the rain, drowning out everything but the sound of their skin meeting, their ragged breaths.
He was losing himself. The world narrowed to heat, and friction, and her blue eyes locked on his, wide and unblinking. She was chanting his name, a broken mantra. “Gage. Gage. Gage.”
A memory flashed, unbidden—not of Alexis, but of the Neon Lounge. Weeks ago. He’d gone there with some buddies from the old shop, not knowing she worked there. The place reeked of stale beer and despair. And then she’d appeared under a bleeding red light, in a sequined corset that strained over the new, gentle curve of her belly. She’d moved with a defiant, gritty grace, her smile not reaching her eyes. He’d been rooted to his stool, a cold dread and a hotter fascination twisting in his gut. She’d caught his eye from the stage, held it, and her smile had shifted into something real and dangerous. Later, she’d slipped onto the stool next to him, smelling of sweat and glitter. “You’re Alexis’s guy,” she’d said, her knee brushing his. “The plumber with the kind eyes.” She’d laughed, a sound that cut through the bassline. “I didn’t think you were real.”
Now, in the blinding fluorescent truth of the laundry room, he was more real than he’d ever wanted to be. This was the consequence of that look. This was the destination.
“I’m close,” she gasped, her body beginning to clench around him in rhythmic pulses. “Don’t stop. Don’t you fucking stop.”
He drove into her, each stroke a fracture in the foundation of his life. Her climax hit her like a seizure, a silent, open-mouthed scream before the sound tore loose, raw and guttural. The feeling of her coming apart around him shattered his last thread of control.
He followed her over the edge, his own release a white-hot annihilation. He muffled his shout against the damp skin of her neck, his body bowing into hers as he spilled deep inside her, a final, irrevocable transgression.
For a long moment, there was only the sound of their heaving breaths and the oblivious hum of the dryer. The washing machine lid had stopped rattling.
Slowly, sensation returned. The chill of the metal under her thighs. The ache in his back from her nails. The stark, ugly light. The profound weight of what they’d done settled over him, heavier than her body ever was.
He softened inside her and pulled back, the physical separation feeling like a loss and a relief. He turned away, fumbling to pull his jeans up, unable to look at her. The guilt didn’t wash in; it had been there all along, waiting under the heat. Now it rose, cold and suffocating.
He heard her slide off the machine, the soft sound of her finding her clothes. He focused on his own hands, on the simple mechanics of a zipper, a button.
“Gage.”
He didn’t turn.
“Look at me.”
He forced himself to face her. She was dressed again in the damp shorts and shirt, her hair a wild halo. She looked young, and tired, and utterly unrepentant.
“That,” she said, nodding toward the washing machine, “changes nothing between you and her. You hear me? This was mine. I took it.” She hugged herself, a sudden, vulnerable gesture. “I needed it.”
He just stared, hollowed out. “What does that even mean?”
“It means I’m scared and alone and my body feels like a rented house,” she shot back, her eyes glittering. “And for twenty minutes, I didn’t feel any of that. So thank you.”
The gratitude was a knife twist. He opened his mouth, but no sound came out.
The dryer beeped, loud and jarring in the small room. Cycle finished.
The sound broke the spell. Tori bent, pulled open the dryer door. A wave of heat and the smell of clean, dry fabric billowed out. She started pulling clothes into her empty bag, methodical, her movements brisk now.
“You should go upstairs,” she said, not looking at him. “I’ll be up in a minute. We’ll… we’ll figure it out.”
He didn’t move. He was stuck in the charged space between the machines, the ghost of her still on his skin, in his mouth.
“Gage. Go.” Her voice was firmer now, laced with a command that left no room for argument. It was the voice she probably used at the Neon Lounge to get rid of handsy drunks.
He went. He walked up the basement steps on legs that didn’t feel like his own. The living room was exactly as they’d left it, his half-finished beer still on the coaster. The rain still lashed the windows.
He stood in the middle of the quiet, civilized room, listening to the faint sounds of her moving below. The ache in his back, the smell of her on him, the phantom sensation of her body against his—it was all a roaring reality. The door was unlocked. Alexis was still out there in the storm, trusting, oblivious, her world already cracked open from the inside.
He heard Tori’s footsteps on the stairs. She appeared in the doorway, her laundry bag over her shoulder, her face a careful mask. She looked like a girl who’d just done her laundry. Nothing more.
“I’m gonna head out,” she said, her voice casual, as if the last hour hadn’t happened.
“It’s pouring,” he said, the words automatic.
“I’ve been wet before.” She paused, and the ghost of her wild smile flickered. “Thanks for the use of the machines.”
She walked to the front door, opened it. The roar of the rain filled the room. She stepped out into it, pulling the door shut behind her without a backward glance.
He was alone. Truly alone.
He walked to the window, watched her hunched figure, bag in tow, disappear into the gray downpour. Gone.
The house was silent. AThe storm raged. And upstairs, in the bedroom he shared with his girlfriend, his phone began to ring again.