Chapter 1: The Clinic Where Inhibitions Died
The air in the hospital was a solid thing. It pressed against Wren’s skin, a damp miasma of bleach, stale urine, and the sour-sweet smell of infection. She snapped the latex gloves over her wrists, the sound sharp and final in the general din of low moans and hysterical weeping. A cot over, a man with sunken cheeks sat up and began tearing at his gown with gaunt, frantic fingers, a delirious laugh bubbling from his chapped lips. His ribs stood out like a ship’s hull.
“Marshall, sedate him,” Wren said, her voice flat. She didn’t even turn. She was already moving, her eyes scanning the next crisis.
That’s when the main doors wheezed open, shoving a wedge of cold, rainy night into the room. A man stumbled in, clutching his forearm. Blood, shockingly vibrant, seeped through his fingers and dripped onto the linoleum with soft, purposeful taps. He was tall, athletic in a way that suggested former routine, now frayed. And he was completely naked.
Wren’s trained eye swept him in a second. No obvious contagion lesions. Steady gait aside from the injury. Clear, focused eyes, though wide with pain and… something else. A strange, unsettling absence of shame. The new normal.
“Here. Now,” she commanded, pointing to a recently vacated cot. The man—Paxton—shuffled toward it, his bare feet leaving faint scarlet prints. He didn’t try to cover himself. He just lowered himself onto the thin mattress, his jaw tight.
“What happened?” Wren asked, pulling a suture kit from a rolling cart. Her movements were efficient, automatic.
“Broken window,” Paxton grunted. “Clearing a house on Queen Anne. Slipped. It was dumb.”
“Most things are now,” Wren muttered. She pulled a stool over, sat between his spread knees. “Let me see. Pressure here.” She guided his other hand to a point above the wound. His skin was cold from the rain. She bent to the laceration, a nasty, jagged thing on the meat of his forearm. “Deep. Needs stitches. Lidocaine is scarce. You’ll feel this.”
“Just do it.”
Her fingers probed, cleaning away the blood with antiseptic that made his muscles jump. She was aware of his nakedness not as a provocation, but as a clinical fact. The dark trail of hair leading down from his navel, the defined cut of his hips, his soft, flaccid penis resting against his thigh. Anatomy. Nothing more. She had to believe that.
She threaded the needle. “Talk to me. Distract yourself. What’s your name?”
“Paxton. Paxton Reed.”
“Wren Jackson.” She pinched the skin together and pierced it. He hissed, a sharp intake of breath. A tremor ran through his thigh, which brushed against her hip. “You’re not from the camps. You look… healthier.”
“I was a hermit before. A programmer. Now…” He laughed, a short, pained sound. “Now I guess I’m a scavenger. My parents… they didn’t make it. The first wave. Got the apartment, some stocked shelves. It’s running out.”
“I’m sorry.” The words were rote, but she meant them. She stitched with quick, precise movements. “The neurological shift. It hit you?”
“Yeah. The… lack of filters. The noise in your head just… quieted. About social stuff, anyway. The grief is still plenty loud.” He was looking at the top of her head, her focused brow. “Doesn’t it bother you? Any of this?”
“My job is bodies. Bodies are messy. This is just a different kind of mess.” She tied off a stitch. “Almost done.”
But something was changing. The initial shock of his entry was fading, and in its place, a new awareness crept in. The heat of him, so close. The smell of rain and iron and a clean, male sweat that cut through the hospital stench. Her breath shallowed. When she reached for another length of suture, her hand brushed the inside of his bare thigh.
A jolt, like static, went through her.
She froze. Her eyes flicked up to his. He was staring at her, his earlier pained focus gone, replaced by a dark, liquid intensity. The air between them crackled, thick and suddenly unbreathable. The moans of the other patients faded to a dull buzz.
“Wren,” he said, her name a rough scrape in his throat.
“Don’t,” she whispered, but her hand was still on his thigh. She felt the powerful muscle tense under her palm.
“You felt that too.” It wasn’t a question. The new world had stripped away the pretense, the games. Desire, when it sparked, was a pure, undeniable current.
“This is not—"
“Why?” he interrupted, his free hand coming up to cradle her jaw. His thumb stroked her cheekbone, a touch so shockingly tender it made her chest ache. “The rules are gone. We’re just animals in a ruin, trying to feel something that isn’t fear or loss. I see you. You’re tired to your bones. Let me make you feel good.”
His words were a trespass, an invasion. They were also the most honest thing she’d heard in months. The compassionate, reserved Dr. Jackson was crumbling under the weight of endless days, and the raw, unabashed want in his eyes was an offer of oblivion.
She didn’t consent. She didn’t protest. She leaned into his hand and kissed him.
It was a collision. Her lips parted under his, and the kiss instantly deepened, desperate and hungry. She tasted the rain on him, the faint coppery tang of his blood. A low groan rumbled from his chest. Her hands came up, one tangling in the damp hair at the nape of his neck, the other splaying across the hard plane of his pectoral muscle, feeling his heart hammer against her palm.
He pulled back, breathing ragged. “Somewhere else. Please.”
She stood, her legs unsteady. She grabbed a discarded hospital blanket from a pile and thrust it at him. “Cover up. Follow me.” Her voice was thick.
She led him past rows of ailing humanity, blind to them now. Down a short hall, into a supply closet. It was cramped, shelves towering with boxes of gauze and saline bags. She locked the flimsy door behind them, plunging them into near-darkness, a sliver of light from under the door slicing across the floor.
The second the lock clicked, he was on her. The blanket fell. He backed her against a shelf, his mouth devouring hers, his hands cupping her face. She met his frenzy, her fingers digging into the hard muscles of his back. This wasn’t romance. This was a claiming, a frantic need to obliterate the world outside the door.
“Fuck, Wren,” he growled against her neck, biting the tendon there. She gasped, arching into him. Her hands shoved at the waist of her scrubs, pushing them and her underwear down in one frantic motion. He kicked them aside.
He lifted her. She wrapped her legs around his waist, the cool metal of the shelf digging into her back. There was no more foreplay, no gentle exploration. The electric urgency between them was a live wire. He guided himself to her entrance, and she was wet, so wet, the new senseless world amplifying every signal her body sent.
He drove into her in one deep, relentless stroke.
“Christ!” she cried out, her head thumping back against the cardboard boxes. He filled her, stretched her, a brutal, perfect friction. He didn’t wait for her to adjust. He set a punishing pace immediately, each thrust slamming her into the shelf, making its contents rattle. The raw, wet sound of their joining filled the tiny closet.
“Look at me,” he demanded, his voice guttural.
She forced her eyes open. In the dim light, his face was a mask of agonized pleasure, his eyes locked on hers. Every thrust was a punctuation in a sentence of pure need. She felt the coil of her own orgasm building with terrifying speed, fueled by the sheer illicit danger of it, the blatant carnality.
“You’re so fucking tight,” he rasped. “So perfect. Take it. Take all of it.”
His words, filthy and direct, pushed her over the edge. Her climax tore through her, a silent, shattering convulsion that milked him violently. She buried her scream in his shoulder, biting down on the muscle to stay quiet as the waves battered her.
Feeling her clench around him broke his control. With a choked, ragged groan, he pistoned into her twice more and then froze, his body bowing against hers. She felt the hot, pulsing release of him deep inside, a flood of intimacy more profound than anything she’d ever allowed.
For a long moment, they stayed like that, welded together, breathing in shattered gasps. The reality of the closet, the hospital, the world, seeped back in slowly, coldly.
He softened, slipped from her, and gently lowered her until her feet found the floor. Her legs nearly buckled. He kept his arms around her, his forehead resting against hers. Their sweat mingled.
Outside, someone coughed, a long, rattling sound. A cart rolled by.
Wren’s mind, the doctor’s mind, rebooted with a cold shock. What had she done? In a supply closet. With a patient. While people were dying yards away.
She pulled away, scrambling for her scrubs, her movements stiff and ashamed. She couldn’t look at him.
“Wren,” he said softly, reaching for her.
“Don’t.” She yanked her top straight. “That was a mistake. A neurological… glitch. It can’t happen again.”
She unlocked the door, the sliver of light now seeming like a blinding interrogation lamp. She paused, her back to him. She could still feel him inside her, the sticky evidence of their transgression already cooling on her thighs.
“Your stitches,” she said, her voice clinical, dead. “Keep them clean. The suture kit is on the cot. Remove them in ten days.”
She didn’t wait for a response. She stepped out into the buzzing, sickly light of the hallway, closing the door on him and the smell of sex and desperation, forcing her face into its mask of impassive competence as she walked toward the next crying patient. But her skin was still electrified, and her heart hammered a frantic, terrified rhythm against her ribs that had nothing to do with medicine.
But her skin was still electrified, and her heart hammered a frantic, terrified rhythm against her ribs that had nothing to do with medicine. She grabbed a chart, any chart, and stared at the meaningless glyphs until they blurred. The phantom sensation of him, thick and wet inside her, was a brand. She walked, her thighs sticking together with every step.
Two rows over, a different kind of pain was crystalizing.
Sister Mary Agnes pressed a cold compress to a young woman’s forehead. The woman trembled, caught in the final, feverish stage of the neuro-shift. Her prayers, murmured for hours, had dried up. Now, the woman just stared at the cracked ceiling, her breath coming in shallow hitches.
“It’s alright, Elara. The confusion will pass,” Mary Agnes said, her voice the familiar, gentle balm. It felt like a lie. The woman’s hand shot out, clamping around Mary Agnes’s wrist with surprising strength. The touch was scalding.
“It’s so quiet,” Elara whispered, her eyes wide, lucid, and utterly empty of the fear that had been there before. “All the noise… the guilt, the shame… it’s just gone. Sister… is this peace? Or is this damnation?”
Mary Agnes had no answer. She’d been asking herself the same thing for weeks. The doctrines, the vows, the careful architecture of her faith—it all felt like a distant lecture, words spoken into a howling wind. Here, in this visceral pit of suffering and raw humanity, her celibacy felt not like a sacred promise, but a ridiculous abstraction. A denying of the very pulse of life that fought so stubbornly in these bodies.
She extracted her hand. “Rest.”
She turned and almost collided with a stretcher. An orderly was rushing a man into a corner, his leg a ruin of blood and splintered bone. The man was screaming, a raw, animal sound that cut through the departmental hum. But it was his eyes that arrested her. They found hers, beseeching, not for God, but for an end to the agony. There was no transcendence in that pain. Only meat and nerve.
Something in Mary Agnes snapped.
A clean, silent break, like a bone giving way under pressure.
She walked away. Not with purpose, but with a drifting, dreamlike detachment. She passed the chapel—a converted storage room with a plastic crucifix—and didn’t even glance inside. The God who lived there had nothing to say to this.
She pushed through a set of swinging doors marked ‘STAFF ONLY’, entering a dim, narrow corridor lined with lockers and smelling of stale coffee. Leaning against the cool cinderblock wall, she slid down until she was sitting on the linoleum, her knees drawn up. She fumbled in the pocket of her simple tunic, her fingers finding the forbidden contrabank she’d confiscated from a patient days ago: a single cigarette and a book of matches.
Her hands shook as she lit it. The first drag was harsh, punishing. She coughed, her eyes watering. The second drag was smoother. The nicotine hit her empty stomach, a dizzying wave. She watched the smoke curl toward the flickering fluorescent light.
The door swung open. It was Leo, one of the orderlies. Big, quiet, with perpetually tired eyes. He stopped when he saw her.
“Sister? You okay?”
She looked up at him, blowing smoke out slowly. “No,” she said, and it was the truest thing she’d said in months. “I am not okay.”
He hesitated, then sat down on the floor a few feet away, his back against the lockers. He didn’t speak. Just shared the silence.
“Do you ever feel,” she began, her voice strangely calm, “like everything you were told is a cage? And the door has been open this whole time, but you were just too afraid to walk through it?”
Leo watched her. “Every damn day since this started.”
She took another drag, then stubbed the cigarette out on the floor. The acrid smell mixed with the antiseptic. She turned her head to look at him fully. In the poor light, the sharp plains of his face were softened. He had a kind mouth. She thought of the man’s scream, the sheer biological truth of it. She thought of her vow of chastity, a word that now felt as hollow as a gourd.
“I want to feel something that isn’t grief or prayer,” she said, the words leaving her without permission. “I want to feel… real.”
Leo’s expression shifted from weariness to a deep, understanding caution. “Sister… Mary Agnes… you’re in shock.”
“Don’t call me that.” She moved. It wasn’t graceful. She crawled the short distance between them on her hands and knees, the rough floor scraping her skin through her habit. She stopped when her face was inches from his. She could smell his sweat, his exhaustion. It was human. “My name is Mary. Just Mary.”
“Mary,” he breathed, his eyes wide.
She closed the distance and kissed him. It was clumsy, desperate. A search for a feeling, any feeling. His lips were chapped, and he froze for a second, stunned. Then, with a groan that seemed to come from the depths of his own loneliness, he kissed her back.
His hands came up, large and rough, cupping her face. The kiss deepened, turning hot and hungry. It was nothing like the divine love she’d pledged herself to. This was all tongue and teeth and shared breath, a messy, glorious friction.
She clawed at the simple knot of his scrubs top, yanking it untied. He broke the kiss to pull it over his head. His chest was broad, covered in a dusting of dark hair. She ran her hands over it, the reality of warm, living skin a revelation.
“Are you sure?” he gasped, his hands hovering at the waist of her tunic. “Your vows…”
“They’re broken,” she said, and it was a statement of fact, not regret. “Break them with me.”
That was all he needed. He tugged the coarse fabric up and over her head. She wasn’t wearing anything beneath. The cool air hit her skin, and she shivered. His eyes drank her in—her small, firm breasts, her narrow waist, the stark white of her skin against the dark blue of her discarded habit pooled on the dirty floor.
He leaned in, taking one nipple into his mouth. She cried out, her head thumping back against the locker. The sensation was so direct, so brutally good, it short-circuited her thoughts. There was no theology here. Only his mouth, wet and hot, his tongue lashing her.
His hand slid down her stomach, over the curve of her hip, and plunged between her legs. She was wet. The shocking evidence of her own betrayal, her own awakening, slicked his fingers. He groaned against her breast.
“Fuck, Mary…”
He found her clit, rubbing tight, frantic circles. Pleasure, sharp and bright, stabbed through her core. She rocked against his hand, shameless, chasing it. She fumbled with the drawstring of his scrub pants, her fingers inept. He helped her, shoving them down just enough to free his erection. It sprang free, thick and heavy in her hand. The weight of it, the reality, made her gasp.
“Now,” she pleaded, her voice raw. “I need to feel it. I need to know I’m here.”
He guided her onto his lap, her back against his chest. He positioned himself at her entrance. She sank down onto him slowly, her body stretching to accommodate his girth, a burning, exquisite fullness that tore a sob from her throat.
He was fully sheathed inside her. The feeling was catastrophic. It shattered the last vestige of Sister Mary Agnes. She was just a body, a greedy, clutching animal.
He wrapped one arm around her waist, holding her still, while his other hand found her breast again, pinching and rolling her nipple. He began to move her on him, setting a slow, deep, devastating rhythm.
“This is it,” he rasped in her ear, his breath hot. “This is real. Flesh and blood. Nothing else.”
Each upward slide made her gasp. Each downward drop punched the air from her lungs. The pleasure built, a coiling, unbearable tension. She reached a hand behind her, tangling it in his hair, anchoring herself as he fucked up into her from below. The sounds were obscene—the wet slap of skin, their ragged breathing, her broken whimpers.
“I’m gonna come,” he warned, his pace turning frantic, brutal. “Gonna fill you up, Mary. Gonna make you remember this.”
His words, filthy and direct, shattered her. Her orgasm ripped through her without warning, a silent, convulsive wave that clamped down on him like a vise. She shook in his arms, her mouth open in a soundless scream.
With a choked roar, he buried himself to the hilt and pulsed inside her. She felt the hot spurts, a visceral sign of their transgression, of life stubbornly asserting itself in the house of death.
They slumped together, slick with sweat, breathing in ragged unison. His softening length slipped from her body, followed by a trickle of their mingled fluids onto the floor between them.
The silence of the corridor rushed back in. The distant echo of a PA announcement. A cart rolling somewhere.
Mary leaned her head back against Leo’s shoulder. She felt empty. She felt used. She felt more profoundly, devastatingly alive than she ever had kneeling at an altar.
Her vows were not just broken. They were ashes. And in the dim, filthy light, she found a strange, terrifying peace.
And in the dim, filthy light, she found a strange, terrifying peace.
It didn’t last. The door to the staff corridor squeaked open, flooding their little confessional with brighter light. Mary flinched, trying to cover herself with her arms, but it was too late. Leo froze, his body rigid with panic.
Wren stood in the doorway. Her scrubs were wrinkled, her ponytail coming loose. Her eyes, usually so sharp and assessing, looked glazed, distant. They took in the scene: Mary, naked and shameless in Leo’s lap, their skin gleaming with sweat, the undeniable smell of sex thick in the air. A used condom—Leo had somehow had the presence of mind—lay on the floor beside them.
For a long second, no one spoke. The only sound was the hum of the lights.
Wren’s clinical mind should have been disgusted. Should have fired off a lecture on hygiene, on professionalism, on the fragile psychology of caregivers in a crisis. Instead, she felt a jolt of pure, unadulterated envy. It was so sharp it stole her breath.
They had given in. Completely. They looked shattered, but they also looked… satiated. The knot of desperate tension that had lived in Wren’s own gut for months twisted tighter.
“Dr. Jackson,” Leo stammered, his voice rough. “I can explain—”
“Don’t,” Wren cut him off, her voice not much more than a whisper. She wasn’t looking at him. She was looking at Mary’s face—the flushed cheeks, the swollen lips, the eyes that held no regret, only a dazed, exhausted wonder. “Are you… are you okay?”
Mary let out a sound that was half laugh, half sob. “I don’t know. I think I might be.” She finally moved, shifting off of Leo, wincing slightly as she reached for her tunic. She didn’t turn away to dress. The modesty was gone, incinerated. “Does it matter?”
Wren swallowed. Her own thighs were still sticky. She could still smell Paxton on her skin. “No,” she heard herself say. “I don’t suppose it does.”
She turned to leave, her mission—whatever it had been—forgotten.
“Wren.” It was Mary who spoke now, pulling her coarse fabric over her head. “You feel it too, don’t you? The quiet. The… nothing where the rules used to be.”
Wren stopped, her hand on the doorframe. Her knuckles were white. She didn’t answer.
“Where is he?” Mary asked, softer. “The man you stitched up.”
“Gone,” Wren said, too quickly.
“Liar.” Mary stood, her legs shaky. She took a step forward. “It’s written all over you. You’re vibrating with it. You want to go find him.”
The directness was a slap. Wren’s composure, the last brick in a crumbling wall, fell. “What if I do?” she snapped, turning back. “What the hell is left for us here? To change bedsheets until we catch the next variant? To watch people dissolve until we join them? He has a place. He has food. He’s… real.”
Leo stood, pulling his scrubs up. He looked between the two women, a new, unsettling calculation in his eyes. The old Leo, the devout orderly, would have been scandalized. This Leo, the one who had just fucked a nun on a dirty floor, just nodded slowly. “Safety. Resources. It’s logical. Is he alone?”
“I don’t know,” Wren said. But she remembered his words. My parents… they didn’t make it. Got the apartment, some stocked shelves. It was an offer. It had always been an offer.
“We should go,” Mary said. It wasn’t a suggestion. It was a decision. “You, me, Leo. Elara’s clear now, the fever broke. She’s… adaptable. She has no family here. She’ll come.”
“This is insane,” Wren breathed, but the protest was hollow. The idea was already taking root, a wild, desperate weed. To leave this fluorescent purgatory. To go to a place with walls that weren’t stained with grief.
“Insanity is staying,” Leo said. He picked up his shirt. “Give me ten minutes. I’ll get Elara. Meet at the ambulance bay exit. The one with the broken camera.”
They moved.
Twenty minutes later, they were a ghostly procession in the rainy dark, slipping through the chain-link breach in the hospital’s perimeter fence. Wren led, her heart a frantic drum against her ribs. Mary followed, a shadow in her dark tunic. Leo guided a drowsy but lucid Elara, a beautiful young woman with wide, curious eyes who asked no questions, just moved. The world was soft and noisy with rain.
Wren only knew the general area Paxton had mentioned. Queen Anne. A labyrinth of dark, towering houses. They walked for what felt like hours, jumping at every sound. The old world’s dangers—looters, gangs—had been simplified by the pandemic. Now the main threat was silence, an empty window that might hide a pair of hungry, uncaring eyes.
Just as doubt was about to swallow her whole, she saw it. A third-floor corner unit in a grand old brick building. A single window glowed with the warm, honeyed light of candles, not the cold blue of LEDs or generators. A silhouette passed by the window. Tall, broad-shouldered.
“There,” Wren said, her voice cracking.
Getting in was almost comically easy. The building’s main door was busted. They took the stairs, their footsteps echoing in the stairwell. Wren stopped outside the door, 3B. She raised a hand to knock, but hesitated. What was she doing? Bringing strays to a man she’d fucked in a closet? This was how people got killed now.
Before she could decide, the door opened.
Paxton stood there, shirtless, a dish towel in his hands. He’d cleaned up. The stitches on his arm stood out, dark and neat. His eyes found Wren first, widening in surprise, then flicking over the bedraggled group behind her. His expression shifted from shock to wary assessment.
“You came back,” he said.
“I brought… we…” Wren faltered.
“We’re leaving the hospital,” Mary said, stepping forward. Her voice was clear, firm. “We need sanctuary. Wren said you had it.”
Paxton’s gaze lingered on Wren. A slow smile touched his lips, not quite kind, but acknowledging. He saw the doctor, but he also saw the woman from the closet. He stepped aside. “Yeah. I’ve got it. Come in before you let the cold in.”
They filed into the apartment. It was spacious, lived-in. Books lined the walls. There were real blankets on the sofa. The smell was incredible—canned soup heating on a camping stove, real coffee, the absence of decay.
Elara breathed it in like it was paradise. Leo stood guard by the door, scanning the space like a soldier.
Paxton closed the door and locked it, throwing two heavy deadbolts. The sound was final. He leaned back against the door, looking at his unexpected guests. “So. A doctor, a nun, an orderly, and…?” He nodded to Elara.
“A student of useless things,” Elara said, her Greek accent soft. “I am… adaptable.”
“I bet you are,” Paxton said. His eyes returned to Wren. The tension in the room was a live wire, thrumming with exhaustion, relief, and a raw, unchanneled energy. The quiet he’d spoken of. It was here, in this room. The old world’s chatter was gone. Only need remained.
He pushed off from the door. He walked past Mary, past Leo. He stopped in front of Wren. He didn’t touch her. He just looked down at her, his eyes dark pools in the candlelight.
“You chose,” he said.
“There was no choice,” she replied, but it was a lie and they both knew it.
He reached out then, one hand curving around the back of her neck. His thumb stroked the frantic pulse there. It was the same tender, devastating touch from the hospital. Her eyes fluttered closed.
“You all stink of that place,” he murmured, but his voice was low, for her alone. “You need to burn it off.”
He looked over Wren’s head at the others. Mary was watching, her lips parted. Elara had sunk onto the sofa, her eyes wide, taking in the dynamic. Leo’s jaw was tight, but his eyes were on Mary, a possessive heat there now.
“The bedroom’s through there,” Paxton said, his voice gaining a new, commanding roughness. “There’s a shower. It’s cold, but it works. Get clean. Then we figure out the rest.”
It wasn’t an orgy. Not at first. It was a shedding. They took turns in the shower, the cold water shocking the hospital stink from their skin. Wren went last. When she came out, wearing a borrowed t-shirt of Paxton’s that hung to her thighs, the dynamic in the living room had shifted.
The candles had been moved. The rug was clearer. A bottle of whiskey, half-full, was on the coffee table. Elara was sipping from a mug, curled in an armchair. Leo sat on the floor by Mary’s feet, where she sat on the sofa. He was tracing the arch of her bare foot with his finger, a gesture of stunning intimacy. Mary’s head was leaned back, her eyes closed.
Paxton stood by the window, looking out at the dark. He turned when Wren entered.
The silence was different now. It wasn’t empty. It was charged, thick with potential. The quiet he’d talked about—the quiet that let you hear what you really wanted. And Wren could hear it, a roar in her own blood.
She wanted to not think. She wanted to not be the doctor. She wanted to feel that obliterating rush from the supply closet, but here, in the safety of walls, where she could scream if she needed to.
Paxton saw it. He always saw it. He walked toward her, took the damp towel from her hands, and tossed it aside.
“Stop thinking,” he said.
He kissed her. It was deeper than the first time, slower, but no less hungry. She melted into it, her hands fisting in the fabric of his shirt. A low groan came from the sofa. Wren broke the kiss, turning her head.
Mary was kissing Leo now, her hands in his hair, pulling him up to her. It was not gentle. It was ravenous.
Elara watched from her chair, her knees drawn up. She wasn’t shocked. She looked… fascinated. Curious.
“See?” Paxton whispered against Wren’s ear, his breath hot. “The rules are gone. We’re just animals. Good animals. Taking care of each other.”
His hands slid under the hem of the t-shirt she wore, his palms rough on the skin of her thighs. He lifted her, and she wrapped her legs around his waist, just like in the closet. He carried her to the large, worn rug in the center of the room.
He laid her down. He peeled the t-shirt off her, tossing it away. He looked his fill, his eyes burning. Then he looked over at the