Chapter 20: The Red Eye
The cab ride was silent, a vacuum sealed by the partition glass. He slid in beside her, his duffel bag between his feet. He didn’t speak. He simply reached over, took her hand, and pressed his lips to her cum-sticky knuckles. The taste of her skin, of him on her skin, was his answer.
At the airport, a detached efficiency took over. Check-in, security, the long walk to the gate—all performed with the numb focus of soldiers heading back to a war they’d started. They boarded, the flight attendant’s smile a bland curtain separating their reality from the normal world. First class was nearly empty. Two rows behind them, a man was already snoring softly.
They stowed their bags. Channah took the window seat. Ryan sat beside her on the aisle. The doors hissed shut. The engine’s vibration settled into their bones.
When the seatbelt sign dinged off, she moved.
She unbuckled his belt, then her own. “Up,” she whispered.
He stood, letting her slide past him into the aisle. She pushed him back down into his seat, then knelt between his legs in the cramped space, her back to the empty cabin. She worked his jeans open, freeing his cock, already hard from anticipation, from the scent of her still on his hands. She leaned in, her mouth a hot, wet seal around him, and took him deep. She bobbed her head twice, three times, a quick, slickening preamble.
Then she rose, hiking her dress up around her waist. She wasn’t wearing the thong. She’d taken it off in the airport bathroom, a calculated risk. She straddled him, her knees pressed into the soft leather on either side of his hips. She reached between them, guiding him. The broad head of his cock pressed against her, not where he expected. He inhaled sharply.
She looked down, her bangs falling into her eyes. “You heard me on the roof. I want to feel it for days. Every time I sit down. I want to remember.”
She sank onto him.
It was a slow, inexorable invasion, a breathtaking fullness that made her see sparks behind her eyelids. She took him inch by brutal inch, her body stretching to accommodate him, a low, continuous groan vibrating in her chest. When she was fully seated, impaled, she paused, letting them both feel the shocking reality of it. Here. Now.
“Fucking hell, Channah,” he breathed, his hands gripping her thighs.
“My turn to drive,” she whispered, and began to move.
She rode him with a slow, grinding rhythm, her inner muscles clenching around his invading length. The angle was deep, punishing. Each rise and fall was a muted slap of skin, drowned by the engine’s roar. She clamped a hand over her own mouth, her eyes screwed shut. The pleasure was a sharp blade, honed by the risk. A flight attendant could round the curtain. The snoring man could wake. The potential for ruin was everywhere, and it electrified every nerve.
She felt his control fraying, his hips starting to buck up to meet her downward strokes. Just as his breath hitched, she lifted herself off him with a wet, tearing sound that seemed deafening. She sank back to her knees on the carpet, ignoring the protest in her joints. She took his dripping cock back into her mouth, cleaning him with her tongue, sucking hard, tasting the stark, intimate flavor of her own body on him. It was filthy. It was reclaiming.
He tangled his hands in her hair, not pushing, just holding on. “You’re insane,” he whispered, awed.
She sucked him until he softened slightly, then she stood, trembling, and climbed back onto him, sheathing him inside her once more with a sharp gasp. The cycle began again. A half-hour of her riding him, her sweat making her dress cling to her back, his teeth sinking into the fabric of her shoulder to silence himself. Then the dismount, the descent to her knees, the devout, obscene worship of her own aftermath.
The hours bled. The cabin lights dimmed to a deep blue. They lost track of repetitions. It became a ritual, a language. Fuck. Cleanse. Repeat. Her ass grew more accustomed, the initial burn melting into a thick, glowing ache. His cock was red, used, gloriously abused. They didn’t speak. Words had been spent. This was pure physics. Need. Connection. A frantic attempt to merge through the one act that felt too forbidden, too intimate, to ever be undone.
During one of her kneeling sessions, he looked down at her, her lips stretched around him, her eyes glazed with tears and defiance. “Why?” he asked, the single word raw.
She pulled off with a slick pop. “So you never forget what you walked away from. So you know exactly what you’re getting back.”
She mounted him again.
As a pale, predawn light began to etch the clouds outside her window, she was on him, moving with a fatigued, relentless rhythm. They were both exhausted, raw, hovering on a painful edge between pleasure and overstimulation. The climb to climax was slower now, a distant peak. She leaned forward, her forehead against his, their breath mingling. The world narrowed to the point where their bodies joined, a searing, persistent truth.
The cabin lights flickered on, sudden and cruel.
The world rushed back in. The hum of the plane. The scent of coffee from the galley. The sound of a toilet flushing.
They froze, locked together. Her body clenched around him involuntarily. That single, sharp contraction was the trigger.
He came inside her with a choked, ragged sigh, his whole body bowing into hers. The heat of his release, deep in her ass, was a final, shocking claim. It set her off a moment later, a silent, shuddering orgasm that ripped through her, milking him dry.
For a long minute, they didn’t move. Stuck together. Spent.
Slowly, carefully, she disengaged. The aftermath was a visceral, wet reality. She stayed on his lap, boneless, her head on his shoulder. They heard the flight attendant moving about.
“We have to…” Ryan started, his voice sandpaper.
“I know.”
She stood, her legs unsteady. She pulled her dress down. He tucked himself away, the fabric of his jeans dark with damp. They fastened their seatbelts as the plane began its descent. They didn’t look at each other. The evidence of their five-hour sin was between them, on them, inside her.
The wheels hit the tarmac with a jolt.
“My place,” she said, staring straight ahead at the seatback in front of her. It wasn’t a question.
He looked out the window at the gray, morning sprawl of New York. “Yeah.”
As they taxied, she finally turned to him. Her face was pale, beautiful, utterly serious. “This doesn’t fix anything.”
“I know.”
“It just makes it more complicated.”
He reached over and wiped a smudge of mascara from under her eye with his thumb. “Complicated I can handle. Empty I couldn’t.”
They gathered their things, their movements stiff. Walking up the jetway, she felt the profound, aching fullness he’d left in her, a persistent ghost of the night. Every step was a reminder. She smiled, a private, weary thing. It was exactly what she wanted. A scar. A bookmark. A reason to turn the page together.