Chapter 27: The Reckoning
The silence after his words was a physical thing, a third body in the bed with them. Channah felt the truth of it, his flight, the inevitable return to separate coasts, settle into her bones like a deep chill. She pressed back against him, seeking his heat, and his arm tightened around her.
“I know,” she finally said, her voice small in the vast quiet of the room.
For a long time, they just breathed. The street below began to stir with the sounds of a city waking—a trash truck groaning, a distant car horn. The pale gold light through the curtains grew stronger, painting a stark stripe across the rumpled sheets and the landscape of their discarded clothes.
She moved first. Slowly, she turned in his arms to face him. His expression was etched with a quiet anguish that mirrored her own. She didn’t smile. She simply reached down between their bodies, her fingers finding him where he lay soft against her thigh. She took him in her hand, weighing him, feeling the velvety skin. She began to stroke, a slow, patient rebuild.
“Channah,” he sighed, a protest that wasn’t a protest at all. His eyes fluttered closed.
“Shhh,” she whispered. “We still have now.”
She watched him harden under her touch, the flesh becoming firm and full, the vein rising along its length. She leaned down and took him into her mouth, her hair falling like a curtain around her face. This time, her sucking was not frantic, but devotional. She lavished attention on every inch, tracing the outline of his tattoos with her tongue, nursing at the head, swallowing him deep until her nose was buried in the coarse hair at his base. She tasted the mingled residues of their night—salt, her own musky tang, sleep.
He let her work for a few minutes, his hands fisted in the sheets. Then, with a growl, he pulled her up by her shoulders. “My turn.”
He rolled her onto her stomach. The sheets were cool against her front, a contrast to the feverish heat of her skin. He hooked his hands under her hips and pulled her up onto her knees, her face buried in the pillow. He settled behind her, his breath hot against the back of her thighs.
He didn’t speak. He just spread her open with his thumbs, exposing her completely. He blew softly on her wet, swollen flesh, and she shuddered. Then his mouth was on her.
He ate her with a focused, brutal intensity. His tongue was a flat, demanding pressure on her clit before spearing deep into her cunt. He licked her from hole to hole, dragging his tongue through her slit before circling the tight, pink pucker of her ass. He probed it with the very tip, and she cried out, the sound muffled by the pillow. He slid two fingers into her pussy, crooking them forward, finding that spongy spot inside her with unerring accuracy while his tongue returned to her ass, licking and pushing until the ring of muscle relaxed and yielded to the intrusion.
The dual stimulation, the filthy, wet sounds of his mouth working her, the sheer openness of the position, sent her over the edge in a matter of minutes. An orgasm tore through her, vicious and complete, wringing a shattered scream from her throat. Her body convulsed, her cunt pulsing around his fingers, her ass clenching against his tongue.
Before the last tremor had subsided, he was moving. He positioned himself, the blunt, slick head of his cock pressing against that same, sensitized entrance his tongue had just violated.
“Look at me,” he demanded, his voice shredded.
She twisted her head, her cheek against the pillow, and met his gaze over her shoulder. His eyes were black with need, his jaw set.
He pushed in.
It was a slow, relentless invasion, a reclaiming. She was so open, so wet from his mouth and her own climax, that there was little pain, only an overwhelming, breathtaking fullness. He buried himself to the hilt and held there, his body trembling with the effort of stillness.
“Fuck,” he breathed. “You feel… you take all of me.”
Then he began to move. He set a hard, driving pace from the start, each powerful thrust jolting her forward. He gripped her hips, his fingers digging into the soft flesh, holding her open for his punishing rhythm. The slap of his body against hers was a loud, rhythmic counterpoint to their ragged breathing.
“Is this what you wanted?” he gritted out, fucking her with deep, grinding strokes. “All these years? This?”
“Yes,” she gasped, pushing back against him, meeting every drive. “God, yes, Ryan. Just like this.”
The angle was perfect. Each retreat dragged his cock against a secret, internal ridge, each plunge rubbed the swollen nub of her clit. Another orgasm, sharper than the first, began to coil low in her belly. “Don’t stop,” she begged. “Don’t you fucking stop. I’m gonna come again.”
“Come on my cock,” he ordered, his pace becoming erratic, brutal. “Squeeze that perfect ass and come.”
She did. The climax broke over her in a wave of blinding, pulsing heat, her vision whiting out at the edges. She clenched around him violently, milking his length, and with a shout that was pure triumph, he followed her.
He pulled out at the last second. His hot come shot across her skin in thick, ragged stripes—over the curves of her ass, down the back of her thighs, one hot splash landing on the small of her back. She whimpered at the sudden emptiness, at the shocking heat of his release on her skin.
Without a beat, she turned, collapsing onto her back. She reached for him, her hand closing around his still-throbbing cock, slick with her juices and his own cum. She guided him to her mouth.
She sucked him clean with a fervent, desperate hunger. She licked the head, chased the last drops from his slit, swallowed the bitter-salty mix of their essences. The taste was primal, a circuit completed. When he was soft and spent, she released him.
They collapsed side by side, breath sawing in and out of their lungs. The room smelled of sex and sweat and the faint, floral hint of the hotel’s cheap soap. The stripe of sunlight had crept up the bed and now lay across their tangled legs.
He found her hand. Laced his fingers with hers. Their palms were sticky.
“I lied before,” she said, staring at the water-stained ceiling.
“About what?”
“I don’t want to do this forever.” She turned her head to look at him. “I want you forever. This is just… the proof.”
A muscle ticked in his jaw. He brought their clasped hands to his lips and kissed her knuckles. He didn’t promise her forever. He didn’t say it was impossible. He just held on, as the sunlight grew stronger and the digital clock on the nightstand marched, minute by inexorable minute, toward seven.