Chapter 36: The Public Walk of Shame
The bell jangled again, a shrill announcement of their exit. The night air felt like a cold towel on fevered skin. Channah kept her grip on Ryan’s hand, her stride confident, her head high. Streetlights pooled on the sidewalk, illuminating her plainly. A couple passing averted their eyes, quickening their pace. She didn’t blink.
“Your place or mine?” she asked, her voice curiously casual, as if asking about the weather.
“Yours. It’s closer.”
“Ten blocks. Think you can make it?”
“I think the question is, can you?”
She smiled, a flash of teeth in the semi-dark. The dried streaks on her face had tightened her skin. She looked like a warrior painted for a different kind of war. They walked in silence for a while, the city’s sounds—distant sirens, the rumble of a late-night bus—filling the space between them. The animal frenzy of the store was cooling into something else, a resonant hum in their veins.
“All those years,” Ryan said, his thumb stroking the back of her hand. “I’d imagine running into you. At a conference. In a bookstore. It was always… civilized. A drink. Polite catch-up.”
“And now?” She glanced at him, her eyes reflecting the neon from a bar sign.
“Now I know what you taste like. I know the sound you make when I’m buried in your ass. It’s better.”
She laughed, a real, unfettered sound that seemed to startle her. “Twenty-five years of therapy, Ryan. Teaching people to sit with their discomfort. To use their words. And with you, in an hour, I’ve thrown the whole manual out the window.”
“Regrets?”
“Not a single one.”
Her building was a pre-war brownstone, its lobby a small, tidy space smelling of lemon polish and old wood. The elevator was a brass cage, sighing its way upward. Inside, the close quiet was palpable. She turned to him, her back against the rattling gate. The overhead light was unforgiving, detailing every splatter, every smudge.
“You’re a mess,” he murmured, raising a hand to her cheek.
“Your mess,” she corrected, and caught his thumb in her mouth, sucking it clean with a slow, deliberate swirl of her tongue.
The elevator stopped. Her hallway was long, lined with dark doors. Her key turned with a solid click. Then they were inside, and the world narrowed again, this time to her domain. The air smelled of her—sandalwood, tea, the faint ozone of a therapist’s calm. Books lined the walls. A single reading lamp was on, casting a warm pool of light onto a deep, worn sofa.
She didn’t turn on more lights. She kicked off her shoes and walked into the middle of the living room, then turned to face him. She began unbuttoning her blouse, her eyes locked on his. Each button was a deliberate revelation. Pale skin, the generous swell of her breasts in a lace bra. She let the blouse fall.
“I want you to see all of me,” she said. “No velvet curtains. No dusty chairs. Just here.”
She unsnapped her skirt, let it pool at her feet. Stood in just her bra and panties, her body a lush, familiar landscape he’d spent decades trying to forget. She was magnificent.
“Now you,” she said.
He undressed quickly, his clothes joining hers on the floor. The tattoos on his arms and chest, ink accumulated over a lifetime of restlessness, seemed to tell a different story now—one that led, inevitably, back to this room, this woman.
She closed the distance, her hands finding his hips, pulling him against her. The kiss was slower now, deep and searching. It was the kiss they should have had in their twenties. It was full of years.
“Bedroom,” she whispered against his mouth.
It was down a short hall. Her room was tidy, dominated by a large bed with a white duvet. The moonlight filtered through slatted blinds, painting the room in stripes of silver and shadow.
She pushed him onto the bed, his back against the cool linen. She stood over him for a moment, looking down, her expression unreadable. Then she lowered herself, not onto him, but beside him. She twisted, her head going to his groin, her body sliding up so her knees were on either side of his head, her wet panties hovering over his mouth.
“Sixty-nine,” she said, the words muffled against his thigh. “We’ve been thinking it all night. Now we do it.”
She didn’t wait. She took his cock into her mouth, swallowing him down with a practiced, hungry ease. At the same time, she settled her weight, the soaked lace of her panties pressing against his lips. He hooked his thumbs into the sides, peeling the fabric down, and then she was there, open and glistening in the moonlight. The scent of her, musky and deep, filled his head. He licked her, a long, flat stroke from her asshole up through her soaked folds.
Her whole body jerked, a shiver convulsing through her. A low, guttural moan vibrated around his cock. He felt her throat work as she tried to take him deeper, as she tried to moan and suck at the same time.
He feasted on her. He licked and probed, his tongue circling her clit, then plunging into her cunt, then tracing lower, to the tight, wrinkled pucker of her ass. He tasted everything—her arousal, the faint, lingering bitterness from the store, her essence. It was filthy and profound. Her hips began to grind against his face, her movements losing rhythm as pleasure built.
She was sucking him with a desperate, sloppy intensity, her hands clutching his thighs. He could feel the scrape of her teeth, the heavenly pressure of her throat. He let one hand slide up her thigh, over the curve of her ass, and he pushed a finger into her.
Not her cunt. Her ass.
She cried out, the sound dampened by his flesh. She pushed back against his finger, fucking herself on it, her mouth never stopping its urgent work. He added a second finger, stretching her, preparing her. She was tight, impossibly so, but yielding.
“Now,” she gasped, pulling off him with a wet, ragged breath. “Fuck my ass now, Ryan. Here. In my bed. I want to feel you in me when I come.”
They rearranged themselves, a slow, clumsy dance of limbs. She got on her hands and knees, her back arched, her head buried in the pillow. He positioned himself behind her, his cock slick from her mouth. He guided himself to her other hole, the one he’d opened with his fingers. The head pressed against the resistant ring of muscle.
He pushed.
It was a slower, more agonizing penetration than in the store. It was deliberate. She whimpered into the pillow, her body shaking, but she pushed back, meeting him, taking him inch by devastating inch until he was fully seated, buried to the hilt in her ass. They both went still, connected in the most primitive way, breathing through the intense, burning fullness.
“Oh god,” she sobbed. “It’s so deep. Fuck, it’s so deep.”
He began to move. Withdrawing almost completely, then sinking back in, each stroke a long, slow conquest. The sounds were lewd, wet, obscene in the quiet room. Her moans were uninterrupted, a continuous stream of filth and praise.
“Your cock is destroying my ass… yes… just like that… claim it, it’s yours, it was always yours…”
He fucked her with a steady, deepening rhythm, one hand tangled in her red hair, the other gripping the swell of her hip. He watched himself disappear into her, watched her body accept him. The intellectual depth, the restless spirit—it all boiled down to this: the need to be inside this woman, to be so deep she could never get him out.
Her moans climbed in pitch. He slid a hand around her hip, his fingers finding her clit, swollen and hard. He rubbed tight, fast circles.
That was all it took.
Her orgasm ripped through her, a silent, screaming tension that suddenly shattered. Her ass clamped around his cock in rhythmic, vice-like pulses, milking him. The sensation was too much. With a ragged shout, he drove into her one last time and came, his release hot and seemingly endless, flooding the tight channel.
He collapsed over her, both of them slick with sweat, breathing in broken gasps. He softened inside her, but didn’t pull out. They stayed like that, joined, for a long time. The moonlight moved across the floor.
Finally, she shifted, and he slipped out. She rolled onto her back, wincing slightly, and pulled him down to lie beside her. She turned into him, her head on his chest, her leg thrown over his. Her hand rested over his heart.
They didn’t speak. The silent understanding was thicker than any words. Outside, a garbage truck beeped, starting its early morning rounds. The night was almost over.
Her finger traced a pattern on his skin, over a tattoo of a bird in flight. “You’ll have to go back to Washington,” she said, not a question.
“Yes.”
“And this… this madness?”
He turned his head, kissed her sweaty temple. “This is the only thing that’s made sense in twenty-five years.”
She nodded, her eyes closed. A single tear tracked through the dried remains on her cheek, cutting a clean path through the night’s history. She didn’t wipe it away.