Chapter 6: The Morning After the Storm
The cold air off the quad bit through my thin jacket. My lungs burned. Each step away from that oak tree, from her, felt like wading through wet cement. The confrontation played on a loop behind my eyes. Alison’s polished calm, her verbal knives sheathed in sympathy. My own trembling rage. It left a metallic taste in my mouth, like I’d bitten my own tongue.
I didn’t go home. My feet, acting on a perverse homing signal, carried me back to the one place I swore I wouldn’t go. The stairs to Harry’s apartment smelled of the same stale beer, the same mildew. Our ghosts were probably still fucking on the landing. I pushed the unlocked door open. The silence inside was a physical weight.
He was right where I’d left him, but awake now. Sitting on the edge of the bed, his head in his hands. The crumpled note was gone. My text to Alison glowed, unanswered, on his phone screen beside him. He’d seen it.
He looked up. His eyes were red-rimmed, desperate. “Where did you go?”
The truth felt like a weapon. I let it hang between us. “I saw her.”
He flinched as if struck. He stood, his body tensed for a fight, for flight. “Nikki—”
“She’s sorry.” I laughed, the sound brittle and sharp. “Can you believe that? She’s sorry. She said it was a mistake. That she never meant to hurt me. That she just got caught up in the… the game of you.”
His face drained of color. “Don’t.”
“The game of you,” I repeated, letting the words drip. “That’s what I was, right? The championship girlfriend. The loyal heart. And she was the forbidden thrill. The dirty secret. Was it a good game, Harry? Did you win?”
He crossed the room in two heartbeats. His hands grabbed my shoulders, not to shake me, but to hold me up, to anchor himself. “It was never a game with you. It was never a game.”
“It was all a game!” I screamed into his face. “And I lost! We both lost! She’s the only one who fucking won, and she’s standing out there under a tree telling me she’s sorry!”
The dam broke. Sobs I didn’t know I had left ripped out of me, ugly and wrenching. I beat my fists against his chest, a weak, pathetic rhythm. He absorbed the blows, his arms wrapping around me, trapping me against him. I hated the solid warmth of him. I hated how my body instinctively softened into the cage of his embrace.
“I’ll fix it,” he murmured into my hair, a broken record. “I’ll make it stop.”
“You can’t.” The words were muffled against his shirt. “She’s in the walls. You put her there.”
He pulled back, just enough to look at me. His thumbs brushed the tears from my cheeks. His gaze was fierce, unblinking. “Then I’ll burn the whole house down.”
He kissed me. It was a kiss of annihilation. There was no tenderness, only a claiming that bordered on violence. His tongue pushed past my lips, tasting my tears, my anger. I kissed him back with equal ferocity, my fingers tangling in his hair, pulling. It was a battle with no victor, only mutual destruction.
He walked me backward, our mouths still locked, until my knees hit the edge of the bed. We fell onto the rumpled sheets. The scent of us, from before, was everywhere. It was cloying. It was home. His hands were under my shirt, pushing it up, his palms rough on my ribs. He broke the kiss to yank it over my head.
“I need to see you,” he growled, his eyes drinking in my bare skin. “All of you.”
He made quick, brutal work of the rest of my clothes. My jeans, my underwear, were tossed to the floor. He stood back for a moment, just looking, his chest heaving. The morning light cut across his torso, highlighting the scratches I’d left earlier. He looked like a ruined angel.
Then he was on me. His mouth was hot and demanding on my breasts, sucking one nipple deep, biting just shy of pain. His hand slid between my legs, his fingers parting me. I was already wet, a traitorous, physiological surrender. He groaned, pushing two fingers inside me, curling them.
“You’re still so fucking tight for me,” he breathed against my skin. “Even now. Even after everything.”
He pumped his fingers, his thumb finding my clit, circling it with a ruthless pressure. Pleasure, sharp and unwanted, jagged up my spine. I arched off the bed, a gasp torn from my throat.
“That’s it,” he whispered, his lips at my ear. “Come on my fingers. Let me feel you.”
He crooked his fingers just right, stroking that deep, hidden spot. The orgasm was sudden and vicious, a seizure that rolled through my hips. I cried out, my body clamping around his hand. He watched me come, his eyes dark with a possessive hunger.
Before the last tremor faded, he was moving. He shoved his sweatpants down, his cock springing free, thick and already leaking. He didn’t reach for a condom. The omission was deliberate, a terrifying intimacy.
He grabbed my hips, flipping me onto my stomach. He pulled me up onto my knees, my face pressed into his pillow. He positioned himself behind me, the blunt head of his cock nudging at my entrance, smearing through the wetness.
“Tell me you want it,” he demanded, his voice rough. His hand came down on my ass, a sharp, stinging slap. The shock of it made me gasp. “Tell me.”
“I want it,” I heard myself say, the words barely audible.
“Louder.”
“I want it!” I snarled into the pillow.
He drove into me. One deep, brutal thrust that buried him to the hilt. The stretch was immense, raw. I screamed, the sound swallowed by the fabric. He didn’t pause. He set a relentless, driving pace, each slam of his hips jolting me forward. His balls slapped against my skin. The sound was obscene.
One of his hands fisted in my hair, pulling my head back. The other wrapped around my throat, not squeezing, just holding, a dominant claim. “This is mine,” he chanted, his breath hot on my neck. “This tight, wet cunt is mine. You come on my cock, Nikki. You come on it like the fucking addict you are.”
I was. God help me, I was. The pain, the vulgar possession, the sheer physical domination of it fused into a white-hot wire of pleasure. My body was betraying me at a cellular level. Another climax, darker and deeper than the first, began to coil in my gut. My inner muscles fluttered around him, trying to pull him deeper.
“Feel that?” he grunted, pounding into me. “Feel how you suck me in? You were made for this. For me.”
His words pushed me over the edge. I came with a strangled sob, my vision spotting, my body convulsing around his cock. The intense, rhythmic clenching of my orgasm tore his own release from him. With a ragged roar, he slammed into me one final time and held there, pulsing. I felt the hot, sudden flood of his cum filling me, marking me from the inside.
We collapsed together, a tangled, sweaty heap. He was still inside me, still slowly softening. His arms wrapped around me, holding me close. We lay there in silence, the only sound our ragged breathing. The reality of what we’d just done—no barrier, his come leaking out of me onto his sheets—settled over us like ash.
His hand splayed on my lower stomach, over the place he’d just filled. His lips brushed my shoulder.
“Marry me,” he said again, his voice quiet, stripped bare. “After the championship. Marry me.”
The first time he’d said it, it was a desperate fantasy. Now, in the brutal, messy aftermath, it felt like a sentence. A life sentence. Lying there, filth-soaked and hollowed out, the fungal network from Spencer’s gallery pulsed behind my eyelids. I was a spore now, attached to the rotten, beautiful host. There was no separating without destroying both.
I didn’t say yes. I didn’t say no. I reached back, my fingers finding his where they lay on my stomach. I laced my fingers through his. A shudder went through him. He buried his face in the nape of my neck, and I felt the wet heat of his tears against my skin.
Outside, the world went on. The championship loomed. Alison’s text was a silent scream in my discarded phone. But in that room, for that moment, we were just two ruins holding each other up, waiting for the next tremor to bring it all down for good.
His tears dried into a cool salt patch on my skin. The silence stretched, a taut wire between his question and my withheld answer. My fingers still laced with his were the only reply I could give.
Outside, a car alarm wailed then choked into silence. The ordinary world was reassembling itself, brick by brick. I carefully disentangled myself from his limbs, the loss of his body heat immediate and shocking.
His cum trickled down my inner thigh as I stood. The physical evidence felt more binding than any ring. I walked naked to the bathroom, my reflection in the mirror a stranger’s—purple hair wild, eyes hollow, his bite marks flowering on my shoulder.
I turned the shower knob hard. Steam billowed, fogging the glass and the stranger’s face. I stepped under the scalding spray, flinching as water hit the tender places. It stung the scratches on my back.
The bathroom door clicked open. He filled the doorway, a silhouette carved from regret and want. He watched me through the fogged glass, a ghost at the edge of a storm.
“You didn’t answer,” he said. His voice was raw from shouting, from crying.
“What would you like me to say, Harry?” I asked, not turning. I scrubbed at my skin with a loofah until it bloomed pink.
“Say yes.” The glass door slid open. Steam rolled out. He stepped in, the space shrinking to the size of a coffin. Water plastered his curls to his forehead. “Or say no. Just say something real.”
I finally looked at him. Water streamed down the planes of his chest, over the marks I’d made. “I saw her face this morning. It was clean. There was no guilt on it. Just… pity.”
He winced. “Don’t.”
“Why? Because it reminds you that she’s not the villain in her own story? That she just took what you offered?” I shoved his chest. It was like shoving a wall. “She pities me. She thinks I’m the sad girl who can’t let go of a boy who shit on her.”
His hand shot out, gripping my wrist under the blistering water. “I know what I did. It’s etched into my fucking spine every time I look at you.”
“Then stop asking me for things!” My shout echoed off the tiles. “Stop asking for my future when you poisoned my past!”
He released my wrist. His gaze dropped, tracing the path of water between my breasts, down my stomach. His cock, already half-hard, stirred against his thigh. The sight was a punch to my gut. My body recognized his, always, despite the ruin.
“I’m not asking,” he murmured. He dropped to his knees on the hard tub floor. The water cascaded over his shoulders. “I’m begging.”
He put his mouth on me right there, under the spray. His tongue was a hot, relentless counterpoint to the stinging water. He licked into me, drinking the traces of himself from my body. I gasped, my hands fumbling against the slick tile wall.
“I’m filthy,” I whispered, looking down at the crown of his head.
“You’re perfect,” he growled against my flesh. His words vibrated through me. “You taste like us. Like home.”
He worked me with a singular, devastating focus. His tongue circled my clit, then plunged deep, fucking me with it. His thumbs hooked around my thighs, spreading me wider for his mouth. The dual sensations—the scorching water on my shoulders, his scorching mouth between my legs—short-circuited my thoughts.
My knees buckled. He held me up, his grip iron. The orgasm coiled, low and deep, then snapped. I came with a sharp cry, my hips jerking against his face. He didn’t let up, sucking and licking through the tremors until I was shuddering, oversensitive.
He rose, water sluicing down his body. He was fully hard now, his cock jutting toward me. He backed me against the cold tile, the contrast shocking. He lifted me, my legs wrapping around his waist.
“Look at me,” he demanded.
I forced my eyes open. His were the green of a storm-churned sea.
He pushed inside me in one slow, inexorable stroke. The stretch was breathtaking. My head thudded back against the tile. The water beat down on us, a chaotic drumming on our skin.
“This,” he grunted, starting a deep, rhythmic grind. “This is what’s real. This connection. This heat. Not her pity. Not her fucking words.”
He fucked me with a purposeful, driving intensity. Each thrust was a punctuation mark. Mine. Here. Now. The suction of our wet skin made slick, obscene sounds. My breasts slid against his slick chest. He bent his head, capturing my nipple in his mouth, biting down.
The pain was a bright flare. I moaned, my nails digging into the muscles of his back. I could feel every ridge of him inside me, a perfect, brutal fit.
“You feel that?” he panted against my skin. “You feel how deep I am? Tell me you feel it.”
“I feel it,” I gasped. The admission was a surrender.
“Who do you belong to?”
I was silent, biting my lip. He slammed into me harder, shifting the angle. The head of his cock brushed a spot that made my vision blur.
“Say it!” he roared, the sound muffled by the shower spray.
“You!” I screamed it, the word torn from me. “I belong to you, you bastard!”
A triumphant, broken sound escaped him. He drove into me faster, his control shattering. The tile was cold and unyielding against my back. His body was a furnace. I was being split apart, remade. Another climax began, a deep tectonic shift.
“Come with me,” he pleaded, his rhythm becoming frantic, erratic. “Come on my cock, baby. Please.”
That ‘please’ undid me. It was the crack in his armor, the little boy lost in the wreckage. My orgasm erupted, a silent, convulsing wave that clenched around him, pulling him deeper. He shouted, a raw, guttural sound, and poured himself into me. The hot pulses seemed endless.
He held me there, pinned between his body and the wall, as we both shuddered. The water began to run cool. We were a sculpture of spent passion, of salt and steam and regret.
He finally lowered me. My legs almost gave out. He steadied me, his hands gentle now on my hips. He turned off the water. The silence was deafening.
He reached for a towel, wrapping it around me first before taking one for himself. We didn’t speak. We dried off in the humid silence, avoiding each other’s eyes. The room was a sauna of our shared failure.
Back in the bedroom, I pulled on one of his t-shirts. It smelled like him. Like us. He pulled on a pair of shorts, then sat on the edge of the bed, staring at his hands. My phone, discarded on the floor, lit up.
It wasn’t Alison this time. It was a calendar alert.
Championship Banquet - 7 PM - Mandatory for players & guests.
He saw me looking. “It’s tonight.”
“I know,” I said flatly.
“You’re my guest.”
It wasn’t a question. I looked at him, at the desperate hope warring with the guilt in his eyes. It would be a room full of people. Boosters, teammates, their polished dates. Alison would likely be there, hanging on the arm of some fraternity president.
It was the last place on earth I wanted to be.
He stood and walked to his closet. He pulled out a garment bag, unzipping it with a sharp sound. Inside was a dress. A simple, backless slip of black silk. Expensive. It was my size.
“I bought it for you,” he said, his voice quiet. “Weeks ago. Before… everything. I was going to ask you to the banquet properly.”
I touched the fabric. It was cool and liquid under my fingers. A peace offering. A bribe. A costume.
“Put it on,” he said. It wasn’t a command, but a plea. “Come with me. Let them see. Let her see.”
The fungal network in my mind pulsed, those invisible threads of connection and decay. This was another spore, another node. To go was to accept the infection, to become part of the public display. To refuse was to break the fragile, rotten thing holding us together.
I looked from the dress to his face. I saw the championship, his last chance at a legacy before graduation. I saw the hollow man beneath the star athlete. I saw the boy who’d held my hair back when I was sick, and the man who fucked me raw in a stairwell to prove a point.
The tremor was here. I could either fall or build on unstable ground.
“Okay,” I said, the word leaving my mouth like a stone dropping into a well.
The relief on his face was profound, and it looked so much like love it made my chest ache. He crossed the room and kissed me, soft and chaste. A promise.
But as he turned to get ready, my eyes drifted back to my silent phone. Another text had appeared, previewed on the lock screen.
Unknown: Can’t wait to see what you wear tonight. I’ll be wearing the necklace he gave me. The little soccer ball charm. Remember?
The room tilted. The ground didn’t just tremble. It opened up beneath me. I remembered that necklace. A silly, cheap thing he’d bought from a kiosk at the mall our sophomore year. He’d said he lost it.
I slid the phone into my pocket, the screen against my thigh like a shard of ice. I looked at the black dress hanging from his closet door. It wasn’t just a dress anymore. It was a shroud. And I had just agreed to put it on.
The silk of the dress felt like a second skin, cool and accusing. It whispered against my thighs as I moved, a ghost of the girl who might have worn it weeks ago, before the world cracked. I stood before his foggy bathroom mirror, the black fabric clinging to curves that felt like someone else’s. My reflection was a stranger with hollow eyes and purple hair, a curated doll for a war I hadn’t agreed to fight.
Harry watched from the doorway, his gaze a physical weight. He was already in his tux, the crisp black and white making him look like a statue of a man I used to know. “You look…” he began, but the sentence died. His throat worked. “Incredible” wouldn’t fit. “Beautiful” was a landmine.
“I look like the guest of honor at a funeral,” I said, my voice flat. My fingers traced the neckline, where the necklace he’d given Alison would sit.
He flinched. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what? Don’t say it? If I don’t say it, does it stop being true?” I turned to face him. The dress swirled, a dark vortex. “She’ll be wearing it. She told me.”
He crossed the room in three strides, his hands coming up to cup my face. They were warm. They were the hands that had held my hips in the shower. “Look at me. Right now, she is nothing. You are everything. This night is about us walking in there together. Whole.”
The lie was so pretty, so fragile. I could see the panic in the green depths of his eyes. He was trying to convince himself. I said nothing. My silence was my weapon, my shield.
The ride to the hotel was a vacuum. The car’s interior was a capsule of chilled air and strained breathing. Streetlights strobed across his profile, illuminating the tight set of his jaw. His knuckles were white on the steering wheel. I kept my phone in my clutch, a tiny, cold bomb.
“The team… they’ve been asking about you,” he said, just to fill the silence.
“I bet they have.”
“Nikki.” His voice was a warning.
“What, Harry? What do you want me to say? That I’m excited to smile next to you while your bros slap your back? That I can’t wait to see if she flaunts that cheap charm over the champagne table?” The words spilled out, sharp and fast. “You want me to play my part. I’m wearing the fucking dress.”
He slammed his palm against the steering wheel. The car swerved slightly before he corrected it. “I am trying! What more do you want from me? Blood?”
“I want the last six months back!” I shouted, the sound tearing the quiet apart. “I want to not feel like I’m crawling out of my own skin! I want to not wonder, every time you touch me, if your hands learned that on her!”
He pulled the car over with a violent jerk, tires screeching against the curb in a dark, empty stretch of the riverfront park. The engine idled, a low growl. The city lights shimmered on the black water beyond.
For a long moment, he just stared straight ahead, breathing hard. Then he turned to me. The look in his eyes was feral, unhinged. “You think I think about her when I touch you?” His laugh was a bitter, broken thing. “When I’m inside you, Nikki, I forget my own goddamn name. She is static. You are the only signal I get.”
He unbuckled his seatbelt with a sharp click. Then he unbuckled mine. His movements were precise, dangerous. “You want to know what I think about?”
He didn’t wait for an answer. He grabbed the hem of the expensive black silk dress and pushed it up my thighs, bunching it around my waist. The cool leather of the seat met my bare skin. I gasped.
“I think about this,” he hissed, his fingers hooking into the sides of my thong and yanking them down to my knees. The fabric tore. The sound was obscenely loud. “I think about how wet you get for me. Every. Single. Time.”
He unzipped his trousers, freeing himself. He was already fully hard, jutting angrily into the dim light. He didn’t touch me to prepare, didn’t kiss me. He just grabbed my hips and pulled me toward him, sliding me across the smooth leather until I was at the edge of the seat.
“Look at me,” he commanded, his voice gravel.
I looked. His eyes held mine, a challenge and a plea fused into one.
He notched himself at my entrance. I was slick, my body betraying me again, responding to the fury and the raw need pouring off him. He pushed in, a slow, inexorable invasion that made my breath hitch. The stretch was immense, a filling so complete it blurred the edges of my anger.
“This,” he groaned, seating himself fully inside me. “This is what I think about. This perfect, tight heat. This cunt that grips me like it was made for me.” He began to move, a deep, rolling thrust that rubbed against something profound. “Do you feel her? Is she here?”
“No,” I whispered, the fight draining out of me, replaced by a dark, pooling want.
“Say it again.”
“No. She’s not here.” It was the truth. In this cramped, dark space, there was only the scent of his cologne and my arousal, the sound of our ragged breathing, the sight of his tuxedo shirt straining with each movement.
“Whose is it?” He pulled almost all the way out, then slammed back in. The car rocked.
“Yours.” The word was a surrender.
“Damn right.” His pace quickened, becoming harder, more frantic. One hand braced against the dashboard, the other gripped my hip hard enough to bruise. “I’m going to fuck you so full of me, you’ll taste it tomorrow. You’ll walk into that room and everyone will know. They’ll look at you and they’ll know I was here.”
His filthy words, the possessive brutality of his thrusts, the illicit thrill of the public space—it coalesced into a lightning strike of pleasure. I came suddenly, a silent, seizing climax that clenched around him, my back arching off the leather seat. A choked cry escaped my lips.
The feel of my internal spasms triggered his own end. With a guttural shout, he drove deep and held, his body rigid. I felt the hot, pulsing release of him filling me, claim and punishment in one. He collapsed forward, his forehead resting on my shoulder, his body shuddering.
We stayed like that, joined in the quiet dark, for a long minute. The only sound was the river sliding by.