Page 77 of Theta

"Fucking hell."

A shuddery sigh. "The day I met Anselm? The nightmare I kept having was seeing Jimmy. After the shooting was over, and my parents' bodies were pulled off of me, it took a while for emergency services to sort through the chaos, y'know? So for I don't know how long, I was alone, sitting there with my parents' bodies, their heads covered by random hoodies. And Jimmy and his parents, they were…oh, fifty feet away from me. Right by the escalator. His mom tried to hide him behind a big potted fern. The shooter fired at a downward angle, and the bullet went through her forehead, out the back of her neck, and into Jimmy. I thought he was dead. I was staring at him. His eyes were open. He wasn't blinking. I thought he was dead…and then he blinked. Gasped. Mom—Selah—saw my reaction and went to help him. Everyone thought he was dead." She frowns, shakes her head. “That’s why I was under the bed. And then I heard something—I wasn't sure what. A sound that I knew wasn't normal. So I shut off my flashlight and lay under the bed, listening. I heard Mom come home. I heard her talking. I couldn’t figure out who she could be talking to, since our neighbor would have been asleep by then. Then she stopped talking. I remember she popped her head in." Story swallows hard. "I pretended to be asleep when she peeked under my bed. I don't know why. Maybe if I'd let her know I was awake…?" she shrugs. "I think about that a lot. How things could've been different. I almost fell asleep for real. But then I heard a different noise. Men’s voices. A scuffle. Fighting. Mom screamed. But she was angry, not hurt. I wanted to go help her, but I didn't. I couldn't. I…I stayed hidden under the bed. They took her, and I never left my hiding place. Not until a lot later. I heard more steps. They came closer and closer, and I was so scared it was whoever had taken Mom. But then he pulled up the blanket and I saw his face, and his eyes. It was his eyes that got me to come out."

A long pause.

"Some of it is hazy. A lot, actually. It was a lot of walking and driving and waiting. What I remember the most vividly is walking through a cold dark forest with Anselm. And then there was this warehouse—or an industrial area, since there were several warehouses, and Anselm somehow knew which one Mom was in—Lear, obviously. He gave me a gun—or was it a knife? I was so scared and cold and tired and confused that I don’t remember. You'd think I would, but I don't. It was just this cold, hard thing he put in my hands. What I remember is he had me hide in this little cubby where a stack of old pallets were leaning against the metal outside wall of a warehouse. There was smelly trash and stuff nearby, but where I was hiding was pretty clean. And being a small space, it was fairly warm. He pulled something in front of the opening to hide me. But there was this gap. I could see the other warehouse. The door. The guard standing outside of it. I saw Anselm go over there, and to this day, my starkest memory is of how he was a ghost in the darkness. He wasn't even a shadow. He was part of the darkness. I watched him kill the guard with a knife. It was far enough away and dark, so it wasn’t, like, graphic, but I could see enough to know what was happening."

"Jesus. Hell of a thing for a seven-year-old to witness."

"What choice was there? Mom had been kidnapped because he used her house to patch up a wound. Was he supposed to leave me alone in that empty house? Leave me alone in a cold car in the middle of a forest, miles away from where he was, while he rescued Mom? The only thing he could do was bring me with him." She shrugs, shakes her head. "He did the only thing he could do, and he did everything he could to protect me and minimize my exposure."

"You know I’m not faulting Anselm, Story."

"No, I know. But I get defensive about that. About him." She looks at me, then. "My need to feel safe is a big deal, Killy. It's not easy for me to feel safe. I have a heightened awareness of danger. I've known death and danger as a near constant my whole life. I mean, the only peace I've ever had are the years after Mom met Dad and we became a family up until I finished med school."

"I thought nursing was a separate career path from being a doctor.”

She smiles. "It is. I started out wanting to be an MD, and actually went a good ways toward it. But I had a long conversation with one of my teachers, who later became my mentor. She was a nurse practitioner. And that's a whole different thing. You know there are levels of nurses, right?" I nod, and she continues. "It's basically the apex of the nursing path, which is focused on patient care. Nurses are the boots on the ground. Doctors are focused on diagnosis, surgery, and discerning the correct method of care—the generals and other officers, to continue the military metaphor. I realized that I didn’t want to diagnose and all that, and I really didn’t want to waste time with rotations through all the departments when I knew what I wanted to do—take care of patients." She smiles. "So when I say med school, I'm using it as a general term because I did go through med school, I just only completed the pre-clinical phase as an actual MD student. That's when I switched…although switched is a nicer term for how it actually worked out." She laughs. "What I'm saying is, my path was dumb. I went in thinking I wanted to be a doc. The white coat in the ER, ruling my domain and saving lives like a boss. The credits don’t transfer neatly, but I got there. I got my nursing license and started in the ER, and I've been taking classes on the side to get my DNP—Doctor of Nursing Practice.”

Story puts one clamshell inside the other, closes the pair, and then spins in place, looking for somewhere out of the way to put them, and settles on shoving them under the lone chair. That done, she squirts hand sanitizer on her hands and rubs it in, tosses the bottle to me so I can do the same.

"I'm done talking about all that for now," she says to me, swaying toward me with a sultry shift of her hips, peeling out of her sports bra and shimmying out of her panties. "And you, Killian Harris, are wearing far too many clothes."

14

Time Flies When You’re Having Fun?

Killian gazes up at me with an expression of such reverence that it's hard to breathe. For the first moment or so, his eyes stay fixed on mine, seeking and searching. And then his gaze flicks over my face and explores the column of my throat and the swell of my breasts, then the flatland of my belly and the bell of my hips, and then the shadowed V of my pussy, where it lingers.

"So fucking…perfect," he murmurs, the pause brief but telling, as if he hunted for a better word and came up short. He reaches for me. "Tell me you're mine," he whispers.

He's still in his jeans, socks, and shoes, shirtless, his zipper open. His cock bulges in the opening, pressing against his underwear, the head outlined against the thin fabric.

I kneel at his feet and untie his shoes, slip them off, tug away his socks. Hold his eyes, unblinking and silent. Tug at his pantlegs. He lifts his ass off the bed, and I slide his jeans down, toss them aside. Now he’s in just his underwear, and my need for him is growing exponentially as I bare more and more of his body.

I curl my fingers in the elastic of his underwear and slip them down, intentionally allowing the waistband to catch at the tip of his cock, stretching it away from his body. I nibble on my lower lip in anticipation, and then let his cock go free to slap against his belly. His abs tighten as I pull his underwear off, and now he's finally naked with me, bared for me.

I slide my hands up his thighs, my eyes greedily raking over his body, taking in the hard, sharp-carved blocks of his rippling abs, the thick power of his arms, the heavy slabs of his chest. As I reach my feet, standing between his wide-spread thighs, Killian wraps his hands around my waist, above my hips and beneath my ribs, and pulls me toward him.

I catch up against him, and with me standing and him sitting on the edge of the bed, we're almost perfectly lined up, the hot length of his shaft pressed against the seam of my pussy, the tip of his cock gently waving at my navel with his slow, deep, controlled breaths. "Hi," I whisper. “You’re mine.”

“Not what I said, but I’ll take it.” His eyes are rife with need, void of levity or humor or softness. "I fucking need you, Story."

I pull him to me, and he buries his face between my breasts, and then rests the rough stubble of his chin on my breastbone and stares up at me; I gaze down at him, my hands around the back of his head. "So take me."

He surges to his feet, taking me upward as he stands; I cling to his shoulders with my arms and lock my legs around his waist, biting his lower lip hard enough to elicit a soft grunt of surprised pain from him. Two short steps take us across the room, and now my back is pinned to the door, his hands cupped under my ass. His mouth slashes across mine, and he snarls wordlessly, a sound of raw, ragged, erotic arousal. His mouth tilts, and his tongue stabs between my lips, demanding I open for him. I do, eagerly, and suck his tongue into my mouth and slither mine over his, cup the back of his head with one hand and reach between our bodies with the other, clutching his thick hard cock.

I ache, my pussy pulsing with need, dripping with arousal. Killy tips his hips toward me, sliding his length through my slit.

"So fucking wet for me," he whispers.

"Yes," I answer, meeting the pivot of his hips with one of my own. "You make me wet, Killy. Fucking take me. Please, Killy."

He growls, a low rattling of his chest, and sets me on my feet, drops to his knees. “Not yet." Before I can so much as take a breath, his mouth is fused to my pussy and his tongue is battering at my clit with quick, light, fast flicks that take me from wet and hot and pulsing with need to trembling on the cusp of orgasm within a few very literal seconds. "Come for me first."

I cry out through gritted teeth, hyperaware that the window is open and there are people within earshot. "Killy!" I keen, panting, rocking into his mouth. "Ohmyfuckinggod—Killy. Oh god. Oh god."

I struggle to keep my voice down as he assaults me with his tongue, speeding me toward the cliff and then slowing, again and again, for long minutes of agonizing ecstasy, until I'm helplessly wild with the spasming inferno of a long-denied climax, the madness of need totally subsuming my mind. "Killy, fucking god. Please. I need you." I pull him up by his ears until he stands, caging me against the door with his hard body. His cock is a ramrod between us, bobbing with his breathing, and I wrap my fingers around him, plunge them down his length, grinning savagely as he hisses his pleasure at my touch.