Page 10 of Baby for My Ex’s Dad

Her chest heaves at the thought. But she keeps the gag.

So, I torment her with it, tooling the toy around her wet pussyf until she trembles. Then I settle between her thighs once more, bring her to the edge with my mouth and slide the toy into her sweet pussy. I bring her back to the edge and then pause to ask, “Are you still thinking of the ice geese now?”

Her brows lift in question, and I flick my tongue over her clit, making her shake for me again. She grinds forward, a silent plea for more.

“Patience,” I murmur against her.

She communicates, with a single sustained glare, precisely where I may file my patience.

When I finally let her come, she falls hard and long, and I keep her there through all of it, working her through the first and straight into a second, because the first one was mine and the second is hers. She comes apart magnificently, nothing polite in it, nothing managed, none of the ballroom competence anywhere in sight. Just her, wrecked and shaking, hair defeated, wrists twisting in silk, and the sight of it is the finest thing the world has shown me in years.

I pull the knot loose with one hand and free the gag with the other. Her arms come down around my neck before I can ask whether she wants them free, which answers the question, and I take her again while she’s still shaking, slow this time, face to face.

Her wrists end up pinned in one of my hands above her head because she pressed them into my palm herself and left them there.

Her body is hot and soft, and fucking her is like sinking into Heaven itself. She fucks like she communicates—like she’s been dying to do it, but no one’s ever let her. When I release her hands, her fingernails claw down my back while her legs wrap around my waist. It’s as though every part of her needs every part of me.

This woman’s a fucking gift someone else forgot to unwrap.

What finishes me is nothing athletic. She looks at me. That’ffs the entirety of it. Those unsettlingly green eyes open, watching my face come apart the way I watched hers, greedy for it, and I swear as I erupt, because I feel her erupt, too.

My mind takes a long time to reassemble. The city hum comes back first, then the weight of no sleep threatens to sink me, then the fact of her, warm along my side, real, still catching her breath.

She doesn’t try to talk again. That surprises me, and I’ve been keeping count of tonight’s surprises, and the tally is now high enough to constitute a trend. Instead, she lies against my side with her cheek on my chest, one fingertip tracing the ink across my shoulder, following the lines of the star without asking what they mean.

She has questions. I can hear her not asking them. But her breathing goes long and slow anyway. It catches once, rebalances, and then deepens. Against my chest, most of the way gone, she mumbles something that ends in “geese.”

I lie in the dark with a stranger’s weight on my chest and my hand resting on her back, rising and falling with her breath, and I stay awake a while longer for no reason.

Outside the glass, the city goes on glittering, all of it unaware, and for one more night, nobody in it knows I’m home.

Nobody but my idiot son.

5

THEA

Sneaking out of a hotel room is a project, and projects have phases.

Phase one is inventory, conducted flat on my back at 3:47 a.m. by the glow of a clock I can’t turn off. Dress? On the floor by the sofa, poor thing. Heels? One visible, one missing in action. Underwear? Location unknown. There comes a point in every operation when you accept your losses and proceed with the assets you have.

Phase two is extraction, and the complication there is that my legs don’t work. I discover this on my first attempt to leave the bed, when I slide out from under a heavy arm and stand, and my knees offer the structural integrity of warm frosting.

I grip the nightstand and wait out the wobble. My whole body is one long ache with a satisfied expression, and my wrists hold a faint silk-burn that flares hot in my face when I look at it.

I have some memories to process.

And I’ll be processing them for a business quarter.

Behind me, Max sleeps on his back, one arm now flung across the space I vacated, breathing evenly. Asleep, with his pale eyes closed and the watchfulness switched off, he looks less like a threat and more like a man.

Silver stubble. One old scar shining faint at his ribs where the city light touches it. The thing stands out among the black ink around it, a small oasis. Something in my chest wobbles worse than my knees do, and I stand there in the dark, holding my shoes, waiting for that to pass, too.

This is why I leave. Right there. That wobble is exactly why.

Klaus never noticed that I hate sleeping next to people. Not the activity before the sleeping. The sleeping. Every cough, every turn, every blanket negotiation snaps me awake, and by morning I’m a wrung-out rag in a more-desperate-than-usual-for-caffeine kind of way.

I like my own bed, my own pillow with the dent in the correct place, my cat annexing his quarter of the mattress despite composing one percent of its population. Waking up next to another human is a level of intimacy I didn’t prepare for tonight, and it takes me some preparation to do it comfortably. Or comfortable-adjacent.