Page 6 of Dirty Sweet Cop

I don’t pull out. Can’t. Won’t. I stay locked inside her, forehead pressed to hers, both of us breathing hard, my come leaking around my cock where we’re joined.

And that’s when the fear hits.

“Winny,” I say, and my voice is wrecked. “I need you to know something.”

She blinks up at me, dazed, satisfied, her fingers tracing lazy patterns on my chest.

“I’m terrified,” I admit. The words feel like gravel in my throat. “You’re grieving. You have no one else. And I just—” I swallow hard. “I just took your virginity in my bed after knowing you for less than twenty-four hours. If this is me taking advantage⁠—”

Her hand covers my mouth. Soft. Small. Certain.

“Stop,” she says. “Just...stop. You’re the first thing that’s felt right since they died. So don’t you dare take that away from me.”

I kiss her palm. Then her mouth. Slow, now. Tender in a way I’ve forgotten how to be.

“Okay,” I murmur against her lips. “Okay, baby girl. I’ve got you.”

And I do. For better or worse, I’ve got her.

four

. . .

Winny

Days blur.

I wake up in Clayton’s bed. Fall asleep in Clayton’s arms. The hours between are a strange, suspended reality where the outside world—the empty house, the bills, the grief—exists as something distant and muffled, like traffic noise through thick glass.

His house is a fortress. Deadbolts. Security system with a code I don’t know. Motion-sensor lights that flick on if a raccoon so much as twitches in the backyard. Windows that don’t open more than six inches. At first it felt like being locked in. Now it feels like being kept.

He goes to work. Detective hours—early mornings, late nights, calls that pull him out of bed at 3 AM. But he checks in. Constantly. Texts that arrive with military precision: Eating? at noon. Resting? at two. Miss you at random intervals that make my stomach flip.

I wait for those texts. Count the minutes between them. Tell myself it’s pathetic and do it anyway.

When he’s home, he teaches me things.

Small things. Mundane things. The kind of things my parents would have taught me if they’d had more time. How to change a tire. How to read a mortgage statement. How to check the oil in a car I don’t own yet but will someday, according to Clayton, who’s already researching safe models with good crash ratings.

He does this while I sit on the kitchen counter and he stands between my spread thighs, one hand on my knee, his voice steady and patient. Or while I’m curled in his lap on the couch, his chin resting on top of my head, his chest a solid wall against my back.

He pulls me into his lap like it’s the most natural thing in the world. Like my body was designed to fit against his. Maybe it was. The way I melt into him—every time, without fail—suggests something primal at work. Something older than grief or loneliness or the fact that he’s twice my age and built like he could break me without trying.

Nights are when the careful teacher disappears and the animal takes over.

He fucks me with a thoroughness that borders on devotional. Long, deep strokes that start slow and build to something that leaves me clawing at the headboard, his hand wrapped around my throat—not squeezing, just holding, his thumb pressed to my pulse like he needs to feel my heart beating to believe I’m real.

The praise is filthy. Constant. Take it, baby girl. My cock. My come. Gonna fill you up so good. Wanna see your belly round with my kid someday. Wanna know you’re carrying part of me everywhere you go.

I come so hard I see stars. Sometimes twice in a row. He watches me unravel with dark, hungry eyes and then drags me back to the edge and does it again. By morning I’m sore between my thighs, marked on my neck, addicted to the way his beard burns against my inner thighs when he drops to his knees and eats me out like a man starved.

It’s too good. That’s the problem.

It’s too good to be real. And I’m too broken to trust it.

The thought crystallizes one rainy Tuesday—exactly one month since the accident—while I’m folding his laundry in the bedroom. His t-shirts. His boxers. His socks paired neatly the way he showed me. And it hits me, all at once, like a cold wave:

He’s fixing me.