Page 63 of Bonds of Shame, Bonds of Lust

"Sí." He fumbled for it, tore the packet with his teeth, handed it to me. I rolled it onto him, too slow, my hands not steady, every second I spent on it a second he wasn't in me.

I pushed my shorts down one leg and lowered myself onto him.

He slid in, and it was good, it was so good, and I rode him with the sun on my neck and the blanket under my one bare knee and my bare skin open to anyone who looked into the trees. And at the thought of being looked at, being seen, being known, I came harder than I had the first time. He gasped and went with me.

And while the last of it was still going through me, I heard them again.

Panting. Shoes on dirt. Closer this time, and more than one.

"Ricardo." My voice was clear now, but the thrill and fear rose together again. That I could get caught should terrify me. I could be seen naked in public. My breath caught. "Off. Let me up," I whispered.

He didn't let go.

His hands closed around my hips and held them, and he was still inside me, and he didn't move. The grip wasn't painful. It wasn't negotiable.

"Ricardo." I was almost panting, I could feel myself clench on his cock. "Let me off." My arms pushed against him as my pussy clenched harder to stay.

"No, no. It's okay. They can't see you."

I could see them through the trees, two figures, closing. I pushed at his hands and his hands stayed. He held me down on him with a strength I'd never had a reason to test before, and he wasn't laughing now, and he wasn't afraid, and he was watching my face. Whatever was happening on my face, he liked it. The light had gone glassy in his eyes, the look of a man who'd found the exact thing he came for and didn't intend to give it up one second early.

The runners were thirty feet out. Twenty. He let go.

I rolled off him onto the blanket, half-naked, scrambling for my shorts, and got them up over my hips as the first runner came around the bend. A woman, another behind her. The first one's head turned a fraction toward the trees as she passed. She faced front again. Then her head came back around, her eyes a little wider.

She kept running.

The crunch of her shoes took a long time to fade.

Ricardo lay there on the blanket with his cock softening in the condom, smiling up at the canopy.

I sat up and pulled the waistband the rest of the way over the useless liner and tried to make my hands work and couldn't, quite. My heart was going in a way that had nothing to do with running. He'd held me. I'd said off, and he'd held me anyway, two seconds, in which the woman might have turned all the way around, and I'd almost come again just at the thought.

"You held me," I said, flat.

"I was excited." He said it easily, like he said everything. "It was so good, Lacey. And you looked amazing, electric, and I felt you milk me!"

I looked at him and tried to find the line between a man too carried away to hear me and a man who'd heard me and decided not to listen. Or who thought I didn't mean it. Even now the idea that I might have been seen acting like… a slut, I heard the voice whisper in my mind and it thrilled me. Ricardo's face gave me nothing to convict him with. He looked young, lit up, a little lost in it, and that was almost worse, because I couldn't tell whether the holding had been an accident of his excitement or the point of it. Whether he'd wanted me caught. At least he'd let go in time.

He started pulling his shorts up slowly, the way a man does when he's hoping a third runner might still come around the bend.

"You're really going to make me run back alone?"

"I don't feel like running this second." He stretched out on the blanket. "How can you run, after that?"

I left him there.

I jogged back toward the lot. The movement was wrong against me, swollen and wet, every stride a small report of what had happened. The fabric rubbed where his mouth had been and where his fingers had been and where the rest of him had been five minutes ago.

What am I doing? What am I doing?

But it had felt good. It had felt better than anything had felt in a long time. I was finally getting some of what everyone else seemed to have been getting all along, what women in books had, what women who weren't me had had since they were twenty-two.

And it was dangerous. Not the abstract kind. The kind with a man's hands on my hips that didn't let go when I said to. I should be angry. I tried to be angry. That was dangerous. We could have been seen.

But I loved it. That was the part I couldn't get around.

He hadn't stopped when I told him. It kept looping without any emotional effect. That was wrong, surely.