Total pages in book: 81
Estimated words: 75833 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 303(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75833 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 303(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
The room smelled of sex and with every passing second I was wanting her more.
“Tired?” I asked as she yawned.
She nodded with a soft smile. “Yeah, I have to work in a few hours too.”
“I’ll walk you to your room.”
“It’s the same building,” she explained, faintly amused. “I’m pretty sure I can make it safely.”
“Not the point,” I replied and she understood. It had been a long time since I found a woman who wasn’t trying to have a push and pull of a power play or one that wanted to be treated like some princess. She had a spark to be on her own and yet this trust in me to submit. It was what every man in my world craved.
We didn’t talk in the hall. We didn’t have to. She turned her face up once toward the fluorescent lights like she was steadying herself; I slid my hand to the small of her back and her breath evened out the rest of the way.
At the her room door, she looked up at me with that open-water gaze. There was a small bruise blooming where my mouth had been at her throat. I wanted it darker. I wanted the memories etched in her body, the kind that hides under fabric and aches when she reaches for a shelf and makes her think of me all day.
“You’ll ride with me again,” I told her. Not a question. “Tomorrow after work.”
“Yes,” she said, as simple as an agreement can be.
“And you’ll tell me if something in this place tries to bite,” I added reminding her of our first encounter.
A corner of her mouth lifted. “Which part of ‘no other man’ do you think I didn’t hear?” Then she winked at me as if she didn’t just lose her virginity. “Plus, I think I like the way you bite enough to let you have another taste.”
Oh this woman was a temptation like no other.
I let out the kind of low sound that’s as close as I come to a laugh when the world’s looking. “All right, Melody,” I said, letting her name live where I wanted it, on my tongue, in the room, in the air she was about to take in. “Go sleep, baby.”
She rose on her toes and kissed me once—quick, decisive—then slipped inside, swallowed by the door closing between us. I stood there one heartbeat longer than necessary after the lock engaged.
Outside, the sky had settled into that late light that makes anything look like the truth. I lit a cigarette, smoking it, and letting it burn down nearly to the filter while my head replayed the way she felt under me.
My phone buzzed once as business came clawing back into my reality. I answered it, made the decisions that needed making, moved the pieces on the board the way I always do. The whole time, there was a second rhythm under my words: the weight of a woman who challenged me and the feel of owning her first time.
11
MELODY
The next day crawled, slowly in the most agonizing way. I had never cared for time to pass until now. Until Enzo.
I moved through the laundry room like a ghost, arms on autopilot while my brain stuck on a reel I couldn’t switch off. The washers thudded and spun. Steam hissed. Bleach burned the inside of my nose. Every sheet I fed into the press flashed me back to white hotel linens bunched in my fists, breath caught high in my chest, Thrasher’s mouth at my ear, the feeling of everything inside me opening and frightening me at the same time.
I kept telling myself to stop thinking about it. But memory didn’t care that I had towels to fold or that I’d already checked the dryer lint trap three times. Memories kept cutting in—his palm at the back of my neck, gentle but sure; the rumble of his bike between my legs before that, when the ride changed from shaking and panic to this weird, bone-deep calm I’d never felt with anyone. The way he’d looked down at me afterward, his expression cracking when he realized I was brand new to all of it.
Then came the moment he hooked into me like a fish taking the bait. The claim in his voice.
“No other man’s gonna taste what’s mine. You hear me? You’re it now.”
Mine.
No other man. That sentence lived in my chest now, scraping the bones of my ribs whenever I breathed.
By the time I clocked out, my shoulders ached and the back of my neck throbbed.
Outside, it was late Carolina afternoon—the kind that pressed warm and wet against my skin and made my hair stick to the back of my neck. Whoever said the humidity in the South was a special Hell wasn’t lying. The sun leaned low, turning everything a bruised gold. The parking lot hummed with cicadas. Somewhere on the far side of the building, a bike revved and then cut. The sound reached straight down my spine and lit up a hundred little nerves I didn’t know what to do with anymore.