“A little more,” he says, teeth gritted.
That’s when I realize he isn’t all the way inside. “Oh God. I can’t take more.”
“You knew it would hurt,” he murmurs, jaw tight, eyes shut as if he’s hanging on to control by a thread.
I shouldn’t care about him, shouldn’t love what he does to me. That’s how he’s broken me. So much worse than the ripping agony in my body. So much harder than knowing we’ll end when the clock stops ticking. “Do it,” I whisper.
He takes the invitation with a curt nod. There’s a slight tensing of his muscles. I feel it between my legs. That’s the only warning before he pushes forward, plunging deep inside me. I can feel him at my very center, filling me, hurting me. “How do people do this?”
His laugh is pained. “Only you could make me smile at a time like this.”
I wince. “Is it over?”
He reaches down and uses his thumb like he promised, rubbing it over my clit like the smooth head of the pawn. Around and around in endless, blissful circles. By degrees I can relax. It still feels too full. There’s a memory of the burn as he entered me. But my muscles ripple around in something almost like pleasure.
Then he pulls back and pushes in, hitting a spot inside me that makes my back arch, my head bend back, my teeth click together in audible shock.
“That’s right, little virgin,” he says, one syllable between every thrust.
I’m turning into some other creature, more and more every time he finds that place inside me. My whole body feels liquid, turned inside out. Something is building, like when he touches my clit but different too. “I’m not…a virgin…anymore.”
He’s inside me, so deep inside me.
One thrust and he’s all the way to the hilt. I can feel the coarse hairs of him pressing against my sensitive bare skin. He grinds there, and my eyes roll back.
“Did you really think this would end?” he mutters roughly. “Did you think I would fuck you and you’d stop being my little virgin?”
I don’t answer. I can’t. He’s rocking against my clit with his whole body, and it’s pushing me over some edge. I dig my heels into his back, desperate to hold on to the ledge.
“No, I bought your virginity. I took it. It’s mine, little virgin. Just like you, you’re mine.”
My mouth opens on an uneven breath. He pushes his hips against mine, a crude demand my body understands better than I do. The orgasm hits me, and I’m freefalling, dizzy with it, upside down, the wind against my face. I can see the high ledge that I’d stood on as I reach the ground and crash.
Gabriel grabs the back of my neck with one hand, my hip with the other. Leverage, I realize. My body and soul. One. Two. Three deep thrusts and then he’s coming, groaning like he’s in pain, muttering my name in rapid succession—Avery, Avery. Fuck, Avery.
He collapses on me, rolling to the side, pulling me with him.
And then one final “Fuck,” his voice broken.
“I didn’t know,” I whisper, and it feels like a grave injustice that it took until the ripe age of twenty to learn how this could feel. At the same time it’s the perfect discovery. “I didn’t know you could be so deep inside.”
There’s a strange emptiness when he pulls out of me, a dampness against my thigh. Then I’m draped over him, catching my breath against his broad chest, reeling from what just happened.Chapter ThirtyI’m still breathing hard when he stands up.
He touches something on the sheet. Blood, bright and smeared across white sheets. It looks barbaric. That came from my body. From his rough claiming.
His hand curls into a fist.
“Gabriel?”
Without a word he goes into the bathroom. I’m half expecting him to draw a bath like he did for me before. Or maybe return with a damp towel. I can feel him between my legs.
It’s sore there. And bloody, apparently.
The sweat on my body cools, and I shiver in the bed. Alone.
I feel a little disoriented, as if I drank a whole bottle of that moonshine. What just happened? That was sex. I just had sex with Gabriel Miller. I lost my virginity to him.
My legs are unsteady as I stand, using the side table to hold myself up until my knees lock. Then I make my way over to the bathroom, where the door is slitted open. Gabriel is standing there naked, unselfconscious, his arms braced on the edge of the counter, his strange gold gaze trained on the mirror. He’s looking at himself. What does he see?
“Gabriel?”
He doesn’t move. “What do you want?”
The sharpness of his voice cuts me. “Are you coming back to bed?”
I liked the way he held me last time, curled around me protectively while I drifted off to sleep. I need him to do that again, especially with the strange, remote expression on his face.