CHAPTER 31 - CARELESS
1396 Words
IVY’S POV
Nobody comes.
We lie there frozen for what feels like an hour but is probably ninety seconds with Knox’s hand still between my legs and my heartbeat so loud in my ears that I can barely hear the silence of the hallway over it, and when the apartment stays quiet, Knox exhales against my neck and the tension in his body releases in a way that tells me even HE was scared – which is the first time I’ve seen him scared of anything that wasn’t Viktor-related – and the novelty of it almost makes me laugh.
He doesn’t let me laugh.
His hand clamps over my mouth and his eyes are gold-ringed in the dark and he says “not a sound” against my ear, and the command sends a jolt through my body that has no business existing given that I just came hard enough to nearly blow our cover, but my hips roll toward him anyway because my body has stopped pretending it has a vote in these situations.
He pushes inside me with his hand still covering my mouth and the fullness of him after the edging is so intense that my teeth sink into his palm on reflex. He hisses through his teeth and his eyes flare full gold for a second and I feel the muscles in his arms shift under his skin in that wrong way that means the wolf is pressing forward. Knox has to close his eyes and breathe through his nose for five seconds before the gold recedes and his body settles back into its human proportions.
He f***s me in absolute silence with his hand sealed over my mouth and my wrists still pinned above my head, and every thrust is deep and slow and deliberate because speed would mean sound and sound would mean discovery, and the restraint of it all makes every sensation feel amplified to the point of distortion.
I c*m again with my scream trapped behind his palm and my body arching off the mattress and his hand tightening over my mouth hard enough that I can feel his heartbeat in his fingers.
Afterward he pulls me off the bed and down the hallway to the laundry room, which is a sentence I never expected to be part of my s****l biography but here we are.
He closes the door behind us and the dryer is running – I put a load in before bed, towels and sheets – and the machine is humming and vibrating against the floor in a way that Knox clearly considers an invitation.
He lifts me onto the dryer and the vibration travels through the metal casing and up through my body and I’m already sensitive enough that the rumbling against my bare skin makes me gasp. He pulls my shirt over my head and I’m in a bra and jeans and his hands go to my waistband and he pulls and the denim TEARS – through the fabric, like he’s ripping paper instead of clothing – and the shredded remains of my jeans join the growing pile of garments that Knox Voss has destroyed in the line of duty.
“Those were my good jeans.”
“I’ll buy you new ones.”
“You owe me four pairs at this point.”
He laughs an actual laugh that vibrates against my neck where his mouth is pressed, and the sound of it is so unexpected and so human that something in my chest cracks open a little bit, because the man who stands over me late at night issuing commands like a military operation just laughed into my skin like a boy who finds his girlfriend funny, and the whiplash between those two versions of him is making my head spin.
Then his hands are on my hips and he’s pulling me to the edge of the dryer and pushing inside me while the machine rumbles underneath us, and the vibration combined with the fullness of him creates a sensation that’s half mechanical and half supernatural and entirely overwhelming.
He braces one hand against the wall behind the dryer and the other grips my hip and he f***s me against the rumbling machine with a rhythm that syncs up with its cycle, and every time the dryer hits the heavy part of its rotation the vibration spikes and my c**t pulses and I’m gripping his shoulders and biting my lip because the laundry room shares a wall with the kitchen and the kitchen shares a wall with the hallway and the hallway leads to my mother’s bedroom and the geography of this apartment is a minefield.
He cums with his forehead against mine and his hand over my mouth again because I was getting loud, and the dryer keeps rumbling underneath me as I come down from my own peak, and he holds me on top of the vibrating machine for an extra thirty seconds just because the overstimulation makes me twitch in a way that he clearly enjoys watching.
***
I go to the kitchen for water afterward because my throat is raw and I’ve lost approximately forty percent of my bodily fluids tonight, and my mom is sitting at the table.
She’s in her robe with a cup of tea and she couldn’t sleep, and she pats the chair next to her and I sit down in my remaining clothes – a bra and Knox’s t-shirt that he threw at me in the laundry room because he destroyed my options – and my hair is a disaster and my lips are swollen and I pray that the dim kitchen light is hiding the worst of it.
“Can’t sleep either?” she asks, and her voice is soft with that late-night intimacy that happens between mothers and daughters when the house is quiet and the world feels small.
“Just thirsty.”
She wraps her hands around her mug and looks at me with an expression that makes my throat close, because she looks happy. Genuinely, deeply happy in a way I haven’t seen since before the parade of boyfriends that left bruises and empty bank accounts and 2 AM bathroom crying sessions.
“After everything we’ve been through,” she says, and her eyes are bright in the kitchen light, “I think we deserve this. A real family. Dominic is...” She pauses and smiles into her tea. “He’s a good man, Ivy. I finally found a good man.”
The guilt hits me so hard that I have to grip the edge of the table to keep my face from crumbling, because I am sitting across from my mother in a t-shirt borrowed from her fiancé’s son who was inside me against her dryer four minutes ago, and she is looking at me with hope in her eyes and an engagement ring on her finger and telling me she finally found a good man, and the good man’s son just made me scream his name loud enough to rattle the walls of the home she’s trying to build.
“I’m happy for you, Mom,” I say, and the words taste like battery acid but my voice holds.
She tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. “Love you, baby.”
“Love you too.”
I go back to my room and close the door and look at my body in the mirror – Knox’s fingerprints on my hips, the bite on my shoulder, the old bruise, the new bruises forming on my thighs – and Dominic’s voice floats through my memory from the car this morning, precise and cutting as a scalpel.
Cover them better.
Careless. Knox is careless with his marks, careless with his volume, careless with the evidence he leaves on my body and in the air and on the furniture. And Dominic noticed. Dominic, who has spent twenty years hiding a wolf behind a suit and reading glasses, looked at his son’s handiwork on my skin and called it what it is.
Careless.
I climb into bed and pull the covers over my head as I wonder which is more dangerous – the man who marks me where everyone can see, or the man who hasn’t touched me yet and is already leaving bruises where only he would look.
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