The Contract Between Us

Chapter 4

Aurelia

His mouth was already on mine the second we crossed the threshold, hungry and unrelenting. My hands shoved at his jacket like the fabric had personally offended me. It hit the floor with a dull thud. His fingers found the zipper at the back of my dress and yanked it down in one rough pull. Cool air kissed my bare back a second before his palms did, sliding up my spine as he walked me backward without ever breaking the kiss.

I was still half-drunk, the alcohol warm and loose in my blood, making everything feel sharper and softer at the same time. My balance wasn’t steady. When the red fabric slid from my body like water, and I kicked it away, I nearly lost my footing. He caught me around the waist and hauled me against him. The hard line of his body pressed into mine, and a low, hungry sound escaped my throat.

I dragged his shirt the rest of the way off, then went for his belt with impatient, slightly uncoordinated fingers. He helped me, steady where I wasn’t, shoving the rest of his clothes down until there was nothing left between us.

We didn’t speak. There was nothing left to say that our bodies weren’t already screaming.

He lifted me like I weighed nothing. My legs locked around his waist as he carried me the last few steps to the bed. We fell onto the mattress in a tangle of limbs, still kissing, still desperate, mouths open and breathing hard into each other.

His hands were everywhere, my thighs, my waist, the curve of my breasts, rough and reverent at the same time. Then his mouth left mine and trailed down my throat, over my collarbone, until he closed his lips around one n****e and sucked hard. Heat shot straight between my legs. I was already soaked, the fabric of my underwear clinging wetly to me, and the strong pull of his mouth only made it worse. He flicked his tongue over the tight peak, then sucked again, deeper, while his hand squeezed my other breast. A helpless sound spilled out of me.

I arched into his mouth, fingers twisting in his hair. “Please,” I whispered, already desperate. “Please, I need you inside me.”

He didn’t stop. He switched to the other n****e, sucking just as hard, teeth grazing lightly, while his free hand slid down and pressed against the soaked center of my underwear. The heat of his palm made me whimper. I was dripping, aching, the alcohol stripping away every scrap of pride.

“Please,” I begged again, voice cracking. “I’m so wet… just f**k me. I need it. Now.”

Only then did he lean back enough to shove his boxers the rest of the way down. My eyes dropped, and they widened the second I saw him. Thick, heavy, and bigger than I expected. A jolt of nervous heat ran through me even as my body clenched with want.

He noticed. A dark, satisfied sound left his throat as he hooked my underwear aside. The blunt head of his c**k pressed against my entrance, already slick from how ready I was. He rubbed it there slowly, coating himself, teasing.

“You’re so f*****g tight,” he muttered, voice rough. Then he pushed in.

The stretch was immediate and intense. Even as wet as I was, my entrance gripped him like a fist, hot and narrow, resisting the thick intrusion for a second before giving way. A sharp gasp tore from my throat as he filled me inch by inch, the pressure bordering on too much. My walls fluttered around him, trying to adjust to the size of him. He groaned low in his chest at the feel of it, forehead dropping against mine.

“Christ… so tight.”

He didn’t give me long to get used to it. Once he was fully seated, he pulled back until only the tip remained and drove in again, harder. The rhythm he set was pure fire, raw, frantic, the bedframe creaking beneath us in time with every thrust. Each stroke dragged against places that made my vision blur. I could feel every thick inch of him stretching me open, the way my body clung to him on every withdrawal like it didn’t want to let go.

I met every thrust, hips rolling up to take him deeper, chasing the friction. Sweat slicked our skin, making us slide against each other. The room filled with the wet, filthy sound of him moving inside me, the harsh edge of our breathing, the soft broken noises I couldn’t stop making. His hand fisted in my hair, tilting my face so he could kiss me again while he f****d me like he was trying to brand himself into my body. His tongue stroked against mine in the same relentless rhythm as his hips. I clung to him, legs trembling around his waist, every nerve ending lit up and screaming. The pressure coiled low and tight, tighter, until I was shaking with it.

It didn’t last long. It couldn’t. The intensity was too much, the pressure building too fast. My orgasm slammed into me without warning, sharp, blinding, a full-body wave that stole my breath and left me shaking. My walls clenched hard around him, pulsing, milking him as pleasure ripped through me in long, shuddering waves. I cried out against his mouth, the sound swallowed by his kiss. He followed seconds later with a low, guttural sound, burying himself to the hilt as he came. I felt the hot pulse of him deep inside me, his hips stuttering, face pressed into the curve of my neck as he rode it out.

We collapsed together in a sweaty, trembling heap. My limbs felt heavy, the alcohol and the aftershocks pulling me under. He stayed wrapped around me, both of us still naked, the sheets kicked halfway off the bed. Sleep took us almost at once, deep, exhausted, dreamless.

The next morning I woke to pale gray light and a deep, insistent ache between my legs.

For a second I didn’t move. My body felt thoroughly used, sore in the best and worst ways, muscles trembling faintly when I shifted. The scent of him still clung to my skin. His arm was draped heavily across my waist, his breathing slow and even against the back of my neck. We were still naked. The sheets were a wreck.

Reality settled in slowly, then all at once.

I stared at the wall, heart starting to pick up speed for an entirely different reason. What the hell had I done? My fiancé had betrayed me days ago, and I’d just slept with a stranger whose name I didn’t even know. Last night had been everything, raw, consuming, the kind of s*x that rewrote the air between two people. But the morning was different. Morning brought consequences. Questions. The careful walls I’d spent years building felt suddenly, dangerously thin.

I eased out from under his arm with surgical care. He murmured something in his sleep but didn’t wake. I sat on the edge of the bed for a moment, bare feet on the cool floor, staring at the dress still crumpled near the door. My legs protested when I stood, the soreness flaring with every step. I ignored it.

Clothes. I needed clothes. I gathered them in silence, slipping back into the dress with trembling fingers, not bothering with the zipper all the way. My shoes had ended up somewhere under the bed. I picked them up rather than put them on. Barefoot would be quieter.

I paused at the door, hand on the handle, and looked back one last time at the stranger who had made me feel something I hadn’t felt in longer than I wanted to admit. Asleep, he looked younger, almost peaceful, nothing like the man who had been so wild, so unrestrained, hours before.

I snapped myself out of it before the thought could finish, eased the door open just wide enough to slip through, closed it behind me without a sound, and walked away down the empty hallway, already telling myself this was a mistake I would never let repeat itself.

The elevator ride down felt endless. My reflection in the polished doors looked like a stranger, hair a mess, dress barely fastened, mascara smudged in a way that made the whole night suddenly, humiliatingly visible on my face. I stepped out into the lobby with my head down and my arms crossed over myself, half-convinced every person I passed could tell exactly what I’d been doing a few hours ago, though logically I knew no one was paying me any attention at all. Everyone in this city had their own night to recover from.

Outside, the cold hit me properly for the first time. I hurried my pace without quite deciding to, my bare feet cold and complaining inside the shoes I’d finally forced on, my legs still aching with every step. It wasn’t until I turned onto my own street that I remembered Nadia, and the guilt landed like a second slap, sharper somehow than the first one still bruising my cheek from four days ago. She would have woken up in the middle of the night to check on me the way she’d done every night since Rex broke up with me, and found my bed empty and my phone left behind on the nightstand where Nadia herself had left it. She would have panicked. She would have called everyone she could think of, maybe even the police, imagining every terrible thing that could happen to a woman who’d already had the worst week of her life and then simply vanished in the middle of it.

I broke into something close to a run for the last block, ignoring the protest in my legs, my mind already rehearsing the apology I owed her before I’d even reached the building.

But underneath the guilt, something else sat there too, something I didn’t have a name for. I kept waiting for the regret to hit, the kind that would make me hate myself for sleeping with a man whose name I never asked. It didn’t fully come. What came instead was messier. For a few hours last night, I hadn’t been Rex’s ex-fiancée, or the woman from the video, or a headline strangers were still picking apart online. I had just been wanted, plainly, and some small, traitorous part of me was grateful for that, even now, walking home with my hair a mess and my conscience arguing with itself the whole way.

I hated that I felt that. I hated that four days after being humiliated in front of a room full of strangers, the thing that had finally made me feel like a person again instead of a spectacle was another stranger’s hands on my skin. It didn’t make sense, and it didn’t have to, not this morning, not with my key already in my hand and the door to my building coming into view.

Whatever last night had been, it was over now.

I told myself that twice befo

re I reached the stairs, like repetition alone might make it true.