Page 9 of Obsession
I turn off the vibrator and ease it out of him. He whimpers at the loss and reaches for me—actually reaches, for the first time tonight. Every other time, I've been the one to initiate. Now his hands are pulling at my shoulders, grabbing at me, trying to get me on top of him, inside him. His scent is pure need, no performance left at all.
"I want you," he says, and it's the most honest thing he's said all night. "Not the toy, you, I want you inside me, please—"
I settle between his thighs and push into him and we both groan. He's so wet and open from the knotting and the toy that I sink all the way in with one stroke and his legs wrap around my waist and his arms wrap around my shoulders and he pulls me down against him, chest to chest, face to face, and I can feel his heart hammering against mine.
"There you are," I say against his mouth. "Took you long enough."
He makes a sound that's half laugh, half sob, and then I'm fucking him. He's holding onto me like I'm the only solid thing in the room. Just his body under mine, his breath in my ear, and the way he keeps sayingyesandthereandharderand please in a broken, continuous stream. I give him everything, driving deep on every stroke, and he takes it all. His heels dig into my back, his nails rake down my shoulders. When my knot starts to swell, he doesn't tense or try to control the pace. He just opens for me, tilts his hips, and whispers yes against my neck.
The knot locks and he comes again, untouched, his cock pulsing between our stomachs while his hole clenches around the knot and his whole body shakes. I bury my face in his neck and come inside him. The intensity whites out my vision for asecond, my cock throbbing while he milks me. His hands are in my hair, mumbling wrecked sounds against my skin.
We lie there for a long time. Locked together, breathing, his fingers trailing slow patterns on the back of my neck that I don't think he's aware of. His scent has gone quiet and warm and completely unguarded for the first time all night, and I can smell the real him underneath the heat, the actual person, and he smells like someone I want to know.
His breathing slows, his hands go still, and his body relaxes under me with the boneless heaviness of someone who falls asleep between one breath and the next. I don't pull out; the knot is still holding us together. I don't move. I lie there with his heartbeat under my ear and his scent in my lungs. I think about how this omega came here tonight with a plan aimed at me, a plan I don't understand yet. In the middle of it, he told me he'd been thinking about me for three months and couldn't stop, and he cried when he said it.
He's the most interesting person I've ever had in my bed. Manipulative, sharp, lying with his body the way most people lie with their mouths. He can think through heat in a way I've never seen. Underneath all of that, I get the sense that he's desperately lonely. The sounds he made when he stopped performing were the most genuine thing I've heard from anyone in years.
The knot goes down slowly, and I ease out of him. He murmurs something in his sleep and turns into me, pressing his face against my chest, and I pull him in and let him stay.
I want to know his name. That's against the rules here. I don't care. I want to know his name and what his face looks like under the mask. Which firm he works at, what he looks like in a courtroom, and whether he's this sharp when he's not in heat. I want to know what the plan was. I want to know why he's been thinking about me.
I'm going to find out.
Kieran
Iwake up with my face against his chest and his arm around my waist. For a few seconds I don't remember any of it.
Just warmth. Skin on skin. His scent fills my head, thick and expensive, the kind of smell that settles in your bones. My body is loose, heavy, every muscle slack and satisfied in a way nothing else has ever managed. I’m half-hard against his thigh, pressing in before I’m even awake, nose tucked against his collarbone. I breathe him in. He smells even stronger now, after a night of sweat and sex, his scent tangled with mine until I can’t tell them apart. Something in my chest goes soft and stupid.
Then I remember.
Everything. In order. The floor and the railing and sayingpleasewith his hand on my cock. The private room and riding him and losing the rhythm when my heat crested. Face down on the mattress, sobbing while he knotted me. The vibrator and the ring and him asking questions while I shook apart and the way he turned it down every time I mouthed off and turned it up when I answered and the confession — oh, fuck, the confession,I've been thinking about you for three months and I couldn'tstop and I hate it, and I said that, I actually said that out loud while crying with a cock ring on and a vibrator in my ass, that happened, that's a thing I did with my mouth in front of another human being.
I go very still against his chest.
Okay. Take stock. My heat’s basically done. What’s left is a dull ache, more soreness than need, like embers after a fire. My head is clear now. That’s a relief, and a disaster. No excuses left for last night. No buffer between me and the mess I made. I came to Knot Club with a plan—revenge on a man who didn’t even know I existed. I stopped my suppressants, forced a heat, walked in, picked out one alpha. Ninety minutes later, I was sobbing on his knot and telling him I’d been obsessed for months. The plan didn’t fail. It was never real. I just wanted Everett Callahan, and I couldn’t admit it, so I made up a story to cover for wanting to get fucked.
I am the worst lawyer alive.
My body doesn’t care about any of that. Last night was the best thing that’s ever happened to it. I’m warm, sated, pressed up against this alpha like I belong here. Every breath is full of him, and every breath makes me want to stay. I can feel where he was inside me—a sore, used ache that should feel like a mistake but just makes me want more. My hips are bruised from his hands. My neck is raw from his stubble. All of it feels good. All of it feels like his. My heat is over and I still want him. That’s not biology. That’s just me.
Just Kieran. Wanting this man. Without a single excuse to hide behind.
I need to leave. I need to get up, get dressed, get my mask secured, and walk out of this room and this club and never come back. I need to do that now, before he wakes up, before there's a conversation that I am in no way equipped to have, before the vulnerability of this morning becomes something I can't takeback. I can still salvage this. He doesn't know my name. He doesn't know where I work. He knows I'm a lawyer but there are thousands of lawyers in this city. I can disappear and he'll never find me and last night will become a story he tells at the club about the weird omega with the agenda, and I'll go back to my life and pretend none of this happened.
I start to pull away from him and his arm tightens around my waist.
"You're awake," he says, and his voice is rough with sleep and so close to my ear that I feel it in my spine. His thumb moves against my hip, a small, lazy stroke across the bruise he left there, and my whole body lights up with a want that has absolutely nothing to do with heat.
"Yeah." My voice comes out scratchy. Wrecked. I barely recognize it. "I should go."
"Should you." He doesn't phrase it as a question. His hand stays on my hip, not gripping, not holding me in place, just warm and there, and I could leave. He's not stopping me. But his palm on my skin is making it very hard to want to move, and the truth is I don't want his hand to stop touching me.
"Masks are supposed to stay on until the omega leaves," I say, because rules feel safe right now, rules are something I understand, and if I can turn this into a procedural conversation instead of an emotional one I might survive it. "So I should leave."
"Okay." He doesn't move. "But that's not why you want to go."
I close my eyes. He’s right. He was right last night, too—when I was performing, when I was real, when I was lying, when I stopped. He’s right now and I hate it. I hate how easily he reads me. I hate that he took me apart with his hands, his voice, his patience, and I gave him the truth like he deserved it.
