Page 26 of Dreadful

Cruz turns my chin back toward him. His face fills my entire field of vision. He studies me for a long before the corner of his mouth pulls. “I’ll make an exception.” A beat. “For you.”

Then his mouth is on mine.

And Gage’s mouth is on my cunt.

The sensation is all-encompassing, sharp edges smoothed by the haze of sleep and the dizzying heat in my veins. My head tips back, and Cruz’s hand is right there, cradling the base of my skull, guiding me as he deepens the kiss.

Gage’s tongue flicks, then lingers, and I lose track of the world outside this bed, outside the slow, relentless pressure of his mouth and the hungry, patient way Cruz devours every sound I make.

The duality of it is disorienting—Cruz’s mouth slow and consuming above while Gage works me open below, and my nervous system cannot decide where to send its attention. It keeps splitting, fraying, losing the thread. My body gives itself up too easily, too fast, like it was already halfway gone before either of them started.

Gage’s tongue circles my clit in slow, deliberate passes, and the sensation builds in tight concentric rings that radiate outward through my thighs, my stomach, the backs of my knees. I want more. I want his fingers inside me, want that specific fullness that would tip the scale, but he withholds it with the patience of someone who enjoys the withholding.

Cruz shifts his weight above me, his palm sliding from my throat as his mouth finds mine again. I throw myself into his kiss.

Below, Gage flattens his tongue and drags it through me in one slow, thorough stroke, the kind that covers everything, misses nothing. Then his teeth catch the soft, sensitive outer edges of me—a barely-there graze—and the contrast of it, the delicacy of it against all that slickness, pulls a sound out of me that Cruz catches before it can escape.

Then Gage’s mouth seals around my clit from a different angle, and two fingers push inside me at the exact moment Cruz swallows my sharp inhale.

The fingers curl upward.

Every coherent thought I have left dissolves into white.

I come apart all at once.

Cruz catches the sound in his mouth—swallows it whole—as the orgasm breaks through me in a single cresting wave that doesn’t crest so much as collapse, the way a wall gives out rather than falls. My spine arches off the mattress. My thighs clamp shut on instinct and Gage presses them back open, patient and immovable, his mouth still working against me with that same slow, merciless focus while I shake through it. The pleasure has edges—it’s almost punishing.

Eventually, the trembling subsides into something quieter. I surface slowly. The room reassembles itself—pale morning light, the warm weight of bodies, the faint salt smell of skin.

Cruz draws back. Gage lifts his head at the same moment, and when I find his face he’s dragging the flat of his tongue across his lower lip with the unhurried ease of someone finishing a meal he enjoyed. Something loose and satisfied lives behind his eyes.

I look at Cruz.

He’s already watching me. Two fingers raised to his mouth, drawn in past the knuckle, tongue moving along them in one slow, thorough pass. He doesn’t look away.

“Fucking delicious,” he says with a slow smirk.

The sequence clicks into place a beat too late. His fingers. That fullness, that specific curling pressure⁠—

Gage’s mouth finds mine before I can finish the thought. I taste myself on his tongue, something warm and faintly sweet, intimate in a way that makes my stomach tighten all over again.

He pulls back slowly, lips grazing mine, teeth catching the corner of my mouth. “How’s that for a good morning kiss?”

TEN

BELLAMY

“I can’t believe I told you that your mom just walked in, and the first thing you do is”—I wave a hand around the air—“that.”

Gage flashes me a feral sort of grin, rogue around the edges, and it reminds me of the boy I used to know. From before my life took a turn and everything changed overnight.

Longing pinches between my ribs, deep enough that I know the ache will linger long after whatever is happening between me and the Calloways ends. And it is going to end. If not for what happened at the warehouse, then for this unconventional dynamic growing between us like something none of us planted on purpose.

It's a sobering thought.

A hand curves around my jaw from the other side and redirects my attention until Cruz is all I can see. That ever-present smirk of his is another blade piercing my soft tissue.

“Most girls look happier after they come.” His thumb traces the seam of my mouth, a deliberate, unhurried stroke that leaves a faint damp trail in its wake. His gaze doesn't waiver from mine. “Perhaps my brother didn't do a satisfactory job, hm?”