Chapter Sixteen

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Crow

Ifelt caged, like I still had the cuffs around my wrists. Once I’d gotten on the mountain, I’d hoped that feeling would go away, but it didn’t. My heart hadn’t slowed its beat. My limbs tingled, everything inside me feeling restless. I didn’t know how to fix it, how to clear my head and relax my body. I just needed.

I grabbed Cyrus and flipped him to his stomach. I kicked out of my shoes, climbed onto the bed, and jerked my jeans down my thighs. I spit on my fingers and pushed them between his ass cheeks. The tip of my digit circled his rim before pushing inside.

“Fuck…Crow…”

A low rumble started deep in my chest. The way he said my name…it was almost enough to pull me out of this frenzy, his voice a life raft, thrown to me while I was lost at sea.

I fucked one, then two fingers into him, Cyrus thrusting against the bed. My other arm wrapped around him, tugging him up onto his knees so I could reach around and stroke his cock. It was hot and hard in my hand. My erection throbbed, ached and pulsed with all the need inside me to let loose, and the only way I knew how to do that was with him.

I pushed a second finger into him again, blinded to anything except the pale arch of his back beneath me, but when he tensed slightly, flashes of our only other time together played in my head—how difficult it had been to push inside him, his tender hole afterward.

Jerking away from him, I stumbled off the bed. My jeans almost made me fall, so I tugged them up.

“Where are you going? Why did you stop?” I hated the broken sound of his voice, the soft ache in it telling me he thought I didn’t want him. How he could care that much about me, I didn’t know, but he did.

“Crow? It’s me. I won’t hurt you.”

He hadn’t been afraid of me. Despite everything and who I was, he’d worried I would be afraid of him rather than fearing for himself.

I didn’t have inside me the words he deserved, but I picked him up and went toward my room.

“Crow?” he asked as I dropped him onto my massive bed. I’d built it myself. I’d built everything myself, but this was one of my prized pieces, the head and footboards made from thick, heavy logs.

I pulled him to the side of the mattress and hefted him up onto his knees. I pushed my pants to mid-thigh again, then plucked the lube from my nightstand. I needed to come, needed my balls to unleash and release some of the panic inside me. I pushed two slick fingers into his hole, and Cyrus moaned in response, pushing back against me and fucking himself on my hand.

He was…beautiful. The way his spine arched so he was at the right height for me. His flawless skin. I wanted to mark him everywhere, needed my scent all over him again, his body marked from my mouth. The need to rut into him, to spill my load deep inside him where it belonged, grew with each passing second.

A third finger joined the first two, stretching his body so he could take me. I didn’t deserve him giving me this, but he was, and I didn’t have it in me not to take it.

“God, that feels so good. I love being full.”

Couldn’t I just fill him all the time? Take him whenever I wanted because he was mine?

The thought pulled me out of the moment. He could never be mine. No one could, and I shouldn’t want that. What did I have to offer him?

He tried to turn his head to look at me, but I pushed it down toward the bed, holding him there with my hand at the middle of his back.

“I want to see you,” Cyrus said, but I didn’t know how to give him that. I took everyone from behind, afraid of what they’d see if they looked into my eyes. I didn’t reply, and somehow, Cyrus understood. He always understood, so instead he asked, “Can you take off your clothes?”

I’d done that with Hillary, of course, but not since then. I’d always fucked and left. The purpose had never been anything more than getting off, but this was Cyrus, and he was…different.

I ripped my shirt over my head.

He didn’t move, didn’t turn to see me as I pulled my jeans and underwear down, then tossed them to the bed so he could see that I was doing my best to give him something he needed.

Once we were both lubed up, I held his hip with one hand, using the other to hold the root of my erection as I pressed against this hole.

“Fuck me,” Cyrus begged.

I snapped my hips forward, filling him. The tight heat of his body washed over me. My eyelids fluttered, eyes rolling back at the perfection that was his body. Nothing had ever felt this good, and I couldn’t believe he was giving it to me.

I pulled back and snapped my hips again, holding his waist with both hands now. The whole bed shook, Cyrus’s body rocking against mine as if he needed this as much as I did.

My gaze darted to his hand when he reached out, plucked my boxer briefs from the mattress, brought them to his face, and inhaled.

It snapped whatever control I had left in me, made my brain waves change. I let out a growl as I took him harder and faster than I’d ever fucked before. We were both sweating, Cyrus taking what I gave him, his body submitting to mine, while he breathed in the most natural scent of me.

I wanted to do the same to him, wanted to possess him.

My grip on his hip tightened. Bending over, I licked his shoulder, the mark I’d put there just days before, before sucking his skin into my mouth. I used my teeth too, one spot, then another, as I rutted into him like an animal and Cyrus begged for more.

I ached, wasn’t sure how much longer I could last, so I used one hand to wrap around his cock and jerk him while I fucked him. Seconds later Cyrus cried out, his body spasming as his hole tightened around my prick, hot, sticky cum sliding between my fingers. My balls drew up, my mouth on the other shoulder, sucking and biting him while my orgasm pummeled me, my balls emptying inside his willing body.

He collapsed onto the bed when I pulled out. “God, that was good,” Cyrus said breathlessly.

Fucking him had taken the edge off in one way, but added to it in others. Slowly, I backed away, seeing my cum between his ass cheeks.

I sat down on the floor across the room from him, back against the wall.

Cyrus turned slightly, then curled into a ball the way he slept, and looked at me. “Are you okay?”

Me? Was I okay? I’d locked him in a room and left him. He’d spoken to me and calmed me down, and then when I came home, I’d fucked him like an animal.

I shook my head because I wasn’t okay. Was this the life my mother had wanted for me? Treating someone I cared about this way? But then, I didn’t know if I was capable of anything else. “I shouldn’t have…” I pointed to him. “Done that.”

He flinched. “My thoughts keep trying to tell me you don’t want me, that no one will want me, but you do. I can see it. If I’m wrong, then no, you shouldn’t have done that, but if this is some misguided guilt for my benefit, I loved what we did. I loved the way it made me feel.”

Why?I wanted to ask, but I didn’t.

Cyrus sighed.

“I got your things.” That would please him, wouldn’t it? He wanted to be here, on my mountain, and I wanted that too. I also wanted to make him happy. I needed it.

“Thank you for doing that, and for letting me stay, but you shouldn’t have gone in the middle of the night, and you definitely shouldn’t have locked me in a room while I was sleeping. What if you’d been arrested? What if there was a fire? Hell, what if you got in an accident and no one knew I was here? If I’m going to stay, you can’t lock me away when we’re not together.”

My nostrils flared at the thought of something happening to him, of him being hurt because of something I’d done.

“Okay?” Cyrus pressed. “I need you to tell me okay. That’s a deal breaker for me. I don’t want to be locked up.”

I nodded, wondering what was happening to me. What he’d done to me. There wasn’t anything I didn’t want to give him.

“I won’t come into your room if you don’t want me to. But free rein of my room, the bathroom, living room, and kitchen would be nice.”

My heart spiked, but I did my best to shove it down.

“We can work up to that,” he said. “Just no locks.”

I nodded, then looked down. My feet were flat on the floor, legs bent, arms on my knees. Cum had dried onto my soft cock, and my wrists were hurting, still feeling restrained.

Being inside him helped me forget, but now it was flooding back. When I began to shake, Cyrus said, “Oh, Crow.”

The bed shifted, but I didn’t look.

Slow footsteps padded across the room, but I still didn’t look.

Cyrus knelt beside me. When he reached out to touch me, I flinched away.

“I’m sorry… I…” He pulled his hand back, but I grabbed it, held it in mine, then leaned my head toward him. Cyrus understood what I needed and began running his fingers through my hair. I hadn’t known something like that would feel so good, hadn’t even understood what made me silently ask him to do it, but now I wanted to melt into it, could live in this moment with his hand in my hair. “I won’t ever let anyone lock you away,” he told me.

They did that when they forced me to leave here. They restrained me and took me away from my home.

I was exhausted, my whole body worn out, my brain too.

My brave little lamb sat beside me, wrapped an arm around me, and continued to play with my hair.

Mine.Yes, he did feel as if he belonged to me, didn’t he?

I understood the concept of emotions. I’d loved my mom. I’d even loved Chosen. I’d seen people in The Enlightened together, spouses and friends. But I’d also seen them throw people away. I’d seen them hurt them for punishment or to open them up for Enlightenment. I’d had that done to me too. But what I’d witnessed hadn’t felt like this. Even knowing how much my mother loved me and what she did for me hadn’t felt like this because she hadn’t been allowed to be affectionate with me.

And then…fights, name-calling, being harassed daily, before I came back to my mountain for ten years of nothing.

Until Cyrus.

“What is this?” I forced out.

“I don’t know,” he replied, and I believed him. While he knew friendship, love, and emotions in ways I never would, I believed that this, us, was foreign to him too.

Cyrus stroked my hair. “You should get some rest. The sun will be rising in a couple of hours.” I immediately tensed. “You can’t spend the whole winter doing nothing but catnapping. I won’t hurt you, Crow.” When I didn’t respond, Cyrus continued to talk. “One time when I was young, my mom was really high. We stayed awake all night, but I was too young to understand why. I just thought about how much fun it was. We watched TV and drew pictures and made a cake and a batch of cookies. I know that sounds terrible—a mom being high with her son, but she doted on me. She made me happy. We always had so much fun together. Oh, and then this one time…”

I listened, my head on his shoulder, until I fell asleep.