Page 17 of Prohibited

Finally, he stopped. He put his weight against the iron bars again, pressing the weight of his body against hers again. Then, shaking with excess and unable to help himself, he put his nose in her hair and inhaled the scent of her body. The scent of the past, warm nights and caresses in the humid darkness. The scent of her fear, her sweat. They both stood there, panting.

At last, sense started to reknit itself inside of him, leaving him strangely exhausted though satisfied in the wake of the retreating river of his fury. He peeled himself off of her back and stumbled away from her. He tried not to look at her. Didn’t mean to look at her, but he did.

She was looking over her shoulder at him with wide eyes, an expression he couldn’t read. It wasn’t hatred. It wasn’t anger. It wasn’t brokenness. It was fear, yes. But fear mixed with something else.

Petal perfect lips parted, eyelids just a touch heavy.

“Ryan?” she said, her voice a moan. A touch of disbelief. Pleading. “Why?”

Shame began to invade him, a foreign and unwanted feeling, but it wasn’t stronger than the lust that came boiling up inside of him at a frightening temperature. Hot enough to scald him from the inside out.

The look in her eye. Did she feel the heat of it too?

He ignored the way the past clutched at his heart.

With shaking hands, he drew the key from his pocket and stepped out of the cell, locked the door with a swift flick of his wrist. Her voice, like notes of bittersweetmusic, hit the air after him like arrows, but he didn’t hear a word she said.

He closed and locked the door to the room behind him and traveled down the tunnel, lit by two burning torches, to the Crystal where he promptly crossed to the water closet.

Alex was standing at the bar, holding his hat in his hand. Just arriving for the day.

His lips parted in a greeting, then his eyes narrowed at the blood on Ryan’s face and the sheen of sweat on his chest showing through the open collar of his shirt as he bolted for the water closet.

Alex called after him, but Ryan disappeared behind the curtains and snapped the door shut behind himself. The fabric of his trousers caught as he yanked at the buttons. He groaned in frustration, the fever pitch of his need threatening to suffocate him. At last, he yanked them down and freed his erection. It bobbed once, obscenely hard and insistent in its hunger to be satisfied. Ryan had no choice but to oblige. He wrapped his hand around the head and began to jerk his fist back and forth in a familiar, urgent rhythm.

The sound of her wails rolled through him like a wave of heat over and over again, causing his balls to jolt and draw upward. He bit his lip until it stung to keep from moaning while he thought of the dark hand prints he left on her tender flesh, bright red against white.

The look she gave him over her shoulder, parted lips and drawn up eyebrows. Eyelids heavy. The sound of his name, falling from her lips like a song.

God, and what if he had just slipped his fingers into the garden of pleasure between her legs? Would they have come out bearing the nectar of the fruit secreted there? God, why hadn’t he? There was nothing she could have done to stop him. Nothing.

If she’d even wanted to stop him at all.

And he had left her tied there, humiliated. Naked from the waist down, her breasts pressing against her camisole. Just the thought of it made him shudder and filled him with such a surge of desire that he nearly choked on it.

Her final wail echoed through him as his seed spurted from him, sticky gossamer that only took a shadow of the shreds of his acute and hungry lust with it.

Dear God.

After he pulled his pants up and turned away from the toilet, he caught sight of himself in the mirror. Blood down the side of his face. Scratch marks splitting his forehead open around his eyebrow like a punctuation mark. His hair mussed like he’d been fucking her instead of fighting with her. The wild look in his eyes that was only just starting to abate.

He swallowed and wet a small bit of toilet paper that he used to swipe the dried blood from his face.

When he finished cleaning himself up, he stared into his eyes, wondering who the fuck was staring back at him.Then, he fixed his shirt, his collar. Shame flared up inside of him again when he thought of Alex, that Alex had seen him in that state. How much he probably enjoyed it. More shame came when he realized Alex had probably gone in there, that he had probably found her bound like cattle to a fence.

Not that Alex wouldn’t enjoy it. Alex enjoyed nothing as much as he enjoyed the pain and humiliation of others.

But there was something in him that didn’t want anyone–not Alex, not anyone–to know how much he enjoyed it, too.

He took a deep breath and steadied himself, the thought occurring to him that perhaps he shouldn’t have left her like a deer tied to a tree, an offering on a platter for a predator like Alex.

Then he looked at himself in the mirror again, steeled himself against that worry. Alex could do what he damn well pleased with her.

Ryan opened the door and went back out into the Crystal.

Chapter eight

Evie

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