Page 85 of Cherry Auction

“Oh fuck, Domhnall, yes.” I clutch his neck with one arm and dig my nails into his scalp with the other. “Oh god, harder, please.”

“I’ll give ya harder, and more. Oh fuck, I’ll give ya everything. The whole fecking world, love. I’ll give ya the whole fecking world.”

Somehow while he’s holding my weight in the air and screwing my brains out, he manages to shift his hand so he can grab my ass, pinching one of his marks. The pain mingles with the pleasure, and I squeeze down so hard on his cock as ecstasy bursts out the top of my skull like an explosion.

I feel Domhnall pumping and then he stills, whole body shuddering. A pleasured groan sounds from low in his chest. My joy at feeling him fill me and drip down my thighs bursts as bright as the orgasm still shaking my limbs.

“I love you,” I breathe into his ear as I clutch his neck, compulsively squeezing around his cock again and again, milking even more cum out of him.

He gasps and his hands squeeze my waist. His flinty blue eyes shoot to me. “Do ya mean it?” I see the youngman from the pictures on his face, vulnerable and completely stripped. “Love, do you mean it?”

Love. It’s just the pet name he calls me, and I don’t know if he’ll ever really be able to say it back to me. But I can’t hold it in my heart anymore without it bursting out of my lips. “I love you, Domhn. I think I’ve loved you for a very, very long time.”

He kisses me, then, and I feel joy and boyish exuberance in his kiss.

As if I’ve healed him in this moment.

Like I’ve finally brought peace to the troubled man by giving him everything he ever secretly wanted but could never admit to himself because of all the complicated pain wrapped up inus.

I feel that peace, too, and I’mhappy. So, so happy.

I slump my head on his shoulder and open my eyes lazily.

“I love you, too,” he whispers back.

But the utterance of it rings like a nonsensical, dissonant echo in my head.

Because my veins have frozen solid as ice.

With me faced the way I am, I can see over Domhnall’s shoulder to the back corner of the club.

Moira’s there, pushing open the back door.

And in that instance, several shattering things happen in the space of a single moment.

Domhnall’s ringing confession of love.

Moira leaping into the arms of an older man standing in the light outside the back door.

It’s Gus, the handyman from the shelter.

Her secret.

Gus makes eye contact with me as his arms wrap around Moira in return.

Then, while her face is buried in his chest, he lifts one hand from her waist, palm flat, and makes the motion of wiping down his face.

As if unmasking himself.

It’s a mentalist’s trick. A signal to snap a person out of hypnosis. I don’t know how I know, but I do.

I recognize it in the same moment I’m spiked with the painful rush of a headache. And right before the door closes on Gus and Moira, I recognize who Gus really is. He was neverjustthe shelter’s handyman who I occasionally played chess with.

All along, hiding in plain sight, it’s actually been?—

My father.

Oh god. I was never going to be able to find wholeness in Domhnall, was I? I’m too fractured deep down inside. I swim with nausea as I’m forced to retreat, past flooding present. I flail in my mind, but it’s too late.

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