Page 89 of Speak

Raven tenses beside me and her eyes close. When she opens them, they all share a look.

“Shit.” Jonas mumbles. He puts his plate on the coffee table and hangs his head, shaking it slowly. Raven puts her plate beside his and climbs into his lap. He puts his arms around her waist and inhales her scent.

A lover comforting her lover.

Where jealousy should spike, it merely ebbs and quickly disappears. “Friend of yours?” I ask.

Jonas nods. “I just saw him yesterday at the funeral. It’s wild.” He looks at Raven and offers a soft smile. “I’m okay baby, I promise. I wasn’t close with him like I was Chase.”

I look over at Damon, whose plate is also now on the tray, his ankle is propped on his knee, and his thumb is rubbing against the length of his middle finger. Silver eyes take in the lovers, not an ounce of jealousy scribed on his face. He watches them with a burning intensity and even shirtless and in his pajama bottoms, he looks every bit like the psychiatric doctor he is, analyzing their behavior like two animals caged in a zoo.

Hiszoo.

But there is no malicious intent behind his usual cold, calculating stare. There’s a warmth, a softness for them. He catches me watching him and a smirk forms. “Little bird, how about you take Jonas upstairs for a nap? I’ll join you shortly.”

There. There is when a sting of heat, an unfamiliar emotion twists in my chest, as I watch the young man get up, holding Raven in his arms, and trudge up the stairs that I can place that unfamiliar spark of emotion between desire and envy.

Catch. Feast. Rut. Claim.

My lizard brain, the most Neolithic, primal part of my brain, wants so much to be buried inside this woman. This beautiful fucking mute and I don't understand it.

Why?

She wouldn’t be able to moan, to gasp, to sigh a breathy little sigh, cry out my name – none of the things that would satiate the beast inside and yet… to feel her thighs tremble around me, her pussy throb while I shoot my cum deep inside of her, the thought of her face contorted in conquered ecstasy, hair spread around a pillow like a halo has me hard.

“Penny for your thoughts?”

“I believe my thoughts are a bit more expensive.”

Damon laughs. “Well, can’t say I didn’t try to shut them up for you. Maybe another trip to Inferno for you tonight, then?”

“Shut up.” I reply in an annoyed huff.

Damon stands and heads to the back door just when I begin to hear the unmistakable sound of a man praising his lover. As I step through the door and out onto the covered porch. “Oh, Harrington?” I turn, the handsome prick grinning like a starved wolf that just caught a bird.

“I want to thank you for being such a great professor and thoroughly teaching your student how to… swallow.” He slams the door in my face.

Like I said,PRICK.

That spark in me rises, that disturbing jealousy flaring. The victors are cashing in onmyspoils.

I walk the trail back to my own back yard through the rain that’s now a steady drizzle, grumbling, imagining all types of scenarios in my head. Scenarios that all contain the various positions I’d imagined putting her in and they morph into something far more disturbing that include Jonas and Archer. I shake them off. When I take her, and I will, it will bealone.

I don’t know when and I don’t know where or how or evenwhy, but all I know is Raven deserves to be punished. She’s been a good girl, I’m sure, forthem… but for me, she’s always fucking bad. The intolerable short skirts. The fishnets or thigh highs. Flashing her panties. Being in the goddamn restricted section of the library. Nibbling on the tip of her pen while I’m teaching, biting her lower lip when she doesn’t understand something. Her defiance. Spitting on me, fighting me…

It's only a matter of time before she acts up again. She can’t help it. It’s instilled in her to fight and I can instill it into her to crave discipline.Myform of discipline.

By the time I reach my back gate I’m so fucking hard I could punch a nail into the wall. I enter the threshold of my home. Other than the low hum of the refrigerator, silence greets me. There is no warmth to my home. It’s dark because all the blinds, save one, are closed. When I step into my kitchen, a cold cup of coffee waits for me.

There’s no arguing over it.

There’s no television on.

No smells of someone making breakfast.

No sound of a book’s page turning.

No music.

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