He’s in a fucking battle.
Another controlled pass of his hips, and then one hand is sliding between my legs, the other squeezing between my breast and the couch. I try to move back a bit, but he’s right there, all of him, this hot, chaotic energy that wants to undo me.
He starts fucking me harder, the couch moving in inches across the floor. Each hard shove makes my mouth drop open, my eyes rolling back in my head, breathy little cries rising from my throat.
He whispers hoarsely to me, pressing kisses on my neck, my shoulders.
He tells me how good I feel.
How much he loves me.
How badly he wants me to come.
That I’m a good girl.
That he can never be without me.
His finger slides across my clit again and again, and I know that I can’t hold back. I gasp as the orgasm rocks through me and then builds, builds, higher and higher, until I don’t know where it ends or if I can come back down. My cries get louder, more incoherent, and if I went off like a bomb, then the real explosion was lying in wait.
I am obliterated.
So is he.
“Fuck!” he yells in a choked cry, pumping in as deep as he can go, holding me so tight to him that we’re fused. He’s shaking as he comes, and the way he keeps saying my name, that prayer again, brings tears to my eyes, all the emotions of the last twenty-four hours flooding through me.
He falls forward, his damp chest pressed against my back, his face buried into my neck, breathing hard.
We stay like that for a few moments and it grows so quiet that I can hear the fridge kick on, mixing with the sound of our breathing. In all that we’ve gone through, we’ll always come back together like this. Like there are magnets in our hearts.
“That’s my girl,” Dex whispers into my hair, words shaking. “That’s my girl.”
A single tear rolls down my cheek, and I quickly wipe it away with the heel of my palm. I don’t always get so emotional during sex, and for some reason it embarrasses me today. I’m a wreck.
He pulls out, and I hate that empty feeling I get afterward, even though I feel so much more whole now than before.
“You okay?” he whispers, placing a kiss on my shoulder before getting to his feet.
I nod, closing my eyes, turning my head to give him a small smile.
The exhaustion suddenly hits me, and it takes all my effort to actually face him, collapsing onto the couch.
He pulls on his briefs, smiling at me with that blissfully sated look in his eyes that tells me everything between us is back to normal just as his phone rings from his jacket on the floor.
“Might be Atlas,” he says, pulling it out of his pocket. He peers at the number and shrugs. “Hello?” he answers.
I gather my scattered clothes, about to take them to the laundry basket in the bedroom, but I pause when I notice that Dex is silent, looking absolutely dumbfounded.
“How?” he asks breathlessly into the phone. I watch as his expression gets more confused, more fearful. An icy river trails down my back.
“Okay, thank you,” he says. “I’m sorry.” That comes out in a whisper.
He hangs up the phone and looks at me, blinking for a few seconds.
“What is it?” I ask him.
His mouth opens and then closes again. “Harry is dead.”
Fourteen
I stare at Dex, trying to process what he just said.
“Harry is dead?” I repeat. “What do you mean he’s dead?”
He swallows and sits back down on the couch, elbows on his knees. “I mean, he’s dead. That was his accounting firm. I’d left a message with them when I couldn’t get a hold of him or Atlas. They told me he was found yesterday on the shore of Seward Park in Lake Washington. They’re doing an autopsy right now but they’re calling it an accidental drowning.”
My hand goes to my chest. “Oh my god.”
It’s then that I realize I’m still naked. I’m tired of being horrified and naked at the same time.
“Hold on,” I tell him, hurrying into the bedroom to throw my gym clothes in the laundry basket. I quickly get dressed into a long thermal shirt and leggings, pulling my wet hair back into a bun. I rush back out to see Dex zipping up his jeans, subtly shaking his head.
“This can’t be a coincidence,” he says in a grave voice.
“Maybe he…maybe he tried to kill himself.”
“Then he didn’t try. He succeeded.” He pulls on his shirt, messing up his hair. “Why would Atlas let us go to the house?”
“Maybe he didn’t know his stepfather was dead? They didn’t seem close from the way he talked about him. And Harry never even mentioned Atlas at all.”
“I knew there was something off about the both of them.”
“We both figured that. I mean, he paid us all that money for pretty much nothing…” I trail off, realizing something. “Oh my god. They’re going to think we’re suspects now!”
Dex frowns. “What are you talking about?”
“They’ll see Harry wrote us a giant check. They’ll wonder why he paid us that huge amount and then died like three weeks later.”
“From what his company told me, it didn’t seem suspicious.”
“Yeah right! Why do an autopsy then?”
“Covering their bases?” he says with an unsure raise of his brows.
“Well fuck. I don’t know. What if the police contact us?”
“So then they do. We haven’t done anything wrong.”
“We’ve been in his house.”
“His abandoned house and with his permission.”
“We need to get a hold of Atlas.” The apartment seems cold suddenly, and I rub my hands up and down my arms. As if I wasn’t already anxious enough, this is just throwing more shit on the fan.
“I’ll try again,” he says, picking his phone up off the coffee table. “I’ve literally been calling and texting him all morning. Of course, I looked him up on Facebook, Instagram, all the usual suspects. There’s nothing. Nothing but a phone number. I’m starting to wonder if…”
“Wonder what?” I ask uneasily.
“Is he even alive?”
“Atlas?”
“Yeah. What if he’s not? What if he’s a ghost?”
I try and think back to all our encounters. We’ve only seen him at the house, nowhere else. Never seen him get in a car or an Uber. Never seen him beyond the property. He just always sort of…appears. Beyond cryptic and creepy too.
“He could be,” I say. “But…it doesn’t make sense. If he’s dead, what does he need us for?”
“To open the Veil to get his mother out. Look at the ginger bastard. He can only do so much.”
“But Atlas has a phone. What ghost has a cell phone?”
Dex shrugs. “I don’t fucking know. The millennial ones? What I do know is we need to talk to him and we’re not going back in that house until we do.”
“Dex, come on. We can’t do that to our friend.” Then again, with Dex so mad at me up until now, we’ve never really had a chance to discuss Maximus together. I mean, wow, there’s a lot to unpack right there.