“Are you leaving?” My coworker, a girl whose name I can never remember, looks at me with wide eyes. She’s been in the back doing inventory for the last hour, which is code for playing Animal Crossing on her phone. “It’s not the end of your shift yet.”
“Yeah, about that—I quit.” I lay the apron gently on the counter and sprint for the door.
Adam’s tall, with long legs and an even stride, and he’s halfway down the block already. I bite back the urge to shout his name. I don’t want people watching us right now. What I want—what I want—
I run instead of shouting. I run fast. He pauses at the corner and I put on a burst of speed. I swear to god, if I get there and he’s not real, if none of this is real…
My fingers sink into the wool of his coat. His muscles are tensed underneath from holding his coffee cup. He grabbed a lid on the way out.
He smiles and my heart stops.
I can’t let go of his sleeve.
“Where are you going?” I sound breathless and hopeful and slightly scared. “I quit my job.”
“Anywhere,” he says. “Everywhere. Want to come?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Elijah
Holly is thinking.
She does this sometimes, after we’ve fucked—she just lays there in the bed next to me, her hair spread out on the pillow, looking up at the ceiling with a thoughtful expression.
I can’t keep my hands off her.
I trace a path over her collarbone and down her shoulder to the delicate skin of her wrist. “I should leave you alone.” Her eyes meet mine, a sharp reply on her lips. “But I won’t, because if you tried to run away from me, I’d just kidnap you again.”
“Good.” Holly laughs, then kisses me, then rolls away. Not far enough that I can’t touch her. Just far enough to reach the notebook she keeps on the bedside table. She uncaps her pen with her teeth and props herself up on one elbow to write in it while I absorb myself with the curve of her hip under the sheet. It seems like a shame to leave her skin covered, so I slide the sheet down until it’s highlighting her ass. She shivers but keeps writing.
“What is it?”
“What is what?” Her pen moves quickly over the page. I always assumed she wrote everything on a computer, but Holly, I’ve learned, likes to hand write most of her notes like she’s an author from the forties.
“That’s a new notebook, isn’t it?” She always keeps one close to hand, but this one is green. The color of reeds over water. The old one was a dusky purple.
She twists to look at me over her shoulder, and the grin on her face isn’t sheepish or shy. It’s proud. “Our story.” Holly turns back over and keeps writing.
I don’t know how she does it. The story of me and Holly is a long one. All the individual threads of us reach years into the past. There are sisters and brothers and parents. If she wanted the full picture, she’d have to ask her parents about how they got together. Might be a touchy subject. Who knows? This is why she’s the writer, not me. “Where does it start?”
“A woman near an ocean,” she says absently.
“A mermaid?”
She throws me a look over her shoulder, and honestly, it makes me want to throw the book out the window and fuck her. “Am I a mermaid, Elijah?”
“Maybe.” I bite her on the shoulder, and she wriggles against my body, all warm and willing woman, making me hard again. She makes me endlessly hard.
“I’m writing, you know.” I bite her again, and Holly twists in my arms and sinks her teeth into my shoulder. “Is this what you wanted?”
Her eyes are bright, wicked, and I pull her on top of me. Holly takes this for the challenge that it is and tries for my wrists. I let her think she’s won. I let her pin me so that she can kiss me, her hair falling around our faces like a curtain. She opens her mouth for me and I taste her again, a long stroke of my tongue that makes her forget she’s trying to wrestle with me.
Her mistake.
Now she’s pinned, arms behind her back, both wrists trapped in one of mine. It arches her for me. Holly tips her head back and groans. “This isn’t fair.”
“What’s not fair?” I stroke two fingers between her legs. She’s wet there already and sensitive. This isn’t the first round of the morning. I push those fingers inside her. “This?”
Her thighs are already shaking. “It’s not fair,” she complains. “I was writing.”
“You think you’ll write about this?” I’m finger-fucking her now, slow, deliberate strokes. I give her a taste of my thumb on her clit and take it away. This wouldn’t be her first orgasm of the morning, either, but she still makes a disappointed noise. “Or this, maybe?”
“No, I wouldn’t.” She lies through clenched teeth. “I wouldn’t write about it unless you stopped being so mean.”
“But you like it best this way.”
“I don’t.”
I take my fingers out and circle one of her nipples with her own wetness. “You’re not a good liar, sweetheart.”
Holly rocks her hips downward, her desperation clear in her red cheeks. “Why are we talking anyway? We could be fucking.”
“Good point.”
I roll her off me so fast she yelps and bend her over the nearest pillow. It’s tied for my favorite position for so many reasons. One of those reasons is that Holly loves it. It makes her red-faced and embarrassed and extremely wet.
She fights me on it because that’s what she always does. It’s a game of a protest and I always win.
“Not fair,” she pants. “Not fair, Elijah—”
I cover her mouth with my hand, line myself up with her waiting pussy, and thrust home.
The rest of the world does not exist. There’s only Holly moaning into my palm and clenching around my cock. Fucking her this way clears my head, and it does something better to Holly. She scrapes her nails down the sheet, trying to reach behind her, and I lean down and pin her wrist to the bed.
She shudders underneath me, a full-body shiver, and her pussy gets hotter. Tighter. Wetter.
One time, in the middle of the night, she woke up from a dead sleep and told me that the white van haunts her dreams. That every time she sees a white van, her heart stutters. And then she pulled me on top of her and demanded that I pretend.
So I did.
The difference now, obviously, is that there is no white van. It’s just me. And whatever fucked-up feelings we both have about all the fucked-up things that happened, it doesn’t change the fact that we both have our fantasies.
This is Holly’s.
Thank God.
She comes hard, no warning, and opens her mouth to bite the skin between my finger and thumb. I pull my hand back but only so I can turn her face another quarter inch and kiss the side of her lips. “You’re mine. My little captive. There’s nowhere for you to go, nothing to do but take what I give you, your sweet little cunt wrapped tight around my dick.”
“Again,” she says.
I put a hand between her legs and haul her closer so I can fuck her harder. This means she has to work for it, angling her hips for maximum contact. When she comes again it’s with her face buried in the pillow and both hands clenched into fists. Holly throws her head back, saying something, but I can’t make out the words. I’m too lost in the electric tension of taking her. Using her. Wringing out all her orgasms and making her feel mine, too.