Page 34 of Animal Tamer
I blink. “Yourself?”
“Yeah.”
“Did… Did it hurt?”
His eyes hold mine, steady and burning.
“That's why I did it.”
The sentence lands somewhere deep in my chest and cracks it open. The pain he chose. Pain with his own hand, on his own terms, on skin no one else would ever be allowed to reach. Wondering what drove him to it makes me want to cry, and I want to crawl across the floor to him, and I can't do either, so I sit on my hands and watch as his fingers wrap around the base.
He strokes up. Slowly.
His breath shudders out. His head tips back an inch, throat working, and the lamplight catches the ink moving under his fist, and I have never seen anything—in twenty-nine years of life, in any movie, in any fevered fantasy—like Rowe Holloway touching himself while he looks at me.
“You're staring,” he rasps.
“You want me to stop?”
“No.” His fist drags up again, thumb sweeping the crown, spreading the wetness gathering there. “God. No.”
My underwear is soaked. I'm squirming on the bench and I've given up pretending otherwise, my thighs flexing together with every slow pull of his hand, and his eyes track it, and each time they do, his grip tightens and his breathing frays a little more.
“Rowe.”
“Yeah.”
“Is there anything—” My voice has gone breathy and strange, someone else's voice, some braver woman's. “Anything I can do? To make it better for you?”
The groan that tears out of him is low and wrecked, like the question alone is halfway to finishing him. His hand stills at the base, squeezing, holding himself back, and his eyes drag over me—my face, my throat, the neckline I second-guessed in the mirror—dark and starving and asking permission all at once.
“Your blouse,” he says roughly. “Unbutton it.”
My hands are already moving.
“And your bra—” His voice cracks. “Pull it down. Let me see you. And do you…” He hesitates, his grip visibly tightening on that beautiful cock. “Do you want to touch yourself too?”
My heart stops at his question, my clit pulsing once, hard.
Do I want to touch myself too?
11
ROWE
She doesn't answer with words.
Her fingers leave the blouse buttons and drop to her jeans instead. The button pops. The zipper hisses as she lowers it. She lifts her hips off the bench and shimmies the denim over her thighs, and I watch it happen, unable to look anywhere else.
The jeans hit the floor. She leaves her underwear on. Plain cotton, pale blue, nothing designed to be seen by anyone, and that makes it worse, makes itbetter, because she didn't plan this. She's giving it to me anyway.
There's a dark patch soaked through the fabric between her thighs.
The groan rips out of me before I know it's coming. Low and animal, from somewhere under my ribs.
“That's—” My voice fails. I start over. “That's for me.”
“That's been for you since yesterday.” Her face is scarlet, but she doesn't look away.
