Page 11 of Switch

It was too much, the stretch of it, and I did it anyway. I took him slow, an inch at a time, my hands on his shoulders and my thighs shaking, and he held so still under me I could feel the tremor running through his whole body. When I finally sat all the way down with him buried to the root, we both made a noise I’d have been ashamed of in daylight.

For a second it was that night again. The funeral dress on my bedroom floor. His mouth on my throat. The way he’d said my name like it hurt him.

I put it out of my head and moved.

I rode him hard. I didn’t want slow and I didn’t want sweet. I lifted up until only the head of him was inside me and dropped back down, and the chair banged against the linoleum, and his fingers dug into my hips and held on. His mouth was open against my collarbone. Every time I came down on him, he grunted.

“Look at me,” I said.

He did. His eyes were wild. His teeth were gritted, the cords standing out in his neck, and I could see him fighting to let me run this, fighting not to flip me onto that table and take over.

It made me feel ten feet tall.

I ground down on him and rolled my hips, and his cock hit the place deep inside that made my vision go white at the edges. I did it again and again. His hand slid off my hip toward my thigh and I caught it.

“I said nowhere else.”

“Let me touch you.” His voice had gone to gravel. “Savannah. Let me.”

I should have said no. I took his hand and pushed it down between us instead, where we were joined, and his thumb found my clit on the first try and circled, rough and sure.

That was the end of me. I came so hard I stopped breathing. It tore up out of me, my whole body clenching down on him, my nails in his shoulders, a cry breaking out of my throat that I heard bounce off the kitchen cabinets. He swore, long and filthy, and his hips came up off that chair under me. He drove up into me twice, three times, then buried his face in my neck and came with a rough, broken groan against my throat.

Down at the barn a horse snorted. I could feel his heart slamming against my breast, or mine against his, and for a few seconds I let myself stay there with his arms locked around my back and his breath hot on my skin.

Then I climbed off him.

My legs almost didn’t hold. I bent and picked up my shirt and pulled it on over my head, and I didn’t look at him while I did it.

“Go to bed, Switch.”

He sat there a moment with his jeans around his thighs and his chest heaving. Then he stood and pulled himself together, and picked his cut up off the floor. He stopped beside me on his way past. Close enough to touch. I kept my eyes on the salt shaker lying on its side on the table.

He walked down the hall in silence, and the spare room door closed behind him with a soft click.

I’d wanted him to fight me on it. I’d wanted him to say something, anything, so I could hate him properly.

He’d just gone.

I set the salt shaker upright. Then I went to my own room and lay down on top of the covers in my shirt and nothing else, and I listened.

For the bike. For the kick of it starting up behind the hay barn, and the growl of it going down my drive, and the sound fading out toward the road. I knew what it would sound like. I’d heard it in my head for three years.

I lay there until outside went gray.

There was no sound of a bike that night.

CHAPTER 4

SWITCH

She checked for my bike before she checked for me.

First light, hair down, one of those big work shirts buttoned wrong. She went around the side of the hay barn first, walking fast, and I watched her stop dead at the corner and stand there looking at my bike like she’d found a snake.

Then her shoulders dropped. All the way down, like somebody had cut a rope.

I’d heard her through the wall half the night, awake same as me. She’d have heard it if I’d started that bike. She knew damn well I was still here, and she’d had to go and look anyway.