Page 7

Hawthorne

‘O h, shit,’ I exclaimed breathlessly, then hurried to bend down both to help her gather her books and to hide the growing burn inside my cheeks. ‘I’m so sorry.’

I couldn’t look at her as I lowered myself to stack the books that fell, intending to use them to cover my undoubtedly fire-engine red face. Instead, I ended up only doing more damage when our foreheads clashed as she bent at the same time.

I backed up again, mortification riding my fight or flight instincts and leaning firmly towards flight.

‘Fuck. Shit, I’m so sorry,’ I rambled, my head still swimming with confusion and hurt at what I’d just walked in on. Compounding with the headache and humiliation from my clumsiness, I didn’t know what to do with my body except get it out of the way.

‘Ow…’ she complained, her hand cradling her head. I felt even worse when I remembered her telling us she already had a headache before I’d gone and made it worse. Gods, I was fucking this up. Big time.

Suddenly, her face paled and she swayed, her eyes rolling back in her head as she dropped to the floor.

‘Shit!’ I exclaimed, rushing forward to catch her before she could hurt herself in the fall.

‘What the fuck did you do, Thorne?’ Oz asked, concern riding his instincts hard in a way I only saw from him when he cared about someone. Just how close were they?

Now wasn’t the time to think about that, however, when the woman that had plagued me for years was unconscious in my arms.

‘I…I don’t…’ I stammered, unsure what there even was to say.

He huffed, moving to push the door open further. ‘Just help me get her back to her room,’ he ordered. I didn’t argue.

‘Enid, can you grab the books?’ I asked, only Oz stepped forward to snatch them up before she could even graze one with a fingertip.

‘I’ve got the books. Just get her settled in her own bed. The door should still be open.’

‘Why can’t I grab the books?’ she asked with a scowl, and I couldn’t fault her for her suspicions.

‘Because you couldn’t carry them when they were in my suitcase and I don’t trust you not to ruin them even more than they’ve already been,’ he retorted, but I’d had enough. Juniper was limp in my arms. She was the priority here.

‘Who cares who gets the books. Someone get the damn doors so I get her into her own room already,’ I snapped.

‘Right,’ Oz muttered, gathering the old, strange looking leather tomes from the floor and following on my heels while Enid opened the door to Juniper’s dorm.

As soon as the door was open, I barged in and placed Juniper’s unconscious form on top of her bed, arranging her into a more comfortable position so she wouldn’t wake with numb limbs. However, as I was gazing down at her the scene seemed wrong. Praying for forgiveness for what I was about to do, I pulled of her shoes and averted my eyes as I began tugging off her jeans.

‘Woah, what are you doing, man?’ Oz stepped in before I could get them over her hips.

‘She should be under the covers, but sleeping in jeans is uncomfortable…’ I trailed off, realising how insane I sounded. Juniper didn’t even really know me, and I certainly didn’t have any right to be undressing her when she couldn’t even consent.

‘Why don’t you just head on out and I’ll meet up with you later?’ he asked, ushering me and Enid towards the door. ‘I’ll watch over her, see if I can heal her. She really was complaining about a headache.’

He turned his back on us, the discussion apparently over whether we liked it or not. There wasn’t really anything Enid or I could say, either. We had no place here, and she did know Oz a bit better since they both taught at the middle school. My eyes caught on the leather tomes stacked neatly on her desk. And apparently studied together.

My mortification came back full force with the added pain of the strange new closeness between my best friend and the unwitting bane of my existence. I was so embarrassed that the amount of blood rushing to my head made me light-headed. Before I could stop myself, I swayed. Luckily, I managed to catch myself before I joined Juniper in her unconsciousness.

‘Woah!’ Enid leaped toward me and placed her hand on my arm to help keep me upright, though her touch did nothing to truly help.

I muttered a quick incantation beneath my breath to reset my heartrate back to normal and remove the flush practically singeing my hair and prayed to all that the gods that it had gone unnoticed. Of course I wasn’t that lucky.

‘Hey, are you okay?’ she asked, and I realised her hands were still on my arms.

‘Y-yeah,’ I stammered, hesitated, and then fled the scene like the hounds of hell were on my heels.

I ran across campus towards the university dorms, bolted up the stairs to my apartment, and I slammed the door shut behind me in record time. As a grad student I had a private studio apartment to myself, and I was more than happy for that right now. Despite the humiliation of bowling over Juniper and essentially knocking her out, something magical had just happened. Something I should have been ashamed of but couldn’t bring myself to feel anything other than the butterflies swarming my stomach.

I’d held her in my arms.

My dick was hard as steel.

My bag slid off my shoulder and down my arm to rest at my feet, and I left it where it fell as I headed straight for the bathroom. I turned the shower on, the water magically heating to my preferred temperature within seconds. I shucked my clothes and tossed them aside, uncaring where they ended up, and climbed into the stall. The water was bliss on my bare skin, and my hands followed the way it tracked over me from my chest, over my stomach, to finally drag over my aching cock.

It was throbbing, the sensitive tip already seeping precum that I used my thumb to massage in my head.

Just as I gripped the base, readying to stroke myself to completion, the shower door swung open. I jolted, startled, but it was only Enid. She took one look at the state of me and tutted but shucked her own clothes to join me. I watched her as her breasts swayed with her movements, tracking the path of her dark nipples as she stepped inside the shower stall.

As soon as the fogged-up glass door sealed shut behind her, her hand was wrapped around my cock while the other stroked further below, cupping my balls and rolling them between her fingers. I couldn’t contain the moan that escaped, the sound low and gravelly as I allowed her to toy with me for a moment. I closed my eyes and imagined it was Juniper’s hands on me instead of my friend’s, but it was more difficult now that I knew how they felt on me.

Juniper’s hands were much smaller than Enid’s, and they were a little rougher than I imagined they’d have been. The calluses on her fingers that I’d felt when I’d arranged her on her bed, most likely from the amount of time she spent in the gardens, only added another layer to those fantasies. It was even more erotic to imagine them sliding against me, the juxtaposition of the soft and the rough only adding to the pleasure.

Enid’s hands tightened on me to the point of pain, drawing out a little whimper from the back of my throat. I loved the combination of pleasure and pain, bringing myself to the edge of my limits and leaving myself aching in all the best ways. But I just couldn’t get there with Enid’s silky soft hands. Whereas before they had been just hands I’d had no problem smoothing against my skin, now they were disrupting the fantasy.

I wrapped my fingers around her wrists to halt her movements, but I still needed a release. Pushing her out of the shower stall, I picked her up and settled her on the countertop. Her hair stuck to the mirror behind her and she hissed as she made contact with the cold surface, but one look at the wildness behind my eyes and her own drooped with heavy-lidded lust.

She grabbed for me, but I didn’t let her. She wasn’t the woman I wanted beneath me, and I felt the urgent need to punish her for it. Smacking her hands away, I transferred them to my grip and yanked them high up over her head, stretching her body and opening her up for me to take. Her breasts pushed out at the new angle, the dark nipples erect and begging to be abused, so I bowed my head, gripped one between my teeth and bit down. Hard.

She cried out, the sound more pained than pleasured, but I didn’t let up. Nipple still caught between my teeth, I nudged her legs open with my own and settled between them, my cock already seeking her hot entrance. I pushed in with one hard thrust, all the way to the base, enjoying the way she squirmed beneath me and whimpered at the sudden invasion.

Enid was always wet for me, and it didn’t take her long to adjust to my thickness, and I started pounding into her as soon as she did. Flesh slapped against flesh, combining with the slick sounds of our fucking. Grunts tore from my throat as I pushed into her roughly, my grip around on her wrists tightening as I moved my other hand to squeeze her pretty little throat.

Her mouth gaped as she attempted to draw in a breath to no avail, and I thrust even harder inside her. I wanted her to hurt. I wanted her to suffer for being the wrong woman.

Her walls started to flutter around my length, the danger I posed driving her to heights no other man had managed to achieve. I would know. She told me all about them.

Within moments she was squeezing me like a vice, her scream nothing but a whistle through my grip around her throat. Spurts of liquid squirted from her, soaking me in another shower I would need to wash off before getting into bed. The thought of smelling like her removed me from the moment and I struggled to keep going. I just wanted to pull out and be done with it, but she deserved more than that from me.

I kept thrusting, drawing out her pleasure until she was a loose weight against the mirror. Only then did I release her, sliding myself from her slick heat. I was still hard, my orgasm nowhere near close. I could keep going, but she just wasn’t doing it for me tonight. I didn’t think she would ever really be what I needed. She wasn’t Juniper, and that was a problem.

Enid stirred, sitting up with a sated smile on her face that soon dropped when she realised I hadn’t come with her. Her lips were quick to reform into a sly smile, eager for more when I stepped away to put some distance between us.

‘Not tonight,’ I said, then picked up her clothes and handed them to her before returning to the shower.

‘You need to get over her,’ she said, her voice tinged with frustration and no small amount of concern. When we’d first started sleeping together it had been a lot easier to look past the fact that there was no romantic love between us. Lately, however, it was getting increasingly difficult to find any sort of pleasure in any woman, not just Enid. I would have worried about the state of our friendship, except she knew the score. No strings and our friendship remained intact.

‘Easier said than done,’ I mumbled, hoping she couldn’t hear me over the stream of water baring down on me.

I wasn’t so lucky.

‘This isn’t healthy, Thorne. I’m worried about you. You need help.’

Help wasn’t what I needed. I needed her .

There was no time to dwell on it, however, because the distinct tingling that overcame my entire body let me know I needed to hurry it up and make it to the safety of my soft mattress before I collapsed. Another vision was coming, the second one today. Even if my previous vision was like a personal attack that had rubbed salt in an open, seeping wound, the amount of visions in one day was enough to let me know that something big was happening.

But one thing was abundantly clear as my second vision was much like my first. My stomach twisted with nausea as I was forced to watch the woman who held my heart and didn’t even know it have sex with someone else. Again. It was strange, as the first vision showed her partner to have purple skin and curling horns. A Daemon, which was insane since they didn’t even exist. This new one showed her with another man with dark skin that shifted to onyx scales beneath her touch.

While I was cursing the fates for plaguing me with these visions, taunting me with the knowledge that she would literally rather be with men who didn’t even exist than realise that I’d been right in front of her nose this entire time, I understood at least one aspect of the message they were sending me. Something big was happening and Juniper was somehow at the centre of it all. The content of my visions had dread curling in my gut, because while they were ambiguous in their context, I had a feeling Juniper was going to need a protector, and I intended to take the job.

No one was going to touch her. I’d make sure of it.