Rowan

by Tilly Delane

  “You want more?” he growls against my lips.

  “Uh-huh,” I manage to breathe.

  “Say it, Raven. Say you want me to finger fuck you. Tell me you want me to make you come.”

  “I do.”

  He grins wider against my mouth as he dips in a little deeper. But not fucking deep enough. Nowhere near.

  “You do what, Raven?”

  “I want you to make me come,” I answer hoarsely then bite his lip.

  It’s like a rag to a bull. With a growl that vibrates through his entire body, he takes my mouth, opening me up and entwining his tongue with mine while he plunges his finger into my pussy and starts massaging my insides.

  He’s fucking massaging me, and I can already feel the orgasm build.

  It scares the living daylights out of me that he can get me this high so quickly, and I automatically flee the scene in my head and start thinking about the wallpaper in my room at the cheap motel where the cockroaches came out of the drain each time you showered.

  “Oh no, you don’t,” he hisses, and I realize that he’s stopped ravaging my mouth. “You stay with me, Raven. I’m gonna make you come. And you’re gonna like it. You’re going to like that you are helpless in my arms. You’re going to like that while I finger fuck you, I’m gonna rub my dick all over your arse and I’m gonna spurt all over your back. You’re gonna fucking well love it, you hear me?”

  He lets go of my hair and slings his free arm around my torso until his hand finds my right tit. He cups it then pinches my nipple. Hard enough to draw me back to the present, skilled enough to give me another bolt of lust.

  “No more going away in that pretty little head of yours. You stay here, with me.”

  And then he is everywhere again. His tongue is in my mouth, his finger is stroking my walls and the heel of the same hand is undulating over my clit. His other hand is kneading my tit in the same slow, infuriating rhythm as he holds me even tighter than before, moving me up and down to massage his dick in my cleft, like a rag doll used as a fuck toy, and making my butthole spark with pleasures unknown.

  He’s not even inside me and I’m being more fully possessed than I knew possible.

  And he’s right. I fucking love it. I want all of him, everywhere. I want him to grow two dicks and five hands and three tongues and fill me up everywhere.

  I want him to fucking obliterate me.

  His movements are getting more and more desperate, jerkier, gruntier, quicker. And the more he loses his shit, the higher I climb.

  His grip on me gets so hard I can barely breathe, his motions coming faster and faster.

  And then he stops, and I feel the judder of his orgasm against my backside, his load hitting my spine.

  But what undoes me, really, is that he never falters.

  We’re not done when he’s done.

  All through his release, he keeps up his onslaught until I finally give up, and give in.

  The orgasm explodes in my head, my heart and my pussy, so fiercely I have tears streaming down my face when I come down.

  Rowan

  She’s limp in my arms, and there is a part of me that’s worried I’ve broken her.

  I don’t mean figuratively, I mean literally.

  I was holding her so tight, maybe I cracked a rib or two.

  “Raven?” I ask her in a whisper as I gently set her back on her feet, and relief washes over me when she chokes out a response.

  It’s just a noise but it’s not a dying noise, so I guess her ribs haven’t gone piercing her lungs or some shit like that.

  “Are you alright?” I ask while I gently swivel her around by the shoulder to face me.

  But she doesn’t look at me. Her eyes are scrunched up and there are tears streaming down her face.

  Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

  I thought she was enjoying this. I’m sure she came. Hard. But maybe not?

  Maybe...oh, I don’t know. All I know is that my heart fucking breaks at the pain on her face. Those cute frown lines are crater deep right now and I know I put that expression there. It stings. It fucking cuts me to the bone.

  This isn’t ‘we have an accord’.

  Nowhere fucking near.

  Fuck. Fuck. Double fuck.

  I wanna say something. I have no idea what, but I take a big breath anyway. See what comes out. But before I can, she holds up a hand, her flat palm turned towards my chest in the universal but polite ‘fuck off and leave me alone’ gesture.

  “I’m fine,” she says in a steely, quiet voice that tells me nurse Raven is back in the room and opens her eyes. “You need to go now. I don’t snuggle.”

  I’m being dismissed and that pisses me right the fuck off.

  I’ve clearly broken it already, so I might as well break it some more, right?

  “Yeah, well, tough titties, neither do I,” I reply. “But I do fucking well clean up after my shit.”

  I pick her up in the same breath to sling her over my shoulder, making full use of the fact she can’t protest without raising the whole fucking house. She doesn’t struggle as I walk backward till my legs hit the back of the bed. I sit down before I slip her off me to slide her sideways onto the bed.

  “Don’t roll on your back, you’re covered in spunk,” I inform her, matter of fact. “Stay while I get something to clean you up. In fact, don’t fucking move a muscle, or next time I’ll get serious. You hear me?”

  She nods, not moving, not looking at me.

  I turn my back to her and start walking away. I’m already at the door when I hear her hiss.

  “There ain’t gonna be a next time, asshole.”

  And there she is.

  Relief is fast becoming a familiar emotion.

  I grin to myself.

  Whatever you say, honey.

  I got this.

  Raven

  I don’t move. Not because he ordered me not to but because I can’t. I’m frozen.

  Too close.

  Too fast.

  Too fucking much.

  I try not to think about it and concentrate on the here and now. I try to listen out for his footsteps, but I don’t hear a thing. He sure moves quietly for such a giant. He doesn’t even switch the light on in the bathroom.

  Eventually, all I get is the sound of the running water and then the faucet is turned off again and half a minute later he is back by my side, the mattress dipping under his weight as he sits down behind me. He gently cups my shoulder and rolls me fully onto my front. The next thing I feel is the dampened half of a hand towel being swiped deftly over my back. He wipes me clean then uses the dry half of the towel to rub me dry.

  He is neither gentle nor rough but efficient, almost professional, in his movements, like a good nurse would be. And that calms me to no end.

  He stays well clear of my pussy, too, despite the fact she could probably use a good scrub and all. I’m so soaked it’s insane. I’m making a mess on the sheets. When he’s finished, he gently puts the towel on the bed next to me.

  “Here. I said I’d clean up my mess. You wanna clean yourself, go ahead.”

  He gets off the bed, and suddenly I don’t want him to leave.

  “Don’t look,” I whisper as I roll back onto my side, open my legs and start cleaning myself up.

  “Not looking,” he says as he walks away, not to the door but back to the window. “But be careful. That’s my guys on that towel. I was the best swimmer at my school aside from Silas.”

  “Who’s Silas?” I ask as I mop myself up, giving myself involuntary sparks as I rub over my still sensitive clit.

  I’m not worried about immaculate conception, I’m on the pill, but this is good. We’re chatting. He’s being flippant. This I can handle. Chatting is good. Flippant is good. If he’s flippant, I can ignore that he just turned my world upside down, or the fact that he’s bending down to pick something up off the floor by the baseboard and that he shows me a full flash of his absolutely glorious ass in the moonlight that slants in through t
he window.

  “My brother,” he answers. “Kinda the reason I’m here. You’ll meet him on halfway day. I hope.”

  Halfway day is exactly what it sounds like. Halfway through rehab, we invite the families, or other nearest and dearest, of our guests, so they get a chance to start making amends. It’s the only part of the classic 12-step-program Halosan embraces. It’s a taster of things to come for the rehabees but at a point when they are still cushioned by us here. There’s always a small number of guests that don’t make it past halfway day, but I’d bet my ass Rowan ain’t one of them.

  “Can I turn around yet?” Rowan asks, and it’s only then I realize how safe I really am with this guy.

  He does what he just did to me, but if I ask him not to look while I clean up, he doesn’t look, he doesn’t argue.

  I fling the towel on the floor next to the bed.

  “Yes.”

  I can’t see the expression on his face when he turns back to me, backlit as he is, but I just know he’s carefully schooled it into a neutral expression.

  He comes over and holds out something in his hand. I recognize my airpods and it makes me smile. In his own fucking way, Rowan Hadlow-Fuller-O’Brien is a British gentleman.

  “I know you said no snuggling and I respect that, but can I stay at least for a little bit?” he asks.

  Rowan

  My heart is beating in my throat.

  She looks back and forth between the airpods in my open palm and me, and I swear I can see her swallow.

  “No snuggle,” she says as she snatches one of the airpods out of my hand.

  Just one.

  My already overworked heart skips a beat.

  “No snuggle,” I confirm.

  “Just two people listening to music, right?”

  “Just two people listening to music.”

  I sit down on the bed next to her. Carefully, so she doesn’t spook.

  “I get to choose,” she declares.

  She turns onto her back and props herself up on her elbows. I try hard to ignore what that does to her tits in the dim light because I can feel my dick stirring again and that would be so not good right now. Fucking bad idea. But all he sees is that we are still naked, he could go again, and her tits look fucking delicious. So I will him down.

  “You get to choose,” I assure her while I stick an airpod into my ear.

  “And you’re not allowed to laugh at my choice,” she adds.

  I cock my head and frown at her.

  “Why would I laugh at your choice?”

  She shrugs and shuffles up on the bed to get her iPod from the nightstand.

  “’Cause it’s not badass.”

  “Who says I only do badass?” I respond and hold out my hand in a silent demand for her pod.

  “My choice, remember,” she says.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I respond. “Change of plan. I pick the first one and then you can have all the others.”

  She possessively furls her hand around the little rectangle, but I just keep holding out my hand and eventually she gives up and slides it into my palm.

  “One, O’Brien. Just one.”

  I smile as I scroll through her music, realising quickly she doesn’t have what I’m looking for. Wi-Fi is my friend, and I Spotify it instead. The whole thing takes a little while, but she lets me get on with it while she fumbles her airpod into her ear and waits.

  I hit play and make myself comfortable on the bed, propping myself up against the headboard and waiting for the first soft guitar chords to hit.

  She recognizes it. Of course she does. Not many English-speaking souls on the planet who haven’t heard Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘The Sound of Silence’.

  “Really?” she asks just before their voices start up in that perfect harmony of theirs. “This? Why?”

  I reach out to cup her cheek in my hand and swipe a thumb over her lips. It’s a gamble. A fucking huge one. But I figure I have fuck all to lose here.

  “’Cause it’s both my favourite and my least favourite song in the whole world and I want you to know not everything about me is badass either.”

  I leave it there. Despite every fibre of my being wanting to pull her up onto my chest and making her curl up to me, I respect her rule and let my hand drop again.

  For the first minute of the song, she just keeps staring at me. Then she crawls up the bed and settles in next to me, flush, shoulder to shoulder, arm to arm, leg to leg.

  I close my eyes and let the music take me away until the song finishes, and I hear her pick up the pod and press play again.

  Same song.

  Same arrangement of limbs.

  But this time, she slips her hand into mine and keeps it there, our fingers entwined.

  Raven

  I wake up the next morning, alone and with the faint smell of lemongrass in my nostrils he left behind on my sheets. And I’m chill. Completely.

  It’s the strangest sensation.

  I keep my eyes shut, nestle deeper into the mattress and remember him leaving sometime around dawn, throwing a sheet over me and giving me a kiss on the temple. And I remember wanting to reach out to keep him with me. Just there, by my side, not snuggling but holding hands, sharing the soft underbelly of our musical tastes.

  I’ve never let anything like this happen before.

  Men are for fucking.

  We meet, we get off, I go home. I don’t spend time.

  Rowan got one of the last firsts I had to give.

  And I don’t regret it.

  But it can’t happen again. There is too much at stake.

  Time to get up and kick some addict ass.

  Rowan

  I might be an ogre, but I’m not daft, and I know she is going to feel weird about the whole intimacy thing when she wakes up.

  Not the getting off together. I’m certain she’s fine with that, despite the tears, but about what came after. I get the distinct feeling she doesn’t do being close.

  I do. I fucking crave it. Not with the people I’m shagging normally because that just muddies the waters, but I like being close to people. I was close to my mum until I killed her. I was close to my half brother and sister until their father decided I was dead weight. I was close to Silas before I fucked it up.

  I think of Silas and his brand-new American redhead as I slip into the gym early in the morning, strip and slice into the water of the empty pool.

  Water and Silas always go together in my head. The guy is the meanest swimmer I know. Fucking fast in a pool, absolutely fearless in the ocean. In those years when we weren’t talking, if I was a free man, I’d sometimes go for a dip somewhere just to feel near him. I love him so fucking much, so I’m not lying when I say I’m happy for him. But I also feel a sharp sting of envy when I think of him with Grace, for there is no way that I will get to keep my American princess.

  I won’t allow it.

  I might only have had two hours of sleep, but my mind is clear.

  I watched over her for the longest time before I finally managed to drag myself away, knowing that there wouldn’t, couldn’t, be a repeat.

  I destroy everything I touch, and she’s already broken as fuck.

  And I refuse to become the final nail in her coffin.

  Raven

  Rowan makes it so I never have to have the talk with him.

  I don’t see him for the whole of Saturday. Rumor has it he’s hanging out with Alan Allsorts, but we meet in the kitchen for barbecue prep that evening. I take one look into his eyes, and he tells me wordlessly that he knows exactly where I’m at.

  We have an accord.

  And for the next couple of days, he simmers right down on the heat. He still looks at me and I still look at him. I remain hyper aware of his proximity whenever he is near, and each evening in bed I hold my breath, but he doesn’t come closer than is appropriate for a client-nurse relationship again.

  We still talk, about music, about books, about the world going to the dogs and about life in genera
l, and he’s still easy company, but we’re being adults about the whole thing.

  Boundaries restored.

  And not before time, because I have bigger fish to fry than pursuing an impossible relationship.

  Rothman is back, and it’s time Frank and I had a little chat.

  It’s late Monday evening, long past dinner and well into social time, when I find myself outside Rothman’s house, about to knock on his door. I stand on the doorstep and hesitate for a moment. The guy really, truly skeeves me out and I fancy going in there like a hole in the head, but it’s gotta be done.

  Just as I finally lift the cast iron door knocker, a door opens at the other end of the row of houses on this side of the road, and somebody spills out amid a cloud of male laughter. I don’t need to look across to know who the person hitting the doorstep is, but I do anyway.

  Rowan catches my eye and his laughter simmers down into a warm smile, followed by an inquisitive frown. He turns away again to say his last goodbye to Alan before the door shuts then makes a beeline for me.

  My heart starts racing as he comes closer. Stupid thing.

  “What are you doing here?” he asks, and it’s not in a casual tone.

  It’s also none of his business, but there is a protective edge to his voice I can’t ignore.

  “I need to talk shop with Rothman,” I answer truthfully, and let go of the knocker for a moment to sling my right arm around my chest and rub my hand over the biceps of my arm.

  Rowan’s eyes narrow at the stance. He doesn’t ask questions, but he gets it.

  “Hmm. Need some muscle to loiter outside?”

  It’s silly how relieved I am at his words. Why the fuck would I need a security guard just to talk to some nerdy psychotherapist about keeping to his remit around here? But that doesn’t change the fact that I instantly relax and stop rubbing myself when Rowan makes the offer. And I’ve been around too long to deny string-free help when it’s up for grabs.