CHAPTER 19 - PARTNERS

I made it back to my room in eleven seconds.

Eleven seconds of creeping down the hallway naked with my clothes balled up against my chest and Knox’s bite throbbing on my shoulder and his cum still wet between my thighs, and my mom was humming in the entryway while I slipped through my door and pressed my back against it and stood there breathing like I’d just sprinted a mile instead of walking fifteen feet.

That was last night. Now it’s morning and I’m standing in front of my bathroom mirror cataloguing the damage, and the damage is extensive.

The bite on my shoulder has bloomed into a deep purple crescent that no amount of concealer is going to cover, so I’m wearing a high-necked shirt in the middle of September like a person who makes excellent life choices.

His fingerprints are on both hips – four distinct ovals on each side where he gripped me while he was inside me, and the bruises are dark enough that they look like ink stains against my skin.

There’s a mark on my inner thigh that I don’t even remember him making, and when I press on it the ache sends a pulse of heat straight to my core that makes my hand falter because my body has decided that soreness is just another form of foreplay and I genuinely don’t know what to do with that information at 7 AM.

Everything hurts in a way that feels like being rebuilt from the inside, and I cover all of it and go downstairs for breakfast.

Knox is already at the table eating cereal like a person who didn’t spend last night taking my virginity in two separate positions while my mother was at dinner. His foot slides between my ankles the second I sit down and the contact makes me choke on my first sip of coffee, and my mom looks up from the stove where she’s scrambling eggs with that concerned expression she does.

“You okay, baby?”

“Wrong pipe,” I say, which is technically accurate for a completely different reason, and Knox’s foot presses harder against my ankle and I can feel him watching me from across the table with those grey eyes that know exactly what I look like without the high-necked shirt.

Dominic lowers his newspaper. He looks at Knox – a long, measured look that sweeps from his son’s face to his hands to the way he’s sitting – and then he looks at me, and his eyes drop to my high-necked shirt and the faint flush that I can’t control and something passes across his expression that’s too fast to read before the newspaper goes back up and he takes a sip of his coffee like nothing happened.

But something happened. He clocked it. I don’t know what he clocked or how much he can see through a turtleneck, but the way his jaw tightened behind the newspaper tells me that Dominic Voss is paying attention and that the meter on his restraint just moved.

My mom tucks a strand of hair behind my ear on her way to the table and says “Love you, baby” and I say it back and want to disappear.

***

At campus, I can barely sit down. Every chair is a reminder that Knox Voss was inside me eight hours ago, and the soreness between my legs makes it impossible to find a position that doesn’t send a dull ache radiating through my pelvis, which means I’m shifting in my seat every thirty seconds like I have a medical condition and the girl next to me has noticed.

Knox slides into the chair behind me and leans forward until his mouth is close enough to my ear that his breath moves the hair against my neck.

“Sore?”

I ignore him.

I stare at my notebook and grip my pen and pretend he doesn’t exist, which is a strategy that has never worked even once in the history of me trying it.

He presses his knee into the back of my chair hard enough to push it forward an inch, which pushes me forward an inch, which puts pressure on exactly the part of me that’s most tender, and his voice comes again, low and satisfied.

“Good.”

After class he catches my wrist in the hallway and steers me into the men’s bathroom and I should protest but my body is already responding to his grip the way it responds to everything he does, which is immediately and without consulting my brain. He pushes me into the last stall and lifts me up and sets me on the partition between the stalls and my back hits the cold tile wall and he’s between my legs before I’ve adjusted to the height.

He pushes my skirt up and my underwear to the side and he’s inside me in one stroke that makes me gasp loud enough to echo off the bathroom tiles, and the soreness from last night flares and then dissolves into the fullness of him and my legs lock around his waist and my nails dig into his shoulders through his t-shirt.

He fucks me fast and hard against the tile with one hand braced on the partition beside my head and the other gripping my thigh, and the angle is deep enough that every thrust bumps something inside me that makes sparks shoot up my spine, and I’m trying to be quiet but the acoustics of a tiled bathroom are working against me in ways I did not anticipate.

The bathroom door opens.

Knox’s hand clamps over my mouth so fast I taste the leather of his jacket on his palm, and he doesn’t stop. Doesn’t slow down. Doesn’t even change his breathing. Someone walks to the urinal ten feet away and I am pressed against a bathroom wall with my stepbrother’s cock inside me and his hand over my mouth and a stranger unzipping his fly on the other side of a stall door, and Knox looks directly into my eyes while he keeps thrusting in slow, silent strokes that are somehow more devastating than the fast ones because the control required to fuck someone quietly while another person washes their hands six feet away is a level of audacity that makes my pussy clench around him so hard his jaw tightens.

The hand dryer goes off. The door swings shut. Knox removes his hand from my mouth and his hips snap forward hard enough to make the partition shudder and I cum biting down on the collar of his jacket with my legs shaking around his waist and his name stuck somewhere between my throat and my teeth.

After, he sets me on my feet and straightens my skirt and fixes the collar of my shirt where it twisted and tucks a strand of hair behind my ear with the same gesture my mother uses, which is either coincidental or the most psychologically devastating thing he’s ever done, and then he turns me toward the mirror above the sink and smooths my hair down and says, “You have Dominic’s class in ten minutes. You look perfect.”

I look wrecked. He knows I look wrecked. He’s sending me to his father’s classroom looking like I just got fucked in a bathroom because I just got fucked in a bathroom and the deliberateness of it makes my stomach flip.

I walk into Dominic’s lecture seven minutes late and his eyes find me the second I open the door, and something in his expression tightens as he takes in my flushed face and my swollen lips and the way I’m walking, and his lecture – which has been smooth and composed every single day until now – goes clipped and sharp for the remaining forty minutes like he’s biting every word before he lets it out of his mouth.

After class, he assigns a partner project. He reads the pairs from a list on his desk and when he gets to mine his eyes lift from the paper and land directly on my face.

“Cross and Voss,” he says, and the way he says it makes it sound less like an assignment and more like a sentencing.