CHAPTER 6 - AWARENESS

KNOX’S POV

She obeyed.

I watched her work her entire shift today at The Grind House on legs that were still shaking from what I did to her in that lecture hall, and when she bent over to wipe down a table I caught a flash of bare thigh under her skirt and nothing underneath it and the knowledge that she followed my instruction she walked around all day with nothing between her skin and whatever seat she sat in because I told her to – made my hand tighten around the coffee mug I still hadn’t ordered.

I smell her before I see her.

It’s been like this since the engagement dinner – this low, constant awareness of where she is in any given room, like my body has developed its own GPS system that runs exclusively on the scent of vanilla shampoo and something faintly sweet underneath that she doesn’t know she puts out but that I can pick up from across the apartment like a fucking bloodhound.

It’s 2 AM and I’m standing in the kitchen eating cold leftover pasta straight from the container because I can’t sleep, and the second her bedroom door opens upstairs I know it’s her and not her mother because her footsteps are lighter and she smells different – less perfume and more bare skin, warm from sleep.

She comes around the corner in a t-shirt that hits mid-thigh and nothing else, and her hair is messy from tossing around in bed and her eyes are heavy with that half-awake look that makes her face softer than it is during the day, and my hand tightens on the counter because the wolf in my chest just sat up and started paying very close attention.

She doesn’t see me until she’s reaching past me for a glass in the cabinet, and the movement puts her arm inches from my bare chest and I can feel the warmth coming off her skin and I catch her wrist before I make the conscious decision to do it.

She freezes with her hand in the air and her pulse hammering under my thumb and I hold her there because the feeling of her heartbeat against my fingerprint is doing something to me that I should probably examine in therapy if I was the kind of person who went to therapy instead of the kind of person who stands shirtless in a dark kitchen holding his stepsister’s wrist at 2 AM.

I count the beats out loud. “One... two... three... four...”

Her breath catches on four and her pulse spikes hard enough that I can feel it jump under my thumb and her pupils blow out even in the dim light from the stove clock.

I look at her face – this close I can see the faint mark on the inside of her cheek where she bit down yesterday in the lecture hall, and knowing that I put that mark there with nothing but two fingers and the sound of my voice makes my cock twitch in my sweatpants.

“Fast,” I say, and let go of her wrist.

She grabs her water glass and disappears up the stairs so quickly she almost trips on the second step, and I stand in the kitchen listening to her bedroom door close and the creak of her mattress as she gets back into bed, and I eat another forkful of pasta and wait.

It takes her about four minutes. I’m counting because I can, because my hearing is sharp enough to track her breathing through the walls and the twelve feet of hallway between our rooms, and at the four-minute mark her breathing changes.

It gets shorter and more shallow and there’s a rhythm to it that has nothing to do with sleep, and the scent hits me almost immediately after – this warm, heady bloom of arousal that seeps through the drywall like she opened a window directly into my nervous system.

She’s touching herself.

I set the pasta down and lean against the counter and close my eyes because the smell alone is enough to get me hard and the sound of her breathing is making it worse, and I know exactly what she’s thinking about because her heart rate spiked at the same points it spiked during the lecture and in her bedroom two nights ago, which means she’s replaying every single thing I’ve done to her on a highlight reel and using it to get herself off, and the knowledge that I’ve put enough material in her head in three days to fuel a solo session at 2 AM makes me want to kick her door open and replace her hand with my mouth.

I don’t.

Not tonight.

I go to my room and close the door and push my sweatpants down and wrap my hand around myself while I listen to her through the wall, and the proximity of it is so fucked up that it makes it better – she’s right there, twelve feet and two layers of drywall away, getting off to the memory of me while I get off to the live audio of her getting off to the memory of me, and if that’s not the most deranged feedback loop in the history of human sexuality then I don’t know what is.

She’s getting close. I can hear it in the way her breathing stutters and the way the mattress creaks in a tighter rhythm, and my hand speeds up because her sounds are pulling me toward the edge faster than I expected. She’s quiet – she’s trying to be quiet because her mother and Dominic are down the hall – but she’s not quiet enough for me because nothing is quiet enough for me when it comes to her.

She whispers my name when she cums.

It’s barely a sound, but I hear it so clearly I might as well be lying next to her, and my hand tightens and my hips jerk forward and I cum so hard my free hand slams against the wall before I can stop it.

I don’t even care if the sound is loud because she just said my name like a prayer and I am permanently and irreversibly fucked.

I lie there in the dark breathing hard and listening to her come down on the other side of the wall, and her scent is still curling through the drywall like smoke and my hand is still wet and I’m already getting hard again because my body has decided that once is not enough when it comes to Ivy Cross and honestly my body is making some excellent points.

Then I hear it – her breath catches again. Shorter this time, faster.

She’s going again.

She’s going again and she just came thirty seconds ago and the fact that she can’t stop is doing something to the wolf in my chest that I can’t fully control, and a sound comes out of my throat that isn’t entirely human – this low, vibrating growl that rumbles through my ribcage and into the wall and through the drywall to wherever she’s lying with her hand between her legs.

I hear her stop. Dead still on the other side of the wall. She heard it.

Good.