by Roxie Noir
No one ever has to know. Even if he tells, who’s going to believe him?
He strokes me, thumb moving in little circles, teeth and lips around my clothed nipple, and I moan again. I can’t help it and I can’t stop myself, because this was always the problem: Wilder knows how to play my body like a goddamn Stradivarius, and somehow, he always has.
And right now? My strings are tight and it’s been ages since someone came along who was any good at music.
“Get your shirt off,” he growls.
“And if I—”
Wilder sits forward, bending his legs, grabs my shirt in both hands and tears it off over my head, followed moments later by my ugly bra before pulling me in and kissing me so hard our teeth nearly knock together.
“That’s what happens if you don’t,” he growls, half-laughing, his lips moving to my neck. “Which is what you were gonna ask, right, Squeaks?”
“Maybe,” I murmur, closing my legs around him.
“When has it not been in your best interest to take your clothes off around me?” he murmurs.
One hand shoves into my leggings, past my clit. He strokes my outer lips with two fingers, teasing me, and I push myself against his cock again, pure want pumping through my veins. He laughs into my neck and I curl my fingers into his hair, holding him there as his teeth and tongue are on me and it’s all I can do to stay upright like this.
“Wilder,” I whisper.
His fingers drag over my lips, start circling my clit, and my legs tighten around him.
“Don’t make—”
“Who the fuck would see it if I did, Squeaks?” he asks, biting me again, fingers moving roughly over my clit as his teeth graze my neck. “It’s us and the wolves out here.”
He sucks the skin below his lips, a shower of sparks running down my spine as his fingers circle my clit harder, my body shuddering.
“Just come on,” I say, my voice barely audible.
Suddenly he bites me, his teeth and fingers even rougher, and I moan, tangling my hands through his hair as hard as I can.
“Don’t worry,” he whispers savagely. “I’ll make you come in secret if that’s what you want, you know.”
My whole body jolts, legs tightening, my teeth grinding together. I’d somehow forgotten this part, where I feel like a ball of yarn at the top of a skyscraper, looking down.
I moan into his ear, helpless against myself, against my own body’s stupid wants and desires.
“Just our dirty secret,” he murmurs.
I fall, and I unravel, unspool, spinning and tumbling down until I can’t anymore and I open my eyes right into his, gasping for breath as he pulls his hand from my pants and grabs my ass with it, grinding me against him.
More. I need more, now, right now, and fuck everything else.
We crash together, tongues and lips and teeth. Wilder kisses me like he’s trying to devour me. I have to pull my glasses off so they don’t get crushed between us, my hair tumbling down around my shoulders as it comes loose and he shoves his hands through it.
Then I’m on my back, Wilder above me, between my legs and I finally reach down, grab his cock. He groans, bites my lip, kisses me. Grabs my other hand and holds it over my head.
Growls into my ear, “You like that, Imogen?”
I stroke him hard as an answer and he groans again. Lets my hand go, rocks back on his knees. Yanks my remaining hiking boot off, and I lift my hips as he tugs off my leggings too.
He takes my knees, pushes them wide, leans over me and kisses me again. This time his bare cock is right against me, resting against my wetness, making my nerves crackle again.
I slide my hand around his head, lock my fingers into his hair, his forehead against mine as we kiss fiercely, my legs wrapped around his hips. I can feel every muscle in his body as it moves and writhes, pure raw power behind them.
Wilder’s like a caged animal ready to spring, both his hands clenching fistfuls of sleeping bag on either side of my body as I grab his cock again, stroking it, sliding the head against my clit until we both moan in unison.
I shut my eyes hard, forcing myself to slow it down for one second as I swallow hard, gasping for air.
“Are you—”
“I’m clean,” he gasps, hips bucking, cock sliding against my clit again. “Are you—”
I just lift my hips and Wilder plunges into me with a shout, so hard and deep on the first thrust that I leave scratches up his back even as I grunt with the force of it.
Sparks explode in front of my eyes because God this feels good. I tighten my legs instantly, still holding his hair in my hand, our faces together as I try to pull him in and it feels like he’s trying to push my hips through the floor below us.
“Jesus,” he whispers into my mouth, just as I curl my tongue around his, fingers tightening on his back as he shifts and rocks, pulling one knee up, sliding half out and grabbing me and driving back in so hard I just whimper for more.
“Fuck yes,” I manage to whisper.
I tighten my grip. I buck my hips up to meet him and he holds me down, his cock hitting every perfect place inside me and some I didn’t know I had. In whispers I tell him to go harder, faster, deeper, more of everything as I twist and moan underneath him, my teeth on his lips and his neck and his shoulder.
I want him, and I want to hurt him, shred him to pieces, feel him explode like a grenade and get every ounce of pleasure I wring from his body. I want him unable to control himself, to shatter into a million pieces and not be able to stand properly tomorrow morning and I want it to be because of me. I want to do it to him, do everything, make him hurt and come and regret everything and forget the world exists.
Harder, faster, deeper, rougher because we’re somehow not on the sleeping bag any more but my bare back is against the plywood and the floor is creaking and Wilder is shouting and I’m going to come again in seconds as he drives himself into me with no mercy, nothing but need.
There’s one perfect, crystal clear, split second where I swear the whole blurry cabin comes into sharp focus and time stops.
I come like I’m being torn apart, gasping and shouting and fucking begging Wilder not to stop with teeth and lips and fingernails and he doesn’t, not even as he comes inside me a second later, a string of curses growled into my ear as he pushes my legs up, getting as deep as he can while my body flutters and jolts.
We slow together, echoes washing over my body, unwilling to stop just yet. The floor’s freezing beneath me but we’re flushed, sweaty, my body trembling as Wilder finally sinks against me, his head in the hollow of my shoulder.
What did you just do? my brain whispers, even as I roll my head against the floor, rough plywood against my cheek.
That’s the dumbest thing you could have done, everyone’s going to laugh at you again, how could you give in again like this Imogen there was only one thing you weren’t supposed to do again, and it was—
Shut the fuck up, I tell myself.
Miraculously, I shut up. I relax my grip on Wilder’s dirty hair, running my fingers through it. I can feel him blinking against my neck, his breath warm on my shoulder, my head turned away from his.
It feels good to be like this, slow and drowsy and tangled together. It feels right.
And I kind of wish it didn’t.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Wilder
“All right,” I ask. “Do you want meat lasagna with green beans and potatoes, or… chicken curry with steamed broccoli?”
I turn the second package over, holding it closer to the light of the stove. When the hell did MREs start coming in chicken curry flavor?
Imogen pulls the sleeping bag tighter around her, sitting on the floor, legs crossed. She’s dressed again, and I’m wearing an enormous camouflage jacket and overall pants that I found in the plastic bins stacked against the wall.
Hope Bubba doesn’t mind that I’ve borrowed some of his stuff. Maybe if he ever finds out what happened I’ll give him a gift card
to a hunting store or a free heliskiing trip or something.
Not that whoever owns this cardboard-and-plywood place has any business heliskiiing. The ramshackle cabin has more of a drinking beers and racing souped-up snowmobiles vibe to it.
“I’ll take the chicken curry one,” she says.
“Great,” I say, and shove them both into the MRE heater.
I wonder again if this is the last two, because Imogen says she couldn’t find my pack after she dragged me in here. She also said she didn’t look that hard, and Christ knows I’m not venturing out to look for it tonight in bare feet and a sleeping bag.
It might be sitting there, somewhere she didn’t see it.
It might be at the bottom of the lake. I’ve got no clue what happened to it, and I can only cross my fingers and hope that it’s the first, and not the second, particularly since Bubba didn’t seem too hot on stocking his little getaway with, you know, food.
The MREs finish heating. I give Imogen hers, open mine, and for a couple of bites we eat in silence together.
“You know, something occurred to me,” Imogen finally says.
“Mmm?” I ask, spoon in my mouth.
“There’s a woodstove here,” she says slowly. “There’s a bed frame, there’s a twin mattress, there’s all these sheets of plywood and everything. This stuff didn’t get here on someone’s back.”
“No,” I agree.
I don’t think we’re going to talk about what just happened, how it feels a little right now like my world’s flipped again and somehow I’m right back where I was ten years ago.
The last time it took me forever to get over her. Even though I never saw her again after prom night — not until Amy called me over to the counter at the Solaris airport — I was nearly twenty years old before I stopped seeing Imogen’s face on every girl I looked at.
And there were plenty. I rebounded like hell, plowing through the cheerleading squad at Solaris High, even though most of them were Melissa’s friends who’d sworn to her that they’d never touch me.
I taught ski lessons sometimes the next winter, after Imogen was already in California, and I met rich men’s daughters, took them to the secret hot tub in the resort, the one where I first saw Imogen naked. I sat them in the same spot and whispered the same things and got what I wanted but it was never what I needed.
Sometimes it was the rich men’s wives, purring cougars who knew what they wanted and weren’t afraid to have a barely-legal kid give it to them.
It took forever to get over her, is my point. The only thing that finally worked was joining the Navy and going to flight school, the thrill of the air the thing that made her face disappear, only for her to come back.
“So there must be a road,” she says, opening her MRE and peering inside. “And that road must go somewhere that has plywood and wood stoves and big plastic tubs.”
I open my own MRE, stab into it. It isn’t really good — it tastes like an MRE — but I’m so hungry right now that it could taste like vomit-flavored dirt and I wouldn’t care.
“Did you see a vehicle?” I ask.
Imogen shakes her head slowly, stirring her MRE together. The only light is the low fire in the wood stove, so she’s lit from the side, her face orange and shadowed, her glasses darkening crazy lines across both eyes.
“I didn’t look,” she says. “I figured we weren’t leaving until tomorrow, anyway.”
I look at her ankle, pointedly.
“Maybe if we find a snowmobile,” I tell her. “But I don’t think we will, and you’re not walking anywhere on that.”
She pulls the edge of the sleeping bag over her ankle, even though she’s got her thick wool socks back on, like not being able to see it will make me forget that it’s black and blue and swollen.
“We can tape it again,” she says, not looking at me.
“We taped it before you did whatever the fuck you did to it.”
“Whatever the fuck I did to it was pull you out of the lake,” she fires back. “I can do that, I can walk out of this stupid valley on a road.”
“So you can turn it again on a rock or something, halfway out, and then I can carry you the rest of the way?” I ask, a knot in my stomach slowly unfurling. “If you go I’m not going with you, and if you go I might also haul you back here so you can sit the fuck down and heal for a minute, Imogen.”
“I’ll be fine,” she says, not looking at me, her voice quiet and sharp.
I swallow hard, look through the tiny window and into the fire inside the wood stove. She’s always been like this, fucking stubborn, and something about her being this way always makes me even more pigheaded than I already am. Something inside me hates giving way to Imogen even though I know she’ll never bend or break.
Like when she said she wanted me to tell Melissa.
Barricade the door, carry her back here if she leaves, tie her down and make her stay until her ankle’s better—
“You’re not fine,” I say, trying to keep my voice even, reasonable.
I try not to react like we’re both seventeen, because we’re not.
“You’re injured, and by going out there, you run the risk of injuring yourself further and putting us both in danger,” I continue.
I sound calm. I sound reasonable.
“We’ve got shelter, we’ve got warmth, we’ve got some food, let’s stay here another day or two,” I say.
“We’re low on food,” she says quietly. “These were the last two, we lost your pack into the lake—”
“You said you weren’t sure.”
“It’s not looking good,” she says, her eyes boring into mine. “There are a few more bins but I don’t think those have anything in them either.”
“A day,” I tell her.
“I don’t want to starve in the warmth,” she says quietly.
I finish my MRE, and my stomach growls. Imogen’s already finished hers, drawn her knees to her chest. I want to pull her to me, stroke her hair, tell her that we’ll be fine, but the girl’s like an iron gate that slammed shut.
“I bet we could catch a bunny,” I say.
She leans her chin on her arms around her knees, looking at me skeptically.
“At least call them rabbits.”
I grin at her.
“Why, you don’t want to eat a bunny?” I ask. “You know they’re the same thing either way.”
She shoves her glasses up her face, the ghost of a smile around her mouth.
“Semantics matter,” she says. “Though I’ll believe you can catch a bunny when I see it.”
“I went on a hunting trip once with my dad,” I point out.
Imogen snorts, but now at least she’s smiling.
“I’m so sure the two of you hung out in a camouflage shelter all day where you ate jerky, peed into bottles, and stayed cold and miserable in the hopes of seeing a deer,” she says.
“Not exactly,” I admit.
I can’t even begin to imagine my dad actually hunting. I can barely imagine the man wearing anything but a suit and tie. Camouflage? Pissing in a bottle? Hell no.
“It was on a preserve,” I tell her. “And we were shooting… what’s the bird that flies up out of the bushes and then you shoot a shotgun and some of them fall down?”
“Quail? Partridge? One of those,” she says. “So you did that and now you think you can catch, kill, skin, and eat a bunny?”
“I thought we were calling them rabbits.”
“Apparently, we are, now that I’ve made you think about killing one.”
“I think the hard part would be catching it,” I admit. “I’m not a bad shot, but there’s no gun and I’ve got no clue how to build a rabbit trap.”
I let it go unsaid that I’ve got no problem with the thought of killing a rabbit, even if it’s fluffy and cute.
“And here you had me thinking you were Mister Survivalist,” she teases.
“Did I?” I ask. “I guess I was doing all right until I fell into a lake and
you had to drag me here.”
“That wasn’t super impressive, no,” she agrees, sitting back on her hands. Imogen straightens her leg, making a face as her right ankle moves. Even through her thick socks I can tell that her ankles are different sizes, and it worries me all over again.
“And you did scare the hell out of me,” she says, suddenly, her voice brittle but soft.
She’s staring into the wood stove, suddenly rigid, like she’s holding an invisible shield against whatever I’m about to say. There’s that haughty look I know, that holier-than-thou manner that she has that fucking infuriates me, makes me want to drag her down to earth.
Her guard is up. She just told me something real, something true, something that makes her vulnerable and that’s all. I don’t know why I never saw it for what it was before, but right here, right now I feel like plate glass just shattered over my head, shards raining down around me.
“I’m fine now,” I say, just so my mouth is making noise because it needs to do something. “I think it was worse for you than it was for me. I was barely conscious for most of that.”
It’s not true. I still remember crashing through the ice in sharp relief, the sudden plunge into the cold that burned like I’d been launched into the sun. Imogen grabbing at me, slipping away, the certainty at that moment that I was going to die there.
Wrapping something around myself. Imogen screaming, leaving, being pulled toward the edge and kicking and pulling like hell to get myself out, getting half-dragged to the cabin because I could barely think, let alone walk.
Imogen, piling up blankets and coats, wrapping herself around me. She must have been freezing.
“It was pretty bad,” she says, her voice still flat, that tone that makes my hackles go up instantly.
Defense mechanism, I remind myself.
“We should get some sleep,” she finally says. “I can grab a couple of blankets and sleep on the floor, you’re still recovering—”
“Bullshit,” I say.
She raises an eyebrow.