I take the stairs because I don’t want the elevator to spit me out into the atrium. I don’t want to have to cross it, feeling all those eyes on me. Not when I can still feel her. Hear her.

Taste her.

Not when I’m so fucking hard I can barely walk.

I might not give a fuck about social decorum but even I know that rocking a horse-sized hard-on in a public building isn’t something that would be considered appropriate in polite society.

So, I take the stairs, as fast as I can, cutting left when I hit the ground floor, so I can push through an exit that feeds directly into the parking lot. Climbing behind the wheel of my car, I start it up and slam it into reverse, tires chirping as I hit the brakes and press the clutch before shifting into 1^st.

It’s 4:35PM. I have twenty-five minutes.

Thankfully, my shop is only a few blocks away. When I pull up, Lena Ford is blaring, and Tess is buried in the last of the service trucks. The same one she was working on when I left.

Declan’s.

It bothers me that she insists on working on it herself. Will argue with me when I try to do it. It bothers me but right now, it’s barely registering. I’ve got bigger things to work about than Tess’s low-key obsession with my dickface brother.

Cutting the engine, I leave the keys dangling from the ignition. Popping the door, I leave it hanging open, in too much of a rush to bother closing it. Despite the racket she calls music, Tess notices me. Shouts at me as I streak past her.

“Hey, I thought you were meeting—”

“Forgot something,” I shout back, hitting the stairs to my apartment, taking them two at a time.

She turns down the music. “Can you call Dickface and tell him his truck won’t be ready until tomorrow afternoon? It needs—”

Again, I don’t let her finish. “Yup,” I bark at her before I knock my shoulder into the door, pushing my way through it before I slam it closed and lock it.

I’ve got my pants worked open and jerked down around my hips before I even get to where I’m going, hand jammed into the front pocket of my jeans.

I took her panties.

Pulling them out, I fall back onto my bed, boots planted on the floor, fist clenched around the wad of silk and lace in my hand. They’re soaked. Still warm.

Jesus.

Tess is downstairs.

She’s got her music up so loud she can’t hear shit.

Henley is expecting me to pick her up in a matter of minutes.

Henley.

My cock twitches in response, a hard jerk that has me gritting my teeth around a deep, rumbling groan.

Am I really doing this?

Yeah, motherfucker, you’re doing this. You can’t be around her without wanting to fuck her. You can’t fuck her without wanting to kiss her and you can’t kiss her.

You can’t.

I can’t do this either. It’s wrong. Even I know that.

Since when do you give a fuck about wrong?

Since it’s Henley.

Wrong was agreeing to keep fucking her in the first place. Wrong was letting her make you pancakes and asking her to kiss her. You want to survive this, this is how you do it because you can’t fuck her and you’re physically incapable of fucking anyone else, so this is it. This is what you’ve got so, quit whining and get to work.

Before I can let myself think my way around what I’m doing, I jerk my pants further down my hips, taking my boxer briefs with them. My cock practically jumps into my hand and I wrap her panties around it. Fisting them around the head, pre-come seeps through silk and lace, my arousal mingling with hers.

Just like that, I don’t give a shit about right or wrong. What I can’t do and what I can. Should or shouldn’t. My brain finally shuts the fuck up.

The silence is glorious.

Giving myself a slow stroke, I pump my shaft from tip to base, again and again, until I’m thrusting my hips against the grip I have on my cock, her panties sliding along the hard, swollen length of it, each stroke I give myself harder and faster than the last.

I think about kissing her last night. The way her lips felt against mine. Her tongue in my mouth. Swirling and licking against mine. The way she tasted. Sweet and sticky like maple syrup. Warm and salty like butter. Her hands in my hair, fingers gripped against my scalp, hard enough to hurt.

Suddenly, it’s her hand wrapped around me, pumping and stroking up and down the shaft of my cock. I can feel her breath, hot and ragged against my neck. Her tongue tracing the ink on my chest. My neck. My bicep. The seam of my lips.

I want you to kiss me.

“Christ.” The curse rips itself up my throat, heat pooling at the base of my spine, seconds before my balls go tight, the orgasm spiraling up the length of my dick so fast and hard I have to clamp my hand around it to keep it from jerking itself out of my grip while spasm after spasm wash over me, hot spurts of semen lashing against my exposed stomach.

I lay here, breath sawing through my lungs so quick and heavy, I feel like I just ran an eight-minute mile. Raising my shoulders off the mattress, I look down the length of my torso, knowing what I’ll see.

My hand glued to my cock.

Henley’s panties and my abs covered in cum.

Flopping back onto the bed I squeeze my eyes shut, hearing an almost audible click as my brain comes back online to sum up the situation in two words that have become my personal mantra.

Pathetic shitsack.