Waking up was a slow, steady process. Bit by bit, Jessie found herself surfacing up into the world. A languid stretch, followed by a desperate need to pee. The sun outside was bright and well overhead. Her phone wasn’t on the bedside table, and she had no idea what time it was. Other than mid-morning, at least.

 

She remembered Tex coming to bed, snuggling back into him, his arms wrapped around her as she drifted back to sleep. At some point in the night he’d rolled over, splaying wide across the bed, and he was snoring gently. It was kind of adorable, the delicate little snores emitting from the big, bulky man. She wanted to kiss him. And then a whole lot more. But first, she really, almost desperately, needed to pee.

 

The bathroom still smelled like the lavender stuff he’d put in the tub the previous night. He’d been so sweet to her once they’d gotten back to the apartment. He must have come back in here, too, at some point; their clothes were picked up off the floor, and the tub looked like it had been wiped down from the suds.

 

She sat down, finished her business, then brushed her teeth. No need to greet a handsome man with morning breath if it weren’t strictly necessary. She spent a moment planning her approach. She could go back in there and kiss him awake while she straddled his hips, or she could just pull down those navy blue pajama pants she’d bought him and put his cock in her mouth. That was tempting, so tempting that she felt a flush of warmth through her thighs. Yes. That was where she wanted to start this morning. He’d been so incredibly well behaved the night before; it seemed perfectly obvious that he needed a reward.

 

But when she went back into the bedroom, he was wide awake, his cock in his hand, stroking gently at the erect length. Well. That settled that, then.

 

“Hey there,” she said, putting a little extra sway in her walk.

 

He didn’t say anything, just focused his gaze on her hips, then coursed up to where the points of her small breasts were tenting out her shirt.

 

“Did you find me a present?” She let her own gaze flow down to focus on his cock, the tip of which was now lightly beaded with moisture.

 

“Think you can handle me this morning?” His voice was low, rumbling, delicious.

 

“Haven’t had a problem yet,” she replied, and she went to him.

 

He undressed her so quickly she wasn’t entirely sure where her clothes went. She was dressed, and then she was naked, tossed down onto the bed, her knees up on his shoulders as his tongue lapped into her cleft. It was like all the arousal from the night before, in the bath, washed back into her at once. There was no real lead-up, she was just dancing on the edge of release again, all at once. His thumbs came up to her body, one holding her lips open to give him all the access he needed, the other tapping at her clit again while his tongue fucked up inside of her, and she moaned. She loved having her legs hooked over his shoulders; it imprisoned her while giving her all the leverage she needed. Her hips could buck and she could go completely wild, fucking his face just as thoroughly as he ever fucked hers, and she’d never manage to escape him.

 

He growled against her delicate tissues, and she burst into light, shattering against him, gasping and cursing and fisting the sheets all around her. And then he dropped her ass down on the bed, while she was still shaking, and he poised at the entrance of her. He lined himself up and started to press in, and then froze. “Condom,” he said. “Shit.”

 

She took a moment, did some mental math, and then touched his hand. “I don’t want you to get out of this bed. I don’t want you to go anywhere else. I trust you. I think you trust me. I think that makes us okay.”

 

He raised an eyebrow. “I mean, they’re just over there. It’s not really like I need to go anywhere.”

 

She stuck her tongue out, and he laughed, some of the intensity of the moment fading.

 

“I just don’t want you to get stuck with me. Because if you got pregnant — no matter what happened between us – there’d always be that link. And given how you were raised, I would get it if you didn’t want to tie yourself to a guy like me. I just. I want you to make the choice you want to make. You know what I mean?”

 

“I do,” she said. And she hooked a leg behind him, and nudged him a little bit closer to her. “I’m not saying I want to actively try. I will make an appointment this week to go see my doctor and get some things sorted out. But math says we’re probably okay, and I want you buried inside of me and making me scream again. Yes?”

 

“Yes ma’am,” he said, and he slid forward into her.

 

She gasped with the fullness of him as he buried himself, incredibly deep into her. He rocked into her, his hands full of her breasts, and then he shook his head.

 

“I need—” he started to say, and then broke off.

 

“Something dirtier?”

 

He looked almost like a boy in that moment. “Forgive me?”

 

She reached up for him, and he came down at her urging, kissed her, groaned when she rolled her hips against him. “If I didn’t like the dirty shit we get up to, I wouldn’t be here with you. Tell me what you want.”

 

He withdrew from her, then pulled her up to her knees. He turned her around, placing her hands on the headboard, and then nudged her knees apart. The bed shifted as he stood, and a drawer opened behind her. Her body tensed and relaxed, already anticipating what he might be planning. “I’m in the mood,” he said, quietly. “For you to look a little wanton. To look a little desperate. I don’t want to hurt you. But I want you to be mine. I want you to be fucked. I want you to want it so badly that you beg for my cock.”

 

“That’s easy,” she said. “Your cock is a thing of beauty.”

 

“Is it?”

 

“Yes,” she said. The silence was poignant, and she searched for the right thing to say. “It’s big, and sometimes, when you fuck me fast, it’s almost too big to take. I want to tell you to wait, to slow down.”

 

“So why don’t you?”

 

There was a whisper of silk, and then a blindfold closed over her eyes. There was a familiar, quick rush of panic, and then she relaxed into the soft, gentle peace of letting him control her. “Because you get what you need,” she said. “It doesn’t matter what you want when you’re fucking me that hard. What matters is you, and you getting what you need.”

 

“Good girl,” he said. “And what do I need?”

 

Simple answer. “Me.”

 

“Very good girl.” Two fingers, rough and coarse, plundered into her without warning. She fucked back onto them, just like she knew he wanted her to, turning her heavy breathing into moans for him, and finding that the performance wound her up tighter, got her wetter.

 

He let her fuck herself for a moment just until her moans started to pile up, and then his fingers disappeared. She whimpered, not performing now, the sudden emptiness too much to handle. She pressed back into the air, her back almost straight, as if he was lingering just behind her. He wasn’t, but his fingers closed on the tips of her breasts, twisting almost cruelly, and she didn’t care; it was still a delicious feeling.

 

“Are you full or empty?” he asked, his voice conversational. Which was close to a miracle, since he had to be just as turned on as she was. And he hadn’t gotten off last night, not unless he’d finished things after she fell asleep, which didn’t seem like him. Another twist of her nipple brought her mind back to the question.

 

“Empty,” she murmured. “Very, very empty.”

 

“Do you want to be full?”

 

“Yes. God, yes.”

 

There was something pressing into her, but higher than she expected. It was cold with lube, and too slim to be his cock, too firm to be his finger. He teased her ass with it, and she gasped in delight, shocked he’d known that this was a thing she fantasized about — and also not shocked at all. She’d read enough good porn to feel comfortable, and she’d played around a little with her own fingers, now and then; she relaxed, and breathed, and he murmured in her ear about what a good girl she was as his finger teased her clit ever so gently. And then her ass was full, but her cunt wasn’t, and she was pulsing with need already, twisting in the wind, desperate for him. Desperate to be full of him.

 

“I wish I owned a gag,” he said, almost to himself, and although it was nothing she’d ever thought too hard about, it was something she wanted, too, all of a sudden.

 

That would be full: her ass full of his toy, her cunt full of his cock, her mouth full of his gag. Entirely controlled by him, entirely at his mercy. Her body squeezed so hard she thought she might come apart. She wanted. She needed.

 

He sat back and chuckled, tracing his hands over her body, massaging her with oil, teasing at nipples and her round ass and flicking and pinching and making her squirm. “I want to fuck you,” he said, and she whimpered in a way that she hoped was urging and tempting. She would have used words, if she thought they would have come out in a way that made sense. “But first, I need to ask you a question. It’s a real question, not a scene question, and I should have asked it before.”

 

“Okay,” she gasped out.

 

“Do you want my hand on your throat again, or was that just last night?”

 

That was a question, wasn’t it? She’d read about people who got off on breath play, who wanted their partners to take away their air and make it even less safe. That scared her. But last night, it hadn’t been about the air. It had been about the feeling of a collar around her neck, the feeling of ownership.

 

“I don’t want you to make it so I can’t breathe,” she said, carefully. “I want you to make me feel owned.”

 

“I see,” he said, and there was something about his voice. He sounded almost reassured. “You’re looking to feel possessed. Like I could take it away if I wanted to, but knowing I won’t.”

 

“Knowing I can trust you,” she said, her voice a little smaller than she’d thought it would be.

 

“You can always trust me,” he said, and the bed shifted again as he knelt behind her.

 

The moment when he plunged into her was always delicious, but there was something about this, here, splayed out and wanton, that turned her on so much. She was entirely visible, but she couldn’t see. She was very much at his mercy. And he knew it; he groaned and sagged as he sank into her, and he was breathing heavily from the very first stroke.

 

He did what she wanted with his hands, as if he could read her mind again; one closed softly around her throat giving just enough pressure to make her notice it, and the other finding her clit, just below the place where he’d joined them. And then he moved against her, not quite fucking her hard, but moving with a ruthless, driving efficiency, forcing her to brace against the headboard to keep her from getting her face smashed up against it.

 

She pushed back against him hard. “Is that the best you’ve got?” she murmured, and he growled at her, past words himself. “Can’t you fuck me any harder than that?”

 

“Bitch,” he cursed, the word affectionate in his mouth, and he pulled her hands free, spun her onto her back — with the blindfold on, the vertigo was intense, but he was back inside of her before she had time to be truly disoriented — and her legs were back up over his shoulders.

 

At this angle, he buried himself all the way down inside of her, to the point where it almost started to hurt, and she found herself craving the pain, yearning for it, loving it, spinning out around it until she was arching against him, crying out, not quite coming but exploding as he burst inside of her, spilling forth and sagging over her, rolling to one side. She thought they were done, but his fingers slipped back between her thighs, teasing at her clit until that pleasure stormed through her one more time, making her free and taking her prisoner all at once. She shuddered and shook against him, and let him clean both of them up, curling up onto his chest to fall into something between sleep and blissful unawareness as the pleasure washed away any remnants of darkness.

 

Later, when her eyes were open again, he was stroking her hair. She wasn’t sure when it had come undone. Maybe he’d taken it down himself, to run his fingers through it. The sensation was nice enough to make her purr.

 

“There’s something we still need to talk about,” Tex said, and his voice was businesslike again.

 

She looked up at him. “Should I put my shirt on for this?”

 

He raised an eyebrow. “I can control myself if you can.”

 

She considered. “I’d better put my shirt on.” She wandered around the room, finding a clean shirt in a drawer and pulling the pajama pants from the previous night back on. She tossed him his pants, too. His cock was at rest in between his thighs, but it was still all too tempting. The way it twitched with interest when she so much as looked at it. Nope, she was not in a mood to behave herself. Not when she wanted so much to keep remembering that she was alive.

 

“Two things,” he said, rolling onto his side and propping his head up on his elbow. “Smokey, and last night. Which one do you want to talk through first?”

 

“Last night,” she said, without any hesitation.

 

He nodded. “We can’t talk about it. You remember that, right?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“We have no reason to believe that there will be any problems, but part of that means not really…getting to talk about it. Walking away from it, and leaving it in the past. But I know how hard that can be. How are you feeling?”

 

It seemed like a really abrupt change in the conversation, and she wasn’t entirely sure how the two points related. “Fine, I guess?”

 

“Sure?”

 

She took another moment to think. “I think I should feel guilty. A good person would feel guilty. But I also think that he…didn’t fight back. He was done. You know? I kind of hate that he made us the instrument of that, and I really hate that anyone else got hurt. That part makes me sick. But him?” She thought again, and then she shook her head. “I don’t feel good about it, but I don’t feel bad about it, either. I feel like it’s done, and now I’m going to live the rest of my life.” She cocked her head to the side. “Am I in shock? Is that what you’re looking for? Is that what an emotionally damaged person would say?”

 

He laughed, then, and patted her knee. “I’m the last person in the world to criticize anyone for being emotionally damaged, first of all. Second, I personally think that of all the reactions I’ve seen, yours is the one that tends to lead to people being…the most okay. And for what it’s worth, I agree with you. I hate that Mac got in the way, but I also think he made a conscious choice to do it. I don’t think there’s anything we could have done to stop him, other than let Pedey go, and there was no way that was happening.”

 

They were quiet for a moment, and she tried to hope the conversation was done. No way it would be that easy, of course.

 

“And what about your father?”

 

“He’s not my father.”

 

“Sorry. Excuse me. What about Smokey?”

 

She shrugged. “What about him?”

 

“Last I heard, he was drying out in one of barns at the orchard,” Tex said. “We need to decide what happens to him next. Do we let him go, or do we…not?”

 

It sounded really innocent, put like that. Like not letting him go would be this benign choice, a better choice. Holy crap. “Why do I choose?” she asked.

 

Tex was quiet for a little while. “I’m not going to force you to. If you want to leave that on me, I’ll take it. But I think you should think it through. See what you feel is right. Because whether or not you two have any kind of emotional connection, you do have a biological one, and that means something.”

 

Her first instinct was to tell him to take care of it. To wash her hands of the whole, ugly mess, and just pretend she had sprung forth from her mother’s womb like the baby Jesus. Or to call her mother and ask for help deciding what to do.

 

But the truth was that putting this burden on anyone else wasn’t fair. Not even Tex. His willingness to take it up was commendable. But it shouldn’t be necessary. She should be enough to take care of this decision.

 

Which was all well and good from an intellectual point of view. The emotional truth of it, unfortunately, was that she had no idea what was right from here. “I don’t know,” she said, finally. “I don’t. I don’t want him dead, exactly. But I don’t…ever want to see him again.”

 

Tex nodded, thinking. “I have a suggestion,” he said, “if you’re okay to hear it.”