“Christ!” Ally screamed as her hands raked at my biceps, but I was too gone, too fucking wrapped up in this chick beneath me, the only chick to ever have been standing proudly at my side.

I pounded into her, my stomach clenching and thighs tensing as her head thrashed around in the dust. Her dark hair was lapping up white dust, smudges paling out her flushed face. But the more she thrashed, the more I stared. She looked like a living sculpture. She looked like the best sculpture I’d ever seen.

Back arching, Ally’s moans came longer and her arms fell from my bicep and lay across her head. Dust settled on her flat, toned stomach, and unable to resist, I spread my palm over her covered skin, pumping harder and harder with every stroke. Ally’s eyes were closed as I felt her pussy tighten and start to contract. Then, her whole body tensing, her mouth dropped open as she screamed out her release. Unable to take the sight of her beneath me, and my dick unable to take the pressure of her tight pussy, I came harder than I ever had done in my life, Ally’s eyes shooting open to watch me.

Gasping for breath in the aftermath, I lifted my hand and, using my thumb, lightly traced the dust covering most of Ally’s face with my fingertips, and I knew, without a shadow of doubt that I’d be adding one final piece to the exhibit.

Ally let me touch her face, she let me shift her head from side to side as I studied her angles and features. And I knew right then, that this piece would change it all. This piece would be the first one to break the mold.

It would be the one to set me free.

When my hand dropped from her face, my heart began to race in excitement for what I was going to create, Ally moved her heels from my back. I immediately felt blood drip down the back of my thighs.

I hissed and Ally’s eyes widened. “Shit… Axel, I’m so sorry.”

Lowering my head to take her full bottom lip between my teeth, I pushed into her one last time and dropped her lip from my teeth to say, “Don’t be. That was fucking incredible.”

Ally’s returning smile almost knocked me on my ass. Picking her up again, I walked us to the bed, but not before Ally grabbed the new bottle of whiskey I’d just brought from my table and took it with us.

She held it tightly in her arms. Ally shrugged. “I think we need it after tonight.”

As I lowered us to the bed and we crawled under the covers, dawn began to break. Ally waited until I sat against the headboard, then reached over me to the bedside table. She took a smoke from my nearly empty packet, placed it between her lips and lit it. As the end burned orange, Ally took in a drag, only to blow it out of her lips and place the smoke between my lips. As she hovered above me on all fours and I took a long drag, her eyebrow raised. “They’re real bad for you, you know.”

Taking the smoke from between my lips with my finger and thumb, I exhaled. “Yeah, I heard that once.”

Ally started laughing harder this time, but stopped to press kisses down my stomach. I ran my hand through her hair and Ally lifted her head to say, “I can never get enough of you. It’s impossible.”

My heart beat faster and I reached for the bottle of whiskey. As Ally’s head tilted to the side to gaze at me, I said, “I’m real bad for you, you know.”

Ally held her breath for a moment, losing her smile. She lowered her mouth to my chest and moved up to my lips, only to whisper back, “Yeah, I heard that once.”

I huffed a laugh as Ally sat back, eyeing me playfully. “Just once?” I asked.

She pretended to think, her finger to her lips. “Or twice, or three times…” she laughed, but quickly lost her humor, “or a million.”

My stomach tensed at the sad tone in her voice. I balanced the smoke between my lips and took the bottle of Tennessee heaven from her hands. I unscrewed the cap and, moving the smoke from my lips, took a swig of the whiskey and handed it to Ally. She took three long swallows before tearing it from her mouth to gasp at the burn in her throat and chest.

As she lay back on her ankles after drinking down the whiskey, her eyes scanned around the room. When she saw the state of the workstation, she looked down at her hair and lifted it in her hands. She laughed.

“I’m a mess,” she said, trying to swat the dust off her hair and skin.

She wasn’t a mess. In fact, if she wasn’t here right now, I’d be taking a new slab of marble, beginning to sculpt the image already haunting my damn head.

Ally’s shoulders slumped. Running her finger round and round the top of the bottle, she said, “The exhibit is almost done, Axel.”

That sadness was back in her voice and she couldn’t lift her eyes to me.