He Rejected Me Out Loud and Kept Other Women, So I Never Answered novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Gaff

On bourbon for the first time she walks up to a stranger in an old oilskin coat and tells him what she wants; it is the best night of her life, and she wakes alone smelling of the Alpha.

The Gaff was one long room with a tin ceiling and a woodstove, and nobody looked up when I came in.

I sat at the bar with my wage in my fist and told the bartender I wanted a bourbon.

"You're Darrow's girl," the bartender said.

"I'm a customer," I said.

"You ever had one?"

I shook my head.

"Then it's a short pour, and it's on you," the bartender said.

The bartender set it down and went to the other end.

I drank half of it and nearly died.

It burned all the way down, and then something in my chest I had been holding tight for three days came loose, a little.

I drank the rest.

The second one went easier.

By the third I could look down the length of the bar without my eyes watering.

He sat at the far end, alone, with his back to the stove and a coat over the stool beside him.

It was an old oilskin coat, black and stiff with salt, and the hood hung down the back of the stool.

He had a short dark beard, and he was drinking water.

His hands lay flat on the bar on either side of the glass, and he was staring at nothing.

He looked like a man who had not slept in a long time and had given up pretending he would.

I could not smell him.

That is how the Reach is at night.

The she-wolves wear sea-salt tinctures from the apothecary, so nobody has to know who they smell like.

The men scrub their coats in brine before they go to the bars, for the same reason.

I had never been so glad of a custom in my life.

I picked up my glass, walked down the bar, and sat on the stool next to the coat.

He did not turn his head.

"Is that taken," I said.

"It's a coat."

"Then I'll sit on the coat."

He lifted it without a word and set it on his other side, and I sat.

His arm lay an inch from mine on the bar, and I could feel the heat of it.

"You don't have to talk to me," I said. "I don't want your name."

"Good."

"I don't want mine said either."

He turned and looked at me for the first time.

The stove was behind him, and I could see only that his eyes were pale and that his face had gone very still.

"Why not," he said.

"Because I've had a bad week, and I'd like one night of it to belong to nobody."

He was quiet.

"There's a room upstairs," he said at last. "The bartender keeps a key."

"I know where the stairs are," I said.

"I haven't got anything to give you."

"I didn't ask you for anything," I said. "I'm telling you what I want."

I put my hand flat on his thigh under the bar, and the muscle jumped.

"Tell me," he said, low.

"I want you to follow me up those stairs and lock the door from the inside."

His breath went out through his nose.

"I want to be on top," I said, "and I want your hands where I put them until I say."

"Anything else?"

"I'll let you know."

I finished the bourbon and slid off the stool.

I walked to the back stairs without looking behind me.

I heard the coat come off the stool and a key hit the bar.

I heard his boots on every step.

The room upstairs was small and cold and smelled of dust, with a narrow iron bed and a window over the harbor.

I stood in the middle of it with my back to the door.

He closed it behind him and turned the lock.

It made a flat sound in the dark.

"Say when," he said.

I turned around.

I took his face in both my hands and kissed him.

His mouth was warm and tasted of cold water, and for a second he did not move at all.

Then a noise came out of his chest, and I felt it through my own ribs.

His hands went up and stopped in the air on either side of me, shaking.

"I said where I put them," I said against his mouth.

"Where."

I took his wrists and set his palms flat on my hips, over my jacket.

"There."

He gripped me hard.

I let him hold on while I kissed him again, slowly, with my tongue, until he was breathing in short pulls.

I got my jacket off, and my shirt, and stood in front of him in my bra with my hair half down.

He looked at me and did not move.

His eyes dropped to my breasts and came back up, and a flush ran across his cheekbones.

"Sit on the bed," I said.

He sat.

I stepped between his knees and took his gray work shirt by the hem and pulled it over his head.

His chest was broad and dark-haired, with an old scar across the ribs, and I put my mouth on the scar.

He made a sound I felt in my teeth.

"Can I ask you," he started, and I put my fingers over his lips.

"No questions. No names."

He shut his eyes and nodded and said nothing more.

I pushed him down on the iron bed.

I stripped off my jeans while he watched, and I knelt over him with a knee on either side of his hips, and his hands came up to my waist and stopped.

"You can touch me," I said. "Slowly."

He ran his palms up my ribs and over my bra.

He unhooked it one-handed and let it fall.

When my breasts came free he said "Christ" very quietly, and he lifted his head and took one in his mouth.

I arched into him.

His tongue circled the nipple, and his teeth caught it, and I heard myself gasp.

He sucked hard, and then softly, and I dug my fingers into his hair and pulled him closer.

"Lower," I said.

He rolled me onto my back so smoothly that I yelped.

He knelt between my legs and caught my underwear in his teeth and drew it down, slowly, with his eyes on my face.

"Tell me if I'm wrong," he said.

"You aren't."

He put his mouth on my pussy and licked up it in one long stroke.

I came up off the mattress.

He held me down by the hips and did it again.

Then he found my clit with the flat of his tongue and circled it, slow and wet and patient, until my hands were knotted in the sheet.

I had been touched by two boys in two parked trucks, and neither had known where anything was.

This man knew exactly where, and he took his time, and he watched my face for what each stroke did.

"There," I said. "Don't move."

He did not move.

He kept his tongue hard against me in that one place, and I came with a cry I had to bury in my own arm.

My thighs shook against his shoulders.

He kept going through it, gently, until I pushed his head away.

He rested his forehead on my hip bone, breathing hard.

"You taste," he said, and stopped, and I felt him laugh without any sound.

"Don't talk," I said, and I was smiling.

I got up on my knees and shoved him flat on his back.

"My turn."

I unbuttoned his trousers and pulled his cock out, thick and hard and hot in my hand, and he jerked up into my grip.

"God. Please."

"Not yet."

I took him in my mouth.

He swore, low and long.

His hips lifted off the bed, and his hands closed on the sheets and stayed there.

I took him as deep as I could and drew back and did it again.

I felt him shaking with the effort of not touching me.

When I felt him tighten and swell against my tongue, I stopped, and he groaned as if I had hit him.

"Please," he said. "I want to be inside you."

"Say it again."

"I want to be inside you."

I climbed over him and sank down on his cock in one slow stroke, and we both went still.

He was bigger than I had thought, and I took a long minute to move.

"Okay?" he said through his teeth.

"Shut up."

I rode him.

I set the pace, slow and then not slow, and his hands on my hips held me as I rocked, each push taking him deeper.

I watched his face, and he watched mine.

He could not finish a sentence.

"God, you feel," he said. "God."

I reached down between us and rubbed my own clit while I fucked him, and his eyes went dark.

"Let me," he said hoarsely.

"Do it."

His thumb replaced my fingers, and he rubbed in hard small circles, and I came again, clenching around him so tight he shouted.

"Now," I said. "Now. Do it."

He flipped us over and drove into me, and again, with a sound in his throat that was half a growl.

I wrapped my legs around his hips and held on.

He came with his face pressed into my neck, and his whole body shook.

For a long time neither of us said anything.

His weight lay across me, hot and heavy, and his breath moved against my collarbone.

I looked at the cracked plaster of the ceiling and felt better than I had ever felt in my life.

After a while he rolled off and lay beside me.

I waited for him to speak, and he did not.

His hand found mine on the sheet and held on, and I let it.

I woke him with my mouth an hour later, and he made me come again on his fingers before I let him inside me from behind, slowly, my face in the pillow and his chest warm against my back.

We were quiet that time, and he held my hip like it might get away from him.

Afterward he lay with his forehead against my shoulder blade and did not move for a long time.

Then he got up on one elbow and looked down at me.

"One night," I said. "You heard me."

"I heard you," he said.

"No names."

"I know," he said.

He kissed me once, softly, on the forehead.

It was the kind of kiss a man gives something he has no right to.

"Sleep," he said. "I'll watch the door."

I closed my eyes and slept the way I had not slept since I was sixteen.

When I woke, the window was gray and the room was cold and empty.

The oilskin coat was gone from the chair, and the key was gone from the table.

I lay there with the sheet pulled up, feeling the ache between my legs and the warmth where his hand had been.

I put my wrist to my face to smell my own skin.

I was an Etheridge, and I knew every scent on the Reach, and I knew this one.

It was salt, and tar, and cold cedar smoke.

I lay very still in the dead gray light and understood that I had spent the night with the Alpha.

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