RawHeat (7 page)

He cut her off almost immediately. Like a reflex.

“Don’t. Don’t,” he said, and she understood why. She really
did. Outside he’d be safe, or as safe as anyone could get in this world. He’d
be able to run with the wolves and challenge any that got in his way, and after
a time maybe he’d even build one of the strange wooden cities people said
they’d made.

But
she
couldn’t. She wouldn’t be safe. They’d eat
her alive before she’d taken three steps out of the heavy metal bulkhead at the
end of the south corridor, and they wouldn’t think twice about it.

“It can only end up one way, you know—this thing we have,”
she said, but she could tell he wasn’t thinking about anything like that
anymore. It got hard to think when someone had their hands down over your body,
sliding through a gloss of perspiration slow and easy, everything intent on
making you feel good.

And she was, she was, because stroking him was better than
thoughts of burning or being torn apart or worse. Everything just washed away
when she slid out from beneath the bulk of his body and laid slippery kisses
over his chest, his stomach, and finally his stiff cock.

Of course he reacted the strongest for that last one. She
felt his hand go to her hair almost immediately, and though his hips bucked he
didn’t try to force her to go on. Quite the contrary.

“No, no—let’s not do that. Don’t…that.”

“You missed a word,” she said, then licked over the straining
curve of his shaft, nice and wet and slippery.

He said things then, all right. But she couldn’t really
count them as words.

“Is that good?” she asked. In reply he squeezed the pillow
behind his head. His cock twitched, as though maybe it could get at her mouth
just by acting innocent and moving around a little.

A little wasn’t going to cut it.

“You know, I’ve never had a man in my mouth before,” she
said, and he groaned harder for that one. Mumbled something about her not
having to do it, if she didn’t really feel like it. “Have you ever…?”

He opened his eyes then. They were still heavy-lidded, but
his gaze lasered in on her with some precision. Her sex swelled in response,
everything down there growing slick and ready to take him.

“Once. Once. Maybe…forty years ago now.”

Of course she’d seen his file. She knew he only
looked
in his late twenties. But still, it was sometimes a shock to hear him say how
old he really was, out loud. To hear him talk about things she knew nothing
about, having spent her whole life in this decaying rabbit warren humans now
called home.

“People used to drive around in little vehicles of their
own—not like the big armored transports now. And I had one—a car. I had a girl
too, though she was nothing like you. What we had was nothing like this. It was
all just so…casual. Everything was casual then. I used to take her somewhere
quiet in my car and then she’d put her mouth on me just…like…that.”

She sucked him into her mouth, hard, caught somewhere
between raging desire and twisting jealousy. But then the taste of him—so
salt-sweet and good—flooded her, and the feel of him took the rest of her
senses, and she forgot the little sting of resentment toward some other girl,
long gone.

Especially when his hand tightened in her hair, and he said
so low and soft, “But it didn’t feel this way. Like I’m going to split apart if
you carry on—God your mouth is so hot. So wet. Keep going like that, keep
going.”

She got a hand around him and rubbed as she tasted him,
licking under the pronounced ridge beneath the head of his cock, flicking over
the salty slit at the tip, sucking and sucking until his hips lifted off the
bed. It felt so much better than she’d imagined, to bring someone pleasure with
her mouth, so much hotter. He’d almost lost himself, and she’d barely done
anything at all.

“Turn around,” he said, in a voice so hoarse it was
practically burned down to nothing. And when she did, when she twisted
awkwardly on the bed until he could get at the aching place between her legs,
he didn’t waste time. He didn’t even seem to care if she carried on sucking
him—though she found it a fairly simple task to do so.

It was less simple, however, when he slid a hand up over her
thigh and pressed two fingers over her slit, suddenly, firmly. Said two fingers
found it pretty easy, from there, to slither through her folds and find her
clit.

And then it was all just frantic stroking and even more
frantic sucking, and every scrap of greed in the world rattling through her,
too heady and strong to deny. She could feel her orgasm rising up already,
though she knew it had a lot to do with the shaky breaths he was taking, and
the moaning, and after a long, drawn-out moment he told her, “I’m close, don’t
stop. Oh God don’t stop.”

He actually said the words
don’t stop
. No resistance,
no worry. It was almost as though they were normal, a real and normal couple
just pleasuring each other with complete abandon, and if there was ever a time
for Tara or Commissioner Reddick or anyone at all to just walk into the ward
right then and there, this was it.

But nobody did. Instead, she bristled from head to toe with
that lovely, fizzing sensation, clit swelling beneath his busy fingers, body
releasing and contracting under the pressure of orgasm. And when he blurted
that he could feel her coming—shortly before flooding her mouth with hot,
slippery fluid—the sensation twisted deeper, went on longer.

It was blissful and impossibly perfect. And even better when
he pulled her up to lay beside him, as though maybe they could just drift off
to sleep now. Like real people.

Though in truth he looked better than real, when he turned
his head on the pillow and gazed at her. His eyes seemed a deeper color than
usual—almost a blue—and those lids still hung heavy over his smoky gaze. It
took her a moment to realize it, but then it came to her.

He seemed relaxed. Utterly, lazily relaxed, as though
nothing in the world could hurt or touch either of them.

And he backed her theory up too, when he ran the back of his
hand over the swell of her partially uncovered breast. Down over her side, so
soft and unhurried. A caress, rather than a frantic stroke or grab.

“Would you really leave here with me, if it came to it?” he
asked, and though the mood remained slow and easy, she could feel her heart
suddenly picking up the pace.

“Are you serious?”

He wouldn’t meet her gaze then. Just kept following the path
his hand was winding over every bit of bare flesh he could find.

“I don’t know. I’m just…talking. Idly.”

She propped herself up a little, on her elbows.

“So talk less idly. Ask me for real, and see what I say.”

“There’s nowhere to go—you know that right?”

She thought of the pictures some of the gunners had brought
back once. Of a great field filled with a roiling, squirming maze of fur and
teeth and blood. No wolf distinguishable from another one, everything
nightmarish and strange. She thought of her dreams, so filled with running,
endless running.

“I don’t care.”

“You would. Living in the shell of civilization up there,
eating only what we’d managed to hunt down. Always scared the wolves would
scent you out or worse…because you know the people here would look for you too.
Maybe, in time, I could make the wolves stay away. But I could never stop
whatever humans are left from shooting you down on sight.”

She wanted to say he was crazy—that people had too many
other concerns now. That time was running out and human beings were running
low, and why would they bother coming after some feeble little traitor?

But something in her knew he spoke the truth. They wouldn’t
see her as little or feeble. They’d only see the word traitor in massive,
blinding lights, and go after her with the same burning hatred destroying them
now.

“I’d rather be shot out there, than burned in here. I’d
rather run with you and know we were both free just before we got eaten or
sliced up or whatever else could possibly happen to us, than stay here like
this.”

He turned his head on the pillow, closed his eyes. Spoke in
a low, grave voice, “You don’t know what you’re asking. God, you just don’t know.”

Chapter Five

He’d seemed pretty set on no, after their last talk. So set,
in fact, that when he actually turned up in her room in the middle of the
night, she felt sure she’d cracked her head on something and started
hallucinating.

She thought about her idea in the lab—of werewolves who
could mimic each other. She thought about it long and hard as he shut the door
behind himself and closed them both into utter blackness, leaving behind
nothing of him and everything of some possible other creature. He could have
been anyone or anything in the pitch black, and she didn’t know which was
worse.

Putting her little nightlight on to see if it was some other
terrible thing instead, or keeping it off and sticking with the lack of surety.

In the end, she went with the light. And there he was, just
as bold as brass and twice as large, eyes gleaming with the now familiar sort
of hunger—so much so that she had to wonder if he hadn’t come here to escape
with her like some mental person. Maybe he’d done something even more mental,
like turned up at her door wanting sex.

“Are you insane? What are you doing here? Did you come all
the way down here from the ward? Holy crap—I’m only surprised the combined
hatred of a thousand people didn’t strike you dead as you flounced through the
corridors.”

“I didn’t flounce. I just walked. They don’t even lock the
ward door anymore—they probably think I’m simple.”

“They don’t think you’re simple, Connor, and they do lock
that door. Did you bust it open? I can’t believe you busted it open.”

“Listen. Serena—”

But she had to interrupt. She had to. She’d just noticed
something even more insane.

“Oh my Christ, are you wearing pants? Where the fuck did you
get pants? Oh they’ll just kill you if they catch you wearing clothes, they’ll
kill you—”

“Serena, I’m in your actual real, live room. I think we’re a
little past clothes-wearing.”

She fell silent, then, because by God he was. And he looked
so big in her tiny little space too, like a huge, impossible giant. He seemed
to swell against the narrow line of her bed and the tiny cupboard she kept her
few possessions in, head almost at the ceiling. Shoulders almost crowding
things out.

She didn’t know what to do or say on any level. Most of her
wanted to reach out a hand and touch his immense chest, just to see if he was
real.

“We have to go,” he said, and she needed to check that out
too. Were those the actual, honest-to-God words he’d honestly spoken?

“But you said that—”

“I know what I said. We have to go. Right now.”

“You could have warned me you were going to change your mind
in the middle of the night, Conn.”

It sounded a bit mealy and petty coming out, even though she
hadn’t intended it to be. This was all just so…and he just seemed so…well…

He seemed pale, and harried. And when he almost put his back
to her so he could start doing something ridiculous like rummaging through her
cupboard, she could see all the hackles on the nape of his neck had risen in a
weird, jagged line.

“I haven’t changed my mind. We just have to go whether I
want us to or not.” He passed her a jacket. The one she’d made out of seven
other torn and ruined jackets some scavenger trip had brought back. “Here, put
this on. It’s winter outside, and believe me winter is fucking cold.”

There were still questions in her, but she didn’t find it
odd that her hands wanted to obey him. Her hands wanted to pull on the trousers
he offered her, and the half-woolen, half-something else sweater he rooted out,
and then finally the jacket.

“What’s going on? Have they—”

“There’s going to be a breach. Very soon. A big one.”

She watched him check the torch she had in there, though she
couldn’t imagine why he’d need one. He could see in the dark, couldn’t he?

But then she realized. Oh yeah, then she realized all right.
He
could see in the dark. But
she
couldn’t. And if anything
should happen to him while they were making a run for it, what then?

She’d be lost and alone in the pitch black world above, with
no light and no weapon—or at least, she had no weapon in her imagination, until
he told her to strap the machete over her back.

“Do you have anything else? Guns, arrows—anything?”

She didn’t know what was more disturbing—that she was
shaking, or that he was too.

“They don’t give us anything like that, Conn. Only the
gunners have them. But just wait a second, okay, just wait.” She took a deep
breath, while he tried to fit himself into the biggest item of clothing in her
cupboard—a jersey made out of three other jerseys, all of them with the
remnants of weird words all over them. Things like Harvard and University and
State. “Are you absolutely positive this is what’s happening? You’ve never
sensed a breach before—have you? God, I don’t know if you have or—”

“No, I haven’t.” He swallowed thickly. “But this one’s
different. Okay? This one’s different. It’s over. All of this—it’s over. It’s
like a wall coming this way, too heavy and dark to stand, just too much…”

It was to his credit, she felt, that he sounded remorseful
about it. And the pain on his face looked so real and inescapable too, as
though he had hold of her shoulders and was whispering in her ear,
Even
after everything they’ve done to me, I don’t want things to end this way for
them
.

She loved him. God, she loved him.

“Then let’s go. Go on. I’m with you.”

Those words seemed to help him at least. He took her hand
when she offered it and a great blurt of feeling went through her—stupidly, of
course. Because really, who got so mushy over the first time they’d ever
properly held hands, when wolves were probably about to burst through the
ceiling and kill everyone?