On the Edge of Love (Mama's Brood Book 1) (20 page)

He pushed in and out even more slowly. He was in no rush. He’d stay right here all night long if he had to.

Sabrina broke his rhythm when she moaned, arching her back to take him deeper. He could feel her arousal building. He could feel it in the way she breathed, the way her skin heated, becoming slick with perspiration, in the way her clit grew more engorged as he worked it with the fingers of one hand, while the other slid between the mattress to grip her breast, her nipple a defiant pebble against his palm. He squeezed and dragged his thumbnail over her nipple.

Go slow, he admonished himself as his hips jerked rapidly three times. But so gooood.

Sabrina moaned again and bucked back against him, demanding he pick up his pace without using words.

Go slow.

He dragged his hand from her breast and up the back of her neck, weaving his fingers through the soft coils of hair, and gripped, angling her head so her neck was exposed. He licked and sucked that tender area where his blade loved to cut. Her pulse was wild and rapid, blood pumping through the artery with a force that let him know she was fully awake. He bit her, and she let out a grunt of surprise. He tightened his grip on her hair, his hips surging harder than intended, causing her to cry out louder. Zeus shifted his weight and pressed her head against the mattress as his hips continued to pump steadily, not urgent but no longer languid either. Sabrina tried to position her hands against the mattress and push her torso up off the bed, but he drove his cock into her harder, unwilling to set her free from her current position. He rode her like this at his leisure; her moans and wiggling ass wouldn’t compel him out of his rhythm. He was going to succeed.

“Zeus, please,” she begged. She wanted him to rock into her harder, faster, but he wouldn’t. He liked it this way, just like this, where she could only moan, groan, and whimper.

He surged hard and fast once. He liked that all she could do was take it. That was the only option he would give her.

“Zeus,” she said with each thrust. It became a chant. “Zeus, Zeus, Zeus, damn, baby, uhn, Zeus.”

He ground on steadily, sweat dripping from his face, unwilling to give her what she begged for. More of him. He wouldn’t give her any more, only take.

Her back arched. Her hands clawed the mattress as her pussy rippled, pulled, contracted around him as she shook with orgasm.

He ground his teeth and grimaced out a smile. It was so easy to make her come. He released her head. She was too limp to challenge him. He gripped her hips, pulling them into the exact position he needed them to be in, and he drove forward. Hard. His hands clenched her hips, holding her in place during the impact.

So good.
She felt so damn good. He could fuck her forever.

He growled.
Not forever. No more after this.
He surged into her again. And again, jackhammering into her with so much force he could barely maintain his hold.

When she came this time, the gripping suction of her pussy was his undoing. He ended it hard and fast. Without the condom he imagined he would have pushed his seed so deep he would’ve decorated her vaginal walls in brilliant bursts of white.

She passed out in a sloppy sprawl across the bed. Zeus lowered himself on the bed and gathered her tightly against him while still nestled inside of her. He closed his eyes as he pressed his head into the back of her shoulder. His fingers dancing rhythmically against her thigh. The feeling he’d wanted to extinguish was still there. Expanding even. He would rest, then go at her again. He was positive the third time would be the surgical blade that cut the ethereal cord of need connecting them.

* * * *

Sabrina sneaked out of her own apartment, half-naked and afraid of making even the smallest whisper of sound for fear Zeus would wake up and his dick would somehow land straight inside her woman’s hidey-hole again. After four rounds with him, her body couldn’t take any more. Well, it probably could with the way her nipples tightened just thinking about how thoroughly he had fucked her.

She froze when she closed the front door and it snicked shut. She pressed her ear to the door, waiting to hear him stir, but when no movement or footsteps sounded, she tiptoed down the hall and up the stairs toward Randy’s apartment, groaning as she got a whiff of herself. The scents of Zeus and sex dogged her every step. Maybe it was a mistake to put on his shirt, but it had been the closest and easiest option.

At Randy’s door she tapped lightly, certain he was already up. It was nearly eleven in the morning, and unlike her, he was an early riser. True to form, Randy opened the door bare-chested, with black silk pajama bottoms and a half-smoked joint dangling from his mouth.

He inhaled as he squinted and cataloged every shameful detail of her appearance. Finally he nodded and allowed her to slip into the apartment. She scuttled over to the built-in bench crafted beneath the bay window overlooking the street. Sitting with her back against the wall, she pulled her knees up and stretched the hem of the shirt down, tucking it beneath her feet.

Along the same wall that accommodated the front door was Randy’s plush gray couch. Bride sat slumped down on it, legs slightly parted, wearing a cream linen slip that was scrunched midway up her thighs. Her thick black hair was pulled back into a sloppy ponytail, yet she had the nerve to watch Sabrina as if weighing her worth. The woman had tattoos all over her body—arms, chest, legs—and already she was dangling a tumbler filled with amber liquid between her thumb and forefinger. Who was Bride to make judgments?

In its makeup-free state, Bride’s face glowed with the radiant unblemished health of a child. In Sabrina’s experience, white people who drank as much as Bride seemed to wear the aftermath on their faces. If you took away Bride’s tattoos, piercings, and the blankness of her gaze, she would resemble some delicate pixie chick.

Turning her gaze away from Bride, Sabrina watched Randy as he paced back and forth in front of her. He finally came to sit next to her on the bench and pointed what remained of his blunt in her direction. “You nasty bitch,” Randy said, smothering the end with his fingertips. “Thank God, or Zeus, as the case may be. I swear, if you didn’t get laid with a hot—even if he’s mental—man in your home, I would have written you off.”

“That’s not what you were saying last night.”

He shrugged and slumped back against the narrow column of space where the window ended and the wall began. “Why are you sneaking into my apartment like some runaway slave?”

“Because I’m sore and I need a break, and if he woke up and rolled over, his dick would have found a way inside of me again and again until I wouldn’t be able to walk…and there’s no guarantee he would have stopped even if I hung a CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS sign around my hips.” She sighed. “I left for the well-being of my pud.”

Bride downed the remainder of the liquid and cocked her eyebrow.

“This white broad is sending me,” Randy said in that deadpan voice he used when he was irritated. “Had me smokin’ since seven this morning with all that sitting-and-watching shit she does. She doesn’t talk, doesn’t acknowledge she’s even heard you. That little nod was the most she’s communicated since she’s been here, Bree. What kind of special-ed muthafuckas do you have us associating with?”

Because his back was to Bride, Randy didn’t glimpse the tilt of Bride’s lips. That’s when Sabrina knew the other woman was enjoying herself. Enjoyed the off-putting reactions she engendered. Maybe
enjoy
was too strong a word to define Bride’s minimal emotion, but the other woman wasn’t actively hating her assignment. That much Sabrina knew.

“We could always swap. I take Bride, and you take Zeus,” Sabrina said, feeling more at ease. Interactions with Randy always helped her feel balanced. With him she didn’t have to hold herself back for fear of how he would react. She’d had to do it with Ernesto. Hell, she’d even had to do it with her sister, because Sam had always been more fragile than anyone Sabrina had ever known. For most of their lives it had been Sabrina’s unspoken job to protect Sam from breaking. In the end she was forced to admit she was unable to fulfill that responsibility.

“Just what kind of fool would I look like telling Zeus he couldn’t stay with the woman he’d screwed himself unconscious with because I needed to take a break from Helen Keller’s doppelgänger?”

“Yeah, put like that, it might not go over well.”

“Doesn’t matter how I put it. He’ll either break my neck or eviscerate me, but he won’t be leaving your side.”

“Four times may have been too much,” she mumbled. What they’d done might not have had any effect on someone like Zeus, but she found herself wanting…

Maybe that was just the natural outcome of good sex. It made you want more. Of everything. “Best sex I ever had,” she told Randy. “He even made me say it.”

Bride snorted. “He would.”

Randy cringed and shifted around to look at Bride. “Lord and heaven above, it speaks.”

Bride rolled her eyes and stood. Sabrina and Randy watched as the other woman left the living room and walked a steady line to the kitchen.

Chapter Ten

Zeus woke up instantly, yet kept his eyes closed. What registered first was that he was hard and Sabrina was no longer sprawled over him. He sensed she wasn’t even in the room, and doubted she was in the apartment. Without her warmth, despite the blanket, he was cold.

He opened his eyes and sat up, swinging his legs over the side of the low-lying bed. No, not bed, hard-assed futon. He’d have to get her a better mattress. Continuous sleeping and fucking on this thing would leave abrasions all over his body. It was worse than sleeping on dry earth.

Zeus stood and saw the items Sabrina had worn to bed the night before littered across the floor, but his T-shirt was gone. He flexed his fingers, picked up the knives on the side table, and twirled the blades, allowing them to complete their morning ritual. As the pace of the blades increased, the compulsive need to bury himself in Sabrina’s body diminished, and he was able to clear his mind and allow instinct to point him in her direction. No doubt the direction would lead him to Randy’s apartment. Before all was said and done, Zeus would likely have to stab Randy just to show both Randy and Sabrina that her visiting without him could be bad for Randy’s health as well as the longevity of his life.

He tossed his blades into the mattress to loosen his wrists. Sabrina would be pissed when she saw what he’d done, but she’d understand once he let her know he was going to get her a new one. He pulled on a pair of jeans and walked to the kitchen.

She didn’t have any food. She didn’t have any coffee; she didn’t have beer; she didn’t have shit, not even canned food. She had a half carton of milk, but the stamp said it had expired three weeks ago. Why the hell was she keeping it?

He poured the clumpy remains down the sink and turned on the faucet to wash away the evidence of her less than stellar home-keeping skills. More than food or drink or cleanliness, he still craved her. Didn’t make sense. A lot of things about him didn’t make sense to other people, but he always understood himself. Except where she was concerned. Four times wasn’t a charm. He still wanted her, more than yesterday. The compulsion had rebounded, and she wasn’t here. Unacceptable.

He went back to the living room and pulled another T-shirt from his duffel bag, grabbed his phone, tapped in the code to unlock it, and dialed.

“What’s up?” Big Country answered. “I see your girl sunning in the window upstairs. We laid money on whether you two would even make it out of her bed today. You lost me a wad of money, son. With all the fucking I heard during my rounds, I just knew I had a sure thing.”

Zeus peeked through the heavy brown and gold curtains that looked out on the side of the building and could just see the end of Big Country’s van parked on the street.

“Where’s the tail?”

“Let’s just say us good ol’ boys got a little restless last night and decided to have some fun.”

“Dead?”

“Fun and killing ain’t synonyms to regular folks, Zeus.”

“I would have killed them.”

“Sorry to break it to you, cousin, but you ain’t real regular.”

Zeus hung up, pocketed the phone and Sabrina’s keys, and headed down the hallway to the back interior stairs toward Randy’s apartment. On the second floor, a white guy holding a white cat cradled in his arms stopped in front of him. Zeus looked from the man blocking his path to Randy’s door and felt his fingers twitch.

“Are you lost?” the smaller man asked like he owned the world as well as the universe it rotated in.

Zeus shot his hand out and grabbed the cat, dangling it in the air before letting it drop to the floor. “I like cats.” He didn’t. Quicker than thought his Bowie knife was fisted against his palm. Stupid cat was circling and bumping against Zeus’s leg. For some reason, domestic animals liked him.

“If you don’t move, I’ll cut through you to get to where I’m going.”

The man paled as if Zeus’s words had dropped the hallway temperature by fifty degrees.

Zeus curled his lip in disgust and pushed past the man, who smartly kept his back hugged against the wall as Zeus walked up to Randy’s apartment and pounded on the door twice. Randy opened the door, his eyes automatically going to the blade in Zeus’s hand. Zeus motioned down the hall, and Randy leaned out the door to see the man pressed against the wall, clutching his cat.

Randy opened the door wide and motioned Zeus inside. Zeus immediately took in Sabrina on the window seat, just where Big Country had said. She was wearing his shirt and nothing else. He felt a vibration in his chest as his balls tightened painfully with the need to take her again.

“Stop growling,” Sabrina said casually, and the rumbling quieted, though the pain in his balls didn’t.

“You left.”

“I did.”

“I wasn’t done with you.”

"You were asleep, Zeus. That’s about as done as done gets.”

Sabrina slid off the padded bench with a cup of something steamy clutched between her palms. Before she could move away, Zeus closed the distance between them and took possession of the cup.