RawHeat by Charlotte Stein Page B

with you. Having you inside me. I could still taste
you all over me after…after you did those things to me. I could still smell
you.”
    “And you thought about those things through the bars.”
    “I thought about there being no bars. I thought about
leaving here with you—”
    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