34: GRADY

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I can’t sleep. I’m full of restless energy and decide to have a shower to ground myself. Things are going so well lately, too fricking well. It feels like a precursor for something awful happening. I dry off and wrap the towel around my waist, making my way to the door just as Sunny enters. Cue awful.

She sneers at me.

“Why are you awake?” I bark.

“Oh, you’re talking to me again?!” she detonates.

“I’m sorry, Sunny.” I hang my head. “That was just very…intense.”

“Yeah, I know,” she ticks. “I was there, remember?”

“Hard to forget.” I stare at my feet, having a hard time looking her in the eye.

“Screw off with that,” she squirts.

I lift my head. “With what?”

“With the kicked dog bullpucky,” she splashes. “It was just an explosion. It doesn’t have to mean anything more than that.”

“But it can,” I whine.

She swirls her eyes. “Anyway, don’t sweat it. My nearly burning your bone off was the sincerest form of flattery I can offer. I got off, didn’t I?”

“I remember that part just as vividly as the rest,” I snap.

She smirks. “How about next time we try for a full frostbite experience and see how that works out?”

My poor junk frozen and shattered into a million tiny pieces is how it’ll work out, but my earth spark quakes with anticipation in spite of that, urging me on. “There’s going to be a second time?”

“Maybe even a third,” she flashes, “unless you’re scared I’m too hot to handle.”

I pant. “I’ve already learned the hard way how hot you are.”

“And yet, here you are coming back for more.”

“Glutton for punishment I guess.”

“Just how I like them.” She runs her tongue along her bottom lip, and a shudder runs through me as my earth spark rumbles its approval. “So, my tinderbox is off limits…”

I blush. “I suppose so, yeah.”

“You know what isn’t?” she smoulders.

“What?” I whimper.

“My mouth.”

Before I can even register her meaning, she’s on her knees and hauling my towel away. My yowler comes to from the shock before my brain does, and a second later she’s torturing me with a combination of the heat in her mouth and the cold steel of her barbell.

My fingers wind through her hair, black and blue curling around my fists until my hands are right at her scalp and full of her hair. I use that grip like a rein to guide her. I try to gentle my hold, but when I do, she reaches one hand down to squeeze my chew toys hard enough I flinch back. Her chuckle reverberates around me from the back of her throat and detonates a boom of pleasure through my body.

She’s let me know in no uncertain terms she doesn’t want me to be gentle. So, I comply, burying myself between her lips and driving deep into the back of her mouth with her throat as my magnetic north. The collision of the continued hot and cold race along me as I rut her mouth with punishing force. She braces herself with my hips, driving her nails into my flesh to the point of pain, and that just spurs me on.

I want to see her eyes lit with desire for my control over her, so I jerk her head up to look at me. Thick lashes over heavy lids mark her pleasure. She flicks her tongue once more, the barbell dragging alongside, and I’m done. I spill myself in her mouth, keeping my bone buried deep so the evidence of my pleasure slides right down her throat. I let go of her hair, and she sweeps the side of her lips with her finger where a small drop has escaped. She shoves her finger in her mouth to suck on it, desperate for every last drop.

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Then she stands from the floor, brushes off her knees, and says nothing. Not a single thing. Instead, she leans up on her toes, kisses me chastely on the lips, and heads for the door. She pauses when her hand meets the knob. “Grady,” she radiates, turning back to me, “stop trying to be gentle with me. I don’t like that.”

“I’ll try,” I concede, yelping a lump of nerves down my throat. When I’m in the moment, it’s so easy to lose myself, but after, there’s guilt.

“No.” She’s not joking. “You won’t try, you’ll do, and if you don’t do as you’re told, you’ll be punished.”

My earth spark stands at attention, awaiting my commands, but I don’t have any to give. There’s a new master in our house, and her name’s Sunny.

I’m caught in some half-dazed, half-elated, fully sated place until my serenity is obliterated. “For spark’s sake, Grady,” Ainsley clips, slamming the door the rest of the way open so it crashes into the wall. “Cover that crap up.”

I reach down for my towel and hoist it around myself, every remaining piece of my exposed flesh turning bright red.

“I’d ask what you’re doing up this late,” she begins, “but seeing how I just passed Sunny with a smug smirk on her face, and you’re here still saluting her at half-mast, I already know the answer. Glad she didn’t burn your bone off this time.”

“She…” I stop myself, shaking my head. “What’re you doing up?”

She shrugs. “Opposite problem as you, apparently.”

“You like someone?” I headtilt. “Who is it?”

She clicks her tongue.

“Not Luke,” I yowl. “Come on. Anyone but him. Give me someone I can cheer for. Someone who smiles with all the teeth.”

“That I can freaking do.” She unholsters her Sparklet, aiming the screen at me.

“The latest victim,” I realize.

The picture is of Atlas being held down, fingers jammed into the corners of his mouth and pulling his lips into a horrific smile full of teeth.

“That poor sucker,” I growl. “Well, at least I didn’t have to hack the haunch off this one.”

“Keira did it,” she quickfires.

My brow crumples. “Do I even want to know?”

“Archie took the picture, and Asher held Atlas in place,” she reports, “while Adley pressed his butt right to his cheek here on the left.” She points to the edge of the picture where I can just barely see what would’ve been Adley’s butt.

“Yeah, but how did you know whose haunch it was?” I push.

“It wasn’t Adley’s butt that gave it away. It was Asher’s finger,” she informs me.

I thump my foot expectantly.

“It had nothing to do with me!” she swears. “I wasn’t even old enough to remember, let alone be involved!”

I snuff out a breath.

“It’s the pinky finger.”

I look at the picture again, zooming in. The left pinky finger seems fine. No scars or weird bends. I scan the right. Same thing. I look back at the left, then the right, trying to spot the difference. Then I see it or don’t see it in this case. The pinky finger on his left hand is shy a tip. “What happened to it?”

“Archie bit it off,” she slamfires.

“He what?!” I bay.

“Archie wanted to make a pinky promise to Asher, and Adley told him to make one you have to bite the tip of the person’s finger you want to make the promise to. Archie really, really wanted to make that promise to Asher. So, he didn’t just bite that blitzer. He bit her right off.”

“What was the promise?”

She smirks. “Ironically, it was that he’d never let anyone hurt him again. He was getting picked on in school. Asher has a really soft and good heart. None of us want to see it break even the tiniest bit. If one of us falls, we all freaking fall. Total ladder collapse. I guess we always sort of worried he’d be the first to break, so we’re protective of him.”

“Unless you’re biting his pinky tip off,” I nip. “There might be something seriously wrong with your brother.”

“Which one?”

“All of them,” I admit.

“Archie is…” she hangfires, and I think for a second she might cry. “He never backs down from a challenge, Atlas is the one who keeps our unruly butts in line, Asher is our heart, and Adley keeps us laughing so we never take any horsecrap too seriously.”

“What does that make your dad? It can’t be the ringleader of your doggone circus. That’s too easy.”

“He’s our ladder railing. He’s super sturdy and holds us all together in spite of how incredibly different we are from each other.” She draws a steadying breath. “Anyway, I didn’t come here to piss from my eyes. So, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go take care of that. Then I’ll go back to bed and try to slide my thigh onto Luke’s rudder again to see if I can steer him into my powder keg.”

I wrinkle my muzzle. “Why don’t you talk to him with your North Pole lips instead?”

She brrrts a laugh. “Are you just meeting me for the first time?”

“You talk to me.”

“What Luke and I have is…delicate,” she accurizes. “My squib mouth will shatter it.”

“You’d rather shatter it with extra weight like that?”

“Sometimes banging is just banging, Grady,” she snicks.

“And sometimes it means more,” I yip.

“Like you and Sunny?” she fires back.

“That’s complicated,” I yap.

“Seems we’re in a draw then,” she holsters.

“I don’t want him to hurt you,” I confess.

“I’m not the one you should be worried about.” She smiles and leans up to kiss my cheek. “I’m sort of unbreakable, unlike you.”

“You are.” She’s proved that time and again. “I’ll gladly break my hand on his face if he hurts you though.”

She holds up her fist for me to bump it. I knock mine against hers.

She calls back to me on her way to the toilets, “I’d do some reciprocal threat of violence against Sunny, but she’d like it too dang much.”

I scrub my hand over my face and shake my head as I exit the bathroom. She isn’t wrong. Sunny’s a ticking time bomb. She’s really blown me all to heck. Oh Sunny. That mouth. Those eyes. That fire. Holy heck, that fire. Blindingly bright, yet I can’t seem to look away. Sunshine’s scorched me to the core.