Chapter 385- A Bad Memory Piece
Warm. Immediate. The let-down reflex of a woman’s body doing what it was designed to do when presented with the appropriate stimulus — and she ’cried out’, the sound of it breaking into the garden air with the specific, overlapping register of sensation that had nowhere clean to go.
"’WAIT—’" Her voice. The formal diction gone entirely, pure panic underneath. "’Leave something — leave something for my child — please—’"
He pulled off the nipple.
Looked at her.
His mouth curved.
He thrust.
PAAAH!
"’AAANGHH~!!’"
The milk jetted — the force of the thrust driving the let-down, the thin, warm spray of it catching the moonlight — and he put his mouth back and took what came.
"’Isn’t that,’" he said, against the nipple, his teeth grazing the base, "’my child too.’"
The sound she made at those words was the sound of a woman who has had something said to her that her body found interesting and her mind found catastrophic and neither could agree on the response.
"’Don’t—’" Tears. The real kind. Running sideways across her face into the grass. "’Don’t say that — Hero Raven — AAANGHH~!!’"
PAH! PAH! PAH! PAAAH!
"’AAANGHH~!! HHNN~!! AHH~!! HIEEK~!!’"
The grass bent under them.
Her thighs were running wet — the specific, continuous evidence of her own body’s position on the matter — her cunt clenching around him in the long, rhythmic pulses of a woman who had arrived somewhere against her judgment and was now residing there without alternative.
Her boobs jiggled with every thrust.
The full, heavy swing of them, the milk still leaking in thin trails down the outer curves, catching the moonlight on the way — forward on each impact, back on each withdrawal, the nipples trailing thin ribbons of white in the air.
She orgasmed with a sound that startled the birds from the nearest hedgerow.
"’IAAAANGHH~!! AAANGHH~!! H-HNNGH~—’"
Her thighs clamped.
Her back arched.
Her hands found the grass and pulled.
He kept going.
The pace that had no mercy in it, the pace that had been applied to this problem from the beginning, the pace that had produced this moment and was now extending it past its natural endpoint because he was a man who did not leave work incomplete.
He was building toward his own release. She could feel it — the change in his rhythm, the deepening of each stroke, the hips arriving with a force that had increased slightly from the working pace—
"’YOU BASTARD.’"
The voice came from the garden gate.
Both of them turned.
Gareth stood at the garden entrance.
Not the relaxed posture of a man who has wandered into a garden. The posture of a man whose entire body has arrived at a conclusion that his hands have already begun acting on — the weight forward, the jaw set, the eyes with the specific, cold focus that Gareth’s eyes got when something had bypassed his considerable patience entirely.
Astasia was beside him.
"’Are you — is that — Lady Holt—’"
Gareth was already moving.
He crossed the garden in four steps.
His hand found Raven’s collar.
The grip of a man with basketball-trained hands — large, certain, the fingers closing around the fabric with the casual, irresistible strength of someone who had been lifting his own body weight since he was fourteen — and he ’lifted.’
Raven came up.
His cock, still hard, still glistening with everything the last thirty minutes had produced, pulled free of Lady Holt’s cunt with the wet, audible sound of separation — and in the half-second of that separation, the release arrived, unbidden, the load he had been building toward jetting outward in a thick, uncontrolled arc—
—and landing on Astasia’s silver armor.
The silence that followed had a specific quality.
Astasia looked down at her breastplate.
She looked up.
Her expression — visible now, the helmet under her arm — went through shock, then processing, then the flat, volcanic stillness of a woman who has had the worst possible thing happen in the worst possible location at the worst possible moment and has decided that none of the standard responses are adequate.
Gareth was not looking at Astasia.
He was looking at Raven.
The look of a man who has found something he has been suspecting for some time and is not gratified by being correct.
"’You trash,’" he said.
His fist drove forward.
The punch arrived in Raven’s stomach with the force of a man who had spent three years as battalion top performer and two years as the ranking hero in his intake and had the muscle memory of a thousand training sessions behind every pound of it.
The shockwave was not metaphorical.
The air ’displaced’ — a concussive ring of it expanding outward from the point of impact, the grass flattening in a circle, Lady Holt’s hair and gown catching the edge of it and pressing backward, her body sliding two feet across the lawn.
Astasia’s hair — caught loose at the temples — was pressed flat against her cheek.
Raven’s eyes rolled.
His body folded.
The specific, involuntary fold of a man whose diaphragm has been introduced to a force beyond its current capacity for argument — the lungs emptying, the knees finding their own opinion about weight distribution, the whole architecture of him compressing inward from the impact point.
Blood appeared at the corner of his mouth.
He was going down.
Through the narrowing tunnel of his vision — the amber edges closing in from the periphery, the center of his sight compressing to a point — he saw Gareth’s face above him.
The anger in it.
And beneath the anger, the other thing — the thing Gareth had not processed and did not know he was showing, the specific disorientation of a man who has punched someone and feels the wrongness of the gap between how much force he used and how much he’d meant to hold back.
Raven hit the grass.
He lay there.
The garden was very quiet except for Lady Holt’s unsteady breathing and the distant sounds of the banquet and the birds, which had not returned.
He tasted blood.
He looked at the grass six inches from his face.
He thought, with the flat, clear-eyed assessment of a man who has been comprehensively punched by someone who is not yet aware of what they are:
’Haah... fuck...’
Then:
’’He hit me like I weighed nothing.’’
He moved his lips.
The words came out wet and quiet and aimed at the grass rather than at any of the three people standing over him.
"’Y-you...’" A breath that didn’t have quite enough air in it. The taste of iron. "’...motherfucker—’"
"...."
"’Slurp... Umnhhh... Aahnnmmp~~’"
The kitchen was quiet except for her.
Jennifer’s throat worked around him in the steady, wet rhythm she had learned over the course of the day — the back-of-the-throat pull, the tongue applying pressure along the underside of the shaft on each withdrawal, the specific technique her mouth had developed through the simple, immersive education of repetition.
She was on her knees.
Her hair was loose around her face, most of it caught in his fist at the crown — not pulling, just ’holding’, the way you hold a leash on something that has learned not to run — and her eyes were upturned, looking at him from below with the wet, glassy expression of a woman whose face had been used enough today that ’used’ had become its resting state.
Tears ran.
"Sob... hic.... R...a..v... ummh~"
They had been running for most of the afternoon and had become ambient — the continuous, honest overflow of eyes that had been through a great deal and were reporting on it — and they ran sideways across her cheeks and gathered at the line of her jaw and fell.
Her throat bulged.
Each forward press of his cock into the depth of her visible in the skin of her neck — the obscene ridge of him moving under the surface, his shape present in her body from the outside — and she gagged, soft and wet and involuntary, the sound of it filling the kitchen with the specific, dense intimacy of a woman who had stopped having opinions about what her throat was asked to accommodate.
"’Umnhh~... Mmmpph~... Slrpp~...’"
Her heavy breasts swayed with each motion — the full, pendulous weight of them, still marked from his hands, moving in the slow arcs of things that had no choice about physics — and her nipples, still swollen, still faintly leaking the thin warmth of her milk, dragged against the inside of her apron with each forward pull.
She had kept the apron on.
He had not told her to keep it on. She had simply not taken it off, and now it was the only thing she was wearing, and the domestic absurdity of it — Jennifer Luo, IRONTHREAD retired, on her knees in her own kitchen apron giving head to a man who had arrived through her ceiling this morning — had stopped being absurd approximately four hours ago and had become simply ’true’.
"’Aahnnmmp~~... Umnhh~...’"