The Cruelest Kind of Hate (Riverside Reapers Book 3)

CALISTA

Getting Teague to bed was surprisingly quick and seamless. Thanks to the heaping amounts of sugar we gave him, he crashed pretty hard. He probably—hopefully—won’t wake up in the middle of the night. If he walks in on something he’s not supposed to see, I’ll personally pay for his therapy bills.

And now I have Gage all to myself. After a long, painful ride home, I sobered up enough to regain my bearings and form a plan of action. I’m not going to give in so easily. At least, not if I can help it. That sadistic side of me demands the wheel this time, and I’m going to have him on his knees so I can see how pretty he is when he begs.

Gage peers around the dark corner to make sure the coast is clear, forfeiting a sigh of relief. “God, that was close. I don’t think Teague would ever recover if he saw us playing tonsil hockey. I mean, I saw my parents groping each other once and it was truly scarring⁠—”

I cut Gage off by pushing him up against the adjoining wall of the kitchen, drawing out an unmanly squeak in the process.

“Gage, shut up,” I growl, my palm pressed against the rapid thudding of his heart—which only quickens under my prolonged touch.

He’s staring at me with a measure of fear in his eyes, and blood floods to the surface of his cheeks, lightening his skin in a hue of pink. I take my index finger and drag it down his torso to the hard cut of his muscled stomach, then hook it into the loop of his pants and pull him closer to me. I can already feel him filling out his pants with his erection, and his turgid length obtrudes against my belly, the weight of him incurring more liquid desire to saturate my already-damp panties.

I palm his generous bulge, making him hiss between gritted teeth. “You had your fun earlier, but that’s not how this night is going to go. I’m going to be the one in control, and you’re going to be the one begging me to touch you. Do I make myself clear?”

Gage nods wordlessly, the tendons in his neck quivering, the sturdiness of the wall the only thing keeping him upright. A rare nervousness rules his expression, but it’s combated with gut-wrenching anticipation.

I lightly pinch his cock through the material of his pants, and a shudder shimmies through his body as he throws his head back against the wall.

“It hurts, doesn’t it? All that pressure building inside, that painful strain in your cock, that insatiable ache in your balls. All you can think about is coming so hard you can’t see straight, right?”

“Fuck, yes,” he groans, a drop of briny sweat rolling down his temple, teeth scuffing his bottom lip until blood beads and congeals on cracked skin.

I slowly unzip his fly, but not far enough to let his dick spring out. Even swathed and safely contained, that thing is still intimidating. “You want me to make you feel better? You want me to take your cock out, rub it until you can’t take any more, and then shove it down my throat?” I drawl, all feminine wiles and “innocent” bats of lashes.

“Would give anything to fuck that gorgeous throat of yours, Spitfire. I’ll beg on my knees if I have to.”

“That’s a start.” I pull Gage’s pants down to his thighs, smacked with the droolworthy sight of that carved Adonis belt and the sexy strip of hair underneath his navel. His cock’s practically bursting at the seams, a sizeable spot of pre-cum seeping through the front of his boxers.

“Take your dick out,” I command, tracing my fingernail along that plunging V-line, savoring the way his stomach jumps—the way I hold the power of his orgasm in an expertly placed touch.

I’m expecting a slow buildup of obedience, a measured acceptance of defeat because of his God-like ego, but he fumbles with his underwear, hooking his fingers in the elastic band and pulling them down to blunt the pressure.

His long, forearm-thick cock stands at attention before me, a red, angry hue from this roulette game of teasing, curved just slightly to the right and drooping a little low from the heaviness of its own weight. His piercings glisten underneath the naked bulb in the kitchen, same with the milky dribble of pre-cum pearling at the tip, and little rivers of blue-grey veins feed into one larger one stemming along the underside of his shaft. The perfect detonation point.

I take an exploratory finger and follow the dominant vein, keeping the pressure featherlight, and Gage’s legs collapse for a second. A loud whimper gets caught somewhere in the back of his throat, as if he’s too proud to vocalize it but too weak to keep it confined to his chest.

“Sensitive?” I ask, ending my torturous trek at his sodden slit, where I swirl my digit around his arousal and electrify every nerve ending in the bulging head like a touch-activated sensor.

“You have no idea.” His voice is hoarse, his dick twitching and oozing more pre-cum onto the pads of my fingers, his thighs still shaking of their own volition. I can smell the ripeness of his musk, even the tinge of sweat underlying it, and my mouth waters to taste the saltiness of his cum, to drink it down until I’ve drained every drop from him.

With saliva clotting my mouth, I purse my cheeks and gather a wad of it on my tongue, parting my lips to allow a string of drool to lower to the ruddy tip, where it hits its target with an obscene splat.

“Rub my spit in, Gage. Rub it in with your cum like the good boy you are, then start stroking yourself.”

Another little whine. Another little wordless concession.

He takes his thumb and begins to mix my saliva with his spend, priming the head with a thin gloss of lubrication. There’s not enough spit to coat much of his length, but there’s enough to wet his palm so he can gain some traction.

“Calista,” he groans, struggling to keep his eyes open, just starting to stimulate himself with some half-hearted pumps, a slick noise pervading the kitchen. He performs every rub slowly, as if going too fast will augment the flowering pain.

“I know,” I purr. “You’re doing so well.”

His hand speeds up at my praise, and he bares his throat to me with a toss of his head, his Adam’s apple bobbing under tight skin. The muscles in his arms pull impossibly tight, highlighting each protruding vein, and his chest rises and falls in uncontrollable heaves.

Something ferments in my belly, something I thought would be arousal but turns out to be a modicum of purebred jealousy. I’m jealous. Of his hand. Of the fact that I’m not the one making his eyes roll back.

I give him a few minutes of shallow breaths and grunts, his hand now falling into a steady rhythm as he rubs up and down, seeming to apply the most pressure at the base before wringing it up his length and letting it disperse at the top.

I fight the gush in my panties, fight the frisson of excitement swan diving to my toes, fight the way my thoughts cut in and out like the static of a radio. As much as I want to touch myself, I’m focused on pleasuring him, knowing that he’ll return the favor the minute he comes. But fuck, does everything burn. My pussy doesn’t cease its palpitating even when I force the reins from his hands, replacing his controlled strokes with my faster, rougher ones.

His hands slap loudly against the wall, and he cants his hips forward, his body purging a pornographic moan that practically rumbles through the foundation of the house. My fingers fail to close entirely around the circumference of his girth, but I squeeze lightly on a half-stroke anyways, distributing delicious pressure throughout his length, feeling the skin crease under my fingertips. When I get to his head, I smooth over the tip with my thumb, picking up the sticky excretion there, and I rip another noise of contentment from him.

“You want my mouth on your cock, Gage?” I ask in a patronizing tone. “You want me to suck you dry while I gag on your giant dick? You want to fuck my throat until my jaw locks?”

Gage forces himself to look at me, all heavy-lidded and glassy-eyed, and he manages to find an ounce of control, that dominant side of him tearing through his soft and submissive underbelly. “Gonna look so pretty when you’re choking on my cock, Spitfire. Gonna fuck your tonsils until you can’t take it anymore, and then you’re gonna take every last drop from me because it’s all yours—my dick, my cum, everything.”

I slowly drop to my knees, facing his dick head-on, which is a lot scarier than I initially thought it would be. How is that thing supposed to fit in my mouth when it barely fit in my vagina? Have people actually died from choking on dick? That’s literally the worst possible way anyone can go.

I table the little voice of caution in the back of my head and scrub the nervousness from my face. “You’re right. It is all mine. You belong to me.”

“Damn right I do. And I want everyone in the fucking world to know it.”

With one hand on the root to anchor myself, I part my lips and make way for the nine-inch intrusion, having to unhinge my jaw after I pass his head. His cold piercings tickle the walls of my mouth, and I swallow him down, inch by inch, my incisors brushing the thickness of him until his tip is finally settled at the back of my throat. And then I begin to milk him, hollowing my cheeks with a tight suction and bobbing my head back and forth. My hands work the base while my lips ascend his shaft, gripping around his cock in wet slurps, the overproduction of saliva slipping down my chin.

Gage begins to spear his dick against my tonsils, and he taps my gag reflex momentarily, the brunt of him causing the corners of my mouth to crackle a bit from the agape angle. I choke him down as tears pool in my eyes, adding to the already-slick mess on my face. The smell of him is overwhelming, and I’m stuffed to the point where all I can do is breathe through my nostrils. Once I adjust to his size, I slip up and down at a languid pace, taking my time to experiment with where he’s the most sensitive. I pop off him for a second to lick the throbbing head, and Gage’s hand flies out to nestle in a chunk of my hair, yanking so hard that it makes my neck crick.

“Cali,” he growls, but unlike his usual brassy warnings, this one holds no power.

I delicately skim my teeth over one of the metal knobs of his piercings, causing his hips to convulse and his expression to lose its set-in-steel control to irrepressible euphoria. His muscles can’t decide between being relaxed or strained, so I make the decision for him when I suckle only on the tip, doting on that slit with titillating laps.

“Good boys beg,” I say, sitting back on my haunches, waiting patiently for him to obey me.

“Please…”

I press a kiss to a vein traveling up his length. “I know you can do better than that.”

“Please, Cali. Fuck. I—please keep sucking. Need to come down your throat. Need to show you how much I appreciate you. I’ll be a good boy, I promise. I’ll do anything to have your incredible mouth on me,” he begs, a mess of a man with his pants down and cock out in my kitchen, six feet and one inch of honed muscle surrendering to a seductress in a five-foot-seven body.

I slowly—achingly slowly—reacquaint myself with his dick, switching between hand-curated pumps and earnest sucks, watching as his abdomen contracts and his thighs tauten, forewarning me of the last few stretches he has left in him before tipping over that precipice. And then I take him the farthest I can, deep-throating him, deriving a drawn-out groan that zaps straight to my pussy. He slams himself against the tight walls of my throat, rendering my tongue useless, and keeps a hand on the back of my head while he abuses my esophagus with thrust after agonizing thrust.

It’s a lot. The most intense sensation I’ve ever felt aside from him fucking me raw. Gage is in control now, deciding how rough to push, using the stutter of my gags to gauge when it’s too much. My nose is buried in his trimmed pubes, and my bottom lip skims the skin of his hair-matted balls.

“God, you feel fucking amazing,” he says, continuing to snap his hips against my face, this time repositioning his hand over my windpipe, fingers settled over the slight bulge of him stretching in my skin. “I love feeling myself inside you.”

He keeps his hand there, losing comprehensibility when he gets out the rest of his shunts, and finally, I feel his cockhead swell. Hot spurts of cum pulse down my throat in wave after endless wave, shooting straight into my stomach.

The minute Gage is done, he disengages from my mouth and slides his back down the wall, taking my face in his hands and wiping the spit from my lips. “Are you okay? Did I hurt you?” he asks.

“I’m okay,” I assure him, leaning into the palm caressing my cheek. We’re both exhausted, nothing but the combined sound of uneven breaths to be heard over the silence of the apartment.

“Good, because I think I’d have a heart attack if I killed the love of my life with my cock.”

Ignoring the absurdity of his comment, the tail end of it manages to lure my attention, and it feels like a goddamn kill shot to my heart.

“What?”

“What?” Gage echoes, staring at me like he didn’t just drop the L-bomb and decimate my entire world.

“You just…you just said the L-word,” I sputter, blinking about fifteen times in thirty seconds, trying to keep a cool head when everything in my body is on fire and my emotions are running haywire.

“I did?”

“Yeah, you did. Literally a second ago.”

“Oh.”

Oh? OH? What in the hell does that mean?

I’m losing it. Like, Chuck Noland in Castaway losing it. Did he make a mistake? Was he only saying that because I gave him head? Why did he say it so casually? Am I missing something here? Am I overthinking? Isn’t it too soon for him to be saying that? Oh my God, we’re not even actually together.

“What the fuck, Gage?” I exclaim, anger broiling in my gut, confusion the only thing holding me back from whacking some sense into his fat head.

It takes a second for Gage to catch up to me, and I’m not sure how he understood my freakout—because I didn’t myself—but his eyes widen, and he imposes immediate damage control.

“Shit. I didn’t—I didn’t mean for it to come out that way. I mean, I did mean for it to come out eventually, but I was picturing like a thousand roses and a yacht. I think I’ve gotten so used to saying it in my head that it kind of just slipped out.”

I freeze, feeling a tsunami of suppressed emotions finally sneak up on me, rising too fast for me to scramble to higher ground. “You say that in your head…about me?” I whisper, trying to negotiate with the tears to subside.

Gage blushes, and I feel heat sear the back of my own neck.

“Yeah, I say it all the time,” he answers, characteristically clueless to the internal Mayday, Mayday! distress happening inside me right now.

I don’t have time for an internal monologue. I don’t have time to even catch my breath. This is—AHHH!

“I didn’t know you felt that way about me.”

He cracks his trademark smile—the one well-fitted to his perfect lips, the one that could stop traffic and probably the hearts of half the teenage girls across America. “Of course I do. I love you, Calista Cadwell. I’m in love with you. I’ll always be in love with you.”

The tears have revisited me in gradual drops, and I don’t bother with wiping them away. I don’t bother with quieting the volume of the sobs trying to make themselves known.

This is all so much. I know I feel the same way about him, but I can’t bring myself to say it. Why can’t I bring myself to say it?

“I—”

“Hey, I didn’t say it to hear you say it back. I said it because I wanted to.”

Gage takes my second of uncertainty to lean in and kiss me, sponging up the salty tears on my lips, cradling my face in his hands as if he doesn’t know when he’ll be able to hold me again. In this moment, nothing else exists except for him. No fears for my mother, no tireless duties of my daily life, no yawning hole of self-deprecation telling me I’ve failed or I’ll never be good enough. I give him my fears and he swallows them, locks them away so I’m able to breathe through the lifted smog that I’ve been used to all these years.

I scoot closer to him, not caring that we’re on the cold ground or that the sky’s splitting into a dark storm right outside the window. He readjusts his legs to make room for me, and when I’m close enough to squeeze between his thighs, I feel something hard poking me in the belly.

I look down at his already-swelling erection. “Already? I thought these things have, like, a cool-off period or something.”

He grimaces. “Kind of a permanent state when you’re around.”

“Oh, uh, I’m sorry for constantly making you hard?”

Gage pulls me onto his lap, his large hands clamping around my sides as his lips graze mine. “Never something you have to apologize for.”

I’m about to say something before he reroutes his attention to the tender spot on my neck, diving in and lavishing butterfly kisses over my still-aching throat, tickling me with the slight stubble sprouting on his jaw. I giggle and squirm in his grip as he attacks me with more playful nips, letting my laughter drown out the growls of thunder cruising overhead.

“Speaking of”—kiss—“life-changing declarations”—kiss—“will”—kiss—“you”—kiss—“be”—kiss—“my”—kiss—“girlfriend?”

The smile that’s become a permanent fixture on my face sags. “What?” I somehow flub over the single syllable, my stomach simmering with nervous acid instead of fluttering wings.

“I mean, I wanted to ask you with pants on, but here we are.” Gage’s expression is completely unafflicted by hesitancy, meaning that he’s probably thought long and hard about this.

I gulp. “You want me to be your girlfriend?”

“Of course,” he says confidently. “You don’t have to say yes, but it’d be great if you said yes. Really fucking great.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’ve been chasing after you since the moment we met. I’ve never been surer of anything.”

“What if I don’t say yes?” I ask quietly, tenderizing my bottom lip with my teeth, knowing in my heart what my answer is but needing to seek confirmation all the same.

He sits back slightly, his eyes glinting in the snippets of lightning flashing through the agglomeration of storm clouds. “Then I would wait for you. Forever. I’d fucking wait for you, Cali. Until the day I die. When will you understand that it’s always going to be you?”

It’s always going to be me.

I close the ravine of space between us, kissing away one last fear that’s wriggled free—the fear of being alone. I may not have been ready to say those three big words, but this is a step I’m ready to take that doesn’t seem as scary.

“Of course I’ll be your girlfriend.”

Gage lights up like the city of Las Vegas at night, a gigantic, gum-showing smile pushing back his cheeks, dotting dimples, and forming complementary eye crinkles.

He pumps his fist into the air. “You said yes! Oh my God. I can’t believe…”

He stops himself after he notices the absolute bewilderment on my face, and then he clears his throat and lowers his arm. “I mean, I knew you were going to say yes.”

“You’re an idiot,” I laugh, but the excitement in his voice is like a soothing balm on the scars of my heart. He’s the one shining halo of sunlight breaking through an everlasting tempest, allowing me a circle of dryness amongst an unrelenting downpour.

“Yeah, but I’m your idiot now,” he emphasizes. “Hear that, everyone? Gage Arlington is officially off the market! And he’s in love with Calista Cadwell!”

I have no idea who he’s talking to, but I don’t want to ruin the moment. I’ve never seen Gage so happy before, and I’ve never felt this happy before.

I trusted my heart in his hands—even knowing how malleable it is—and he’s cradled it the entire time I’ve known him, keeping it safe. Not only protecting it but strengthening it with his own love. A simple thank-you won’t suffice. He made me fall back in love with life—with myself. And for that, I owe Gage everything I have. Everything I am.

He leans forward on his hands and knees, just a breath away from my face—an unpredictable breath that’s taunting me with a tango of his tongue. “And as my first duty as your designated boyfriend, I’m going to have my fill of you right here on the kitchen floor.”

A surprised noise gets caged in my throat, and I feel my greedy cunt resume its throbbing, so damn insistent to the point where all the pressure localizes in my belly.

“Now lean back, Spitfire,” he orders, one hand pressed to my back to help lower me to the tiles. “It’s time for me to take care of you.”