Savy handed the mask back and curled herself in a ball, facing away from Clay. In time, she fell into a deep, oxygenated sleep, snoring gently on the pillow beside him.
Watching her respiration, Clay thought about their future. How great it was to have any kind of future after tasting death. And yet, how naïve they had been. So focused on the seductive pull of fame, they had never thought to question who was pulling on the other end.
But was anything worth suffering a fate like Davis Karney’s?
Rocco Boyle: Had his neck broken by someone who wanted to steal his life. Davis Karney: Lost his mind and lit himself on fire, thinking others were there to do the same.
Clay Harper?
Lying in the room of a dead woman, beside a living, breathing woman, Clay contemplated if going to college and working some soul-sapping day job was really so bad.
Not if it meant coming home to lie next to Savy Marquez every night. Even if they never played another big show, wasn’t a safe, anonymous life—with jam sessions and occasional coffeehouse gigs, doing covers of “One Headlight” at the county fair while children danced off-time in front of the stage—still a life worth living?
Of course it was.
People did it all the time.
Eventually the sirens ran their course, and the city grew intensely quiet. Clay fell into an uneasy sleep where dreams and reality meshed inseparably. One moment he was standing at the window, staring down on the street below the hotel, the next he was caught again in the death trap of the mansion, watching Kiss Kiss’s sizzling mouth move at the bottom of the stairs. Come here, she whispered to him. Closer. Please. I need you.
His eyes snapped open and Savannah was in his arms. She was kissing him and half her clothes were gone. The scent of kerosene and woodsmoke hung between them. Their movements were rough, desperate. Maybe it was what they’d endured, escaping death together. Maybe it was something that had been happening all along. Or maybe it was only lust, magnetic forces drawn spontaneously together. But Savy’s sudden proximity filled his senses, the warmth of her, her smoky hair, the contour of her body, flesh and bone grinding into him. And her breath, hot CPR in his mouth. Kissing him. Slow, hard.
Clay’s hands rose to cup her breasts through her bra.
This wasn’t happening.
This was happening.
Savy fought with his jeans until they dipped below his knees. She slipped out of her bra and, in the fading light of the window, her breasts were neither big nor small, but proportional to her body, one slightly larger than the other, malleable to his touch, her brown nipples long as he rubbed them, building a slow friction between his fingers.
She explored with her tongue—neck, chest, kissing the hairs on his stomach. Her grip was firm as she pumped him up and down, as she yanked his boxers away and lowered herself between his knees and brought his cock to her lips.
Her tongue flicked rapidly at his tip as she took him into her mouth. Clay’s groin tightened, threatened immediate release, and he fumbled for her, gripping her damp underarms, hating to make her stop. She gave him a pointed look and the bed groaned as she lay back. And her eyes slipped shut as he drew her panties down her legs and free, the cotton soft and weightless in his fingers.
Naked. They were naked against each other, their skin rubbing, feverishly hot. Even her arms were bare, sans bracelets, the little hairs on her forearm rising to meet his own. And Clay’s mind raced—not happening, is happening!—as he witnessed the thatch of hair between her legs, as he licked a hot trail from her belly to that thatch. “Do it,” she cooed, her hands scrambling.
And Clay lost himself. The folded flesh was wet and parted slowly for his finger. His movements were mechanical at first, but he found his rhythm. Savy purred from the back of her throat, as if she was an instrument he was playing with his mouth and hands, the way she’d played him with her mouth and hands. She rocked against his motion, grabbed him by the back of the hair, guided him lower, filling his nostrils with her scent. Clay kissed the inside of her thighs, licked the button of flesh over her opening, and Savy squirmed and Savy cried out. “Like that. Oh! Faster. Faster!”
His fingers made tiny lapping sounds each time he slipped in and out of her. Her writhing body was beautiful, hands clutching the bare mattress, spine arching,. And most enticing, the music of her throat, moaning as the feeling took possession of her, the feeling he had created in her. So good, so hot!
Then Savy was rolling to her stomach.
Clay massaged her thighs, pressed his fingers against the firm muscles of her ass. There was no blue tigress on either buttock; she’d never been wildcatted by a tattoo machine or fondled by a drunken drummer. But Clay was beyond jealousy anyway, beyond fire and smoke, beyond anything but living, fiercely, carnally, in the moment. To go from near death to sex with the girl of his dreams made firework explosions all over his nerve endings; it lit up his spirit—essence? soul? whatever it is we really are at our core—like a giant cowboy on the Vegas Strip.
He fumbled at first, inexperienced as he was. Though it wasn’t rocket science; it wasn’t even riding a bike; and Man had been figuring it out since his earliest days in the primordial muck. Savy helped him, guided him. He entered her slow. Melted into her, inch by inch. And she gasped, her mouth going slack as he thrust deep. And the bed frame groaned with their movements. And if there were voyeurs in the Capitol
