Cold Metal of the Loading Dock Frame

The crushing flex of Sawyer’s forearm was the only thing left in Cammy’s world: a corded bar of muscle laid across her throat, pinning her to the vertical steel of the loading-dock frame, the tendons under his skin shifting every time he breathed. His fingers were curled just past the hinge of her jaw. Not squeezing. Resting there with a precision that felt deliberate, withheld, the pad of his thumb finding her pulse and pressing only enough that she could feel him feeling it. Cold metal at her back. The heat of his wrist under her chin. The forearm owned the moment; the rest of her body hadn’t caught up to it yet.

Sawyer laughed, low and mean, and the sound travelled down the bone of his arm into her throat. “Look at you. Already shaking.” His other hand went to her waistband and yanked. The button of her jeans gave with a hard little pop, the zipper tore, and denim rasped down over her hips as he shoved it to mid-thigh in one graceless motion, not undressing her, just getting it out of his way. The fabric bunched and locked her legs together. Cold air hit skin that had been sweating under cotton all shift. She made a sound she hated. Something in her tried to stand back up, some old reflex that wanted to lift her chin and tell him he was out of his mind, and he must have felt it move through her because the forearm pressed a fraction harder and his hip drove into hers, grinding her against the steel, taking her weight off her own feet so that her heels lifted and the frame’s ridged edge dug into the back of her skull. “There it is. That little freeze. You still think you get to decide how this goes?”

She couldn’t answer. She could only track the forearm, every micro-shift of tendon under skin, the way the muscle jumped when he dragged the backs of his knuckles over the soaked cotton between her legs. He wasn’t pushing it aside. He was mapping. Learning how far the wet spread, how the fabric clung. Then his hand was gone and the absence was worse than the touch had been, a cold shape in the air where his knuckles should have stayed. Her hips chased without permission and he made a delighted, ugly noise against her ear.

“Desperate already. Pathetic.”

The word should have landed like a slap. Instead her whole body clenched around it, thighs jerking against the denim, a flush climbing from her chest to her hairline so fast it made her dizzy. She wanted him to say it again. She wanted him to say it slower. From this angle she couldn’t see his face, only the dark line of his jaw and the throat above his collar, but she saw his free hand tremble once before it steadied against her hip, a single hard shake he seemed to crush flat the moment it happened. She didn’t know what it meant. She filed it away and hated how much she wanted it to mean something.

He hooked two fingers in the wet cotton and dragged it aside with a slowness that felt surgical, the elastic biting into the crease of her hip and staying there, twisted. Then nothing. Just cool air on her and the threat of his hand hovering close enough that she could feel its heat without any contact. Her thighs trembled and tried to close. The denim wouldn’t let them. She strained against it anyway, felt the seams cut into the outside of her legs, felt her own wet slide between skin that couldn’t press together. Sawyer’s laugh went breathless, like the sight of her fighting the jeans was funnier than anything she’d ever said to him.

The first touch was a single circle around her clit, so light it was almost an accident. Fingertip only. One pass. Her breath caught in the top of her chest and he took his hand away the exact instant it did, as if the hitch had been a signal he’d been waiting for. He didn’t return. She counted the buzz of the fluorescent tube above them, the stutter in its hum, and got to four before she understood he wasn’t coming back until she stopped waiting for him. Her thighs shook against the denim. The forearm across her throat hadn’t moved but it felt heavier, or she had gotten weaker under it. A whine leaked out between her teeth and she bit down on it too late.

“That’s the sound. That’s the one.” His fingers came back different. Not circling. The flat of two fingertips pressed blunt against her clit and held there without moving, a steady, obscene pressure that gave her something to grind against and nothing to build with. Her hips rolled. The friction of her own movement was all there was and she used it, shameless, grinding up into the pads of his fingers with her boots scrabbling for purchase on the concrete. The second her left heel came off the ground he lifted his hand away. “No. You don’t get to fuck my hand. You get what I give you.” He shifted the forearm, rolling his wrist so the heat of the inner skin pressed under her jaw and the hard knob of bone sat against her windpipe, and he said the thing she had been waiting to hear him say, the thing she’d swallowed across a desk for months: “You’ve walked past me every day like I wasn’t there. Like you weren’t wet under all that ice. Look how long that lasted.” She bit her bottom lip so hard that copper bloomed across her tongue and she still couldn’t keep the sound in.

The third time he used his knuckles. Curled his hand and dragged the ridge of them down through the whole slick mess of her, over her clit, down over her entrance where she was clenching on nothing, and back up, one long, rough pass that made her knees knock together against the denim. She jolted so hard the chain-link overhead rattled. He pulled away when her thighs did that, when they spasmed inward, and this time he held his hand up between them so she could see how wet his knuckles were in the dock light before he wiped them slowly down the outside of her bare thigh.

“Please—”

The word got out before she could stop it. Small against the steel and the night. She heard it echo off the concrete and wanted to die.

Sawyer’s forehead dropped against hers, not gentle, just close enough that she could feel the shape of his grin. “Please what, Cammy. Use your words. Or are you too proud to beg like the needy little slut you’ve been hiding under all that ice?” He gave her a fraction more. Two fingers slid through her, not entering, coating themselves, spreading her open so the cold could get at her and make her clench harder around the nothing he was offering. Then he stopped dead. Held his fingers there, framing her, his thumb a hair’s width from her clit and not closing the distance. Her inner walls fluttered around empty air. The forearm at her throat pulsed in time with her heartbeat, or she was feeling her heartbeat against it, she couldn’t tell anymore. He was hard against her hip through his own jeans, thick and unmistakable and unmoving. He made no move to free himself. He just let her feel it and held his hand still and breathed against her forehead like he had all night.

Then his hand left her and slapped down on her bare knee and tugged upward, and everything went wrong at once. The denim yanked. Her other leg came with it, both of them lashed together at the thigh, and her boots skated on the concrete and she pitched sideways. Her hand flew out and caught the edge of the frame, fingers hooking the cold flange of steel, and for a second she was hanging by that grip and his forearm and nothing else, her whole weight swinging against his hip.

“Fuck.” He laughed as he said it, a short, furious sound. The forearm left her throat and his open hand slammed flat against her sternum instead, pinning her shoulder blades back against the steel while he dropped into a half-crouch beside her. She felt him fist the bunched denim at her right thigh. He hauled. The jeans came down over her knee, over her calf, and then stopped hard where the cuff caught the heel of her boot. He hauled again. The fabric refused. Her boot came a half-inch off the ground and hung there, snared, the leg of the jeans twisting around her ankle like something trying to keep her. She was hopping on her left foot with his hand crushing her chest into the frame, her jeans wrenched sideways around her knees, the elastic of her underwear still twisted into her hip.

“Hold still—” He wrenched. The cuff seam split with a sound like tearing paper and the heel came through the gap. Her right leg came loose all at once, bare from hip to boot, the cold hitting the whole length of it, and the ruined denim slithered down and bunched around her left calf, the emptied right leg hanging off it in a twisted, split-hemmed tail, the whole knot trapped there above her boot where she’d never get it undone in a hurry. She was one leg naked and one leg shackled, and he was already rising, already bringing the forearm back to her throat, already reaching under her bare thigh to drag it up.

Her knee hit his ribs. He grunted and shoved it higher. His palm was wet under her thigh, sweat and her own slick, and it slid on her skin so that her leg dropped three inches before he caught it again with a curse and jammed his hip under her to take the weight. The frame had a bolt head somewhere near the middle and it found her spine and stayed there, a blunt knuckle of iron pressing between two vertebrae every time she moved. The chain-link above them shook and kept shaking. She grabbed the steel edge again with her free hand, knuckles white, because her left boot was the only thing touching the ground and it was already on its toes, the calf cramping, the muscle knotting so hard she could feel each fiber pull. She started to slide. The steel was slick with her sweat and she slid down it an inch, two, the bolt dragging up her spine, and she fought it, pushing up on the toe of her one grounded boot, her thigh burning where he gripped it.

There was a half-second where the whole thing went. His hand slipped again, her boot skidded, her grip on the frame edge tore loose, and she felt the two of them tip together toward the concrete, his forearm coming off her throat entirely as he flung that hand out to catch the frame above her head. They hung there in a stupid, teetering triangle, his body braced against hers, his thigh wedged under her hoisted leg, her fingers digging into his shirt. Then he found his footing. Then he heaved. Her knee went past his shoulder and he ducked under it and her calf came down across the back of his neck and locked, and her back slammed fully flat to the vertical frame, the bolt biting, the steel cold from her shoulder blades to her bare ass. The forearm came back across her throat. Pressure and threat, no weight, because his hip and his thigh had all of it now, and the leg over his shoulder, and the ball of her left foot screaming on tiptoe.

The position split her open. Nothing left to close. Her bare leg in the air, denim knotted around the other, her underwear twisted uselessly into her hip crease, and beyond him the dock stretched out empty under the fluorescents, the roll-up doors, the corner anyone on shift could round without warning. She could hear a forklift somewhere in the building. She could hear her own breathing, wet and ragged. She could feel him looking down at where she was spread and she couldn’t cover a single inch of it.

“Fuck. Look at this.” His voice had gone hoarse. He finally worked his own zipper down, the rasp of it grating in the concrete hush, and shoved his jeans off his hips just far enough. He was hot against the inside of her hoisted thigh. He didn’t push in. He took himself in hand and dragged the head through her folds, slow, painting himself with her from her clit down to where she was clenching, and then notched the thickest part against her entrance and stopped. Held it there. Stretching her open just past comfortable and giving her nothing else. She could feel him trembling. She could feel herself trembling. The calf over his shoulder was already going tight and numb. “You’re going to take it like this. Half-dressed, one leg still in your jeans, hooked over my shoulder like you’ve got nothing left to protect. Because you don’t. Not with me.”

He pushed in an inch.

Her whole body seized around it. The stretch was enormous, blunt, the kind of ache that made her eyes water, and it was nowhere near enough. He stopped. She felt him breathing. Then he withdrew until only the head remained inside her, a constant, maddening presence at the very edge of her, and he stayed there while she clenched and fluttered and tried to pull him back by force of muscle alone.

“Greedy,” he said, and pushed in again. Two inches. The slide was wet enough that she heard it, a slick, obscene sound in the quiet. Then out again. All the way out to the head. The drag of him leaving was slow enough to feel every ridge, every millimeter of skin against skin, and the frame bit deeper into her spine because she was arching after him without meaning to. Her hooked leg jolted on his shoulder. The muscle in her calf spasmed once, hard, and he laughed under his breath when he felt it against his neck.

He was counting her breaths. She realized it on the third push, when he went in three inches and stopped at the exact moment her walls fluttered around him, when her body tried to grip and drag him deeper and he froze like she’d triggered something. He held there. Didn’t move. Waited for the flutter to pass. Then out to the head again, that long wet drag, and her free hand scrabbled at his shirt, tore at the fabric over his shoulder, slid down to the wrist under her jaw and dug her nails into the heat of it. She was shaking so hard the chain-link above them whispered continuously now, a soft metallic chatter she couldn’t stop making.

“That’s it. Fall apart. I want to feel you try to hold it and fail.” A broken sound tore out of her and he laughed at it. Her hips jerked in tiny, aborted thrusts that the position wouldn’t let her finish, her one grounded foot losing the concrete and finding it again. “You thought you were hiding it. Walking around with that look, like nothing could touch you. Meanwhile you’ve been soaking through your clothes every time I said your name. I’ve known. I’ve been waiting to take this exact look off your face.” Another inch. He held it. The head of him found a place inside her that made her mouth fall open on a sound with no shape. He drew back out to the head again, the fourth time, the fifth, she’d lost count, and the emptiness after it was so total she felt it in her teeth. “Beg properly and maybe I’ll let you come on it. Maybe.”

The words came out wrecked, humiliating, exactly what he wanted. “Please—Sawyer—please fuck me, I can’t—I need it, I need you, I’ve needed it, I’m sorry, I’m so—” She broke off because he drove in three more inches in one sudden, merciless slide and stopped again, buried halfway, throbbing, his forearm gone rigid across her throat. The stretch burned. She could feel exactly how much of him wasn’t in her. Her clit was untouched, pulsing in the open air a bare inch from where his body pressed against her, and she tried to tilt her hips to reach it and the bolt in her spine stopped her cold.

“Louder. Call yourself what you are.” His mouth was at her ear now, laughing, the words spilling out low and quick. “You’re my desperate little whore. Spent all that time pretending you didn’t want to get bent over anything I put you near. Say it. Then maybe I’ll move.”

She said it. It came out of somewhere deeper than her throat, ragged, and it felt like handing him something she’d never get back. He rewarded her by drawing almost all the way out and slamming to the hilt in one brutal stroke that emptied her lungs in a single hard sound. The leg over his shoulder made it devastating. The angle put him against every nerve she had, the frame gave her nowhere to retreat, and when her grounded leg buckled the knotted denim around her left calf cinched tight, the split seam sawing a hot line into the meat of the muscle before she found her toes again.

He stayed buried. Let her feel every pulse of him, the throb, the twitch, the way her body clamped and released around him without her permission. Then he dragged out, all the way to the head, so slowly that the wet sound of it seemed to go on forever, and she clenched around emptiness and sobbed. He pushed back in. Bottomed out. Ground there, hips rolling against her so the bolt scraped up her spine and the bare skin of her ass squealed against the steel. Held. Withdrew. Each grind pressed her harder into the frame than the last. Her hooked leg had gone dead from the knee down, a heavy numb weight across his shoulder, and every few strokes the calf muscle fired on its own, a hard involuntary kick against the back of his neck that made him grunt and laugh and go still until it passed.

Twice more her walls fluttered around him and twice more he froze at the exact moment they did. Just stopped. Buried deep or halfway or barely in, wherever he happened to be, he stopped and waited and breathed against her cheek while the wave she was riding crested and had nowhere to break and collapsed back into her hips as a cramp. The second time she screamed into her own bitten lip. Sweat had pooled where his forearm met her throat and it slid between them every time he shifted his grip. She could taste copper still. She could hear herself making noises she didn’t recognize, high and animal and continuous, bouncing back off the concrete.

“You’re close.” He sounded delighted about it, almost tender in the middle of the filth. “I can feel you trying to come and I haven’t given you permission. You’d come just from being called names, wouldn’t you. From being used like this where anyone could walk up. That’s how badly you needed someone to take you down.” He reached between them at last and set two fingers flat against her clit. Not rubbing. Pressing. A constant, withheld pressure that matched the forearm at her throat exactly, so that she was held at two points and moving at neither. She tried to grind against the fingers. He lifted them. Put them back. Lifted them. Her sobs had no words left in them. She was pulling at his shirt with one hand and clawing the frame with the other and nothing she did changed his rhythm by a fraction.

A door clanged somewhere far down the dock. Headlights swept the far wall and were gone. He didn’t stop. He fucked her through it, and the danger made every stroke sharper, made her hooked leg shake harder, made the split denim cut deeper into her calf, a line she’d find in the morning. His rhythm was starting to break. She felt it before she understood it: a stroke that came too fast, a grind that lasted a half-beat longer than he’d meant, his breath coming in short pulls against her temple. The laughing degradations lost their edges, ran together, became something rawer and less sure of itself. “That’s it—take it—fuck, Cammy, you feel—” He cut himself off with a laugh that sounded forced even to her, and she couldn’t tell if the thing underneath it was what she thought it was. “You’re going to come on my cock like this and you’re going to laugh because it’s so fucking ridiculous how fast you broke.”

His fingers circled. Tight, merciless, timed to the deepest grind of his hips, and she went up so fast it frightened her, everything in her pelvis drawing inward and downward at once until her thighs locked and her mouth opened on a sound that hadn’t started yet—

And he took it away. Fingers lifted clear. Hips gone still, buried to the hilt and not moving, not a twitch. His laugh landed in her ear, soft and almost kind. “Not yet.”

She hung there. Suspended on the wire of it, every muscle in her body clenched around nothing but the stillness of him, her hooked leg trembling so violently on his shoulder that her boot heel drummed against his back. One second. Two. She stopped breathing because breathing might tip it either way and she couldn’t bear either. Three. The fluorescent tube stuttered. Her grounded calf gave out and she slid an inch down the frame and the bolt dragged and he still didn’t move.

Then his fingers came back down and his hips ground once, hard, and the whole thing let go.

It hit her mid-sob and turned into laughter before she knew what was happening. High, wrecked, disbelieving laughter tearing up out of her chest at the same instant her body clamped down on him in waves that made him curse, and she couldn’t stop either one, couldn’t separate them, laughing and clenching and gasping with her leg over his shoulder and the steel at her back and tears running sideways into her hair. She bit his shoulder through his shirt to try to shut herself up and it only made her laugh harder around the fabric. He followed her over with a groan he tried to bend into another laugh and couldn’t. His hand tore away from her clit and clamped around the thigh slung over his shoulder, fingers sinking into the muscle hard enough to bruise, holding her to him like she might slide off the frame and take the whole thing with her. He came in her in hard, pulsing throbs, his forearm shuddering across her throat, his teeth finding the muscle where her neck met her shoulder and closing there while she was still shaking and laughing and clenching and the chain-link rattled over them without stopping.

The laughter died in pieces. Hers first, then the aftershock of it, then his. What replaced it was worse: a stunned, clinging silence. His forearm eased off her throat but he didn’t pull out, didn’t set her down. He stayed buried, breathing hard against her temple, his hand still locked around her thigh over his shoulder like his fingers had forgotten how to open. Her leg was dead weight. Her grounded calf was one long cramp. Her shoulder throbbed where his teeth had been. She couldn’t find anything left in her to hide behind, and something slipped out before she could catch it, small and ruined and true.

“I— I missed you. Even when I was pretending. Especially then.”

His breath caught. For one second his mouth pressed into her hair, not laughing, not saying anything, just there, and she felt his hand on her thigh go loose and then tighten again in a way she didn’t know how to read. Then footsteps. A radio crackled at the far end of the dock and a voice answered it, close, closer than the door had been. He pulled out of her with a wet sound that made her whimper, the emptiness so sudden it felt obscene. Her leg came off his shoulder on muscle that wouldn’t hold it and she nearly went down; she caught the frame edge with both hands and stood there on one working leg and one that wasn’t, bare to the hip, while he dragged his jeans up and yanked at his zipper. She bent for the denim knotted around her left calf. It was twisted on itself, the emptied right leg wrapped around the left, and her fingers were shaking too badly to find where one ended and the other began. She found the split cuff by feel, the torn seam gaping wide enough now to pass a boot, and jammed her right foot at it and missed and hopped and swore and got the toe through, then the heel, the ruined hem scraping up over the leather, and hauled the whole mess up her legs crooked, the waistband sagging open where the button had been, the twisted seam biting into the inside of her thigh over the mess he’d left in her. He didn’t look at her as he stepped back.

Her back was still against the frame. The bolt had left a hot point of ache between her shoulder blades. The voices got closer, two of them, someone laughing about something else. Sawyer’s face had already closed, that flat, unreadable set she’d walked past for a season of shifts, but his hand found her hip through the denim and squeezed once, hard, hidden by the angle of his body, and then it was gone. Then he was walking away toward the far doors like he had somewhere to be, and she was left with his come cooling on the inside of her thighs and the seam of her jeans cutting into the twisted underwear still lodged against her hip crease and her calf shaking so badly she had to lean her weight on the steel. She fixed her shirt. She held the gaping waistband closed with one fist. She could still feel the squeeze on her hip, the print of four fingers. She waited three seconds more. Then she pushed off the frame and walked the other direction, one boot loud on the concrete, the other still not entirely certain it was hers.