Firefighter Pins the Woman Who Saved Him

Hot. Wet. The thick drag of him splitting me open on every downstroke, and my jaw clamped so hard my back teeth ached, sheet fibers stuck to my lower lip where my mouth hung open against the mattress. I couldn’t close it. Couldn’t lift my head to close it. There was a pressure behind my sternum like a fist had been shoved in there and left, and the fist was Lion, all of him, chest to my spine, belly to the small of my back, laid flat along me like he was trying to press through me into the bed.

He had my wrists. Both of them, dragged up over my head and stacked under one of his hands, his fingers splayed over my knuckles and mashing them into the sheet. His knees were outside my thighs, locked tight, keeping my legs shut so every inch of him had to force its way through. My tits were flattened. My cheek burned where the cotton had already rubbed it raw. The only time I got air was when he pulled back, that half second when his chest lifted a fraction off my ribs and I could snatch a mouthful, and then he’d bottom out and the weight would land and the breath would go out of me in a grunt I didn’t choose to make.

“Fuck, look at you.” Right against my ear, his voice gravel, his stubble scraping the back of my shoulder. “Still taking it. Still greedy. This cunt dragged my ass out of a building that was falling on it, and now it’s sucking me like it wants a medal.” He rolled his hips, slow, and forced another inch deeper, and I heard the wet sound of it, the slick pull on the withdrawal, the headboard knocking the wall on the way back in. “I’m gonna have to send it a fruit basket.”

I tried to laugh. It came out as a wheeze into the mattress. The taste at the back of my throat was still smoke, four days later, that flat ash coating that didn’t rinse out, and every time I swallowed my throat clicked like it had been sanded.

I tried to get my elbows under me. Just once. Just to get my chest an inch off the bed so my lungs could open. I got maybe halfway, felt my shoulder blades start to lift, and he simply let go of his own weight. Didn’t shove. Didn’t need to. He’d been bracing on his free forearm without me realizing, taking some of himself off me with that one arm, and he stopped bracing, and two hundred pounds of him came down on my back all at once and drove me back into the springs with a sound the mattress made for me because I couldn’t make it myself.

“Nope,” he said, almost cheerful, breath hot on my neck. “Down.”

“Lion—”

“Down.”

Sweat had already pooled in the dip of my spine and he moved through it, his stomach sliding on my back, the whole slick length of him rocking. Then his knees shifted. I felt him drag one leg over the outside of mine, then the other, and shove both knees inside my thighs and spread them, wide, wider, until my hips opened and my pelvis tipped and my clit ended up pinned dead center against the mattress under both our weights. Oh. Oh, no. That changed everything. Every roll of his hips now drove his pubic bone into my ass and shoved my whole pelvis down into the bed and my clit took it, mashed flat, dragged a millimeter along the sheet and then dragged back, and I couldn’t move a hair to change the angle. Not up, not sideways, not an inch of tilt to take the pressure off or put it where I wanted it. He decided where it went. He decided how hard. He decided how long.

“There it is,” he breathed, because he’d felt me clench. I heard his breath hitch when I did it, that little catch in his chest right between my shoulder blades. “There’s that grip. Christ, Carmela. You know what your hand did to my jacket?” He bit the tendon at the side of my neck. “Ripped the zipper clean out. Took skin off your palm doing it and didn’t let go. I got a look at that hand in the ambulance and thought, that’s it, that’s the one, that’s the hand that gets to do whatever it wants to me for the rest of my life.”

He didn’t thrust. That was the thing. He stopped thrusting entirely and just stayed buried and rolled, this slow deep circle of his hips that never let my clit off the sheet for a second, and the pressure behind my sternum turned into something with a pulse. I could feel it building down low, that hot heavy pull, and I couldn’t do anything about it. Couldn’t rock into it. Couldn’t rock away. I bit the sheet. I tasted the fabric softener and the ash behind it. He kept rolling, and the springs kept complaining under us in a rhythm, and the sounds I was making were going straight into the mattress and dying there.

“You gonna come like that? Pinned like that?” His mouth was on my ear. “Yeah. Yeah, you are. You don’t get a say. You didn’t give me a say in that hallway, did you? Kept going when I was done. So this is me. This is me not being done.”

The first one hit me with my jaw still locked. My whole body tried to arch and couldn’t, tried to buck and couldn’t, so all of it went inward instead, my cunt seizing around him in these hard involuntary pulses while a sound tore out of me and got swallowed by the bed. My thighs shook against the inside of his knees. My fingers curled under his hand and clawed at nothing. He groaned, low, and his hips stuttered once like he’d lost the rhythm, and then he found it again and kept going. Kept rolling. Right on that same spot.

Too much. It went from good to too much in the space of one breath I didn’t get to take. The aftershocks should have faded and they didn’t, because he wouldn’t let the pressure off my clit, and every drag of the sheet under it now felt like a wire touching a wire.

“Lion, wait, wait—”

“No.”

“It’s—I can’t, it’s—”

“I know what it is.” He shifted his grip on my wrists, got them both in one fist, and slid his free hand down and under me, flat, between my chest and the mattress. I felt his palm spread over my ribs. “Breathe. Go on. I can feel it. In. Out. That’s the chest that coughed up black shit for an hour and kept pulling air. I watched it. Kept pulling. Kept pulling.” He pushed up on that hand a little and it gave me a sliver of room and I dragged in a breath so hard it whistled. Then he let his weight back down and the breath went out of me and he started thrusting again, real thrusts now, short and deep, the wet sound of it loud in the room.

Somewhere in there I panicked. Genuinely. He’d bottomed out and stayed and I’d been at the bottom of an exhale and there was nothing left in me and nothing coming in and my chest tried to expand under him and couldn’t, and for a long second it was the hallway again, it was black air and my knees on concrete and the weight of him on my shoulder dragging me down. My heel slammed the mattress. Twice. Hard, the only part of me that could still hit anything, my fingers scrabbling uselessly under his fist at the same time.

He yanked his hand out from under my chest and shoved himself up on that forearm in an instant, his other fist never leaving my wrists. “Hey. Hey. Carmela. Look at me.” I couldn’t, I was facing the wall, but I heard him and I heard the thing in his voice that wasn’t an order. “Breathe. I’ve got you. Breathe.”

I did. Three, four gulps, ugly, loud. The pressure eased on my ribs and I could feel the sheet peeling off my cheek where I’d sweated to it.

“Okay?” he said.

“Okay.”

“You want me off you?”

The honest answer would have been to think about it. I didn’t think about it. “No.”

“Say it.”

“Don’t get off me.”

He came back down slow this time, letting me feel each part of him settle, chest, belly, hips, his grip on my wrists staying exactly where it was, and when he was flat along me again he said, quiet, “There. That’s us,” and then his mouth was at my shoulder blade, biting, and his hips were moving.

The second one built from someplace deeper, not the wire-on-wire of my clit but something behind it, and it built while he talked. He talked the whole time. He’d found a rhythm that dragged the whole length of him out until just the head was in me and then drove back to the root in one shove and I could hear every stroke of it, the pull, the slap, the springs, the headboard, my own breath getting cut in half.

“I was dead weight,” he said. His voice was breaking up between thrusts, coming in pieces. “I went down. I remember going down. And I remember—fuck—I remember your hand in my collar and your legs just. Going. Just kept going. Like they didn’t know how to stop.” He drove in. “These legs.” He couldn’t reach them so he shoved his knees harder against my inner thighs instead, spreading me another impossible inch, pinning them wider. “These fucking legs, Carmela.”

“I saw Joe go.” It came out of me before I knew I was going to say it. Muffled, into the sheet, but he heard it. His hips stopped. “I saw him go down at the far end and I couldn’t—there was no—”

“I know.”

“So I wasn’t losing you too. That’s all it was. It wasn’t brave, it was—I just wasn’t doing that twice.”

He pressed his forehead to the back of my skull. Breathed there. Then he started again, harder, and his voice went rough and cracked right down the middle. “Bridget was—” He couldn’t finish it. Tried again. “Bridget was two doors behind us. I thought she was behind us.”

“I know.”

“I thought she was right there.”

“I know, baby, I know—”

He fucked me through it. Through him saying her name and me saying I know and neither of us saying anything else because there wasn’t anything else. He got his free hand under my hip and hauled it up half an inch off the bed and drove down into me from that new angle and I felt my body start to bear down, involuntary, that deep clenching push from inside, and I heard myself gasping into the mattress in a rhythm I wasn’t controlling.

“Yeah,” he panted. “There. Give it. Don’t hold it.”

My thighs tried to clamp shut and slammed into his knees and couldn’t. My hips tried to buck up into him and got nowhere, just a shudder against his weight. It came out of me low and hot and wet, a flood, I felt it soak the sheet under my belly and run down between us, felt myself pulsing so hard around him he swore and his rhythm went to pieces. He kept moving anyway. Ground into it. And the exact moment it flipped was the fourth pulse, I felt it, felt the pleasure hit a wall and turn into raw scraped brightness, my clit pinned in a puddle of my own wet against a sheet that had been rubbing it for twenty minutes, and I sobbed. Actually sobbed. My hands were still trapped in his fist and I couldn’t even cover my face.

“That’s two,” he said, and his voice was shaking. “Two. Fuck. Look at you. You’ve got no idea. Wettest fucking thing I’ve ever—” He dragged one of my wrists down from over my head, brought it to his mouth without stopping, and I felt his lips on my palm, on the raw place where the zipper had gone through, and then his teeth, gentle, right on the blister. “This. This is the one. This is what I’m fucking. Say it.”

“Lion, I can’t—”

“That’s not what I asked.” He bit the heel of my hand and kept thrusting. “Say it. Whose hand.”

“Mine.”

“What’d it do.”

“It didn’t—” I was crying. I don’t know when that started. “It didn’t let go.”

“No, it fucking didn’t.”

He put my wrist back where it had been and pinned it under the other and settled his full weight back on me, and for a while there was nothing but the sounds. His breath ragged at my ear. The obscene wet slide of him pulling out and shoving in. My noises, high and broken and going straight into the bed. The headboard. The springs. My own lungs, each breath a fight I won for half a second and then lost again when his hips came down.

The third one took forever. He built it deliberately. I felt him doing it, felt him ease off the deep strokes and go back to that slow rolling pressure that kept my clit trapped, and everything down there was so swollen and raw that just the weight of him sitting still inside me was enough to make my legs jerk. Every roll was a spike. Every spike made me clench. Every clench made him hitch a breath against my spine and grind down harder, and the harder he went the more I clenched, and I could not get out. I tried. I tried to twist my hips, tried to pull a knee up, tried to shove my chest off the bed, and none of it moved him a centimeter. I was a body he was lying on. Everything I did happened underneath him and went nowhere.

“Lion. Lion, please, I’m—it’s too—please—”

“You said that in the hallway.” His voice was gone to rasp. “Said please. Said I can’t. Kept crawling. So no.”

“It hurts—”

“It’s supposed to.” He kissed the back of my neck, wet, open. “Nowhere to go. You hear me? Nowhere. Not into your head. Not into that fucking blank thing you do. Here. I want you right here where I can feel it. Don’t—” His hips drove down and his voice cracked. “Don’t go quiet on me. I can’t. Carmela. I can’t do that one too.”

“I’m here.”

“Say it again.”

“I’m here. I’m here, I’m right here, I’m not—”

“Then come. Come on this. Give it to me, I’m right—fuck—I’m right behind you, give it—”

It didn’t hit like the first two. It came up from the floor of me and kept coming, this slow enormous crest that pulled my whole body rigid under him, back bowed the only way it could, which was inward, into the mattress, my throat opening on a sound that wasn’t a word or a moan or anything I’d made before. Everything. I felt everything. The sheet under my clit. His pubic bone. Each individual pulse of my cunt around him. The sweat running off his jaw onto my shoulder. My wrists going numb under his hand.

And I felt him break. His rhythm went ragged and then stopped mid-stroke, buried to the root, and his voice gave out on me halfway through a sentence, “so good, you’re so fucking—” and nothing, just a sound punched out of his chest into my hair, and the whole weight of him went dead. Not braced. Not held. His body just quit, collapsed down through me into the bed, everything letting go at once except the fist around my wrists, which locked down tighter, like that grip was the last thing in him still taking orders. He came in me hot and hard and I felt each pulse of it because I was still coming too, clenching around it, dragging it out of him. His teeth were in my shoulder and he wasn’t biting, just holding on with his mouth.

Then nothing moved.

He didn’t pull out. He didn’t roll off. I couldn’t have moved him if I’d wanted to and I didn’t want to. He lay on me the way he had the whole time, all of him, and I was shaking so hard my teeth clicked, and he was shaking too, I could feel it through his chest into my back, this fine constant tremor that neither of us could stop. The room stank of sweat and sex and, under it, faint and permanent, smoke. My face was in a wet patch of sheet. I let it be.

“We made it,” he said. Barely a voice. His lips moved against my ear. “We’re still breathing. You feel that?” He pressed his chest down, once, on the inhale, so I’d feel his ribs expand against my spine. “That’s us.”

I couldn’t answer. I nodded, my cheek dragging on the cotton.

His fist finally loosened on my wrists and that arm slid down and under me and around and pulled tight, not to hold me down anymore, just to hold. He was still inside me, softening, and I could feel my own pulse around him, and his heartbeat slamming into my back so hard it was like it was trying to knock its way through. Four days ago that weight on top of me had been the thing dragging me toward the floor. Now it was the only reason I wasn’t coming apart.

We lay there in the dark, shaking, not saying anything. After a while he turned his face into my hair and breathed out one word against my skull, so quiet I felt it more than heard it.

“Here.”