Until the Owner Returns

1. Prologue — The Photograph

The deadbolt turns with the small, borrowed click of a key that still does not feel like hers.

Hux is already against her. He has been against her since the stairwell, since the last landing, heat pouring off the dense black-sable of him in a way no leash can civilize. Willa’s back meets the door. Her coat is still on. Rain ticks off the hem onto Rowan’s floorboards. She has the presence of mind—some thin, late scrap of it—to thumb the chain across, as if a chain could make this belong to her.

He noses under the coat.

The sound he makes lives in his chest before it becomes breath: a low, continuous claim that travels through her belly and settles, shameless, between her legs. She is wet from the walk, from the knowing, from the four flights of holding herself in an elevator that smelled like other people’s dinners. When his muzzle shoves the wool aside and finds the seam of her, she makes a noise she immediately hates. Too loud. Too ready.

Rowan’s photograph watches from the dresser.

It is a stupid photograph. Rowan laughing at a table that is the same table ten feet from here, mouth open, a glass caught mid-lift. Willa has straightened it twice today. The frame is still perfectly square. That is the obscenity: the care.

“Wait,” she tells him, which is not a word he has ever honored, and her hands are already doing the other work—coat shoved up, jeans dragged to one ankle, the cheap towel she keeps folded behind the door kicked into place because she will not put this on Rowan’s rug if she can help it. The towel bunches. One knee finds it. The other stays bare on wood that still holds the cold of the hallway.

Hux mounts the way he always does now, without ceremony. Forelegs bracket her ribs. The weight of him empties the air from her lungs in a single, grateful rush. The slick, tapered heat of him slides the cleft of her once, twice, hunting, and she reaches back because she has learned that if she does not aim him he will take the wrong place and she will still let him, and she is trying, even now, to keep one small part of this intentional.

She finds him. Hot. Slick. Thicker than her wrist where her fingers meet the swelling he is already making. She guides the head down through the mess of herself and holds him there, at the rim, the way a thief holds still in a doorway.

The photograph does not blink.

He pushes.

The stretch is slow only because she makes it slow, breathing through the first thick inch as if patience could pass for innocence. He does not care about her pacing. Short, instinctive thrusts work him deeper, each one opening her on a wet sound the thin walls will carry if anyone is home to hear it. She drops her forehead to the wood and watches her own fingers shine around the base of him, the way her body pulls when he draws back, the obscene gleam he leaves on her skin.

More.

The burn sweetens. Her mouth opens on nothing. He seats himself in a series of heavy, wet advances until her palm is all that stands between her and the knot—already a hard, living fist against her knuckles, already demanding. She has taken it before. She has panicked on it before. Tonight the panic is not size. It is the frame on the dresser and the key still warm in the lock and the fact that she is going to let him anyway.

She spreads herself with two fingers and tells him, uselessly, to wait.

He drives.

The broadest part of him meets her and for a long, trembling second she is only stretch, only the bright edge of too much, thighs shaking against the towel. Then her body gives—one thick, occupying pop that punches a sound out of her—and he is locked, pulsing, swelling the rest of the way inside a heat that has nowhere to go.

She comes from that alone.

It rips through her in hard, humiliating waves, cunt clamping on what cannot move, fresh slick spilling around the seal and running down to the towel in warm threads she can hear. Hux groans into the back of her neck. Drool finds the groove of her spine under the coat. He grinds in short, helpless nudges, each one shoving the knot against the place that makes her vision narrow, and she holds the dresser in her mind like a handhold while her body milks him in greedy, rhythmic pulls.

Seed arrives in pulses she feels as pressure first, then heat, then the slow impossibility of containment. She is full. She stays full. The lock holds her on her knees in another woman’s hallway-dark, jeans at one ankle, coat still dripping, the photograph facing it all with Rowan’s open, laughing mouth.

Willa’s fingers stay on the place they join, tracing the thin, shiny rim of herself forced wide around him, as if touch could make it hers. The radiator ticks. Someone laughs on the sidewalk, already farther away.

The swelling does not ease when she wants it to. She waits anyway, cheek to the door, eyes on the glass and the grin behind it, hips giving those small, traitorous shifts that drag him inside her just to feel the claim again.

Rowan’s mouth, frozen mid-laugh, is still the brightest thing in the room.

1. Chapter 1 — Not My Name on the Lease

The key is warmer than the lock.

Willa feels that first, the cheap metal taking the heat of her fist up four flights, then the stubborn hitch of a deadbolt that has been turned by another hand for years. The door yields on a smell she does not own: citrus soap, dry kibble, the faint clean musk of an animal who has slept here without her. She steps in with one bag. The bag is a decision. Two would have looked like moving. One looks like a favor.

She says it aloud, because the rooms are listening.

“Just until she’s back.”

Hux is already on the couch.

He does not come to the door like a dog in a commercial. He lifts his head from a cushion the color of old tea, slate-and-sable coat throwing dull light, and considers her with the patience of a creature who has watched other people fail this threshold. He is larger than memory. Memory had edited him into something manageable, a weight at Rowan’s knee, a joke in a voice note. The actual dog occupies the couch the way a storm occupies a coastline. When he stands, the leather sighs. When he steps down, the floorboards answer.

Willa stays on the mat with her shoes on.

Rowan’s plant list is stuck to the refrigerator with a magnet from a city Willa has never visited. Water the pothos when the soil pulls from the pot. Do not move the fiddle-leaf; it sulks. Hux eats at dusk. His nails get done on the card on the hall table. There is a heart at the bottom of the note that makes Willa’s mouth do something unkind. She puts her bag down beside the table instead of in the bedroom. The bedroom is a mouth. She is not ready to walk into it.

Hux crosses the rug and stops at her knees.

Heat comes off him in a low, living sheet. His skull meets her hipbone with a solidity that travels straight up her spine. She has forgotten this part—the way a large dog does not request contact so much as arrive inside it. Her hand finds the broad plane between his ears because her hand has nowhere else polite to go. Fur parts under her fingers, dense, sun-warm even in a room that faces the alley. Beneath the fur, muscle. Beneath the muscle, a pulse she can feel in her wrist.

She takes her hand back sooner than she wants to.

“You’re hers,” she tells him.

He breathes against the pocket of her jeans, damp heat blooming through the cloth, and the breath does not feel like information. It feels like a mouth considering the shape of her. Willa steps around him and does a slow, unnecessary circuit of the apartment so that her body will remember it is a guest: the table with its ring of old wine, the bookshelf she must not reorder, the mug tree with Rowan’s two chipped favorites and a third that could be Willa’s if she were the kind of person who claimed mugs. On the dresser in the bedroom—seen only from the doorway, she does not go in—a photograph of Rowan laughing with a glass in the air. Willa leaves the frame exactly square.

Her own lease ended in a hallway that smelled like someone else’s cologne and the last argument about who had been invisible longer. She had stood there with this same bag and no dog and the bright, thin pride of a woman who had chosen to leave. The pride has not traveled well. It sits in her throat now like a stone she keeps meaning to swallow.

Hux follows her from room to room without urgency.

In the kitchen she fills his bowl because dusk is a fact even if she refuses calendars. Kibble pours in a hard rattle. He waits until she sets the bowl down, then eats with a concentration that makes her feel watched anyway. Water. The plant list. She tests the pothos soil with one knuckle and finds it damp, which means Rowan watered before she left, which means the list is not only instruction. It is a way of remaining in the rooms.

Willa eats standing, cold noodles from a plastic tub, hip against a counter whose edge has been worn smooth by another woman’s cooking. Hux finishes and comes to sit on her foot. The weight is intimate in a way that has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with being chosen by something that cannot sign a ...