🔥 The Snap: Riley’s Side 🔥

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You made it to the bonus content — which means you’ve lived through Vic and Riley’s journey from the frozen basement to the gallery kiss to spring. Thank you for giving their story a chance. This exclusive chapter is our gift to dedicated readers — the night everything changed, told from the other side of the mattress.

⚠️ Content Warning: This scene contains explicit FF content, voyeurism, dominance, oral sex, edging, marking, possessive behavior, and the bisexual awakening of a woman who just pinned you to a mattress and told you to stop touching yourself. Rated 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ for a reason.

The Snap: Riley’s Side

Chapter 8 from Riley’s POV • The first night • The mattress in the dark

RILEY

I knew she was awake.

Not because she moved — Vic Sterling slept like a woman in a coffin, rigid on her edge of the mattress, spine straight, hands at her sides, the clinical stillness of someone who even in unconsciousness refused to surrender an inch of control. She hadn’t moved.

But her breathing changed.

I’d been sleeping three feet from this woman for weeks. I knew every frequency of her respiratory system the way I knew color theory — instinctively, intimately, through the sustained observation of someone who was paying far more attention than she should have been. I knew her study-breathing: shallow, fast, the aerobic output of a brain burning glucose at competition speed. I knew her sleep-breathing: deeper, slower, the measured rhythm that only arrived after midnight when she finally stopped reciting neurotransmitter pathways and surrendered to the dark.

And I knew her awake-breathing. The one she had right now. The one where every inhale was held a half-second too long, the one where the exhale was controlled rather than automatic, the one that meant Victoria Sterling was lying in the dark with her eyes open and her nervous system on high alert.

She was awake. And she was listening.

Which meant she could hear what I was doing.

Fuck.

I should have stopped. I should have pulled my hand away and rolled over and pretended I’d been adjusting the blanket or scratching my hip or performing any one of a thousand mundane gestures that didn’t involve my fingers between my own thighs in the dark while my roommate lay three feet away.

I didn’t stop.

Because here’s the thing about wanting someone you can’t have: it makes you reckless. It makes you stupid. It makes you lie in the dark touching yourself to the thought of their hands and their voice and the way they looked at you across the room when they thought you didn’t notice — the way Vic looked at me, like I was a problem she couldn’t solve and couldn’t stop working on — and it makes you not care whether they hear, because the hearing is the point, because the hearing is the closest you’ll ever get to the thing you actually want.

I wanted Vic to hear me.

I wanted her to lie there in the dark with her jaw clenched and her hands in fists and the clinical vocabulary failing, and I wanted her to know that the woman next to her was wet and wanting and thinking about her. I wanted to be the stress response she couldn’t rationalize away. The data point that broke the model. The variable she couldn’t control.

So I didn’t stop. I let my breathing go. Let the sounds escape — small, barely there, but audible in the dead silence of the apartment. A hitch. A catch. The soft, wet sound of fingers on slick skin that was amplified by the quiet the way a heartbeat is amplified in an empty room.

Vic’s breathing stopped entirely.

I almost smiled. Almost. But the wanting was too sharp for smiling — it was in my chest and my stomach and between my legs, a living thing that had been growing since the first night she’d slept next to me and I’d felt her cold hands brush my hip in her sleep and thought, with the devastating clarity of someone recognizing a catastrophe in progress: oh no.

I thought about her hands. The long, precise fingers that held pens and turned pages and gripped the edge of the desk when she was stressed. Cold hands. Always cold. I thought about how they’d feel on my skin — the temperature shock, the contrast, ice on heat. I thought about the way she’d looked at me in the shower — frozen in the doorway, eyes dark, her entire body locked in the rigid paralysis of a woman experiencing something her vocabulary didn’t have words for.

My fingers moved faster. My breathing fractured.

I heard Vic swallow. An audible, dry-throated swallow that was, in the context of the absolute silence, as loud as a gunshot.

And then she moved.

Not slowly. Not tentatively. Not with the careful, measured approach of a woman testing boundaries. She moved the way a wave moves — fast, total, the full-body commitment of a force that has been building pressure against a wall and has finally, catastrophically, broken through.

The blanket was ripped away. Cool air hit my overheated skin. And then she was on me — her thigh swinging over my hips, her weight settling against my legs, her hands finding my wrists and pinning them above my head in a single, fluid motion that was so fast and so confident that my brain short-circuited and my body arched up off the mattress in pure, involuntary shock.

My hand was still between my legs. She could feel it — the position of my arm, the angle, the unmistakable evidence of what I’d been doing. My fingers were wet and my face was hot and I was pinned beneath a woman who was straddling me in the dark with a grip on my wrists that felt like she’d been rehearsing this in her sleep.

Silence.

Just breathing. Hers and mine. Ragged, desperate, the respiratory equivalent of two people standing at the edge of a cliff deciding whether to jump.

Then her mouth was at my ear. Close enough that her lips brushed the shell of it. Close enough that I could feel the heat of her breath and the barely-there tremor in her jaw.

“Stop touching yourself.“

Four words. Delivered in a voice I had never heard from Victoria Sterling — low, dark, stripped of every layer of clinical composure and academic precision, raw in a way that made my entire body clench. Not a request. A command. Issued by a woman who had spent weeks pretending she didn’t want this and had just detonated every pretense with four syllables and a grip that would leave bruises.

I whimpered. An actual whimper — involuntary, humiliating, torn from my throat by the combination of her voice and her weight and her hands on my wrists and the devastating realization that the thing I’d been fantasizing about was happening.

She pulled my hand away. Pinned both wrists with one hand — long fingers, strong grip, the hand of a woman who’d been clenching pens and textbooks and desk edges for weeks and had developed a grip strength that was, in this specific application, absolutely devastating.

“Look at me.“

I opened my eyes. Her face was above mine — inches away, barely visible in the faint blue light from the basement window. But I could see enough. I could see her eyes — usually gray and controlled, now black, the pupils blown so wide the color had disappeared. I could see her jaw — clenched, the muscle jumping beneath the skin. I could see the expression on her face, and it was nothing I’d ever seen from Vic before.

It was hunger.

Not curiosity. Not confusion. Not the tentative, experimental interest of a woman dipping her toe into unfamiliar water. This was famine-level hunger — dark, violent, the starving gaze of a person who’d been denying themselves sustenance and had just walked into a room full of food.

She looked at me like she wanted to devour me. And I — pinned beneath her, wrists locked, still throbbing from my own interrupted touch — wanted to let her.

“You want to come?” Her voice was barely a whisper. Rough. Cracked. The voice of a woman speaking a language she’d never used before and discovering she was fluent. “You ask me.“

I should have said something witty. Something bratty. Something that established that Riley Thorne didn’t take orders from neurotic pre-med students with cold hands and commitment issues. That’s who I was — the mouthy one, the chaos agent, the girl who pushed buttons and tested limits and never, ever submitted.

What I said was: “Please.“

One word. Stripped of every defense I’d ever built. Offered up from the mattress like a prayer to a god I’d just discovered was real.

Vic’s hand replaced mine.

And the sound I made — the sound that tore out of me when her cold fingers found the place where mine had been, when the temperature shock of ice on fever-hot skin detonated through my nervous system like a flash-bang — was not a sound I’d ever made before. Not with Maren. Not with anyone. It was a sound that came from somewhere below my lungs, below my stomach, below every layer of performance and bravado that I’d built to protect the soft, desperate core that wanted nothing more than to be wanted like this.

Her fingers were precise. Of course they were — she was a neuroscience major, she studied neural pathways, she understood the architecture of sensation with the clinical expertise of someone who’d memorized every receptor and every response. She touched me the way she studied: methodically, thoroughly, with the focused intensity of a woman who was going to understand this if it killed her.

She found the rhythm immediately. Not the obvious one — the real one. The specific frequency that I’d been chasing with my own hand, the one that built slow and detonated fast, the one that took most partners months to learn and that Vic Sterling identified in approximately forty seconds because she was a genius and her genius extended, apparently, to the cartography of my body.

“Look at me,” she said again. Because my eyes had closed — involuntary, the body’s attempt to manage the sensory overload by reducing one input channel. “Eyes open, Riley.“

The sound of my name in that voice — low, commanding, the possessive weight of a woman who was holding my wrists and working me with precision and saying my name like it was something she owned — nearly ended me right there.

I opened my eyes. Held her gaze. Let her see everything — the want and the fear and the desperate, devastating love that I’d been carrying since the night she tucked the blanket over me and I’d felt, for the first time in my life, what it was like to be handled with care by someone who pretended not to care.

She moved down my body.

Kissing. Biting. The trail she left was not gentle — it was claiming. A mark on my throat that bloomed beneath her teeth. A bite at the junction of my neck and shoulder that made my spine arc and my hips buck. Her mouth on my collarbone, then lower — the swell of my breast, the nipple she caught between her teeth and worked until I was writhing, until the sounds coming out of me were loud enough to reach the upstairs neighbors and I didn’t care, I didn’t care about anything except the trajectory of her mouth and the fact that it was heading south.

“Vic — please —”

“Not yet.”

Not yet. Two words that nearly killed me. Spoken with the clinical detachment of a woman conducting an experiment and the dark authority of a woman who was enjoying the experiment far too much. She was edging me. Deliberately. Building the pressure with her fingers — slow strokes that brought me to the threshold and then pulled back, left me gasping and shaking and furious.

“I can’t — Vic, I’m going to —”

“Not yet.”

I was going to die. I was going to die on this mattress from sustained sexual torture administered by a woman who had never touched another woman before tonight and was somehow already better at it than anyone I’d ever been with, and the coroner would list the cause of death as excessive competence and they’d put it on my headstone and Suki would laugh about it for the rest of her life.

Vic’s mouth reached my stomach. My hip. The crease of my inner thigh. She kissed the sensitive skin there — soft, then hard, then teeth — and I made a sound that was probably audible three blocks away.

“Vic, please, please, I can’t —”

Her mouth found me.

The first contact of her tongue obliterated whatever remained of my higher cognitive function. I stopped thinking in words. I stopped thinking at all. There was only sensation — wet, hot, devastatingly focused sensation — and the sound of my own voice saying her name like it was the only word I knew.

She was precise. She was thorough. She used her tongue and her fingers in tandem — a synchronized attack that was simultaneously clinical and passionate, that read every tremor and every sound like data and adjusted in real-time with the adaptive intelligence of a woman who learned fast and learned completely. She pinned my hips down when I tried to move — held me still — and the combination of her mouth and her hands and the restraint was so overwhelming that my vision went white.

She edged me one final time — brought me to the absolute peak and then paused, her mouth hovering a centimeter away, her breath warm on my skin, and I was sobbing. Actually sobbing. The sounds coming out of me were no longer in the category of moans or gasps — they were the raw, desperate pleas of a woman at the threshold of something enormous.

“Please,” I whispered. “Please, Vic. Please.“

She gave me what I needed.

The orgasm was not a climax. It was an event — seismic, full-body, a tectonic shift that started at the point of contact and radiated outward through every nerve and every muscle and every cell. My back arched off the mattress. My hands — still pinned above my head, still locked in her grip — twisted against her fingers. I screamed. Not moaned, not gasped — screamed. Her name, torn from my throat at a volume that made the thin walls vibrate, followed by sounds that weren’t words at all but were the most honest things I’d ever said.

Vic covered my mouth with her hand. Not roughly — firmly. The way you contain something powerful. The way you hold a lid on something that’s boiling over. And even through the aftershocks, even through the full-body tremors and the wracking sobs and the devastating vulnerability of coming apart completely in someone’s hands, I registered the tenderness of it. The care. She wasn’t silencing me because she was ashamed. She was silencing me because the walls were thin and this was ours and she was protecting it.

The orgasm lasted longer than any I’d ever experienced. Wave after wave, each one triggered by a micro-adjustment of her mouth that said she wasn’t done, wasn’t stopping, was going to wring every last tremor from my body with the obsessive thoroughness that she brought to everything she did.

When it finally subsided — when the last aftershock rippled through me and my muscles went slack and I collapsed onto the mattress like a puppet with cut strings — she moved.

She didn’t let go. That was the part that broke me.

She released my wrists. Gathered my boneless, trembling body against her chest. Wrapped both arms around me — tight, possessive, the grip of a woman claiming something she’d just discovered was hers. She buried her face in my neck and breathed — deep, shuddering breaths that I could feel against my skin — and her heart was hammering so hard I could feel it through her chest, against my back, a rapid percussion that said I just did that and I don’t know what it means and I’m terrified but I’m not letting go.

“Holy shit,” I whispered.

She said nothing. Her face stayed buried in my neck. Her arms stayed locked around me. Her breathing was ragged — not from exertion but from something deeper, something that lived in the chest and the throat and the place where the body stored the things the mind wasn’t ready to process.

I lay in her arms and felt her heartbeat gradually slow — from frantic to rapid to merely elevated — and I thought about Maren.

Not in the way you’d think. Not with longing or comparison. I thought about Maren because Maren had been beautiful and confident and openly queer and had touched me with the practiced expertise of a woman who knew exactly what she was doing — and it had never, not once in a year of dating, felt like this.

This — Vic’s arms around me, Vic’s face in my neck, Vic’s cold hands turning hot against my skin — was something else entirely. It was terrifying and raw and completely uncharted. Vic hadn’t touched me with expertise. She’d touched me with obsession. With the focused, consuming, total attention of a person who was doing something for the first time and was bringing to it every ounce of the intelligence and intensity that made her brilliant at everything else.

She’d touched me like I was the most important thing she’d ever studied. And the studying had been devastating.

I turned in her arms. Faced her in the dark. Her eyes were wide — dilated, glassy, the expression of a person in the aftermath of a seismic event who was still processing the tremors. Her lips were swollen. Her hair — the tight, perfect bun she wore like armor — had come partially loose, dark strands falling across her face.

She looked wrecked. She looked beautiful. She looked like a woman who had just discovered something about herself that was going to change everything and was standing in the blast radius wondering what came next.

I reached up. Touched her face. Her cheekbone, sharp beneath my thumb. She flinched — then leaned into it. The lean was everything. The lean said I’m scared but don’t stop touching me.

“Hey,” I said. Soft. The way you talk to someone at the edge.

“Hey.” Her voice was wrecked too. Rough and thin and completely stripped of the clinical armor she wore during the day.

“You okay?”

A long pause. Then: “I don’t know.”

“That’s okay. You don’t have to know yet.”

She pulled me closer. Tighter. Her face returned to my neck. Her arms locked around me with the fierce, desperate grip of someone holding on to the only solid thing in a world that had just tilted on its axis.

I held her back. I ran my fingers through the loose strands of her hair. I pressed my lips to her temple and breathed her in — clean, cold, the faint chemical scent of the hand sanitizer she used compulsively and the underlying warmth that she tried so hard to suppress.

And I thought, with the devastating certainty of a woman who had been through this before and recognized the shape of the thing forming in her chest: I am going to fall in love with this person. I am going to fall completely, catastrophically, irreversibly in love with a woman who can’t say my name in daylight and who is going to break my heart.

And I’m going to let her. Because the way she held me after — the way she’s holding me right now, like I’m the most important thing she’s ever touched — that’s not a cortisol reaction. That’s not a stress response. That’s love. She just doesn’t know it yet.

Her hand settled on my hip. Her thumb traced a small, absent pattern on my skin — precise, repetitive, a gesture that felt more like writing than touching. Like she was drawing something. A formula. A molecule. A notation in a language I couldn’t read but that she was inscribing on my body like a secret message, a claim made in the dark that she’d deny in the morning.

I memorized the pattern. I’d look it up later. I’d find out what molecule Victoria Sterling had drawn on my hip in the dark after the first time she touched me, and I’d carry that knowledge like a key — proof that even when her mouth was saying cortisol reaction and physiological response, her hands were saying something else entirely.

Her breathing slowed. Deepened. The transition from awake to asleep — gradual, then sudden, the way it always happened with Vic. One moment she was holding me with the desperate grip of a woman in crisis; the next she was boneless, heavy, her face slack against my neck and her arm draped possessively over my waist.

She didn’t let go in her sleep. She never let go in her sleep. Every morning I woke up tangled with her — arms and legs and the warm press of her body against mine — and every morning she pretended she didn’t know how it happened.

She knew. Her body knew, even when her brain wouldn’t admit it. Her body had been reaching for mine since the first night, and tonight it had finally been allowed to arrive.

I lay in the dark with Vic Sterling’s arms around me and her breath warm on my neck and the marks of her mouth already blooming on my skin — throat, collarbone, inner thigh, places that would be visible and places that wouldn’t, a map of claim that she’d drawn with her teeth and would disavow in the morning light.

Tomorrow she’d wake up and panic. I knew this. I knew it with the certainty of a woman who had studied Vic the way Vic studied everything — obsessively, thoroughly, with the focused attention of someone who recognized that the subject was both fascinating and dangerous. Tomorrow the clinical voice would return. The walls would go back up. The bun would be pulled tight. And she’d look at me with those gray eyes and say something devastating and precise about cortisol and proximity and the irrelevance of what had just happened.

And it would hurt. It would hurt the way Maren had hurt — the specific, targeted pain of being wanted in private and denied in public, of being someone’s secret, someone’s midnight, someone’s shame.

But here’s the thing Maren never did: Maren never held me like this. Maren never buried her face in my neck and breathed me in like oxygen. Maren never drew molecules on my hip in the dark — the language of love disguised as science, the heart speaking through the hands while the mouth stayed silent.

Vic was different. Vic was more. More afraid, more brilliant, more broken, more capable of love than she’d ever been allowed to be. Somewhere underneath the ice queen and the bun and the cold hands and the clinical vocabulary, there was a woman who had just pinned me to a mattress and made me come so hard I’d screamed, and who was now holding me in her sleep with the unconscious tenderness of someone who didn’t know how to do this while awake but whose body understood the choreography perfectly.

I pressed my face into her hair. Closed my eyes. Let her heartbeat be my metronome.

I’ll wait, I thought. I’ll wait for you to catch up to your own hands. I’ll wait for the morning when you wake up and don’t run. I’ll wait for the moment when you say my name in daylight with the same voice you used tonight.

I’ll wait. Because anyone who holds me like this in the dark is worth waiting for in the light.

I fell asleep in her arms. And for the first time in a year — since Maren, since the last time someone held me and I believed it meant something — I slept all the way through the night.

Her hands were still warm when I woke up.

She ran before I could tell her.

THE END

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