Rapture (Ch 20)

Wherein insult, rage, and devotion collide, transforming an evening at the opera into a crucible of possession and release.

« previous chapter | start at the beginning

---

Dear Subscribers,

Earlier this week I received some difficult news: my cancer has returned. I’m still finding my footing with this revelation, but the impact was enough that I couldn’t summon the energy for my usual mid-week post. I do intend to continue releasing chapters of my primary story—which I have tentatively titled In the Quiet—though I’m uncertain right now whether they will still appear on a fixed schedule. I ask for your patience as I balance my devotion to my writing, and to you, with the demands of this new medical reality. In the meantime, if you’re finding something to enjoy in my work, please don’t hesitate to let me know—your encouragement and support is a rare bright spot on an otherwise darkening horizon.

Enjoy the latest chapter of In The Quiet.

Fondly,
Demetria

---

The curbside wind off the plaza cut sharp and cool between them, toying with the hem of Eva’s dress. They stood side by side beneath the glowing banners of Lincoln Center, the fountain behind them whispering its perpetual roar. Yet the space between them felt thick, humming with the aftershocks of Harold’s fury.

Eva didn’t dare speak. The anger radiating off him was simmering, dark around the edges. The kind that filled a man’s chest and burned outward through his stillness. The kind she’d been around before. The kind that once had teeth.

When the car finally pulled up, Harold opened the door for her with crisp politeness, as though manners could lacquer over what had happened. Eva slipped inside quickly, and he followed on her heels. The door thunked shut, closing them into a dim, private capsule of silence.

The car threaded through traffic, headlights gliding over their faces in intermittent washes of gold. Eva’s breathing was still shallow. She waited until the nerves in her stomach stopped buzzing, then tried to pull Harold out of his shell.

“Friends of your wife, I assume?”

Harold didn’t look at her. His voice came out flat, restrained.

“More than friends. Tom is my brother-in-law.”

Eva raised her brows. “Ah. That explains…well. Virtually everything.”

A muscle jumped in Harold’s jaw. “The four of us used to coordinate our tickets for Thursday nights. They don’t always go…” He exhaled through his nose, a tight, irritated sound. “I forgot he and his wife are Mozart fans.”

His tone shifted slightly, but the tension lingered.

Eva folded her hands in her lap. “Will they ever let us back inside, I wonder?”

Harold gave a short, humorless huff. “They will if I donate enough. Subscriptions are in a free fall, they’ll bend over backwards for the right dollar amount.”

She let out a soft laugh, hoping to lighten the air between them. Harold didn’t even blink.

Eva’s laughter faded. She watched him instead. The way he stared straight ahead—not at anything, just walled off in the cramped little hell he’d folded himself into. Anger still smoldered in the tight set of his shoulders, in the rigid line of his mouth.

“Harold,” she ventured gently. “What he said…in the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t that bad—”

“And there it is,” he cut in sharply.

Eva frowned. “There what is?”

He finally turned toward her, eyes dark and unreadable. “You’re upset with me for getting physical.”

She blinked. “Well…I mean, it was very unexpected.”

“So you think I should have let him treat you like that?”

Eva sensed hurt lurking under his anger. She kept her voice calm.

“Harold, I’m a Black woman in America. I’ve dealt with far worse.”

“And that means I should just stand by and let it happen?” His tone sharpened. “Don’t you want me to defend you when you’re attacked?”

Her eyebrows lifted in surprise. “Yes—when I’m actually threatened. Being called a ‘dusky whore’ falls very low on my overall threat assessment scale.”

Harold looked almost insulted. “So you’re upset with me for taking offense.”

“I’m upset,” Eva said carefully, “that you felt the need to resort to physical violence simply because of an off-color remark—”

“Men like him,” Harold interrupted, “will take every inch you give them. One day it’s calling you a whore in strongly racist language, the next it’s…” His hands flexed. “It’s spreading lies that I’m bringing escorts to the opera, acting out my own race-swapped Pretty Woman fantasy.”

Eva’s head tilted, her brows drawing together in a slow, deliberate motion.

“You keep mentioning race,” she said quietly. “Is my being Black that big of a deal to you?”

Harold turned to her with incredulous offense. “No, of course not! I’m saying it matters to them. Tom and Meredith have very strict, WASP-ish notions of who their ‘sort’ should associate with. And people like you and I”—he gestured vaguely between them—“we most definitely do not make the cut.”

Eva hesitated, her gaze sharpening as she took him in anew.

“Okay,” she said slowly. “I definitely want to circle back to why you’re lumping the two of us into the same category, but for now…”

She let out a breath and shook her head slightly.

“I just wish you’d dealt with it in a less pugilistic manner.”

“Oh, wonderful,” he said sharply. “Now you’re telling me how I should behave.”

Eva lifted her palms, startled. “I’m just saying—what did punching him in the jaw accomplish, exactly?”

“It showed him that I’m not going to take his shit anymore.”

“And that’s something you couldn’t have communicated any other way?”

“Not one he’d actually take to heart, no.”

They stared at each other, Eva with disbelief widening her eyes, Harold with a clenched-jaw indignation that seemed impervious to reason. His anger hadn’t cooled; it had compacted, turned dense and unyielding.

“Harold,” she said cautiously. “I don’t want to presume to know the extent of your background with Tom—”

“But you’re going to tell me how to feel about it anyway,” he cut in, bitter heat behind the words.

Eva blinked, incredulous.

“Harold—”

“No, go on,” he said, voice rising. “Tell me what I did wrong. Tell me how I should change my ways to better fit your idea of the perfect man.”

The cruelty wasn’t loud, but it was precise enough to wound.

Eva inhaled slowly, visibly steadying herself. Harold looked…shattered. And prickling, like she’d reached inside him and touched the wrong scar by accident. Rage lived there, but so did something softer, and harder to parse.

“Alright,” she said carefully. “I think we should take a step back—”

“Why?” he snapped. “Are you losing your nerve?”

He leaned in, eyes sharp with something almost desperate. “No, Eva—please. Tell me. Tell me in exacting detail how I’ve failed you.”

She stared at him—at a man who looked both furious and frightened, bracing for blows she had never intended to land. Her mouth parted, but no words followed.

The car slowed, then pulled over to the curb. The interior lights brightened softly as the engine idled. Eva turned toward the window. Her building glowed outside. She looked back at Harold, pulse thudding in her throat.

“If I invite you up…are you going to hurt me?”

Harold’s head jerked slightly, as though the question had yanked him out of whatever storm he’d been spiraling through. His expression shifted through several unreadable shades before settling into something deeper, all the brittle anger stripped away.

“Only if you want me to.”

The words hung in the air between them, potent and unsettlingly intimate.Silence stretched long enough for Eva’s pulse to travel down to her fingertips.

She opened the door and stepped out, but she didn’t walk away. She stood on the curb, waiting, eyes on him.

Harold slid across the seat and stepped out after her. He closed the door gently—too gently for the mood he was in—then offered her his arm with a restraint that felt like a held breath.

Eva took it.

They crossed the lobby in silence. The elevator ride upward was thick with unspoken things, the faint hum of machinery acting as counterpoint to the tension between them. Down the hall to their destination, each step felt strangely deliberate, as though the air were tightening around them.

Eva unlocked her apartment and pushed the door open. The instant it clicked shut behind them, Harold moved.

He grabbed her without hesitation and drove her backward into the door. The impact made her gasp, not in fear but in something far sharper. His mouth found hers in a rough, urgent kiss, all the restraint he’d worn like armor now gone. His hands slid beneath her dress, gripping, pulling, claiming with a fervor that bordered on hunger.

Eva’s response startled even herself.

He pressed her harder against the door, and she let him drag his palms along the backs of her thighs, let him kiss her with the kind of intensity that left no room for thought. Her body answered before her mind could intervene, arching up and forward, meeting his grip with her own need, letting him take without flinching away.

A voice whispered a warning inside her that this was a bad idea. Another voice—one with more steel and edge—drowned it out.

And so she leaned into it all, into the roughness, into the heat of everything they hadn’t said, letting his hands and his hunger pull the truth from her body long before either of them summoned the courage to say it aloud.

Harold moved with purpose. One moment Eva was pinned against the door; the next, he had flipped her around and hauled her tight against him, one arm locked firmly around her waist, the other fisting in her hair. The gesture was not careless but claiming: possession delivered with a precision she felt all the way down her spine.

He half-walked, half-dragged her to the table where they had eaten dinner only hours before. Her heels barely found their footing. The world blurred and narrowed to his grip alone. When they reached the table, he pressed her down over it, palms flat, her cheek touching the cool surface. One broad hand stayed planted between her shoulder blades, pinning her in place with a pressure that left no room for doubt, only surrender.

Behind her, she heard the rough, unhurried sound of fabric and buckles. The sound of Harold preparing himself with the kind of intent that made her breath stutter.

She felt her dress pushed up around her hips, his hand sweeping her underwear aside just enough to bare what he wanted of her. The exposure, sudden and uncompromising, sent a trembling jolt through her legs. He bent over her, his chest brushing her back, his breath hot along the shell of her ear.

“Last chance,” he murmured, low and dangerous.

Eva lifted her head from the table and found his mouth blindly, kissing him with an urgency that was answer enough. She didn’t trust her voice—not when it was already dissolving under the weight of what he was about to do—but she poured everything into the way she pressed back into him, the way her lips opened against his, the way her body leaned into the promise he held over her.

Harold broke the kiss and took her.

There was no gentle easing, no gradual coaxing…only a sudden, overwhelming claiming that stole the air from her lungs. Eva cried out, the sound a mix of shock and something darker, more elemental. Her hands scrabbled for purchase on the table’s edge as her body tried to absorb the force of him, unprepared for how abruptly he had given her everything.

He did not falter. His hands clamped around her hips, anchoring her in place as he drove into a rhythm that was nothing like his usual careful control. It was harder, rougher, each movement sending her forward against the table with a thud she felt in her ribs. Her breath broke into uneven fragments, sharp sounds forced from her with every impact.

She wasn’t ready for him. Not in the physical sense. Her body hadn’t softened the way it normally would, hadn’t opened for him in the slow, wet invitation she was used to offering. A raw edge scraped through her—too much friction, too little glide—yet the discomfort only braided itself with the growing heat in her belly, confusing her, electrifying her.

She should have recoiled. Instead, she felt herself climbing.

Her mind, hazy and stunned, tried to understand how pleasure could twist through the grit like a live wire, how her body could start to answer him with involuntary pulses of want even as the sharpness lingered. She had never experienced anything like this…this paradox of sensation, this mixture of strain and need, this wild, rising desire that seemed to feed off the sheer intensity of what he was doing to her.

Her throat tightened around a sound she didn’t recognize, a sound of surrender and astonishment, of wanting something she had never dared to want before.

And Harold…he gave her exactly what she asked for without ever saying a word.

His rhythm broke apart, no longer controlled, no longer metered. Something inside him snapped, and what replaced it was feral and untempered, a driving hunger that seemed to reach past his body and into some darker, ancient place in him. Each surge hit her harder, deeper in her nervous system, until her breath came in ragged, helpless bursts. The table rattled beneath her; her vision splintered at the edges; his grip on her hips tightened with a single-minded devotion that bordered on savage reverence.

Then his body locked, and a raw sound tore from his throat. He shuddered through his release, folding over her as though the force of it had stolen his balance.

In the next heartbeat he turned her onto her back, lifting her as though she weighed nothing, laying her across the table with breathtaking decisiveness. Before she could orient herself, his hand was already between her thighs—two fingers driving into her with a rough, relentless urgency that stole the world out from under her. The motion wasn’t gentle, or coaxing, or even remotely patient—it was purposeful, overwhelming, a jagged insistence that sent shocks ricocheting up her spine.

Her mouth fell open on a cry she couldn’t swallow. Sensation roared through her, too fast, too much, impossible to brace for. Her legs trembled violently against the table’s edge as he worked her with a rhythm that bordered on merciless.

“You know what to do to make me stop,” he said, voice low and wrecked with intensity.

Her head snapped back. Her fingers clawed at the table, then at his arms, leaving pale marks in their wake that slowly faded to red. Everything inside her coiled tight, then tighter still. And through the storm he never once looked away from her, his gaze locked to hers, unblinking, burning with a possession so absolute she could feel it thrumming in her bloodstream.

“Harold—” she gasped, but the word disintegrated.

The pleasure hit like a breaking wave, loud with raw inelegance. She came with a cry that tore itself free from somewhere deep, a sound that carried shock and surrender and an almost painful relief. Her body arched off the table, shaking, undone beneath him.

He held her gaze through all of it, as if bearing witness was his right alone. As if she belonged entirely to him.

But Harold didn’t slow. Didn’t soften. Didn’t give her so much as a moment to catch the breath she’d lost.

“Again,” he said.

The word struck her like a command delivered straight to the spine.

His hand never left her, never eased; he simply drove on, unrelenting, as though her climax hadn’t been an end but a starting point. The overstimulation hit her instantly, sharp with almost unbearable panic. Her body writhed away on instinct, but he caught her hip with his free hand and held her there, forcing her to face every trembling second without retreat. Heat blurred into ache; pleasure blurred into something nearly painful, a raw, bright overstretching of sensation that dragged a choked sound from her throat.

Harold didn’t even flinch. His eyes stayed fixed on hers, steady and resolute, as if mercy were not even a concept in his vocabulary. Her muscles spasmed beyond her control, her breath stuttered into fragments, and she realized with dizzying clarity that he wasn’t going to stop until her body broke open for him a second time, whether she thought she could bear it or not.

Eva didn’t know how she was supposed to find the edge again. Her body was too raw, too strung out, her nerves lit like exposed wires. The pressure was too sharp; her breath kept snagging; her thighs trembled uncontrollably against the unbearable urgency of his touch. I can’t, her mind insisted, even as her body bucked helplessly beneath his hand.

And then she saw his face. Stripped bare by pure, unabashed need.

Something in that expression stopped her breath in her throat. It was more than lust; more than hunger. It was a man trying to burn something out of himself. A man trying to reclaim ground that another man had fouled, to pour every word of contempt said against her and against him into the furnace of this moment and consume it whole. His jaw was clenched, not in cruelty but in a kind of wounded determination. His eyes were dark with the fierce, desperate devotion of someone who had been pushed too far and was clawing his way back through the only ritual that ever steadied him.

And she realized: he needed this release as much as he needed to draw one from her. Maybe more.

The knowledge spread like an electric thread, rewiring every refusal into something molten. The pain didn’t lessen—her nerves still blazed, her inner muscles still spasmed against the overstimulation—but she transmuted it, gathered it, shaped it into something she could give instead of fight. She forced herself to open to the sensation, to him, to the raw, furious tenderness driving his every motion. Her breath came in shattered pulls, tears pricked at the corners of her eyes, but she kept her gaze locked on his.

And she yielded.

The climax tore through her, a fault line giving way everywhere all at once. Her body expanded into it like light filling a cathedral dome. Every cell seemed to stretch outward, incandescent and trembling, as though she had stepped fully into herself for one impossible moment. Her hips jerked, her spine bowed, and a cry ripped free, ugly and incandescent with surrender. The sound hung between them like a note held too long, trembling at the edges. Her body shuddered against his hand, utterly unmade by the rapture of violence held in measure.

And for a breathless, impossible moment, nothing existed in the room except the two of them and the echo of what had been exchanged.

---