Please stop? Please don’t stop? She didn’t know what she begged for, only that she had to beg for it.

John grasped her shorts and pulled them down and off her. He ripped her shirt up and off her and her bra joined the rest of her clothes on the ground. She needed skin, needed contact. With terrified fingers, she unbuttoned John’s shirt and got it halfway down his arms before he lifted her off her feet and brought her down onto him.

She cried out, a sound that echoed through the quiet forest around them.

Instinctively Daphne wrapped her legs around his waist and her arms around his shoulders. The bark on the tree cut into her naked back but she couldn’t feel it, couldn’t feel anything but him inside her.

“Shh...” John whispered in her ear. “It’s all right. I’ll make it all right.”

“I’ve never—”

“I know,” he said. His fingers dug into her hips. Why did this pain feel so good? So necessary? Like only this pain could banish the pain from her brother’s death? This was the pain she’d been waiting for. “Let me hold you. I’ll stop when you tell me to.”

She buried her head into the crook of his neck and nodded. She didn’t want him to stop but she didn’t know what to do, how to proceed. John knew, though. He pulled her hips toward him as he pushed against her. When he did it again, it felt as if something gave way inside her and she opened up for him. Her body wanted him in it. Her head fell back and her hips moved on his, working against him and with him until he lifted her up again and brought her down once more, harder this time, impaling her on his cock all the way to the center of her stomach. His mouth was on her mouth again, his tongue in her mouth. The kiss was wild, hungry, violent, as were the thrusts that he slammed into her. She couldn’t get enough of this part of him inside her. She’d never get enough of it.

The heat of their joined bodies rose to a fever pitch. She moved her mouth from his so she could breathe. He’d pounded her so hard against the tree behind her she felt as if she would become one with it as she became one with John. Her hands grasped his broad muscular shoulders and her nipples tightened painfully against his burning chest. He’d said he would stop if she told him to but she knew they were both too far gone to stop now. Ecstasy writhed and trembled along every nerve inside her hips. Her vagina poured wetness over him, a mix of blood and desire. Her muscles contracted into a knot and with a cry she couldn’t contain, she exploded around his still-thrusting length. As she spasmed and flinched, he slammed into her with rough jerks of his pelvis, at last coming inside her with a burning rush.

Finally it stopped. Her heart rattled against her rib cage like a prisoner banging on the bars. But John lowered her feet to the ground. He pulled out slowly and she winced in fresh agony.

“Daphne...” he breathed as he kissed her stomach, caressed her nipples with his tongue, kissed her neck and mouth. Even as his semen dripped down her thighs, he couldn’t stop touching her.

“Stop, please...” At last she got the words out. As promised, he stopped. He stepped away from her and nervously straightened his clothes. Before he buttoned his shirt again, she saw she’d left deep red scratches on his shoulders.

In pain like she’d never felt before, she got onto her hands and knees and gathered her clothes.

“Daphne, I—”

She raised her hand.

“Don’t talk to me,” she said. “You killed River and fucking me doesn’t change anything.”

She pulled her shorts on and winced as the fabric met the ravaged flesh. Her arms shook when she hooked her bra and pulled on her running tank again.

“Tell me what I can do to help,” he said. He was begging, pleading, offering her anything. She saw it in his eyes—he would do anything she asked.

“Take me to your house,” she said. “And what you just did to me—”

“What? Tell me.”

She looked up at him.

“Do it again.”

* * *

“What do you think?” Elle asked, bracing herself for Kyrie’s judgment. She sorted through a pile of towels she needed to fold. If she looked busy maybe Kyrie wouldn’t notice how nervous she was, letting someone else read the story she’d been writing.

“You made Apollo into a cop?” Kyrie asked, flipping through the sixty handwritten pages Elle had created over the past week.

“Yeah, and Daphne and her brother lived in a group home—no parents. Seemed like a good idea at the time,” Elle said. “Trying to make the story more contemporary. Daphne’s a runner. That’s the only thing I could think of that would be like a wood nymph—a girl who runs cross-country.”

“He’s also a music teacher?”

“Well, Apollo was the god of music,” Elle said, “and I needed a reason for him to be at the group home. He volunteers there with the kids in the home, teaches them music. He’s an off-duty cop, so when her brother goes off and starts beating another kid to death, he intervenes and Daphne’s brother dies in the process.”

“Where did the arrows go?”

“I thought it would be more interesting if Daphne had a really good reason for hating Apollo rather than just getting hit by an arrow from a pissy little cherub with an inferiority complex. So I gave her a twin brother who was emotionally unstable and then had Mr. Apollo accidentally kill him while restraining him. Daphne blames him and voila! Hate.”

“That’s kind of dark,” Kyrie said, flipping through the pages again.