“Don’t cry,” I murmur. “It’ll be okay.”
I start to pull back, and then she grabs the front of my sweater and twists her fingers in, holding me close. She’s still trembling. “It won’t be okay,” she whispers. “It can’t be okay now. Not when I need—”
She stops herself abruptly, and worry twists my guts. She needs something? Is there more financial worry? Is her father back and causing trouble? “Tell me and I’ll make it happen. Do you need money? Help? For me to leave right now?”
Her eyes meet mine in a scorch of silver. “I need you,” she chokes out, and it stuns us both. It stuns me so much that I’m totally unprepared for her to yank me down to her mouth and kiss me like it’s the only thing that can keep her alive.
Chapter Eight
Charley
For a few gentle but breathless moments, Church’s mouth is pliant against mine. In fact, all of him is pliant—soft and surprised and yielding. I pull him closer to me, and he lets me, and I part his lips with my own to taste him, and he lets me. I slide my hands up so that I can wrap my arms around his neck and I kiss all of my need into him, all of my anger and hurt and loneliness and longing. The horrible tangle of wanting to hate him, but knowing I’ll always, always love him.
And he lets me, he lets me, he lets me.
If I hadn’t seen the truth in his shattered gaze, if I hadn’t heard the honesty in his tired, smoky voice, then I would feel it in his body now: he didn’t expect this. He didn’t expect anything from me.
He meant everything he said.
His hands are slow and shaking as they touch my back, his body is totally frozen against mine. Through our clothes, I feel the pound of his heart, and when I break our kiss and open my eyes, I find his already open, watching me with something beyond awe, something purer than awe, because it’s stripped of all hope. It’s pure humility, pure adoration.
It’s worship.
I used to be the cleverest girl in class, but I’m all out of answers right now. Because he’s looking at me like that, his eyes are a deep ocean blue like that, and he’s still smiling like that.
And what possible answer can I have? To him? To the strange and terrible and undeniable fact that I forgive him? Everyone I know would tell me it’s stupid, everyone I know would tell me that he doesn’t deserve it, that I deserve better, and logically, it all adds up: he hurt me, therefore fuck him.
But maybe . . . maybe logic isn’t all of love. Maybe it isn’t even half, maybe not even a quarter. Because I do love him, damn my eyes, and what I wouldn’t give for some new kind of logic, a logic that could account for fuck him and also let’s fuck him. A formula that could compute I love him and I can’t trust him and I don’t know how to trust him again but also I’d like to try.
There’s no logic like that, there are no answers. Which means I’m only going to listen to the questions right now. Namely, one question.
What is the one thing I know I want with all my heart in this very moment?
That . . . that I do know the answer to, and I pull him back to me for a second kiss.
It’s like a match is struck.
Church’s pliancy burns clean away and blazes into something else. Something firm and fierce and possessive. He’s the one to chase my mouth now, he’s the one fisting and yanking at my sweater, and he’s the one kissing with his whole body: his hands shoving at the hem of my dress, a hard thigh pushing between mine, an arm now banding behind my back so that I can feel his hardness everywhere. His erection, his stomach, his chest. Everywhere he is granite—if granite can be ferocious and greedy and hot.
“Little supplicant,” he breathes against my mouth. In just those two words, I hear him, my Church, my angry god. And I also hear this new Church, this man so broken with love for me that he won’t even pray for atonement because he knows he doesn’t deserve it. I hear both versions of him, and I think I love both. I love him both godlike and mortal, I love him in his cold, marble perfection and I love him shattered.
“Please,” I kiss-mumble, trying to climb him, wishing I could climb inside him, wishing there was something closer than close. And I don’t even know what I’m saying please to, just that I need to say it, and I need him to hear it. I need him to know that I meant I need you in every possible way.
I’m not a small woman, but Church takes me easily in his arms, biting at my jaw and neck as he carries me to the corner of the room. Each bite sends sparks shivering across my skin; each bite reminds me of what I’ve always needed, which is this. Which is him.
I scan the room as he bites my throat and his hands flex under my thighs. He sets me down and pins me against the side of an exhibit case with his chest and hips, while his hands keep roaming up and down the bare skin of my thighs under my dress.
I twist my head to check that the exhibit room is still empty—we’re partially hidden from view, but it wouldn’t take someone very long to figure out there’s a girl getting felt up in the corner. My turning deprives him of my throat and he growls my name.
“Just making sure no one sees,” I say—my words choked off by a large hand palming my breast and the resulting surge of heat between my legs. As if he knows—he always knows—Church presses his hips in and uses the giant rod of his erection to rub against me.
“Don’t I always make sure you’re safe?” he asks, fucking me slowly through our clothes. He pushes up my dress so that it’s only his trousers and my knickers between us and I groan. “Have I ever let a stranger see what’s mine?”
“N-no.” My teeth are chattering, and I can’t stop shaking. Each grind of his cock against me has my eyes fluttering. “You never let anyone see.”
It’s the truth. Church had always been as careful as he was insatiable, and as many times as I’d been fucked, fingered, or eaten in public, I’d never been seen. I was never sure if it was because he was possessive or thoughtful or some heady mix of both, but the result was the same: Church took care of me as he took what he wanted from me, and every needy, breathless fuck that we stole in public was as safe as it was urgent.
He rakes his teeth over my throat as I realize he’s angled our bodies so that even the security cameras can’t see us. “Do you trust me?”
God, he wants an answer that I don’t have. “I trust you with this,” I finally say, and he nods, as if he already knew the answer. But when my eyes catch his, I see a turbulent midnight there. He thinks this is our goodbye fuck, this is some final gift he doesn’t deserve but can’t keep himself from taking.
I don’t want it to be our goodbye fuck. I don’t want that at all. But before I can tell him this, his big hands are in my panties, finding my wet place and penetrating me without warning.
I gasp and arch against him, the small bite of pain heavenly against the pleasure, like salt on chocolate. But that’s nothing compared to what happens to him. As my body clasps his fingers, he gives a fierce growl against my neck, like an animal that’s just scented his mate, and suddenly he’s yanking my panties down and tearing at his belt.
“Need inside,” he grunts.
“God, yes, fucking yes, do it, do it—”
He frees his cock and I nearly expire at the sight of it. It’s thick and straight and a yummy dusky color, and it wedges its way through his opened trousers like a weapon. Like a scepter. Ready to ruin me and rule me.
I can’t wait. Like literally can’t wait. I’m arching and mewing against him like a fussy kitten.
He reaches for his pocket and his head snaps up. “I don’t have a condom.”
For a moment, I’m speechless—Church always had condoms because I always needed fucking, and usually more than once—but then I let out a giggle that echoes around the exhibit.
His broken-soft smile returns, although his eyes are still wild animal eyes. “What, Miss Tenpenny?”
“Just—” I cradle his jaw with my hand. “If I hadn’t believed you weren’t planning on being forgiven before, I believe it now. Because if you thought there was any
chance of this happening, I know you would have had like twenty condoms in your wallet.”
He shakes his head, then presses his lips to my palm. “What have I told you about hyperbole? It’s beneath your intellect. Naturally, I would’ve only put ten condoms in there.”
I laugh again and he bites my palm.
“I have an IUD now,” I tell him, my laughter edging back into fervent need. “And I’m clean. Church, if you mean it, if you meant what you said about not being with anyone since me—”
“I meant it. You want me inside you now? Bare?”
His words are hungry, and that hunger stirs me past enduring. I’ve never had him like this, raw and intimate. Just Church. Primal, naked Church.
“Please,” I beg, pushing my hips forward. My panties are down far enough that I kick them to one side and I use a hand to hold up my dress so he can see the place I need filled. I don’t want there to be any mistaking what’s his to take. What’s his to ease himself with.
Church gives a low groan and his erection surges, growing even thicker, the skin pulling taut and shiny. “I need to fuck you,” he says, somehow both coldly and hoarsely in that contradictory way of his.
“Please take it, God, just please,” I whine, reaching for him, but he stops my hands by grabbing my wrists and pinning them above my head with one hand as he gives the room a quick search.
Then he takes himself in a big hand and notches himself right at my pussy. I wrap a leg around his waist to open myself up to him, and the action spreads my flesh open so that now the searing heat of his crown is pushed right against where I’m wettest.
A hollow groan escapes his throat, and his head drops down between his shoulders, as if even this small contact is too much to bear. For a moment, we just breathe and shiver like this, with his head ducked and his cock spreading me open and his hips poised to thrust.
“Church,” I breathe.
“I know,” he breathes back. “I’m just—fuck, I need it, but I also need a moment to be grateful for this, Charlotte, because I am grateful. So fucking grateful. Just a moment more, just be patient a moment more for me.”
Grateful.
His gratitude guts me. I’m slain by it, and I’ll be slain every time I think of it for the rest of my life, but even in broken gratitude, Church keeps my hands pinned, and when his head lifts, his expression is my favorite one in the world. The one of a god with a sacrifice to devour.
“Now for the rest,” he says arrogantly, but also reverently, and pushes up into me. Just the head, no more than an inch, but already I feel pierced by him, invaded and spread. I’m wet—wetter than I’ve ever been maybe—but Church’s cock is no laughing matter. He gives me another fat inch, and I suck in a breath, writhing on it.
It aches. It feels perfect.
It aches.
It feels perfect.
“Problem?” he murmurs, giving me even more and splitting me in two in the process.
My head hits the case behind me. “I . . . forgot.”
The corner of his sharp mouth curves—not his soft smile from earlier, but that familiar cruel one I love so much. “Forgot what, Charlotte? How hard this cock gets for you?”
Another shove, another inch—and another gasp pinched out of me.
“How deep I go? Or how much your sweet body has to work to take me?”
He’s only about halfway in, and everything below my navel feels like it’s being squeezed in a massive fist. I’m panting, rolling my head along the case wall behind me, and he slides a hand between my thigh and his waist and then pushes me open. He pulls back a few inches and slides back in, my body letting him go deeper this time.
He lets out a very male, very satisfied grunt. “Good girl.”
I look down to where we’re joined and moan. The hard flesh spearing me is straight from mythology—or maybe pornography. Maybe both. “You’re a giant,” I manage. “Or some kind of mutant, maybe.”
“Sorry,” he says, forcing his way deeper and making my eyes flutter in the process.
“You don’t sound sorry,” I manage.
“I’m not,” he says.
“Asshole.”
One of his dark eyebrows lifts in amusement. “What should I say, Charlotte? It’s terrible to see you flushed and panting as you try to take my cock? I hate feeling you squeezed so tight around me that I can barely move? Sorry my penis is so big?”
“It would be a start,” I mumble.
Church looks down then to see what I just saw—the place where his velvet-smooth organ breaches me, and his jaw tics. His grip tightens on my wrists and thigh, as he seems to struggle with some powerful urge.
I know what it is.
“Take it,” I say. There’s no brattiness in my voice just now, and no legitimate anger. There’s no hurt, and no blame. There’s only the love for him that five years ago fell on me like a curse, in this very room. The love that was born to be offered and then taken. A love for temples and secret sacrifices in the dark.
His head snaps up and his eyes meet mine and they’re pure, liquid midnight. And then I’m impaled on him, lanced all the way up to my heart.
There’s pressure and heat and an urgent tightness twisting into something too unformed to be called pleasure. The raw place where pain met bliss was Church’s favorite place to keep me, and he didn’t need ropes or floggers to do it. Just his long, perfect body. Just his huge hands pinning me still and forcing me open for his erection.
I have to bite my lip to keep myself from coming right then and there.
“Little supplicant,” he breathes and then his forehead rests against mine as we pant and tremble together. “You feel—fuck—how will I live without the way you feel? The way you shiver against me when you’re getting close? The way you bite at that freckled lip? How?”
I part my lips to say something—I’m not sure what, but something about how I don’t want him to live without it either—and he kisses me with a sudden fierceness that steals my breath and my words.
I can taste gratitude all over his kiss, and when I lick it off his tongue, when I search out more from inside his mouth, his grip on me turns punishing. Below our kiss, he starts the fucking, moving in shallow, grinding thrusts that have an orgasm burning bright and hot behind my clit, and I’m going to come already, I’m going to come after only a few seconds with my Church inside me—
I look down again, unable to resist the carnal mechanics of it all, the animal sight of it.
“Do it,” Church orders. “Give me what’s mine.”
I break apart for him, on him, around him. I can’t see and I can’t hear—I can only feel and thrash and cry his name as my pussy clenches and releases in abrupt, shuddering waves. It’s all hot, mindless sensation, and it’s flowing everywhere in my body, from my seizing lower belly down to the soles of my feet and the aching beads of my nipples. Everything feels and aches and unravels for my Church, and he knows it, he knows it’s all for him, that my pleasure is his, my pain is his, that I am his. He may think I’m only his right here in this moment, he may think that he’ll never get to own me again after this, but that doesn’t erase the totality of his possession. Of his need to brand me inside and out.
As my body wrings itself out with release, Church seems to lose all patience. All control. My wrists are dropped so he can shove my dress up even higher and squeeze my breast; my thigh is pressed against the case so that my cunt is completely open for his needs. His inhales come in rasping snarls and his exhales in short, angry growls.
And his fucking—his fucking is unstoppable. A cruel weapon meant to command me, and my pulsing sex is evidence that he already does. Not that he seems satisfied with a single orgasm from me. No, he won’t be satisfied until I’m wrecked, until I can barely stand and his fuck is the only thing keeping me upright.
“Give me more,” he whispers in my ear. “Give me everything until it’s all mine.”
I can’t speak, I can’t hardly breathe—this was how it used to be between
us, this is what I’ve been secretly keening for: this ravenous hunger he had for me, like he’ll die if he doesn’t swallow me whole.
And it turns out that in order to live, I need to be eaten alive.
What a lewd picture we make. Anyone walking in could see this cold, dangerous boy with his belt dangling around his hips, his angry cock buried inside a squirming girl with her dress shoved up to her waist and her cheeks flushed from his dirty, filthy attentions.
Anyone could see this for what it is—a liturgy as frantic as it is holy. A sacrifice being taken.
I come again.
Now, it is really only him keeping me pinned against the wall, and as he grinds into me with that massive thing, I slowly melt against him. My hands paw limply at his biceps as my head drops onto his shoulder and lolls there, like a doll’s. And he fucks me like a doll, like a plaything.
“You were right,” I tell him, the words husky and air-starved from all the orgasms. “You are still my temple.”
“And you are my prayer,” he growls back. “Mine.”
Underneath my fingertips and against my stomach and between his legs, all of him goes impossibly taut, impossibly hard. Even as one part of him surges into me, the rest of him trembles and shakes and shivers, like he’s got a fever. Like he’s sick with needing to come.
And then he does.
His eyelids lower, his jaw flexes, and every single muscle in his body seems intent on pushing in deeper, on pumping into me harder, and right when he gives a thrust so fierce I feel my foot lift off the floor, he gives a darkly erotic growl, and releases into me with long, heavy pulses.
He keeps me pinned as he fills me, and it’s all so wet, so dirty, to feel him like this without a condom, and I love it, I want more of it, I want it all the time.
He stabs into me again and again, using his own spend to make the slides slick and fast as he chases the last clenches of his pleasure and makes sure he leaves every last drop between my legs. But for as carnal and raw as it all is below, his hands are grabbing and grabbing above, like he can’t get me close enough. Like I’ll never be close enough to his heart.
Naughty Brits: An Anthology Page 56