by A. L. Woods
I couldn’t allow myself to rely on another man like that. I had done that with Cash, and what had that gotten me in the end? A broken heart, a dead sister, and a twelve-year headache.
My hold on the pillow tightened. The suggestion had been insane, so why had I spent the last couple of hours here hypothesizing about whether it really was that crazy? I tossed the pillow to my side and stood. My footsteps met the hardwood like soft kisses as I moved to the front door in the darkness with nothing but the moonlight that poured through the bay window to guide me. I stuffed my bare feet into my Docs and retrieved the cigarettes and lighter from my coat pocket before I slipped out the front door, shutting it behind me with a soft click.
It was cold, but I barely noticed the wind pick up my hair and blow it away from my face. My body was still too heated from the directional shift our conversation had taken hours earlier, or the fact that he had walked out on me. He hadn’t gone far, though. My eyes followed the trail of golden-orange light that poured from the opened garage. I heard him shuffling about in there, the distinct clang of tools being pushed around eating up the silence of the night.
Sean had a porch swing with a marigold-colored cushion affixed to it that beckoned me, but instead I settled on the porch steps, listening to the sharp clangs that disrupted the peace of the neighborhood. I futzed with the crumpled pack of cigarettes, ignoring the quake in my wrist as I struggled to light the end of the cigarette.
How could today have been such a rollercoaster? Had I not been through enough this week? What had I done in a past life that I kept getting served such a bullshit hand of cards? I dragged on the cigarette until my lungs reached max inhalation capacity, the brume slithering out from my parted lips and disappearing overhead. If I was to leave now, I didn’t even know where I would go. Tony, my landlord, had sounded entirely unconfident and frankly disinterested when he said it would take at least a week or two before he would be able to fix my apartment door. Cash had done a good job breaking the jamb and lock. For now, my apartment was cordoned off, so it wasn’t like I could go back there.
Penelope was still in Connecticut; I could always go stay at her place in the Hill. She wouldn’t have minded, and the silence would be a welcome reprieve. A twinge of sadness struck me deep in my stomach as I extinguished the cigarette on the paver and shoved the cooled butt into my pocket to be dealt with later. Rising, I followed the light that permeated from the garage.
Sean was bent over a work bench, his biceps straining under his Henley, the width of his body masking what he was doing. I stepped into the garage. My footsteps aroused his attention. He tossed me a surly look from over his shoulder, then jerked his head back in the direction of his work.
My footsteps came to a standstill when I saw what he was working on. My desk was propped on a worktable. He had removed the broken legs and one of the functional legs from the shell of the desk.
“What are you doing?” I breathlessly asked.
He was silent for a beat of a second. “I needed the unbroken leg as a guideline so I can wood turn the replacements.” He kicked his chin toward a machine tucked against the wall. “That’s a woodworking lathe.”
My eyes fixated on the contraption he’d gestured to, which looked like a medieval torture device. “I figured I’d just make replacement legs.”
My throat thickened with emotion. “Why?”
Sean set the legs down on the work bench, turning on the heel of his steel-toed boots to face me. “Why what?” he ground out, each syllable wrapped in a frosty annoyance that induced a shiver out of me.
Even pissed, he was breathtaking to look at, all hard angles and eyes that were so dark right now that they reminded me of coal under the guise of his mood. My fingers twitched with the need to touch him from within the depths of my pockets, but I kept still.
“Why are you fixing the desk?”
He looked at me, his expression conveying that this was the dumbest thing I could have asked him. “Because it’s broken.”
“Bullshit.” I stepped deeper into his inner sanctum. “I can buy another desk.”
Hesitation passed over him like a ghost, his jaw growing rigid under the curious judgment of my stare. Sean blew out an exhale that sounded as stiff and pained as my own shallow breathing. “I know an antique when I see one. These things are one of a kind.” He swallowed visibly. “And when something is one of a kind, you put in the effort to fix them even when they appear broken to everyone else.”
My frustration melted away, the double meaning in his analogy not wasted on me. We weren’t just talking about the desk anymore. My throat worked at the lump that had formed in my throat as I gathered the nerve to approach him and break up the distance between us. Sawdust clung to his thick fingers, flecks tangled in his shock of hair, like he had been threading his fingers through it at some point or another. From far away his eyes had appeared lethal, but this close, they were just gilded in a latent sadness that made me want to weep.
“Not moving in with you doesn’t mean I don’t like you,” I said. “I do like you.”
He was quiet for a moment, apparently marinating what I said. “I know,” he murmured, his scowl dropping an inch, taking the edge off of his bad mood. “It’s too soon.”
“It’s too soon,” I parroted back.
He wiped his palms across the outside of his thighs, leaving a streak of dust on his jeans. He probed the inside of his cheek with his tongue before he spoke. “But I want you to know that you wouldn’t lose your autonomy if you did live here.”
I trusted that he was sincere, but it didn’t sway my resolve. “No, but I’d be relying on someone else to fix my problems for me.”
His annoyance slid back into place; any traces of that fleeting warmth disappeared like the wick of a candle that had been extinguished.
“Why do you keep behaving like you have to do things alone?”
“Because that’s what I do. What part of that don’t you understand? If you get involved in this, he will come for you,” I said. It wasn’t necessary to say Cash’s name.
Murder flickered in his eyes, and I swear, for a minute I thought he was going to snap. His voice growled out of him in a way that had every hair on my body standing at half-mast. “I don’t know if you’ve been fucking paying attention then, because he already has.”
“What are you talking about?” I spat, my spine steeling.
“When he chose to fuck with the woman I’m falling in love with, he came for me.”
Time stopped for us in that moment. I gaped at him like a fish out of water, but he just looked at me like he would put those words on every billboard in the state if he could. My unhinged jaw worked to close, but it was useless.
He had said it, and he wasn’t even trying to recover from it.
Sean braced his hand against the table behind him, lowering his head.
Nothing made sense right now. Nothing. What the hell had he just said? There was a brick the size of the desk in my stomach right now, and a rattle in my legs that made my kneecaps tremble. He looked at me with the expertise of an art collector, his eyes tracing over every small detail he could find.
I held my breath, trying to figure out how to get the words in my head out past my lips, but it felt as though I’d been walking through Death Valley in August with minimal water; my mouth was too dry to speak.
He waited. Lord knew he waited. For me to say something, anything.
Finally, after a full minute, he released a dry laugh. “Let me guess?” he said humorlessly. “That’s also too soon?”
“Sean…” I managed, my heartbeat filling my ears. God, why did the ground suddenly feel so uneven beneath my feet?
Say the words, Raquel. Three little words. Say them to him.
“It’s fine.” He turned away from me, lifting up one of the legs from the table with one hand and grabbing a pair of safety glasses with the other. He approached the lathe, then paused for a moment.
“It’s going to get loud in
here, so you should probably go back inside.”
Just like that, I’d been dismissed. At the first roar of life from the lathe, our conversation was over.
It was a little after two in the morning when the bedroom door creaked open. Sean’s clean scent caught in my nose, my head lifting a little to catch him shuffling through an open drawer of his dresser, the towel wrapped around his waist. He used his knee to close the drawer with a soft thud. I sucked in a breath when he let the towel fall to the floor, my eyes tracking the lingering rivulets of water rolling down his spine and getting trapped in the dips and valleys of his muscular back, settling in the hard contours of his butt.
Was I really salivating over a man’s ass? The answer was yes. A person could bounce a quarter off that thing. He cleared his throat, drawing my eyes to the mirror over the dresser where he met my stare dead on.
“You didn’t eat.”
I’d been caught. A blush warmed my face, my tongue sweeping along the roof of my mouth to rid me of my sleep-induced cottonmouth. “I wasn’t hungry.” Which hadn’t been a lie. At some point after he dismissed me, he had returned inside to order Chinese food that was delivered thirty minutes later. He had even somehow known to order broccoli beef, but I decided that must have been a coincidence. He couldn’t have known that was my favorite. But after the way I had clammed up in the garage, I couldn’t stomach the idea of sitting down to a meal with him, so I went to bed.
“And now?” he asked my reflection. The indisputable heat in the question had me squeezing my legs together. I didn’t think we were talking about food anymore. We could be pissed at each other, but that did little to cull our desire.
“I could be persuaded.” I shoved the duvet away and sat up just as he turned to face me, his hand curled around his shaft, stroking with a timed finesse that left me throbbing with a need that was equally unexplainable and painful. I crawled to the edge of the bed as he approached and stopped in front of me, his fingers still wrapped around his cock, squeezing it until I thought I saw him grimace. His jaw looked about as hard as his cock.
“Does that hurt?” I asked, watching the strain in his fingers.
“A little,” he whispered.
“Then why?”
Sean held my stare in his own, a shiver rushing through my spine. “Because pain feels good sometimes.”
I swallowed as I leaned forward on my knees, my hand replacing his. My strokes were gentle, but when his hand crushed around mine, I knew that wasn’t what he wanted.
“Squeeze it.” He reinforced his point with his hand compressing atop mine.
“I’m going to hurt you.”
“You already have,” he said gruffly. I looked up at him in surprise, but the veil over his features were implacable. “Squeeze,” he repeated, spearing something deep inside of my chest that ached.
If I could just tell him how he felt wasn’t one sided, that I was right there alongside him. Then he would know he wasn’t alone.
But I couldn’t, so I took the coward’s route and did what I was told instead.
I grasped him roughly in my palm, his groan a breathy thing that puckered my nipples to the point where I considered for one foolish moment that they might slice right through his T-shirt that I wore.
He groaned, his head falling forward on an exhale. “Just like that.” He thrust his hips forward into my tight grip, his eyes finding mine. This shouldn’t have turned me on, but there was enough liquid pooling between my legs right now to contest that.
I slid onto all fours, replacing my hand with my mouth around his cock, humming hard against him. He jerked for a minute, acclimating to the sensation. I swirled my tongue across his shaft and on its underside. I lifted my eyes to find him staring at me with the concentration of a broken man. My responsibility in that killed me. I left behind a trail of broken people in my wake, didn’t I? It was my modus operandi. I hurt people without even trying.
I shifted forward to envelop my mouth around him once more, and he met me halfway, his fingers entrenched in my hair.
“I’m going to fuck your mouth,” he said darkly.
My nod was subdued just as he jerked his hips forward, his cock hitting the back of my throat. I breathed through my gag reflex, my hands sliding up the backs of his thighs until my fingernails were embedded into his ass. He grunted at the contact, his concentration fixed on me as he moved. Every time my eyes dropped, he would grip my chin, forcing my stare to meet his.
The freneticism of his breathing became the soundtrack in my brain, a song I never wanted to stop playing. Just when I thought I felt that familiar jerk of warning, he pulled away, his hands clinging to his hips. His chest rose and fell with ragged breathing.
“Get on your stomach.” It was a demand, not a suggestion.
And damned if I didn’t like it.
I paused for a beat of a second before I shifted, a tickle of vulnerability curling my insides in a kind of delicious delirium that had my heart thumping wildly behind my chest.
“Lose the shirt.”
My fingers obediently found the hemline of the Red Sox T-shirt I’d stolen from him this morning. Cold air hit my exposed skin, with goosebumps forming. He was behind me in seconds, his fingers brushing a faint trail down my spine that had a gasp ripping out from the back of my throat. My body shifted forward, but he caught me by the waist, melding his chest flush against my back. His hands reached around to settle against my belly, one making the dangerous, languorous descent to palm my breast while the other flattened against my belly, pinning me against him. His hard length was pressed between my ass cheeks, the tip tickling the small of my back.
“I’m figuring out something about you.” His whisper against the shell of my ear sent a current through me. “You like being told what to do, don’t you?”
“I fucking hate it,” I hissed, his deft fingers firm against the inside of thigh, brushing against my panty line.
“I don’t think you do, Hemingway,” he hummed, rolling my nipple with his other hand. “In fact, I think you don’t just like it, you love it.” He shoved me forward without warning. I gasped, and his hands massaged the inside of my thighs, kneading so close to where I wanted him the most.
I let out a growl of impatience, arousing a chuckle from him. “We suffer from the same condition.”
“What’s that?”
“We both lack patience.”
I felt him hovering above me, his body framing mine. His hands closed around mine, the duvet caught between our grasp. I felt his hot stare on my face, but I didn’t meet his eyes.
“I’ve loved you for a while, Raquel.” There was something pained in the way he said it, as if his words were involuntary. “At first, I just wanted to mess with you. I wanted to have a taste of you.” He chose that moment to stroke against the hot seam of my core with the blunt tip of his thick finger, and I all but cried out. He didn’t laugh this time.
“But once I tasted you…I knew one taste would never be enough. I’d need all of you.” Sean tucked my panty line away from my swollen lips, his middle finger stroking lazily across my opening. He coaxed the stickiness of my arousal until I was coated from my entrance to my clit. “You’re a lethal combination of impossibly beautiful and wicked intelligence, and that makes you the most dangerous woman I’ve ever met.”
“Hardly,” I panted, my hips chasing his languorous finger until he granted me what I wanted. My opening accepted his finger like a homecoming, my body all but purring at the invasion.
“That’s where your danger comes from,” he whispered. “You’re completely unaware of it.”
I swallowed, my mouth falling open as I lost myself to the pumping motion of his curled finger inside of me.
“Men would burn down cities for you, but me?” he continued.
His finger slid out of me, a burning giving way inside of me at his departure. I leaned to the left as I jerked my head in his direction, preparing to argue. Sean leaned to the right and caught me by the chin, his
mouth hovering over mine, all but silencing me.
“I’d burn the whole fucking world down for you.” His mouth crashed hard against mine, our teeth gnashing painfully together as we gave way to the turmoil, the anger…and the love.
He shifted behind me, lining himself into my opening before he pushed forward, my body enveloping him tightly. I hissed with relief and curled my spine, lifting my stomach from the mattress to push my ass into his pelvis. Sean’s hands went to my waist, pinning me against him. Without warning, he picked me up and turned me on the mattress so I was facing the mirror. He knelt and guided me back onto all fours.
With my ass pushed out toward him in invitation, he lined himself up against my opening once more, coaxing himself in until I was full to the hilt. Sean’s stare found mine in the mirror, and even if I wanted to look away, I couldn’t. I was enraptured by the intensity of his gaze as his hips slammed into my ass with predatory expertise, his hips slamming into my ass.
I’d never watched myself before, not like this. I’d never seen what I looked like while I was getting fucked, and to my surprise, I liked it.
Sean’s throaty laugh twirled my insides. “I want you to see what I see when I look at you like this.” His fingers sank into my hips, his hips a wild piston against me, his cock slamming into me. I couldn’t look away if I tried. It was too much, all of it was too much. My palm-sized breasts swayed in gravity at this angle, my mussed hair stuck out in several directions. My skin flushed, a glow peppering my complexion. He caught me by the hair with one hand, tugging it just hard enough that it wasn’t gentle, but the faint smarting of pain set off something of a delicious burn that heightened my senses.
Sean pulled my hair, my neck curling so I met his eyes dead on, “Do you see it, Hemingway? Do you see how beautiful you are?” He loosened his hold so I could watch us in the mirror. His hand slid forward, his thumb finding my clit, taking off at a steady stroke that had me panting breathlessly.