by Eva Ashwood
Gray licks a line up my neck and then blows on it softly, making my toes curl as goose bumps fan across my skin. His teeth find the spot where my neck and shoulder meet, but even the way they scrape across my skin is gentle and deliberate.
As if he’s decided he’s not going to let us rush this.
His large palms slide over my shoulders and down my arms before catching my wrists, then he brings them up and pins them to the door beside my head. The wood is cool against my skin, a stark contrast to the blazing heat of Gray’s skin, and I watch him intently as he takes a step back.
“Don’t move,” he tells me, and I don’t.
My arms, legs, and torso are all plastered to the door, and Gray runs his gaze up and down my body as I stand perfectly still, letting him look all he wants. A pleased, hungry smile steals across his face, and he reaches for the hem of my shirt before tugging it off over my head. I slide my arms up the door to help him, but I keep them pinned to the smooth surface over my head.
He seems to like that even more, and the heat in his gaze intensifies as he moves on to the button and zipper of my jeans, working them down slowly before pushing the material off my hips. He focuses on one article of clothing at a time, ridding me of my pants and shoes before moving on to my bra and finally kneeling before me to slide my underwear down my legs.
All the while, I still haven’t moved.
I can’t think of a single reason I would when every worshipful touch of his hands sends my arousal spiraling higher.
Gray lifts my feet one at a time to help me step out of my panties, and then he surprises me by pressing a kiss to the inside of my knee. I never knew I had so many fucking nerve-endings in that part of my body, but my knees actually wobble in reaction to the soft pressure of his lips.
He smiles in satisfaction, looking up at me through long lashes as he trails a path of open-mouthed kisses up the inside of my thigh. When he reaches my clit, he kisses that too, and my hands curl into fists as I resist the urge to bury my fingers in his hair and fuck his face.
It was just a kiss. Just one kiss. He’s done far dirtier things to my pussy than that.
But wetness gushes from me anyway, a surge of arousal I wasn’t prepared for flooding through me.
Gray lets out a groan, his fingers tightening on me as he grabs my hips, and the tortured sound of it makes me feel a little better. At least I’m not the only one who’s being driven crazy here.
He kisses my core again, swiping his tongue up the length of my slit once before he presses back up to his feet and steps back. My arms are above my head, my chest heaving a little as I try to catch my breath. My back is arched and my legs are spread.
I’m literally splayed out for him, and the look on his face as he gazes at me makes more sticky arousal slip down my thigh. His hooded eyes take in every inch of me, possessive satisfaction burning in their depths.
One hand reaches down to catch the hem of his shirt, and he drags it over his head, tossing it to one side. His dark jeans are slung low on his hips, showing off his lean waist and gorgeous abs. The muscles in his shoulders and arms flex as he goes for his pants next, undoing them and sliding them down his legs, undressing himself with the same careful precision as he undressed me.
Not that I’ve got any fucking complaints.
The view of his muscular thighs and the tented fabric of his boxer briefs elicits a soft whimper from me, and he glances up at me as he tugs off his shoes and shucks his pants. A small grin turns his lips up at the corners, and I squirm against the door. I’m dying to grab his face and kiss those full, soft lips. Dying to feel all that hard muscle pressed up against my body.
But I’m enjoying the show too much to stop it. I want to see this.
He’s torturing us both, dragging this out when we both know we need it, and I don’t know how much longer I can hold out—especially when he shoves down his boxer briefs, allowing his thick cock to spring free.
As he kicks off the last of his clothes, one hand wraps around his shaft close to the base, squeezing a little. The tip is already wet with precum, and my hips thrust away from the door against my will, as if I could somehow fuck him from all the way over here.
“I knew it,” Gray says quietly, dragging my focus back to his face. Our gazes meet, electric heat jumping between us like lightning passing from cloud to cloud in a thunderstorm. “I fucking knew it. From the first moment I met you.”
“Knew what?” I whisper.
“That you’d wreck me.”
The second he finishes speaking, he’s already moving, erasing the distance between us as he scoops me up into his arms. My arms fall to his shoulders, wrapping around him tightly as his cock finds my slick entrance. Then his hips pitch forward and he fills me up.
“You’ve wrecked me, Sparrow,” he mutters as he begins to fuck me in earnest, our bodies shaking the door with each thrust.
The slow tease, the torturous wait, the raw honesty in Gray’s words—they all blend together into a force too strong to resist, and I come hard on his cock as he drives into me.
“Yes, baby. Fuck. Just like that.”
I can feel him pulsing inside me as my pussy flutters around him with the remnants of my orgasm, and I expect him to follow me off the cliff.
But with an agonized groan, he slows his strokes, his whole body shuddering with the effort of holding back.
“I want to feel you ride me,” is all he mutters before he pulls me away from the door, wrapping his arms around me and carrying me into the bedroom.
He sinks down onto the bed, settling me onto his lap without ever pulling out of me, then scoots back on the mattress a little before palming the back of my head and sweeping my mouth with his tongue. When he pulls back, he gives me a challenging grin.
“Come for me again. Use my cock to get yourself off. I want to watch you.”
My pussy squeezes hard around him as my whole body reacts to his words, and he clenches his jaw, gritting his teeth in a way that makes me think he’s still teetering on the edge himself.
I like that. I like that he’s about to fucking lose it.
Matching his grin, I shove at his chest, and he falls back onto the mattress, his hands settling on my hips as he looks up at me.
And I do exactly what he told me to. I start with small rolls of my hips, teasing us both as I rub my clit against his pubic bone. When the pressure starts to build inside me, heat radiating out from my core, I rest my palms on his chest and move faster, using my thigh muscles to bounce up and down on his cock.
He watches me with lust and rapt fascination coloring his features, and when he finally finds my clit with the pad of his thumb, all it takes is a few rough circles before I detonate again.
The pleasure is still cresting inside me, my pussy contracting in pulsing waves around his cock, when he flips me over onto my back in a flash. His hips pound into mine, balls slapping against my ass, as he finally lets himself go.
When he comes, he throws his head back, the muscles of his neck straining and his veins throbbing as he grinds his hips against mine, emptying himself inside me. Then he collapses on top of me before rolling us over so that my body rests on his.
“Wrecked.”
He mutters the word so softly I almost don’t hear it.
I’m not even sure he knows he said it.
But that doesn’t make it any less true.
26
Will it ever not be like this?
The thought flits idly through my mind as I lie on top of Gray, our sweat-slicked skin sticking together as we catch our breath.
No matter what else is going on between us—whether we’re pissed at each other or annoyed with each other or locked in an unsteady truce—the chemistry between us never seems to fade. There’s never been a time when Gray touched me and my body didn’t respond as if he’d put a lit match to gasoline.
Is that what we are?
A flash fire? An explosion? Something that will flare up and burn out and leave n
othing but ash in its wake?
The rational part of my brain says yes. The logical part tells me to run, just like I always do when Gray and I get too close.
But I don’t think I can this time. For one thing, the fucker is so damn good at getting me off that I don’t think my legs work anymore. And for another… something feels different.
Gray’s arms are wrapped around me, his touch possessive and warm, and when I shift in his embrace, he makes a rumbling noise of complaint as if he’s not ready to let go yet.
Neither am I.
So I don’t.
Several quiet moments pass as our heartbeats even out and our breathing returns to normal. I’m just starting to drift off like a cat on his chest when Gray finally rolls me over, withdrawing his still half-hard cock as a gush of wetness trickles down my thigh. He doesn’t make a move to clean it up, and neither do I. He just tucks me against his body, the warmth of his skin seeping into mine.
“Sparrow?”
“Yeah?” I’m still in that foggy place between asleep and awake. I have no fucking idea what time it is—maybe not even lunch yet—but I’m worn out, ready for a nap.
“I’m sorry.”
My eyes pop open, my heart giving a little jolt in my chest. Every bit of tiredness in my body has been banished by those two words. Words I never, ever expected to hear from the man lying next to me.
I crane my neck a little to look up at him, my brows furrowed, but Gray isn’t looking at me. He’s staring up at the ceiling with a distant gaze that reminds me of the day we first met, when he stepped inside The Silent Hour and took a seat at the bar.
“For what?” I ask after a silence that drags on for several moments.
“Everything.”
There’s a roughness to his voice, as if the words he’s speaking have been locked up inside him for so long that they’ve started to break down.
He keeps looking up at the ceiling, his blue-green eyes haunted, but the arm he has wrapped around me keeps me pressed close to his side. I study his face carefully, my heart still beating hard in my chest.
Everything is certainly a lot of things.
Is it my past he’s apologizing for? What happened with Cliff? Or is it the back and forth that’s been going on between us since I got here? All the confusion and frustration that’s been left in its wake?
“Okay,” I say quietly.
I’m not sure what else to say. I want more. I want to know what the hell he means, and why he’s saying all of this now. But I don’t know how to ask for it.
He goes silent again, just long enough for me to start to worry.
“When we met, I was fucked up,” he finally says. “I was wrecked.”
Me too.
An ache burns through my chest as I remember that day. Certain details of the Medical Examiner’s office have faded from my memories. But the strange antiseptic smell of the place? The way Jared’s waxen skin seemed to sag on his bones? Those are things I’ll never forget, no matter how fucked up my brain is.
“What wrecked you?” I ask, because I’m not quite ready to volunteer what had me in such a fucked up state that day.
“That day…” He swallows, then lets out a breath. “It was my sister’s funeral.”
His hold on me tightens, and he drags me closer to him until I’m nearly draped over his body again. His nose brushes my hair as he inhales, and I get the strange feeling I’m like a balm to him. That having me close is keeping his demons at bay.
He had a sister?
He’s never mentioned her, which isn’t all that surprising considering how haunted he sounds as he talks about her now. But no one else mentioned her. Ever. Not Declan or Elias or any of the other students at Hawthorne.
Why not?
“I’m sorry,” I murmur, resting my hands on his chest.
He nods, his chest rising and falling with a sigh. “We were twins. She was ten minutes younger than me. Beth. Bethany, after my grandmother.”
“How did she die?”
I’m almost afraid to ask the question, worried that at any moment he’ll realize what he’s said and close back up like he always does, shielding himself with a hard, cold exterior.
But maybe things really are different, because instead of ignoring me, he reaches up to run a hand through my tangled hair as he answers.
“It was a stroke.” He lets out a humorless chuckle. “A stroke. She was barely nineteen, but apparently that shit can happen even to young people. No one expected it—no one saw it coming. I talked to her a day before it happened, and she was fine. We’d just finished our first year at Hawthorne, and she was excited about the summer. And then…”
His body shudders slightly beneath mine, and I find myself nestling deeper into his hold, as if I could block out the pain I can feel seeping into him.
“It was bad,” he murmurs. “Bad enough that her brain stopped functioning, and it all went downhill from there. It all happened so fucking fast. Maybe that’s a blessing, but… fuck, I wasn’t ready.”
He shifts beneath me, sliding his fingers through my hair and tugging my head back a little so he can meet my eyes.
“The scholarship fund that let you come to school here? My parents started it in her honor. They wanted to do something to memorialize her.” His jaw clenches. “It’s why there were two scholarship kids instead of one this year. One of those scholarships is sponsored by my family. Your dorm? That was Beth’s.”
My stomach churns.
Jesus. How could nobody tell me I basically took a dead girl’s place?
I remember the name of the scholarship from when Ms. Neilson gave me the whole spiel about it, but there was nothing in the title that suggested it existed because of Gray’s sister.
“I… like I said, I was fucked up about it.” Gray shakes his head. “I wouldn’t let anyone talk about her, not even Declan or Elias. I couldn’t stand to hear her name, to think about what I’d lost. To be reminded all over again that she was never coming back.”
Tension is building in his body again, and my eyes water a little as his grip on my hair tightens. I don’t pull out of his grasp though. The small bite of pain grounds me, and I couldn’t look away from his shadowed eyes even if I tried.
“That day at the bar? What happened between us? Fuck, Sparrow, it was the only thing that kept me from walking into traffic. It was everything I needed. But then when you showed back up here…” He grimaces. “I didn’t expect it.”
“You didn’t know who I was? That I’d gotten the scholarship, I mean?”
“No. And when I found out, my mind just… I don’t know. I couldn’t imagine someone taking her place. Especially someone I actually liked. Because being glad you were here felt the same as being glad she was gone somehow. So I tried to hate you instead.” He brings his other hand to my face, brushing a knuckle over the curve of my cheekbone and the faint bruise that still sits there. “But you make it hard to hate you, Sophie. Impossible, really.”
I lean into his touch, ignoring the angry pulse of my bruise as I press my cheek against his fingers.
Dozens of thoughts and emotions are crashing around inside me, and I feel like the overwhelming one should be anger. After all, he’s just told me that he formed a personal vendetta against me because he somehow blamed me for his sister’s death, even though I had nothing to do with it.
But that’s not what I feel.
Instead, I just feel a deep sense of sadness and… understanding.
What he did was fucked up, but I understand—in a way I wish I didn’t—just how badly grief can wreck a person.
“I’d just come back from ID’ing my brother’s body at a morgue,” I say quietly. “The day we met. We weren’t biologically related or anything, but he was the closest thing I ever had to family in all my time in foster care.”
Gray is quiet for a moment, his blue-green gaze locked on mine. Then—
“How’d he die?”
“Killed himself.”
“F
uck.”
“Yeah.”
He releases his grip on my hair and palms the back of my head, tucking my face into the crook of his neck as he wraps his arms around me, squeezing so tightly it’s almost hard to breathe.
It’s the first time I think either of us have really said out loud what’s fucked us up bad.
I think it’s the first time we’ve really confronted it.
At least, I know it’s the first time I have.
It doesn’t feel quite as awkward and uncomfortable as I expected it to. I’ve avoided talking about Jared or even allowing myself to think about him for too long because I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to handle the reminder of how fucking unfair life is.
But as Gray and I lie together, skin to skin, words begin to spill out of me.
I tell him about how Jared used to steal charcoals and paints from school for me so I could experiment with expensive art supplies. How he was the only man who actually loved me and the only one who never acted on his feelings for me. And I learn from Gray that Beth had a wicked sense of humor; that she was the only person who could get away with giving him shit. That they were best friends growing up, and that she wanted to be a journalist.
Eventually, our words die out and we just lie in comfortable silence for a little while, absorbing everything that’s been said.
My chest feels lighter somehow. I don’t feel numb like I used to, but my emotions don’t feel quite so overwhelming either.
I don’t feel so alone.
And when Gray finally lifts his head and leans down to kiss me before rolling me onto my back and settling between my legs, what happens next feels less like coping and more like living.
It feels… good.
27
A knocking sound drags me out of the exhausted sleep I fell into after our second round of sex.
I stir, grumbling, as Gray rolls over with a groan of his own and a voice filters in from outside the little apartment.