Sequence laughed, though nothing about it was funny. “Apparently they gave him his choice of ways to make up for the money he’d stolen. He could pay in his own blood or he could take the fall for one of the members. Confess to a murder he hadn’t committed and spend the rest of his days locked up.”
He had to finish it. He’d told her the story and now he had to say the rest. Sequence pushed himself back up so that he was sitting again, eye level with Naomi’s big, sad eyes.
“So, yeah. There it is. I figured you had to know before you let me into your heart. I’m gonna do everything I can to be a good father to this kid. The therapy is helping. The books too. But I figure you might not want to hitch your wagon to someone who is capable of—”
Naomi, a little heavier than she used to be, accidentally accordioned all the air out of Sequence’s lungs when she launched herself into his arms. Either he was stunned on impact or he wasn’t getting the picture, so Naomi pushed him back onto the bed, straddled him, and pinned his wrists down.
“You think that would make me love you less?” she demanded of him.
His eyes dilated hard. He didn’t seem capable of answering her as he lay inert underneath her.
Naomi pushed down on his wrists where she had him pinned. She needed him to get this and she needed him to get it now. “Seek, you think I don’t understand wanting justice? Wanting—no—needing you and your loved ones to be safe at all costs? My father was murdered by thieves. I marched down to the police station and I sang like a bird. I gave up every bit of information I had, just hoping it would help the cops find whoever did it. I wanted my father’s murderer to die in jail. And then you know what I did? I marched my ass to the gun range and learned how to shoot. And I prayed to meet him. I prayed for the man who killed my father to come back for me. Or for my mother. I wanted it to happen.”
Sequence blinked his eyes hard and fast, as if he were attempting to absorb her words directly into his brain. “I can’t picture that.”
“Because it’s so not me? Because who I am now has nothing to do with who I was then? Exactly. Seek, I was an impossibly hurt teenager. The world is very black and white for an impossibly hurt teenager. And sometimes, impossibly hurt teenagers have to make grown up decisions that they’re not equipped for in the least. Sometimes, now, I thank god that the man who killed my dad got away. That I never had to meet him. Because whatever karmic justice that I’m sure the world doled out to him, I don’t have to carry that on my shoulders. It’s his and not mine.”
She sunk down, pressing her belly against Sequence’s belly and her forehead against his. “You have to forgive yourself, Seek. For this thing you did when you thought you understood the world, but you didn’t. Even if they had killed your father, it still wouldn’t have made you a murderer. You didn’t want him murdered, you wanted him gone. You wanted your brother safe. And in your teen-aged mind, this was the only way to do it. I get that. Don’t you see how I get that?”
Sequence stared up at her from the bed. The lamplight was giving her a golden halo, her ruby hair falling messily in her face. Four months ago, her hair had been long enough that it had made a cave for the two of them when she leaned over him. Now, it just fell everywhere, the ends tickling his cheeks as she pressed her forehead into his. He thought of her smooth hands against his rough ones. He thought of every single way that the two of them were different.
It had seemed to him that their draw to one another had been a function of simply desire. Pheromones. A magnet in each of their chests pulling them together.
But for the first time, the clouds parted and he understood. He and Naomi wanted one another because they were different, sure, but also because they were the same. Somewhere, deep inside himself, he’d recognized what was deep inside of her. Underneath the good humor and the smiles and the sweetness, was a person who understood what the world had to offer. She understood what hard decisions looked like. She understood what pain could do to a person.
And what was more than that, she understood something that Sequence was still just learning. She understood how to move on from all that. How to grow and shed that pain like a skin. She understood how to come through the hardest time in her life and become herself again.
Sequence had never known how to do that. He carried the weight of his experiences on his shoulders. He’d let those experiences change who he was on the inside and then he had the audacity to say that that was just the way he was. That his reaction to all the bad shit his father had ever done was somehow Sequence’s personality.
Well, fuck that.
“Do you get it, Seek?” she implored of him, her eyes close enough to his that she blocked out the world, she was nothing but a jewel-toned blur.
He cleared his throat. Tried to speak but had to clear it again. “I get it,” he rasped.
Sequence rolled and resisted the urge to pin her underneath him. The man he was just starting to become didn’t need to pin her down to be comfortable being close to her. This man was learning to be comfortable lying on his side next to her, eye to eye. “But I might forget it, Naomi. I’ve spent a hell of a lot of time keeping myself caged up. Hating—”
“No,” she gasped as she shoved herself into him, pressing her lips to his. She wasn’t kissing so much as she was preventing his words from forming. “Don’t say hating yourself. Please. I can’t stand it. You don’t deserve hatred, Seek.”
“Okay,” he said simply, doing himself the immense kindness of letting her words sink in. Of believing her. “Okay.”
“You did good, baby,” she whispered against his lips. “Thank you for telling me. You did so good.”
Naomi clamped her arms around Sequence’s neck in a rigid hold that would have been uncomfortable if it didn’t also feel like the only thing pinning him to Earth at that moment. He watched her as her eyes fluttered closed. And then, clothes and all, he yanked the blanket over both of them and let his own eyes close as well.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Sequence woke in the dead of the night, completely clearheaded and her words echoing in his ears.
You think that would make me love you less?
The room was silvery in the moonlight, and quiet, the way it can only be at the witching hour. She still wore that lingerie that had made his heart beat a drum in his chest. Her eyes were closed. She looked peaceful and soft. Sequence smiled to himself as he realized that inside of her was a little warrior. She was not made of marshmallow fluff. Inside of her was a teen-aged version of Naomi who’d wanted vengeance. Who’d prayed for the chance to enact it.
You think that would make me love you less?
And then he had to wake her, because he understood that question in every way it was possible to understand it. Dr. Waters was right. Understanding someone, truly understanding them, didn’t make you turn away. It made you step closer. It made you love more. In so many ways, he realized, he’d been the person who saw himself least clearly. Naomi, eternal optimist that she was, had been the one who truly saw him.
Sequence kissed her face. Her hair. Her exposed shoulder. She stirred and he kissed her parted lips. Her fingers slipped over his chin, the shell of his ear, and he pressed, pressed, pressed his lips against hers.
“Are you… smiling?” she asked groggily, lifting her head away from his and squinting through the dark.
“You tell me.”
“Oh my god. You are! Sequence Bone, grinning like a fool.”
He laughed then, a deep, brief sound, and then he kissed her mouth again. They rolled, still kissing, but both of them were getting more teeth than softness, smiling as they were. He loved it. Her pearly smile had been driving him crazy since the day he met her and now he got to kiss it.
Naomi ended up on top of him again, straddling him, her round belly pressing hard into his. He clamped her tightly against his chest.
“You—” he tried, but emotion contracted his throat. He slicked his tongue along her lower lip, turned her kiss from smiling to soft as h
e tried to compose himself. “You love me.”
“So much,” she gasped against his mouth, her tongue sliding against his as her fingers closed around the collar of his shirt. A second later, the gravity of the words seemed to come down on her. She pulled back from the kiss and looked at every single inch of his face. Interpreting. “Wait a second… You love me too.”
His heart started sprinting toward her and she must have felt it because her palm went from being flat against his beard to flat against his chest, as if she were trying to hold each beat in her hand.
“So much,” he rasped, giving her words back to her. And meaning them. Truly meaning them.
Her pearly teeth flashed in the dark as she gave him the smile to end all smiles. And then she was undressing him in a mad scramble, her fingers dragging and scratching against him as she tore off articles of his clothing.
He was shirtless and just starting to sit up when she unzipped his pants, tugged his slacks and underwear down to mid-thigh, and swallowed his hardness all the way to the back of her throat.
“Fuck!” He could have sworn he levitated six inches off the bed. “Naomi, baby.”
His hand found its way into her hair as she came up off him, grinning. “Yeah. You weren’t lucky enough to find out last time, but I’m, like, crazy good at this.”
“Wait—”
But then she was swallowing him down again and Sequence was meeting his maker. He fell back onto one elbow and his face tipped up toward the ceiling. He was panting, seeing without seeing, his hand tangled in her hair and his hips starting to rock.
He pulled himself out of her silky, hot heaven of a mouth and reared up onto his knees. She was sprawled across the bed, her hair everywhere, her lips wet and her chest panting. Sequence fell over her, careful to keep his weight off of her. He was out of control in the best way possible. His mouth found her neck and he attempted to devour her. He licked and sucked and bit at the sensitive skin of her throat, her collarbones. She writhed underneath him.
“Seek,” she gasped, arching, reaching, trembling.
He reared back from her and stood next to the bed. He wrenched his pants down his legs, kicking off his socks, his chest heaving as he looked down at her.
“As hot as this is, Fancy,” he said, leaning forward to finger her lingerie. “I need it gone.” He gently slicked it up her body and tossed it away.
All that was left was the triangle of blue mesh between her legs.
“Naked,” he panted. “How the fuck have we never been completely naked together?”
She was thinking something along those exact lines as her eyes bottomed out on his body. God, she’d never seen him buck naked before and he was just so damn substantial. He was built like a building. Square, wide, each muscle rounding into the next. As he crawled forward on the bed, his tattoos slid over his muscles like some sort of reptilian skin. He was half man-half animal and Naomi had never wanted anything so badly in her life.
He slid her panties away and then laid himself on the bed next to her. His hands were everywhere, his leg in-between hers. He scraped his cheek against her throat, the fingers of one hand stroking down her spine and straight through the cleft of her ass. She gasped and arched against him as he gripped the back of her thigh and just clutched her.
He scraped his chest hair against her and licked up the line of her throat. Naomi tracked her hands over his gigantic, tensing back. Her hands found his ass, the hair at the crown of his head, the backs of his thighs. Being naked with him was the best thing ever. Nothing would ever top it. She wanted to touch his naked for the rest of her life. She wanted to swallow his naked whole. She wanted to rub her naked all over his naked.
On a whim, she wrapped her hands around his neck and gave an experimental squeeze. He chuckled in her ear and raked a thumb over her nipple. “You a little bit of a freak, Fancy?”
“I’m not sure,” she gasped as he shifted and she captured his hardness between the press of her thighs. “Maybe?”
“We got plenty of time to find out,” he said.
“How do we know if I’m a freak?” she asked.
He began kissing his way down her body, tonguing her breast and making her cry out. “How do we know if you’re a freak?” He bit down and she convulsed, nearly wrenching the hair from his head and making him chuckle darkly. “If you wanna fuck in public. Or choke me like you just did. Or call me daddy. Then maybe you’re a freak.”
Sequence pressed her legs apart and slicked his tongue through her wetness. Naomi damn near screamed and he wondered if it was from what he was doing between her legs or because of the dirty things he’d just said to her. He was delighted to think it was both. He suckled on her sweetness and allowed himself to imagine all the ways they could love one another over their lifetime. He’d never thought he’d be so turned on by the idea of sleeping with just one person over and over again, but there he was, humping the bed as he lost his tongue inside of her. The idea of discovering every little nuance of this woman’s sexuality had him so turned on he was seeing stars. He’d never tire of discovering her. Of this, he was positive.
Time rolled out as he tasted her and tasted her, winding her up and letting her spin off into pleasure. By the time he was done kissing between her legs, Naomi’s arms were thrown over her head, her body limp, her eyes blurry.
“Seek,” she moaned, slick with sweat and trembling. “Oh my god.”
“You gonna let me inside, baby?” he asked, biting at her hip.
Her response was to slide her legs open, but her eyes stayed glazed, her breath choppy.
He chuckled, turning her on her side and spooning her, his hardness pressing against her ass. He ached for her. It was an almost painful heat. He’d been hard for an hour now, needing her so bad he worried he’d cause permanent damage to his manhood. “Did I tire you out, Fancy? You need rest?”
“No!” That brought her back to earth. Her eyes were alert as she looked over her shoulder. “No rest. I need you. Just you.”
With that, she tilted her hips, searching him out with her wetness. He hissed in air through his teeth as she found the head and pressed down an inch. He gripped her hip, meaning to push into her slowly. But she had other ideas. Naomi, wet and warm and soft and tight, slammed her ass into his body and took him to the hilt.
Sequence turned his face into the mattress and let loose a string of curses that were the only thing that kept him from exploding inside of her just like that. Nothing had ever felt this good before. Nothing. He hadn’t known that pleasure like this existed. He’d had no idea. His legs swam against the sheets as she arched against him. Sequence found her hands and tangled all his fingers in hers. He crossed their joined hands over her chest, using both of their arms to hug her to him, to keep her tight against him where she belonged. Then he rolled them, so his back was on the mattress and her back was to his chest. Planting his feet, Sequence gripped her tight and thrust up and into her.
Naomi cried out. She called his name, begged for more, jutted her hips into his, took what he gave and gave and gave.
The bed rocked underneath them as he dropped one hand to her slickness and made slow circles between her thighs. He dropped his hand lower and palmed the place where he was thrusting into her. He felt himself disappear inside her and bared his teeth against the revelation of it. His other hand found her pregnant belly. This was where they mixed. This was where they could never be torn apart. This right here was where they were one thing.
He’d always assumed having a baby with someone would make him feel the worst kind of trapped. But no. This was freedom in every sense. Naomi was letting him out of his own cage. She was giving him everything.
Sequence felt her tighten around him, she cried his name as her walls bore down on him. And he couldn’t fight it off anymore.
You love me too. Her words echoed through his head.
“So much,” he grunted into her ear, knowing that she’d understand. No matter how disjointed his words were, she’d
understand. “So much.”
His eyes rolled in his head as he pushed to the hilt inside her and exploded, giving her everything.
***
“Jesus,” Atlas said, surveying them as they walked into the kitchen the next morning. “I take it from the Monet painting that Naomi’s neck is, you two are finally together for real?”
Sequence frowned and turned to look at Naomi. It was true that she was pretty well completely covered in hickeys and bite marks. Thoughtfully he hooked a finger in the collar of his own shirt and looked down. She had definitely returned the favor in kind. He wasn’t entirely certain how to answer his brother’s question though. They’d made proclamations last night, they’d made love to one another, but they hadn’t exactly decided anything officially.
“Yup!” Naomi answered brightly, leaning back into Sequence’s chest and playing with his hand as it clamped across her collarbones. “We definitely are.”
Sequence couldn’t even begin to describe how that made him feel. He had a girlfriend. And she was the person he loved the most in the world.
He was quiet through breakfast, ignoring the amused, satisfied expressions of his colleagues as they filed in one by one. Naomi and Atlas chatted, throwing around terrible baby names like Aardvark for a boy (Artie for short) and Cruella if it was a girl.
He let the conversation swirl around him and tried to let himself sink into contentment, after all, he’d just gotten everything he’d never even dreamed he’d have not eight hours ago. But suddenly, now that Naomi was his, Bastone’s ax over her head seemed so much sharper, so much closer. He realized that he’d been able to distract himself with the pregnancy, but no longer. His entire focus was begging to be placed on Bastone. On making certain that Naomi was safe once and for all.
But that didn’t mean he was comfortable leaving her. Even though they never usually hung out during the day, even though they would see each other when he was off work in ten hours, even though they were used to spending time apart, Sequence still found himself dragging her up to his office after breakfast.
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