“But, wait, shouldn’t we talk about what just happened? You’re obviously mad, and I’m kind of freaked out.” Now that I’m finding my voice again, I can’t stop talking. “We need to figure out what to do—”
“Layla.” His deep baritone stops my babbling.
I blink. “What?”
“We’ll take care of all of that. Right now, I really need to do this, okay? This is what I do when I’m about to lose it.”
I open my mouth to say something, but my words escape me. “Okay.”
Chapter Fifteen
Nico
After we change, we take some time to warm up, and then spend about a half hour on the heavy bag practicing combinations until we’re both breathing heavily. Layla clearly likes throwing punches, but I barely notice, going harder than I’ve gone in months. With every punch I throw, it’s that motherfucker’s face I see. It’s his glasses I’m breaking. It’s his teeth I’m knocking out.
Fuck. Fuck. Why didn’t she tell me? From what he said, it sounds like this guy has either been stalking her since she got here, or else she’s literally seeing the asshole everywhere she goes. No wonder she’s been acting like a scared rabbit. She’s terrified, and for good reason.
Eventually, the gym clears out after the evening classes are over. Nate comes over to tap me on the shoulder. It’s past eight, and he’s about ready to lock up early.
I look up. Layla is sitting on the bench, taking a drink of water.
“It’s all yours,” Nate says, jerking his head at the empty gym. “Lock up, okay?”
“Thanks, man.” I nod and watch until the door swings shut behind him. Then I turn to Layla.
“Come on, baby,” I say. “In the ring. And take off your shoes.”
I toss my sneakers and gloves toward the lockers and hop into the ring. Confused, Layla follows, and then we’re standing, facing each other.
“You can take off your hand wraps,” I tell her. I’m not wearing any, and my knuckles are going to fuckin’ throb tomorrow. But I don’t really care. The pain actually feels kind of good.
Layla does as I say and drapes the reams of black fabric over one of the ropes. Then she faces me. “What are we doing?”
“I wish I could be with you all the time,” I say quietly. “It’s crazy, but I do. I just want to protect you from fuckin’ everything.”
Her blue eyes are wide, scared. The expression guts me every time. I walk around this city feeling like I have a hole in my stomach. I just want that look to disappear. I want her to look at the world, at me with confidence again. With openness, love, excitement, optimism. Just like she used to.
“I know,” she whispers, clenching her hands together. She looks down.
I sigh. “But I can’t, baby. It’s not…that’s not reality. So…I want to show you how to protect yourself.”
“Isn’t that what we started doing this last month?”
I smirk. She’s learning to throw a decent punch, but she’s still only a hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet. Things like height and weight matter in boxing. But there are other things she could learn to do better.
“If a guy like Giancarlo”—fuck, that name really does put a bad taste in my mouth—“forced you down again, do you think you’d be able to fight him off?”
Layla bites her lip and shuts her eyes. I’m taking her somewhere she doesn’t want to go. But I have to. She has to.
I shut mine and say a quick prayer, asking God, whoever that is, to forgive me for what I’m about to do.
Then, I attack.
“What the—WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” she screams.
It doesn’t take much. A quick twist of her wrist and a knock on her knee to push her to the ground, pinning her under my weight. I’m sprawled on top of her, and to my surprise, she barely fights, lost more in the confusion.
“Nico,” she cries as her voice wavers. Tears start to fall down her face, and it just about breaks me. “Nico, please. W-what are you doing to me?”
“Listen to what I tell you to do.” I’m going for soothing even as my heart breaks.
I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to hurt her ever again. But she needs it. Just a little more pain to fight through.
“You have strong legs,” I tell her. “Maybe even stronger than mine. Push up on your heels, and twist your body as hard as you can. Throw me off, baby. You can do it.”
She opens her mouth like she’s going to argue, but then she tries, lifting her pelvis into me, and then twisting around. I move a little—it’s actually hard to stay on top of her like this when she does that—but I don’t fall completely off.
“Keep going,” I tell her as I brace her wrists. “Come on. I’m not a good guy right now, NYU. I’m a fuckin’ asshole. I’m taking advantage of you. Get me the fuck off!”
“I can’t,” she whimpers.
Beneath me, her body deflates. It wrecks me, inside and out. My girl, my strong, beautiful, incredible fucking woman, withers like a blade of grass without water.
But she can do this. I know she can. She has to.
“As hard as you can,” I growl into her ear.
“Stop,” she mewls. “Please stop.”
“Make me.”
And then I release one hand and draw it down her face, closing it around her neck. I take a deep breath and close my eyes, repeating a prayer again. God, forgive me. Lord, give her strength.
And then I squeeze.
“NO!”
Layla howls like a wolf, her body suddenly coming to life. She pushes with her hips, once, twice, gaining momentum for a third, final push, combined with a twist that’s more awkward than anything else. But, as if she just stuck her finger in a light socket, a shock of power courses through her body. She throws me off, forcing me a solid two feet away, giving her enough space to roll over, wheezing while she clutches her neck. I lie on my back, rubbing my sore ribs where she kicked me on the way out. I couldn’t have stopped her if I’d tried. But I’m so fuckin’ glad of that fact.
I turn to her, unsure of what I’m going to see. Layla’s scrambling up, her hand still at her neck. She glares, her eyes lit up like blue fire.
“What the fuck was that?” she spits. “What were you doing?”
“Teaching you to protect yourself.” I clamber up, a silly, stupid grin on my face despite the fact that my head is fuckin’ throbbing. Knuckles and headache in the morning. I couldn’t care less.
“Fuck!” Layla shouts, kicking at the ground. “Why-why are you fucking smiling, you asshole?!”
“Because you did it!” I crow. “You fuckin’ did it, woman! And if you can do that to me, a trained fuckin’ fighter, you can protect yourself against anyone, baby. Don’t you see that?”
But when I look at her, ready to see victory all over her face, she’s crying. Her beautiful face is marred with tears, her blue eyes shining and red-rimmed, her rose-petal mouth screwed up in misery. Fuck me. This isn’t what I wanted. To break her even more.
Immediately, I scramble to her side and pull her into my arms. Fuck the sweat. Fuck all of that. I just want her to stop crying. I can’t fuckin’ take it when she hurts like this.
“Shhhh. I’m sorry. I’m so fuckin’ sorry, baby. I shouldn’t have pushed you like that. What was it? The pressure at your neck? The holding you down? Fuck me, I’m so goddamn sorry.”
“No!” she shouts into my neck, even as her hands cling at my arms, tight enough that her fingernails dig into the skin. Several more sobs wrack through her small body into mine. “Don’t be sorry. It’s-it’s not that,” she stutters as her tears slow to a trickle. She looks up and wipes them away angrily. “It’s not that. It was…it was fine.”
I lean back. “It was?”
She nods. “I’m glad you did it. I sort of hate you right now, but I’m glad I could do it too.”
I push a lock of hair out of her face. “Then what is it?”
She sniffs, and when she looks up, the pain blotting her gorgeous blues, as deep as t
he ocean itself, sends another ripple of hurt through my body.
“I liked it,” she admits, even as her lower lip trembles. “It hurt. Your hands around my throat. Holding me down. I hated it. And I fucking liked it too.” She shivers. “Love shouldn’t hurt, right?” Her voice shakes when she looks up. “That’s what I learned from all that mess. That wasn’t love, and it took me months to figure that out. So why…why do I like it?”
I exhale, not out of frustration, but because finally, finally we’re getting somewhere. I see it clearly now. She wants what she wants, just like we all do. But she hates herself for it.
“I know why I ended up with someone like that,” she whispers. “It’s because a part of me…a part of me liked it.” She looks up, her blue eyes wide and pained. “Why is that? He kept hurting me, but I kept going back. Just like I did with you.”
Her words are straight and true and pierce me like arrows. Because she’s right—I did hurt her. Several times, just like she did to me. And like addicts, we both kept coming back to each other, looking for more of that same, bittersweet rush.
“Some of us just learn it like that,” I murmur.
I realize that this is one of the few things Layla and I have in common. We might come from totally different worlds, she and I, but we both learned in our own ways that it was normal for people to hurt us.
But maybe that knowledge is also what might set us free.
“You know what I think?” I ask. I stroke the side of her arm, and she closes her eyes. But this time I don’t scratch. “I think maybe it’s okay to hurt sometimes.”
Her eyes open, confused. “What?”
“People like us, well, a lot of people, really…maybe we need a little bitter to make sense of the sweet.”
I turn my finger over and press my nail lightly into her skin, just enough for it to bite. The sharp twinge causes the same reaction in her—a shiver of pleasure, and then a pained look on her face. She shudders, but the goose bumps that rise all over her tell me it’s not an unpleasant feeling. Her breath hitches, and so does mine.
“You feel this,” I say as I draw my hand up her chest.
I place it, palm down, over her heart and thrill in the solid beat of it. She’s affected by what I’m doing—that much is clear. Almost immediately, she places her hand in the same spot on my chest, directly over the compass I’ve had tattooed there since I was nineteen. The same age she was when I met her.
“I’m never going to break that again,” I tell her. “That’s a promise.”
“But, you don’t know if—”
“Never,” I cut in.
I don’t even blink, urging her to see the truth in my eyes. She searches my face for several moments.
“We can do it in ways that are good for each other. I can do that for you, baby. You just gotta tell me: what do you need?”
She swallows, then glances down at the other hand resting on her thigh. Slowly, she covers it with her hand, then clenches her fingers, forcing me to grab her thigh, hard enough that it might actually bruise. And then she kisses me. Hard.
“Ah!” she cries out as I nip her lower lip. But she doesn’t pull away. This time she bites back.
“Again,” she hisses after she sucks voraciously on my mouth.
And just like that, I’m hard as a fucking rock. It’s been over a year of waiting for this, waiting for the moment where we really, truly connect again. I didn’t plan for it like this. I didn’t plan for the fuckin’ bathroom of a shitty nightclub either, or the mat of a boxing gym. But if this is where Layla gets herself back, where we learn to be us again, I’ll take it. However it comes.
“Okay,” I say. “But only if you give it back.”
I give her the rough, almost painful kisses she seeks, knead her legs, her thighs, her ass hard enough to hurt just a little while I grind myself into her. My cock finds her ready, just a few strips of fabric between us. There’s nothing more I’d like than to bend her over and take her right now. I’d find her wet and willing, I know it.
But there will be other times like that, when we can go fast and furious. Right now, I need to make sure. I need to make sure it’s right.
“What else?” I say as I take another harsh handful of her ass with a light slap. She moans lightly into my mouth. “What else do you want?”
“I want…oh! I want…more.”
Her hands thread into my hair and yank. That hint of pain shoots down my neck, but it only turns me on more. Her mouth crashes into mine, and we’re a sudden tangle of tongues and limbs. It’s like a light turned on—my gamble paid off. I opened up a door, and Layla’s sprinting through it. Right into me.
“Take—take these off,” she says through a few more torrid, biting kisses. She paws at my shorts, and in about two seconds, I’ve kicked them to the floor along with my boxers. When I look back at her, she’s done the same thing with her pants and is in the middle of taking off her top and sports bra. I watch, fuckin’ mesmerized, as her breasts bob free. She cups them lightly.
“You said once you were a biter,” she says with a sly smile. “Did you forget how?”
On my hands and knees, I cross the mat until I’m positioned over her, with Layla’s back to the floor, a lot like we were only a second ago when she threw me off. The knowledge that she can even do that at all makes me want her even more. I bury my face in her breasts, licking, sucking, and even biting. She moans and arches her back.
“Does that seem like I forgot?” I growl before taking one nipple between my teeth and pulling a little.
“More,” she beckons, a hand sliding around my head and urging me to one side. “Now.”
I take her nipple deeply into my mouth and earn another low, long moan as I suck hard enough for it to pinch. I roll her nipple between my teeth, then bite a little, then a little more, until Layla starts to shake.
“Nico,” she whispers, breathy as her legs open under me.
I’m pressed between her strong thighs, hard as one of the steel pipes crisscrossing the ceiling, and her slick heat moistens as I grind into her core. The tip of my cock slips in, and we both jerk as I switch to her other breast and continue that torture she desires. The torture she needs.
“Condom?” she whimpers even as her hips tilt, taking me a little further.
The hands in my hair pull harder, and with her breast still in my mouth, it’s all I can do not to shove all the way in and drive her down to the mat. But I swear to God, I really am a fuckin’ superhero, because I manage to pull out, my cock just hovering at her aching entrance. A different kind of torture. A different kind of sweet.
“Do we…” I pause, weighing the question. “Do we need it?”
Sometimes real closeness hurts a little too. But it’s a pain that I crave also, just like she needs it from me. The knowledge that even if they don’t, someone could hurt you. Layla’s the only girl I’ve ever been with bare, and I know I’m the same for her. And it’s been almost six months since…him. More than that for me. We’ve both been tested, and we talked about birth control before she came back to New York. There’s nothing stopping us if this is what we want to do. Which, I realize, I do. I want it more than maybe anything I’ve ever wanted in my life. Just to be close to her. To know there’s literally nothing between us, physically or mentally. To know that we belong to each other so much that our bodies actually become one.
The thought sends a convulsive shiver through me from head to toe.
In response, Layla arches up to kiss me, and her hands reach around to grab my ass and guide me fully inside. She’s tight—so damn tight—enough that it takes a moment for her to get used to me. I’m not huge or anything, but big enough to stretch her small body. As I push inside her completely, she flops back onto the mat, breathing hard as I take her breast into my mouth again and bite down.
“Nico!” she cries out. It’s not a whimper, but a shout. And it echoes, again and again off the cinderblock walls and concrete floors of the gym as I drive into her.
>
Her voice, its strength, lets loose some animal in me that’s been dying to be free. With Layla, I am never anything but my purest self. I have no name. I’m barely a man, but whatever I am was made for her, her essence, her body. Made to devour, pillage, ravage, feast on this body that has only ever fit mine perfectly.
Her muscles tense and her legs squeeze around my waist. The movement squeezes the rest of me too, and it only makes me pound into her that much harder.
“Fuck!” she cries out, hands grasping at the mat while she urges me onward.
“Is it…is this okay?” I can barely get the words out, I’m so fucking overwhelmed with want. Fear. Lust. Passion.
“Nico.”
I swear to God, if she didn’t say it, I wouldn’t even be able to remember my own name. But her eyes flash as she swallows.
“Harder.”
It’s the only encouragement I need. In a half second, I have her flipped over onto her hands and knees, two handfuls of her ass in my grip as I yank her hips toward me and impale myself into her waiting warmth.
“Yessssss!” I hiss as I pound into her.
“Yessssss!” she cries, her hips pressing back, hit for heavy hit.
“Again!” she shouts.
So I do. Rhythmically, my hand finds the solid flesh of her with a satisfying crack once, twice, a third and final time that causes both of us to fall apart completely. Layla’s body starts to convulse as my hands take two harsh handfuls of flesh so I can ram into her for the last time before I fall over her. We come together, and the walls of the gym seem to disappear. I can’t see two feet ahead of me. I can’t hear a damn thing. All I can do is feel, and what I feel is her. Layla.
Chapter Sixteen
Layla
“Well, I guess that’s it.”
Shama sets her rolling bag by the door, then turns to me with a lopsided smile.
“Here,” she says, holding out her key. “For your new roommate, whoever that will be.”
Bad Idea- The Complete Collection Page 85