My resistance, already crumbling, caved completely, a pile of hesitation and good intentions now resting at my feet. I looked up into those glacially blue eyes and knew that something was about to change. Maybe it had already started to change.
“My name is Greer,” I said.
“Sweet Greer.” My name sounded so heavenly on his lips. I wished he would say it over and over again. “Let me take you out for bad food and neon lights. I don’t know what happened to make you leave Merlin’s party in tears, but I don’t want it to have the final say in tonight. I think we should have the final say, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I whispered, and I slid my hand onto Embry’s arm.
He grinned down at me, and the world was never the same.
Chapter Thirteen
Five Years Ago
Two hours later, Embry and I were swinging high above the ground in an enclosed car, alone, our mouths sweet from cotton candy and our bodies warm from wanting each other. I could smell him now, something with citrus and heat, like pepper, a smell that made my toes curl in my shoes, a smell that made me restless with the urge to kiss him.
On one side of us there was the relentless glow of the city, and on the other the relentless black of Lake Michigan, and Embry and I were two twilight figures in the middle, half in shadow and half in the heady light of the city and carnival rides below us. We sat on the same side of the car, our bodies near but not near enough, and just a minute before, Embry had taken my hand in his. There had been some accidentally-on-purpose brushes of fingers and shoulders throughout the night, a moment where he’d smilingly wiped a pink smear of candy from the corner of my mouth, but there was something so deliberate and intentional about the way he reached for my hand and placed it firmly against his own. Then our fingers interlaced, and my heart flipped over.
The only other man I’d held hands with had been Ash, and that had been four years ago. I’d forgotten what it felt like, palms sliding against palms, large male fingers stretching and squeezing against my slender ones. I’d avoided romance and sex in any form since Ash, for reasons I didn’t entirely understand myself, and now because of a moment of weakness, I found myself alone with a man who seemed to be romance and sex personified. Even his flaws were attractive: the occasional scowl and frown as we talked about our pasts—me staying studiously away from the topic of Ash or my grandfather and him even more studiously avoiding talk of battles and Carpathia; the somewhat presumptuous way he flirted so filthily and with such confidence; the fleeting giddy grin when we talked about the future and the places we wanted to go and see.
He felt like a real person, a person who exuded confidence but had moments of insecurity, a person who laughed because he knew no other way to drive out the darkness, a person who craved connection but couldn’t let go of something inside of himself in order to reach for it.
In other words, with all of my gifts of perception and analysis, I couldn’t escape the feeling that he felt a lot like me.
And the entire night, through all our wandering talks about Cambridge and literature and the beautiful corner of the Olympic Peninsula where he’d grown up, he hadn’t once asked me about the party. Hadn’t asked why he’d found me crying and gin-soaked and trying to hail a cab. And for that I was eternally thankful. So thankful that I found it possible to confess the events of the party to him, even if only in vague terms.
I looked down to where our hands were linked, up to his face, which was watching mine with an expression of interested but reserved hunger, the way a cat looks when you toss a toy their way but before they pounce to get it.
I took a breath. “There was someone at the party tonight.”
He nodded, as he’d been waiting for me to speak these words all night. “A man someone?”
“A someone I had feelings for. And yes, it happened to be a man.”
I could tell from the amused quirk of his lips that he was fighting back the urge to banter about heteronormativity with me, and I appreciated it. I liked bantering with Embry, but I wanted to get this off my chest more.
“It’s been years since he and I…well, we weren’t together in any real sense. But I still had feelings. We met unexpectedly this afternoon, and there was a moment where I thought maybe he felt the same way. But then I saw him at the party tonight with someone else, and it hurt. It hurt and I was so furious with myself for feeling hurt, because I had no right. No normal person would have feelings for four years with no encouragement, no interaction to bolster them, and then feel wounded at the actual proof that there was no hope of a relationship.”
I leaned my head back against headrest of the seat and concluded, “I’m disgusted with myself.”
Embry’s hand left mine, and for a painful second I wondered if I’d disgusted him too, if something about my story conveyed neediness or clinginess or delusion, but then he was on the floor of the car kneeling in between my legs and taking both my hands in his. The car had a glass floor, and beneath Embry’s blue-clad knees, I could see the dizzying spin of the carousel far below, the tiny toy-people moving and shopping and eating like miniature dolls in a miniature dollhouse.
Embry moved my hands to his face, and I needed no encouragement to slide my hands over the carved lines of his jaw and cheekbones, to run my fingers over the strong ridge of his straight nose and up the swell of his proud forehead. My hands roamed through his sandy-brown hair, thick and soft, almost curly, and then down to his neck, where I stroked the warm skin along his collar.
“Sweet Greer,” he murmured, closing his eyes and leaning his head against my knee. “I’m disgusted with myself too.”
My hands paused as I absorbed his words.
“I know exactly how you feel. There’s a someone for me—they’ve been a someone for me for years—but they aren’t my someone. No matter how much I plead, no matter how much—” his breath catches “—how much I give of myself. I’m wrecked with it, so much that I think it’s never possible I’ll find another someone and I’m doomed to be miserable forever.”
My fingers resumed their stroking, my heart breaking for him and for me and for both of us, and then he caught my wrists and gave the inside of each one a gentle kiss. On the second one, I felt the faintest flicker of his tongue, right over the blueish veins, and something deep inside my body clenched. I was the girl who’d written those emails once again, the girl who wanted bad, who wanted wrong, and wanted it in the most soul-thrumming, reckless ways possible.
“I don’t want to be miserable tonight,” I whispered, and Embry lifted his head, his blue eyes unreadable in the shadows. “I don’t want to feel doomed or disgusted. I don’t want to think about him.”
“I can do that for you,” he said, his voice low. “If you ask me.”
Everything smelled like him in that moment. Pepper and lemon and promise.
The brave Greer spoke for me. “Then do it.”
Ash would have hesitated, not out of disinterest, but out of caution, out of a need to establish consent and boundaries, because Ash was—is—a self-aware monster. Acutely aware of the marks he would leave on his lovers’ souls and bodies, of exactly how dangerous he was.
Embry didn’t hesitate. He didn’t ask for clarification, for hard limits, for a safe word. He didn’t ask what I needed in bed or what I wanted, how many people I’d been with, whether I wanted him with a condom or bare. He left all of those questions unanswered, unasked, and with a searing kiss, showed me the thrilling joy of abandoning safety and leaping feet-first into passion. I kissed him back, not forgetting Merlin’s chains, but intentionally throwing them off, intentionally abandoning them.
I wouldn’t keep my kisses to myself, I’d give them to Embry instead.
And damn the consequences.
* * *
When the Ferris wheel landed, we were already rumpled and breathless, and when we finally got a cab, there was no keeping our hands off each other. I had never made out with someone, and at any rate, my last kiss had been over four year
s ago, and so the experience was intoxicating. The way Embry breathed against my mouth, those tiny stitches of breath when my hands found someplace new, the tiny growls when I opened for him—my lips and arms and legs—heedless of the cabbie in the front seat.
We hurriedly paid the driver, and then Embry fairly yanked me out of the cab, pulling me through his hotel lobby so fast that my feet unexpectedly skipped into tiny jogs to keep up. And then the elevator doors closed and I was pinned against the wall, my legs around his waist and his erection right against my center, his mouth open and hot against my neck and collarbone. All the times I’d fingered myself, gotten myself off with vibrators, none of it could compare to the actual sensation of having a willing, eager male between my legs. The sensation of narrow hips shoving against me mindlessly seeking relief, hands cruelly yanking down my dress and bra cup, the sight of a man’s head ducked against my breast, nuzzling and biting and sucking.
And then the doors opened.
Once again, I was yanked along, and since the hallway was empty, I didn’t bother pulling down my dress, didn’t bother readjusting my bra. Instead, I stood behind him as he fumbled for his hotel keycard, skirt rucked up, hair tousled, breast exposed, begging him in a wild, impatient chant, “Hurry, hurry, hurry…” And when he looked back and saw me exposed and whining with need, he gave an almighty groan. The door snicked and unlocked, and he turned the handle and pulled me inside the dark room, lit only by the skyline outside the window.
He’d pulled so hard that I stumbled as I crossed the threshold, but it didn’t matter, because he caught me and swung me into his arms, carrying me straight to the bed. He stood over me, stripping off his shirt and vest and blazer, not even waiting to toe off his shoes before he lowered his body over mine. I heard the shoes clunk, one by one, onto the floor, heard the slow creak of my leather jacket as he bracketed my body with his forearms, heard the hitch in his breath as our bodies met, heard my answering moan as he roughly kneed my legs apart and ground his erection against me.
His mouth crashed down over mine, and I was lost once more. He kissed me like a man who was facing down death, kissed me like he would never see me—or any other woman—ever again. He kissed me like he knew me and knew my pain, something I’d never felt from anyone ever before.
I scratched my nails down Embry’s bare chest, catching those flat nipples and making him hiss, reaching for his belt. He knelt up, and I sat up with him, my shaking hands struggling with the belt, the task made all the harder by Embry’s insistent hands tugging at my jacket. There was fumbling and pulling and frustrated moans punctuated by leaning, awkward kisses, and then suddenly his belt was gone and his pants unfastened and my jacket was somewhere in the shadowed depths of the room. He was back over me and I arched underneath him, needing the contact, needing the pressure, which he was all too happy to give. I kicked off my heels and used the balls of my feet to work the waistband of his pants down past his firm, muscled ass, and then his cock and my pussy were separated only by the silk jersey of his boxer briefs and the demure cotton of my panties. He swiveled his hips against my cunt, and I cried out with pleasure, my nails digging into his back.
“Fuck,” he grunted into my neck, giving another trial thrust. “I’m going to come just like this. Humping you like a teenager.”
I could come too, just like this, with the rough grind of his cock against my clit, with the thin fabric between us adding an angry sort of friction. But it wasn’t enough for Embry, wasn’t enough for me either, because we’d both unlocked the worst kind of desperation in each other, the kind of desperation that wouldn’t be satisfied until it had cannibalized itself, caught flame and burned itself to ashes.
Too impatient to pull my dress off properly, Embry tugged on the straps and yanked it down so that it was bunched around my middle.
“Your tits,” he murmured, “I want to see them.”
I managed to squirm out of my bra, and then he was on my breasts with his mouth and his rough fingers, making me whimper, and suddenly our breastfeeding conversation from earlier didn’t seem so insane, so ridiculous. In a weird way, it was almost like he was nursing from me, in a metaphorical, vampiric sense, he was seeking succor from my body. Seeking nourishment and release and life, and I wanted to offer it to him.
He licked and sucked and bit with abandon, completely lost to himself and his need. Unlike Ash, who had touched and kissed with such deliberate intention and skill, who awoke my soul with a single brush of his lips, who would later awake the submissive animal within me, Embry kissed with nothing but mindless fire and passion. He awoke the female in me, the woman, and only underneath him could I have found this writhing, assertive version of myself.
Without thought, without anything but blind need, I pushed Embry’s head farther down, past the bunched raspberry fabric, past my navel, my fingers fisting in his hair when he pressed his mouth and nose against the damp white cotton that covered my cunt. He inhaled and his ensuing groan seemed to thrum inside my very bones.
He wrapped his fingers around the sides of the panties and pulled them down, tossed aside to join the leather jacket on the floor. And then he was back at my secret place, one arm sliding underneath my hips to lift me to his mouth, the other positioned so he could easily stroke my belly. A kiss on my mound, a kiss to each inner thigh, and then his mouth was there, there, and my hips jerked involuntarily at the sensation.
It was too much, too much, even though he’d just started, but I’d never felt this before, never felt what a silky wet mouth could do to silky wet flesh. Never known how the gentle nip of teeth would feel on my clit, the sucking of lips on the same, never guessed what having my hole circled and then fucked with a strong tongue would be like. If I had known—Jesus, if I had known, I would have never turned down those myriad offers of dates and drinks at Cambridge.
“You taste so good,” Embry growled from between my legs. “You going to come for me now? Going to make me taste you as you do it?”
I nodded even though he couldn’t see me, nodded against the pillow, writhing and panting, holding his head in place while I rubbed against him. While I fucked his mouth and face, taking my pleasure with each grind of my clit, with each masterful stroke of his tongue. And my body built and built and built its pleasure from that, like a castle of tightly strung tension, each block taking me higher and higher, each buck of my hips and fluttering suck of his mouth sending me soaring.
I raised my head, looking down my bared breasts and dress-covered stomach to my hips, which were still lifted to his mouth. He looked beautiful just then, the light from the window showing his eyelashes dark on his cheeks, the sensual curve of his muscular shoulders and arms, the slight curl of his thick hair. And—oh—his hips moving against the mattress as he ate me, as he mindlessly fucked the bed with his face in my pussy, so needy, so desperate for contact and friction.
That sight—of this powerful, gorgeous man driven to rutting against anything by the taste of my cunt—was what finally did it. I clenched against his mouth and released with something like a scream, my first ever orgasm from someone other than myself, rolling and thrusting and quivering. He pinned my hips in place to hold me still and lapped it all up, licking me until the waves finally stopped cresting, and then he was up on his knees again, wiping his mouth with his forearm. His cock was so hard that the dark tip had pushed its way out of the waistband of his boxers, standing up almost past his navel, the dim city light catching the bead of moisture at his slit.
And his eyes—he was gone. He was raw now, a hard body of speechless need. He stood and shucked his pants and boxer briefs and went into the bathroom, emerging a moment later with a small foil packet in his hand. He handed it to me wordlessly, his hands shaking.
“I need,” he said in a trembling voice. That was all.
Not I need you, not even I need to fuck.
Just I need.
The honest primal nature of it took my breath away. I needed, too. Just for tonight.
&nbs
p; But as I slid to the edge of the bed and tore the foil packet open, I remembered the uncomfortable hurdle of my virginity. I was Catholic, yes, some would even say a devout one, but I wasn’t particularly traditional when it came to premarital sex. It was merely that Ash had ruined me for any other touch…at least until tonight.
Should I tell Embry? Should I slow this down?
I don’t want to slow down.
I wanted to be fucked, hard. I wanted to come again. I wanted the cruel, vicious knowledge that I’d had a man’s cock inside me so that whenever I saw Ash again, I could guard myself with my own experience. He wouldn’t be the only one who didn’t wait, he would no longer be the only one who’d moved on. I would have fucked his best friend, cried out another man’s name, and I wanted that satisfaction so much I could taste it.
Yes, I needed. Yes, in any universe I would be right here, right now, doing this very thing, but in this universe, the jealousy and pain fueled the fire, and from the way Embry’s eyes hooded at the sight of my hand grasping his erection, I guessed that I wasn’t the only one wanting to fuck away my demons tonight.
I had never rolled on a condom before, but Embry helped me, holding his dick steady as I slowly worked the latex down his length. He had a beautiful cock, eight thick inches, straight and proud with a purple-dark tip and close-cropped curls at his base. Even the heavy sac underneath his dick was beautiful, looking so full and ready for release, and I laid back on the bed and beckoned for him to join me, ready for him to spill himself inside me. Ready for him to relieve the ache there.
He followed me, his body still trembling with the effort of holding back, and settled on top of me.
“Open up,” he demanded through clenched teeth. “Open yourself for me.”
There was no question in his tone. No permission. I might have been any woman underneath him, any warm pussy he’d found for the night, and that thought was freeing and exhilarating in how dirty and impersonal it was.
Modern Fairy Tale: Twelve Books of Breathtaking Romance Page 33