In fact, when I think about it, I realize this is the first time he’s ever taken off his clothes in front of me with any kind of sexual intent. The only other occasion was the woods—but that was just him being a smart-ass. Not him thinking we were going to fuck. Right now he definitely knows we’re going to fuck, because his hands are trembling a bit, and his breathing is coming hard, hard, hard. He can hardly stand to touch his cock, and when he does, he snaps his hand back and shakes it, as if it just gave him an electric shock.
“Just so you know, this is gonna take around thirty seconds,” he says.
As if that’s going to disappoint me, rather than just making it worse. I imagine him coming so easily and get a sweet thick pulse of pleasure, so strong I moan over it. I arch my back and beg him to go faster, even though the begging only causes more cursing and fumbling. He fucks up the first one—my man who knows every in and out of my body, who knows how to make me come with a flick of his tongue, suddenly unable to do something this simple.
He has to take several deep breaths to calm down.
He has to say things like, “I haven’t done this in a while.”
While I just get hotter and wetter and more desperate. There’s just something about seeing him lose it like this that gets me going. Maybe the contrast of it—between his outside appearance and what his desire turns him into. He can hardly stand to touch me. He leans down over me and doesn’t seem to want to put his hands anywhere. It takes him just about everything to put one by my head to hold himself up, and the other seems at a loss.
I think he kind of wants to put it on my breasts or my face, but falls just short each time.
Not that it matters. I still feel it. I get a charge between his hovering palm and my skin, sweet enough to make me say his name. “Serge,” I say. “Serge,” and the second I do he closes the gap. His mouth goes over mine, kissing as though he can hardly stand not to. So hot and wet I just have to reach down between our bodies. I have to. I have to grab him, even though he punches the pillow when I do it.
“Don’t,” he says, and stays my hand before I can do anything major.
But it’s okay, because he wants to do the major thing. He has to do the major thing, because I’m way too eager for what needs to happen here. As soon as I feel the smooth head of his cock stroking over everything, I jerk and squirm and try to get more of it. He has to sit back a little and get hold of my hip. He has to say hey, in a sharper voice than I’m used to.
And then show me why going slow is important. Not just for him and his excitement, but for me and my ridiculously tiny pussy. If I had my way I’d probably be in pain now, instead of what I actually get:
Him oh-so-slowly, so very slowly, working his cock over that tightly clenched hole. Back and forth and back and forth until just that on its own starts to wind me up. By the time he starts to ease in I’m shuddering and moaning, hands in weird places like under the sleeves of his T-shirt and halfway up the wall. He has to hold me really tight to stop me from sinking down on him, and boy, am I glad he does.
The sensation is shocking enough when he goes slow. My eyes go wide the moment I feel that big thing opening me up—though I have no idea if it’s pleasure or pain that makes me do it. Somehow it seems to be a mixture of the two, like when you rub a really sore muscle and it hurts but good God, it feels good, too. I almost get that same sweet relief from it, strong enough to make me grab and squeeze him.
Which he of course interprets as agony.
As soon as he feels my hand on his arm, he stops. More than that, really. He goes rigid all over, face suddenly a tight mask, eyes searching my face for signs of some terrible transgression. I have to pant out “No, it’s good, it’s good,” just to get him to move again. And said movement is not particularly fast or fierce. He barely rocks his hips, which is great in one way—he’s so gentle, my Serge, so unbearably gentle.
But in another way it’s agonizing.
I just want to shove down on him, buck against him, but of course the second I do he slows even more. He practically grinds to a halt. “Just wait,” he tells me. “Just take a breath.” Only I can’t. It’s like tightening your grip halfway around one of those stress balls. The urge to crush it completely becomes more and more unbearable the longer you hold that halfway position. I just want to tighten around him.
And when I do, the sensation is worth the reaction.
The reaction itself is worth the reaction. He makes this shocked sound—one that reminds me of outraged ladies slapping indecent men at tea parties. His fist comes up and presses against his mouth, so hard the knuckles turn white. If his eyes squeezed shut any tighter they’d most probably pop out the back of his head, and I can feel him shaking. It thrums right through me. It makes me want to make it worse for him.
Though I swear I try not to. I do my best to be still for a moment, despite the intense need to squirm and tighten again and rock against him. To be honest, I just want to do all three at once, but I manage not to.
For about thirty seconds.
After that he’s pretty much on his own. I have to move. The ache is so great I can feel it in my gums, and the heat, God, the heat between us is unbelievable. It feels as though I’m lying beneath a furnace. Every bit of my body touching every bit of his burns and seems slippery somehow, and when I wriggle a little it gives me so much pleasure. Great white waves of it, rolling over my clit and my belly and my tiny tense nipples.
All I need to do is roll my hips and oh, oh.
So when he stops me I could scream.
At the very least, I need to say “No, please,” but he just holds me even tighter. He presses down even harder. And when he does move it’s even slower than it was before. So slow I want to kill him. So slow I can feel every ridge and line and curve of his cock easing over and into every part of me until finally I realize. I realize. He’s not just trying to be gentle. He’s not just trying to be the good guy anymore.
He’s trying to be a fucking tease.
He’s watching me go nuts, gaze all heated and knowing and lust-warped. And when I school my own reactions a little, rein them in just enough to show him I know what he’s doing, he goes a step further. Like this is all some challenge, only so seriously awesome I could cry. I think I do actually shed some tears when he starts moving in earnest. He just rolls his hips a little in this really specific way—urging that thick cock up against some sweet place inside me—and things happen.
Emotional things.
Pleasurable things.
Things that make me moan his name.
“Yeah, just like that,” I burst out.
And then he does it again.
Only harder. More forcefully.
So much so that the bed creaks and rocks. My breath starts coming out funny. It sounds as if I just got a really bad scare and am now trying to calm myself down, despite the fact that the opposite is happening. I’m not getting calmer. I’m getting more frantic. The hand I put on his back has made a kind of claw, and any moment now my nails are going to puncture skin.
But I can’t help it.
I had no idea sex would be this way. Nothing prepared me—not even Sam or the magazine or the movies or the blogs or anything. I realize now that some part of me really did think sex would be filthy and awful. Some little leftover part, still down in the basement in the dark. Still afraid to take my sweater off at school because if I came home without it on that must mean I was trying to make boys look.
Always my fault for trying.
Never their fault for looking.
But that was all wrong. It’s all wrong. I see that clearly and completely now, as his cock rubs and rubs over something that makes every muscle in my body tense. I’m coming, I’m coming, and when I do, I know it’s true…
It’s okay to be me.
It’s okay to be free.
And better yet, I think he feels it’s okay to be him, too. All it takes is seeing me twist and moan beneath him, so lost in pleasure I don’t even thi
nk about what I’m saying. I tell him yes and now and more, and suddenly he is no longer holding back. He fucks me the way I imagined him fucking—like an animal free of its cage. He takes his pleasure from me, so brutal it’s all I can do to hang on.
But God, I love every second of doing so.
I love the way he makes the headboard crack against the wall and gets this great fistful of my hair. I love how he draws out the word fuck for me, in a way that makes it sound like some other word entirely. Tomorrow there will most likely be bruises, but I know I will love them, too. They will stand as a sign of what we now have.
No shoulds. No barriers. Only the two words he whispers to me, in the aftermath.
Thank you.
Chapter 13
I think we’ve been dozing in the darkness for around an hour when he makes a move to go. But I have absolutely no qualms about suggesting he do otherwise. They were burned away when I saw his face as he came inside me, all lost and loving. Somehow I doubt I need to be reticent around him anymore. There seems little room for wondering about his feelings.
Though I think he may wonder about mine.
“Are you sure?” he asks, as if I’m really going to say no.
He has to know I’m not. But just in case, I tell him anyway.
“You promised me sprawling. I expect you to make good on that.”
“Your roommate might—”
“She won’t. Now get back in my bed,” I say, and he almost gets it right. He doesn’t refuse or express any further concerns. He just starts to do what I ask.
With one tiny issue in the middle of it all.
“You’re going to leave all your clothes on?”
“You want me to take them off?”
“I’d like you to never wear them, to be honest,” I say, and that gets him. I see his grin as he starts stripping. I see the way he shows off for me, turning and twisting so his muscles shift and flex. Or at least, I think that’s why he does it. It could be he wants me to believe that, but then he lies down next to me with his side turned away, and I catch the barest glimpse of another reason altogether.
Possible hiding of the bruise on his side. The one that stretches over so much of his rib cage that a ten-ton truck couldn’t have kept it from view. I don’t even know why he bothered in the attempt—except that I do know, absolutely I know.
He wanted my heart to stay in my chest.
Now my heart is in my mouth. I’m practically chewing on it.
“What happened?” I ask, even though I feel kind of stupid doing it. I know what happened. He’s a fighter. He got punched, quite possibly by an anvil attached to a piston. The mark is so dark and so big I’m surprised I couldn’t see it through his T-shirt. I go to cover it with my hand, but my hand barely makes half of it—and it hurts him. He flinches before I touch him. Or more, he flinches before he can stop himself doing it.
Though I know he wants to.
“It’s nothing,” he says, then adds what I assume he thinks is a reassuring explanation. “They tend to go for my middle because they can’t get my face.”
Yeah, I just love the thought of his internal organs getting pummeled rather than his jaw. And I especially love that he sounds so deflated about it. His voice almost hits this dull monotone, like someone describing the day-to-day drudgery of their terrible, awful, boring lives. Only the boring part in this case is something that could kill him. Why does he do something that could kill him if he hates it so much?
Because I can see now that he does. He hates his violent hair, he hates his ugly wounds, he hates talking about it and showing it to me. And I don’t think that has anything to do with seeming like a bad person in my eyes—a fact that he confirms a second later. I say that he shouldn’t be bothered about it on my behalf if he is, and after a moment of painful silence, he speaks.
“I don’t want to quit because of you. If anything…if anything, you’ve made me feel better about it than I have in a long time. Like it was something I could do for myself and be good at and not just a way out of trouble,” he says, then seems to go very still. It seems obvious why, though. He’s waiting with bated breath to see if I picked up on that last part.
And sadly for him, I did.
“What kind of trouble?” I ask, and then watch as he quite obviously stalls for time. He takes way too long to arrange himself beside me on the bed, most likely relying on the fact that he is enormous and my bed is tiny, and it seems reasonable that it would be an issue.
However, when he starts messing with the blanket and plumping the pillows, I have to draw the line. I nudge him again, one eyebrow raised, and he relents somewhat. He shrugs in this downplaying it sort of way, but he relents.
“I started fighting because my dad owed money. Gambling debt, mostly—to the guy who owns the bar I took you to. He owns a lot of shit, runs a lot of rackets. One of them happened to be brawling, so ’course he took one look at me and here we are. He even picked my name out for me. Said I was like a Redwood.”
“You know you could have told me that. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Same reason I struggle to tell you all kinds of shit. Who wants to hear their boyfriend fucks people up to hold off debt his no-good old man ran up?”
“I do. I want to hear this stuff. I want to know what bothers you or hurts you or makes you pause before you say a word to me. And most of all, I don’t want to go around thinking that something is cool and you do it because you want to when really you hate it and might actually be the slave of some mobster,” I say, then instantly regret that end word.
It sounds ridiculous even before he offers me an eyebrow raise.
“Did you just say mobster? You think I’m in league with the Mob?”
“Well, not now that you’ve turned into the Lord of the Land of Sarcasm, no.”
“Are you imagining Marlon Brando? Or maybe Ray Liotta?”
“Stop making fun of me, Serge. This is serious. You could be killed because of debt that you do not owe by scary people who definitely at least sound like the Mob.”
“He’s just a businessman. Wears a suit and everything.”
“So did John Gotti, most probably.”
“I think his first name might be Albert.”
“Albert is a terrifying name.”
“Most people call him Mr. Smith, if that helps.”
“How on earth would that help? It sounds like an alias. You are the slave of a person so scary that they have to have a strange, bland alias,” I say, and the silence that follows is so full I have to glance at him then. I need to see what expression is on his face—still amused, or maybe something else?
I think it might be something else. There is a line between his brows, and his eyes seem oddly faraway, as though he’s seeing his life in some other light. He was happy just working his way through it, until I throw this spanner into the works.
“Does it really worry you this much?”
“It worries me that it might worry you.”
“I ain’t losing any sleep over it. I like some of it, some part of it, some sense of my own skill at something, you know? One time I got an offer from a guy who runs this MMA type of shit and I thought—”
“Thought what?”
“Nothing,” he says, but I can tell it’s something. That faraway look in his eyes is now practically on another planet. He can see all kinds of awesome stuff, I know he can.
I just have to bring it into focus.
“You thought that if you could pay off Mr. Smith you could go make a good living for yourself being an amazing and awesome fighter in an arena with thousands of people screaming your name instead of just me wetting my already soaking panties,” I say, and suddenly that gaze is no longer lost somewhere way off over there.
It shifts back to me, as steady as a mountain range in a storm.
“That…that is a real interesting way to put things,” he tells me, then just to make extra sure I know how interesting, he cups my chin with one hand. Tilts my face up t
o his, for a long and lingering kiss. “It’s amazing how much faith you have in me,” he says, but somehow I don’t think faith is what he’s thinking of.
I think he’s thinking of the breast he just put his free hand over.
“Don’t try to distract me.”
“Distract you from what?”
“This conversation. This conversation is very important. We need to talk about things and stuff and not…not…you pinching my nipple,” I say, because that is in fact what he seems to be doing. Not hard, but not soft, either, and so good I could just roll with it.
If an idea wasn’t starting to form in the back of my mind.
The only problem is: How to go about raising it? There is absolutely no way he’s going to like it if I just come out with it directly. I have to maneuver around the issue with the subtlety of a sphinx, carefully edging in at him while he’s busy being distracted by other things. Like my mouth on his throat, for example.
Oh, he likes my mouth on his throat.
Now his hand is inside my top, and that makes it much easier to say.
“I mean, how much do you owe this guy?” I ask, so casual I feel sure anyone on earth would believe me. But then I forget Serge is not just anyone. He is perceptive and thoughtful and worst of all, he knows me inside out by now. The words are barely out of my mouth when he goes all still again, midkissing of my shoulder.
“I don’t like the way this conversation is going, Bea.”
“It’s not going to any place.”
“It sounds like it is. You think you can fool me? I know you, girl. Why do you think I didn’t tell you everything? I know what you’re thinking of.”
“I’m not thinking of anything.”
“Swear to me,” he says, and I have to wince then.
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