by Paula Cox
He nods, determination in his face. “I never want to be apart from you again—from either of you. I want to be a family. If . . . if you can tell me what a family is. I’ve never really known, truth be told.”
“Neither have I. You know that. I guess we’ll just have to figure it out together.”
We stare at each other for a long time, our expressions slowly changing. The emotion remains, but it is joined with pent-up lust. Kade leans down and kisses me on the cheek, and then the chin, and finally the lips.
After waiting a month to feel his touch, my body responds at once. My heart hammers more than it ever has before. My fingers, my toes, everything tingles. My pussy comes to life as after a long sleep, reinvigorated and ready to feel his touch once more. But the lust is changed. It is not just dirty now; there is love in there, too.
He kisses me softly and slides his fingers through my hair slowly, caressingly, and then down my back and around my hips with a gentleness I never would’ve dreamed he possessed. He breaks off the kiss, and his face is open, truly open for the first time. There is nothing between us now. No lies, no hesitation. Just love and lust.
“I want you,” he says, voice low.
“I want you,” I reply, voice high.
He lifts me up, lays me gently onto the bed, kisses my neck. I moan, feeling every kiss like it is the first, feeling things I never noticed before: the texture of his lips against my skin; the little puff of air which accompanies the kiss; the almost inaudible noise of the kiss. Before, there was only lust, my mind screaming: ‘Yes, kiss me! Fuck, yes, yes!’ Now, there is so much more.
I wrap my arms around him as I have done many times before, but before, more often than not, I would tear my nails into his skin, feel the blood, listen to the way he moans in pleasure and pain. Before, I could turn half-animal and gouge at him. Before, after all, we were just a man and a woman, fucking. Just fucking. Now, I smooth my hands down his muscular back, feeling every sinew, every taut muscle, feeling the power of the father of my child.
Kade moves down my body, kissing. And then he takes off my pants and my panties, pulls my shirt over my head, reaches around with an expert hand and unclips my bra in one swift movement. He stands over me, looking down at my naked body. His chest heaves, his arms hanging at his sides in that way I know so well. When he stands like that, he’ll dive on me moments later. Now, he undresses slowly. I watch as he reveals his scarred, muscular naked body. I am warm. Not fire-hot. Not burning. But warm and content.
He strips naked, dropping his clothes into a pile on the floor next to him. His cock is hard, rock-hard, steel-hard. He leans over me and kisses me on the lips. I open my mouth and push my tongue into his mouth. We both moan, softly, intimately. I move my hands down to his hips and feel the twitching muscles there. It’s like there is an animal in him preparing to escape, but the animal is being fought back by this new side of Kade. The kiss intensifies, our tongues brushing together with more force. Kade runs his hand down my body, massages my breasts. He’d normally tweak my nipple, cause me pain-tinged pleasure. Now, he rubs gently, arousing my nipple, making it hard.
I break off the kiss and look up into his face, desperate to see the face of the father of my child. I need to make sure it’s real; I need to make sure that this moment is real.
“I love you,” I say, staring into those startling blue eyes.
“I love you,” he replies.
He means it. I can hear it in his voice. He has let his defenses drop, truly drop, for the first time. Always with Kade, I get the feeling that there is a world within him that he is not sharing, a depth of emotion he is unwilling to reveal to anybody. Now, when I look into his face, his emotional-yet-strong face, I see real feeling there.
Still staring into my eyes, he reaches down with his hand and grabs his cock. He guides himself into me, the tip of his cock probing at my hole, pushing, until my lips widen and become wetter and he thrusts himself slowly and deeply inside of me. I bite down, staring at his face as it contorts in pleasure at the tightness of me, and then brace my hands on his bulging shoulders as he pushes in and in, all the way up to that tingling spot. He holds my gaze as he holds his cock at that spot, our eyes locked, my pussy opening for him, getting wetter for him.
Then, slowly, he slides out of me. Now is the time he would become animal and we’d fuck like two hungry wolves. We’d fuck and there would be some intimacy in there somewhere, buried deep, hidden, but there. We’d writhe and gag and cough and scream, but now he keeps the slow pace and I sink into the rhythm with him. We stare into each other’s eyes the entire time, something we have never done before. But if you can’t stare into the eyes of the father of your child, whose eyes can you stare into to?
He holds himself up with one hand. With the other, he caresses my face, feeling the way my jaw clenches each time his cock slides up my wet pussy and the tip tickles my sweet place. In and out, he slides, and each time I am a wetter and warmer. His fingers are rough on my jawline, his eyes are hard even if they are tinged with emotion. He leans down and kisses me. The warmth in the kiss and the warmth in my pussy combine to make me hot. I shift my hips, drive down with more pressure on his cock. He groans through the kiss and we open our mouths and the tips of our tongues clash. A little faster now, but not manic. Still intimate. Still close.
Up deep inside of me, deeper than he’s been before. Or maybe it just feels that way. Maybe the emotional connection makes it seem deeper. Maybe the fact that he’s kissing me and groaning and making love to me—really making love, not screwing—slowly and passionately makes it seem like he’s closer to me, deeper inside of me. All I know is that point of heat in my pussy grows with each steady-rhythm thrust. Before, it grew frantically, almost desperately. Now it grows in tandem with the brushing of our tongues and the steady loving pressure of his cock against the walls of my pussy.
The baby has made this possible, I reflect. Because, though we are not married, though we have not made any formal declaration to each other, we are now closer than we have ever been before. We can’t help but be closer. We have an immutable connection; it is growing inside of me. Without the baby, this kind of intimacy with a man like Kade would be impossible. Now, we have a reason; both of us have a reason neither of us can ignore.
“You’re beautiful,” he says, breaking off the kiss for a moment. He says it with his lips still close to mine, his breath warm on my face, my chin, my upper lip.
I feel my hands grip tighter on his shoulders. It’s coming. I feel it coming. Not a jolting, surging build-up, but a gradual one, like walking up a low-inclined hill and looking back and realizing you’re much higher up than when you started, without noticing much change along the way. In and out, he slides, and up and down, I shift my hips. Our rhythm is connected in a way it never was before: connected in a way I think only the child and our newly expressed emotions can make us. I squeeze his shoulder muscles hard, but I do no scratch them. Kade leans back, pushing his cock inside of me at an angle so that it rubs against the front wall of my pussy, ending at the perfect place in the warm spot, as though aimed directly.
“I’m going to—”
I hardly believe it. So slow, and yet so sudden. And that’s our relationship, I think. Sudden at the beginning, the sudden arrival of a man from the mist, a rescuer, and yet slow in its buildup, the unsaid desires, the withheld secrets. When I come, especially with Kade, I think of dirty things. Sweat and sex and muscles and spit and moaning and pain-tinged pleasure. Now, I do not think of anything. I just stare into his eyes. I wanted blue eyes so I could escape; when I was a girl, I dreamed of them. Now here I am, on my back, with his cock inside of me and the sky-blue of his eyes gazing down at me. This is an escape. This is a special kind of escape.
I squeeze his shoulders even harder. His cock slides rhythmically into my sweet spot, enlarging it to the point where I do not feel each slow motion of his cock, but rather just the steadily-growing spot of heat, until everything below my hips is t
ingling and warm, right down to my toes. I curl them, squeeze my legs together around his hips, squeeze my pussy around his cock. Squeeze my pussy? No—my pussy is getting tighter—tighter—
“I’m about to—”
My pussy goes tight and the urge to close my eyes comes over me. I will close my eyes and see red, sink into the sunlight-like red as the orgasm hits me. I fight off the urge. Instead, I keep gazing into Kade’s eyes. This is the closest you can be with a person, isn’t it? Looking into their eyes as you come, as they make you come. It must be. It is closer than I have ever been with a person, at any rate.
I stare into his eyes and it’s like the orgasm is no longer coming from his cock but his eyes. His eyes pierce me, travel through me, down into my pussy. Yes, I reflect, as my pussy gets tight and the first release of the orgasm hits, his eyes are making me come. I cradle his face, feeling the roughness from where he’s started to let a beard grow in. His eyes. Oh, fuck . . . his eyes.
I moan and it is like a song, a long-held note, as the first wave of the orgasm washes over. Slow ecstasy, steady euphoria, grips me. I wrap my legs around him, interlock my ankles, and ride the orgasm. Another wave, another, and I just keep staring into those depths of blue, which hold mutual pleasure, lust, a restrained-orgasm of his own. The fact that he is holding his pleasure back for me is enough to send a second wave through me. I shake. I clench my hands into fists. The orb of warmth balloons and covers my belly, my breasts; my nipples buzz like mad. A third wave crashes into me, this one hotter. I bring my face to his, leaning up, and hold my eyes within inches of his eyes, staring deeply into them. I imagine I can see the scene in the bedroom in those eyes: a Sunday morning, a real family. When the fourth and final wave of orgasm hits me, I kiss him on the lips, moaning, and then lower myself down.
Kade comes, then, with two more thrusts. I grab his face and make it so he can’t look away.
We are too close for that now.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Lana
The rain has cleared when I wake up in Kade’s arms. Sunlight fills the room, just like in my fantasy; it blooms in all corners of the room. I sit up and look down at Kade. He is sleeping peacefully, despite the situation with the Italians. If there is one thing Kade never does, it’s sleep peacefully. He sleeps in fits, consumed my dreams of his father, dreams of Duster. He never just sleeps. But now, his face is content, a small smile on his lips. He makes a snoring noise which is so cute I want to jump around the room going, Awwwww.
Instead, I stand up and go into the shower, have a quick wash, and then throw on some sweatpants and a hoodie. The thing about being pregnant is, when hunger comes, it comes quick and with a vengeance. I woke up wanting a bite to eat. As I leave the dormitory wing and make my way to the bar, I am ravenous.
But I do not enter the bar. I’m in the hallway area when the smell of coffee hits me. If I was writing about that in my book, hits me is the phrase I would use. It pushes through the door to the bar and slams right into my nose. I take a step back, gagging. It’s like I can feel coffee grinds lodged into the back of my throat. I know it’s not true, but the feeling persists. Coughing, I make for the front door. I need some fresh air, if only a moment of it.
It’ll be safe enough, because there are Tidal Knights guards posted all over.
But as soon as I walk into the parking lot—barefooted, like a fool—I realize I’ve made a mistake.
The first thing I see is a Tidal Knights pledge. Is he smiling? I ask myself this question several times. He must be smiling. He looks like he’s smiling. The brain is strange like that, I guess, because even as I ask myself the question I know the reality. One side of my brain registers the Tidal Knights member with the upper half of his face completely torn away by a gunshot, the lower half twisted into a macabre grin. The other half of my brain keeps seeing a smiling man lying on the concrete catching the morning rays. I look across the parking lot and see two more dead Tidal Knights, both just as mangled as the first one. And then I look up, and see that the parking lot is filled with about twenty Italians, maybe thirty. Once I get past ten, it is hard to tell. Grey-suited men, most of them holding guns, standing in a circle around the bodies, looking at the clubhouse calmly.
Enrique—it must be him—stands at the front of his men. He is short for a man, around my height. In one hand he holds a machete. His other is curled around a gold knuckle duster. He wears a shirt tucked into grey trousers, unbuttoned to the chest to show a gold chain. I want to scream, but my throat seizes at the sight of him. Kade told me about how he casually punched his son across the face, about how he killed Mountain. He did not give me the details of Mountain’s death, but he told me the fact that the big man was dead. Mountain was huge; it was hard for me to accept that anybody could’ve killed him. But looking at Enrique, holding that machete, I can see it. There’s something vicious about the man, something apart from the fact he murders without remorse. It’s his eyes; there is nothing in his eyes. A blank stare. No—an almost blank stare. A glint of sadism flashes at me. Or perhaps I just see that. I don’t know. I am too scared. Thought has become difficult.
I try and scream again. This time a hollow, ‘Ah,’ comes out, but nothing else.
Enrique grins at his men. “Look how happy she is to see us, gentleman.” He skips over to me, slicking his hair back with the knuckle-duster hand, swinging the machete like a cane. “This is an unexpected surprise, madam.” He stops so close to me I can smell blood on him. His chest is thick with black hairs, hairs which have turned crimson with blood. Sweat and blood. I keel over, vomit on my bare feet. “Oh, dirty American whore!” He growls and takes a step back. “You have to understand, friends, that these American girls are always whores. They will do anything. Italian girls—well, they have a little more self-respect, you understand? But American girls will do anything for a few dollars. My father taught me this when I was a boy. He took me to whorehouse and showed me what these girls would do for forty dollars! Forty dollars!”
I take a step back, vomit squishing between my toes. That’s sick; it’s too sick. I keel over, belly a knot, and vomit again, this time onto the concrete. Stones dig into my feet. Everything hurts. Everything seems slow and drawn-out. I scream, try to scream. Damn my raw throat. Damn this paralyzing fear.
Enrique steps around my vomit, not wanting to ruin his expensive-looking shoes, I expect.
He stands close to me.
“Do not take another step away from me,” he says. He speaks casually, but I get the sense that if I were to take one more step, he’d hack at me with that machete without a second thought. I do as he says. “Good girl.” He giggles, weirdly girlishly. Worms crawl over me; he reminds me of Scud.
“Don Enrique, she is the president’s puttana.”
I do not know what puttana means, but I don’t think it’s good. Enrique grins at me with a new appreciation.
“Yes, I see now. She is the pregnant one.”
“How do you know—”
“I have eyes everywhere. They call me spider-eyes.”
He lays the machete against my belly.
The second the blood-covered metal touches me, I scream: “Kade!”
Enrique backhands me across the face, sending me sprawling into the concrete.
Everything happens very fast then, as I’m lying on the concrete. Enrique jabs me twice more in the nose, my head lolling, and then drags me to my feet and throws me into a group of Italians. Three of them catch me, holding me up. My nose is numb; my entire face is numb. One of the Italians casually squeezes my ass. At a time like this, just squeezes it. How could a man get excited enough to do that at a time like this? These are dim thoughts, faraway. I’m only able to look up when I hear Kade’s voice.
He runs out of the clubhouse barefoot, wearing nothing but shorts, holding a handgun.
“Enrique,” he says, walking into the parking lot. “You better let her go right fuckin’—”
“Tut-tut.” Enrique waves his machete li
ke a schoolteacher waving a pointer. “That is not the way to speak to a man who has something you want.”
Kade throws his handgun overarm into the parking lot. It crashes into one of the bikes, and then lands on the floor.
“I killed your brother,” Kade says. “I killed him on purpose. I slaughtered him for no other reason than I could.”
No, Kade. Don’t. Stop it. He’ll kill you.
Enrique growls. “What? What are you saying? Are you a mad man?”
“I killed him.” Kade walks across the parking lot, opposite twenty-something Italians, right up to the machete-wielding leader. “Don’t you want to get some vengeance, Enrique?”
“I will kill you and your woman,” Enrique says, but even from where I stand propped up by three Italians, I can hear it in his voice. Kade has his attention. I know Kade is afraid. He must be. But he does not show it. He stands there, shirtless, arms at his sides, smirking at Enrique.
“I want to make a deal with you,” Kade says.
“What kind of deal?”