Live (The Burnside Series): The Burnside Series

by Rivers, Mary Ann

  He kissed her forehead. “The things you say, Destiny.”

  He kissed her. He kissed her and kissed her and kissed her.

  She slid into his lap, and the quilt slid away from their bodies. He let himself touch her how he wanted, resisting nurturing her for now, just taking all of her skin and curves into his hands for himself. Except that the more he took, the more she pushed herself into his hands.

  She felt heavy, substantial. He put his hands under her skirt and around her thighs clasped at his hips and squeezed, feeling the muscles give under his fingers. He slid his palms higher, pressing in hard, and curled his fingers around the muscles in her arse, under the lace of her panties. She was warm from her nap under the quilt.

  He didn’t wait, or guess. She had come here for something, and he would give it to her.

  He took off his shirt, and dumped her back on the sofa. Kicked off his shoes and hiked down his jeans and shorts. Stood in his living room with his nob pointed at Destiny. Started to put his hands on his hips, even, but he caught her grin, that looked very much like the beginning of a laugh, actually, and crossed his arms over his chest instead.

  Then she laughed, and he laughed, and he started to feel sort of naked, actually, but it didn’t matter, because she was laughing.

  He took a breath and pounced on her, where she was now cross-legged on the sofa. She choked on her laugh, and he mercilessly wrestled her onto her back. Though she went rather willingly, it seemed.

  “What now, Welsh?” Her eyes were back to shining and her lips and cheeks were pink.

  He kept on with decisive action, and held her eyes while he undid the little pearl buttons of her blouse. When it was open, he reached around to unfasten her bra, and she grabbed his wrists and brought his hands back to the front and put his fingers on a little fastener at the front of her bra. “Ah. That’s clever, then.”

  He tried to work the clasp, but his fingers suddenly felt clumsy, and he had to look away from her eyes, and her gaze was what was keeping him grounded, and the room was rather cold, actually.

  “Hefin.”

  He smoothed his hand over her breastbone. Over her belly. “Yeah?”

  “Come here.” She took his shoulders in her hands and tugged until he arranged his body over hers, and they were face-to-face. Her expression was solemn, but her eyes still shined. “I’d like it if you’d kiss me. Would you like to kiss me, Hefin?”

  As an answer, his body relaxed all over and he slid his arms up so he could cradle her face. Kissing Destiny was perfect. She always met him halfway; when they kissed, he’d retreat to breathe, to move over another part of her mouth, and when he came to claim her mouth again, she’d be there.

  This kiss started slow, but then the room warmed again, or his body did. Her foot was caressing his calf restlessly, and when he was so breathless that he had to start in on her neck, just to have a warm and fragrant place to inhale and exhale, her hips bumped up and she was cradling his aching and heavy erection through the thin cotton of her skirt.

  This time, the clasp opened as easily as if it were enchanted. When he dragged his tongue over her nipple, she tipped her head far back into the cushion and pressed her hips against him harder, gently scratched all over his back and shoulders. He spent a long time kissing and licking and sucking at her breasts, light and easy, some teeth, because when he ever so softly bit her there, right under her nipple where the skin of her breast was so rosy and yielding, she near shouted his name.

  He pulled up her skirt, tucked it around her waist. Her panties were pale yellow lace, and he could see her gingery hair through them. He closed his eyes for a minute, but that made the small hold he had on his control less certain because, of course, then his brain was flooded with how good that had looked—her pale skin inside yellow lace panties and an auburn shadow between her legs.

  He opened his eyes to look at her. “If I ask you to keep those on while we …” He looked up at the ceiling like the answer to his paraphilia would be hanging there like a chandelier.

  She laughed. Grabbed his face and kissed him, dirty and slow. Then she was terrible, because she reached between her legs and stretched the lace over, revealing just her sex. “Like this?” she whispered.

  He kissed her forehead, grabbed her knee. “I’m a pervert,” he whispered back.

  “Yeah, you are.” She made it all even worse by stroking him, soft and light in just that way that made him so mad. “I like it.”

  “Would you like to …?” He kissed her cheek. The freckles under her right eye, which were denser than the crop under her left.

  “Yes. I would like to.”

  “Oh.” He sat up on his knees, meaning to reach for his jeans where he’d stuffed the condom box, but forgot what he was doing when he saw her there, laid out, her blouse and bra open, her skirt around her waist, her panties pulled aside. She looked—fantastic. Receptive and beautiful and gorgeously filthy.

  “You’re so crazy hot,” she said. She reached up and ran her hand along his thigh.

  “What are you doing?”

  He thought about it. “Right. Condoms.”

  She propped herself up like she would get away. “Do we need to change venue? I can …”

  “No. I mean, if you want, we can. But, actually, don’t move. Stay just like that. It’s okay. I actually got some condoms when I picked up the pizza.” Hefin was completely starkers, so there was no hope of hiding the blush he could feel rising somewhere from the middle of his chest and setting his ears on fire.

  So he ignored himself, always a good instinct, and leaned over and pulled the crushed box of condoms from his jeans pocket.

  Destiny reached for his hand and pulled him back over her. It felt so good to feel her skin against his. So he just put his arms around her and she, thankfully, put her arms around him.

  Then he reached around to put his hand around her nape and hold her even closer. He could feel his heart beating in his chest, slow and glad.

  “I want you to know that you’re wonderful, Hefin Thomas.”

  He held her tighter.

  He wanted her to know all kinds of things. He wanted to know all kinds of things about her. He wanted the world to be impossibly small. So small only the both of them fit inside it. Except. A small world would take the world away from both of them, and Destiny was Destiny because the world and her people existed all around her.

  What he really wanted was to see the world with her. He wanted to show her the noodle house where he ate breakfast every morning in Beijing. He wanted to sit in a sailboat with her in the harbor that looked back at his town.

  He wanted to walk down the streets of her neighborhood, the one she grew up in, and learn who lives in all the little houses and hear their stories.

  He wanted to know what it was to live beside another and still know who you were. He wanted to know who he was, and to know who his beloved was, and still weave his legs in with hers at the end of every day and make love sideways. Facing the other. He wanted the world where that was possible. He wanted the passport.

  He wanted.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Destiny wanted to laugh, and though she didn’t think Hefin minded so much how she was prone to giggle over him, she restricted herself to smiling into his neck.

  She looked over at the smooshed box of condoms next to her arm and had to breathe through her nose to keep from laughing.

  Strawberry.

  She came here to push her worries to the margins of her brain. To stop counting breaths in her head. Instead, she got dinner. Tea with so much sugar she felt she should talk to him about diabetes. That huge, huge space around herself that he expected her to fill with her thoughts and worries, with herself.

  The space he made for her was still uncomfortable. She was accustomed to small houses, big families, front stoops, peering neighbors, an older brother and sister who took over conversations, took over everything, and a younger brother who lived in her shadow.

  He looked at
her with a focus that sharpened all of her blurring edges into something that made her feel—all by herself. Not lonely, though, more like she wasn’t accountable to anyone but herself. Like she could barrel through the world the same way her big brother Sam did, asking forgiveness later instead of ever wasting time on permission.

  She was starting to realize there was a lot going on with Hefin. Much more than some sad bastard who got divorced and couldn’t get a job and was going home to mom and dad. In her world, honestly, those things were pretty much par for the course for any man over the age of thirty.

  She didn’t have her head completely around it, but it had something to do with why his apartment looked like some kind of sterile model home except for that battered, linoleum-topped kitchen table.

  “Hefin?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Have you always lived here?”

  He stilled. But she just squeezed him harder. Now something was starting to come into focus for her. “This was your place with Jessica, huh?”

  “It was.”

  “You don’t have to talk about it. I don’t think there’s really any reason to. You know what though?”

  “No, I don’t know.”

  “I mean, this is rich, coming from me, the woman showing up at your place and talking you out of your clothes, but Jesus Henry, Hefin, I kind of get the sense things were a bit more impossible for you than was exactly fair.”

  He stiffened even more, and she smiled. She could feel his defense of Jessica rising up from his toes. She rubbed over his shoulders and kissed his neck. Dang, he was the sweetest man.

  He huffed around pretending not to be, that forehead wrinkle of his bisecting the middle of his forehead like his thoughts were so heavy they were going to crack his skull right open, but here he was, in the arms of a woman whom he had fed and kissed and touched and gotten all hot and bothered, and he was still looking for a way to defend his ex-wife.

  She supposed some women might be bothered by that, but when you grew up getting crazy angry at the same people you would fight to the death over on the playground, the rules were probably a little different.

  Lacey had to physically restrain herself from getting back together with her ex even though he was a Pure Organic Grade A Shitheel simply because the news would occasionally get back to her that he defended her honor with his fists after getting drunk at the local bar.

  Hefin was a good man, is what Des was thinking. Didn’t mean his wife didn’t deserve to be taken to task, though.

  “I just mean, what were you supposed to do, exactly?”

  “We could talk about this later.”

  She smiled again. “Yeah, okay. Raise up.” She pushed on his shoulders.

  He braced himself above her on his forearms, and holy crap, that was hot. She couldn’t look at his forearms straight on without making a mess of her underwear, as it was. She realized she should tell him that, sometime, just to see what he would do—look down at the floor and stammer, probably. Right before he asked her if he could see exactly what she was talking about.

  “So.”

  He squinted at her. She wiggled up against him. It was insane, but he still had a hard-on. She was going to have to take him to the emergency room if she didn’t do something about it.

  So instead of wasting any more breath on talking, she kissed him. She had been thinking, all week, about that moment he had brought her close to his body, their legs woven all together, and then slid inside, full and stretching and so completely hers. Almost like she was inside him, too.

  She wanted to feel that again.

  He kissed back. Deep and licking, and she could feel him cross over the boundary, away from his own thoughts in that kiss. It was almost as satisfying a sensation as feeling that first push inside, when she literally could make him lose his mind.

  He used his braced arms to rock his body over hers, just to slide their skin together, then he was holding himself on one arm and using the other to reach between her spread legs and stretch her panties the rest of the way over and glide his big fingers through her.

  She moved away from his kiss so she could really feel it—everything he wanted from her body. She wanted to sink into the pleasure of just being a body, hot and half-clothed and writhing. When his mouth was at her breasts again, she was suddenly pushed to the very, very edge of an orgasm she didn’t want, not yet, not until she could bring it back up from almost the bottom, when she didn’t think she could, but then some thrust or stroke forced it big and sharp and dangerous.

  “Wait,” she whispered, or maybe she didn’t, but he stopped. She scrambled for the condoms, and he sat up and took them from her. Took a moment to rub through her folds again, then he hesitated for just a moment, and she thought Oh God, he’s going to do something just awful, and he did; he grasped her clit with two fingers, and caught her eyes and looked right into them while he pinched her there, just a slow, wet, and unbearable pressure, and she tried to say something, but moaned, moaned in a way that if she wasn’t being made totally crazy would be sort of embarrassing.

  Then he let go, eased away, and it was like she was in the middle of a marathon, gasping, her pulse the fact of every movement. He said, “shhh,” and rested his palm over her mons, pressed gently. And it helped. Sort of.

  Not even a little bit.

  He started opening the box, and when he saw what he had purchased, the look on his face, even on the very freaking edge of coming all over herself, it was so priceless, she couldn’t help it. She giggled.

  “Um,” he said.

  “Problem?” She giggled again.

  He closed his eyes, slow and tortured. She let him off the hook, took the box from him, opened up the condom, redolent with the smell of popsicles and bright pink besides. “Destiny …”

  She grinned, rolling it on, his breath coming faster, his eyes still closed. “Well that looks—awesome.”

  He didn’t bother looking but came back over her, silencing her giggling with kissing.

  Then his hand was over her again, and the head of his penis hot and perfect. She reached down too, tipped her hips up, grabbed onto his waist to control the speed of his slide. The elastic of her underwear pushed and dragged into some unexplainable and teasing position over her clit.

  And all at once, she was overcome with the inside-her-inside-him feeling again. She eased up to look, to look at them together like that, and he was looking, too.

  It looked good. Her yellow panties and his pink condom made it all decorated in springtime hotness.

  She laughed, but it got mixed up with coming suddenly, when he curved his hips back and arched back into her, deep and grinding.

  Easy to laugh with this serious and brooding man, who was laughing, too.

  Easy to find his arms to grip around her when she needed something, bad, to hang on to.

  Easy to be.

  To live.

  For a while after, after laughing again when he took off the condom, after long minutes of just breathing hard, they held each other. Maybe drifted into half sleep, until she realized that her skin was sticking to his. She peeled herself back and kissed his jaw. “How you doing?”

  “I believe I’m doin’ well, thank you.” His accent was heavily slurred over his speech.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “I won’t recover.”

  She bent over and grabbed the quilt. It was beautiful, woven with intricate geometric shapes in bright colors. She pulled it over them. “I like this blanket.”

  “Welsh.”

  “The blanket?”

  “Yes. It’s traditional. They’re milled all over Wales.”

  “You seem pretty traditional. In the Wales sense of things. You know the language. You carve—I looked up Welsh carving on the Internet, by the way. You know, the blanket. Your return home.”

  He was quiet. Then he breathed in, slowly. He got up, but it was just to sit sideways on the sofa, bring her between his knees so her back was to his chest, his arms around her.<
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  “Never thought of myself as such. Perhaps. My parents are, for sure, like I’ve said. Mum teaches Welsh to the wee ones at school, has a group that makes traditional garb to wear at festivals.” He laughed. “You should see the hats the women wear.”

  “What do they look like?”

  He played with her hair and told her about Wales. When he talked about his mom’s festivals, and his dad’s sailboat, and the sticky toffee pudding at the inn’s restaurant, his accent dipped and burred like he was singing it. She could see all the rainbow colors of the buildings facing the harbor, the quiet salt creeks, the half-moon window in his childhood room in his voice. He spoke slowly, one memory triggering another, until his fingers in her hair grew still and his words whispered away.

  In the dark room, she turned in his arms and watched him sleep. She counted his breaths and he breathed the exact normal amount, over and over. His lashes were curled, and his skin was decorated with small moles here and there—like tiny drops of ink. His top lip was swollen from kissing, and she inched her head the two inches between them on the sofa cushion and kissed it, very softly. His whiskers were blue-black and thick except where there was a little missing circlet of them along the blade of his jaw. She touched it with her finger, the skin soft.

  He hadn’t been home for so long, and yet he knew it, as well as she knew her own neighborhood and the people in it.

  Here, Hefin was of a kind not ordinarily encountered—his pretty accent and big hands and quiet endeared. At home, though, he had people.

  People who understood how he had grown and lived, and what’s more, he called Wales home. At home, he’d said, my mum never makes toffee pudding because the inn’s is so good. He’d lived here for years, long enough, she’d found out, that he had permanent residency. He believed that if he’d stay married, to his ex-wife, to Jessica, he’d have taken the citizenry test.

  He hadn’t stayed married, though, or become a citizen. Or, she thought, looking around, really made a home here at all. She thought about that first day they’d spent the lunch hour alone in the park, how she had told him she could see her whole life from the spot that they sat and how he had understood that.