by Meli Raine
Where having Lily receive pleasure is my only mission.
“Oh,” she rasps as I move, seeking a pattern, a rhythm, whatever she likes.
Then I replace my fingers with my mouth.
I expect her to hesitate. To demur. Most women do. They feel embarrassed for wanting this, as if receiving pleasure from a tongue, from hands that slide under their bodies–pulling them forward, toward, around–is above and beyond.
What's above and beyond is the privilege of being given permission.
Lily, though, doesn't hold back. Doesn't question. Doesn't turn shy.
She moves closer to me.
Opening herself up, she runs her hands over my head, my short hair wet, the movement more sensitive than usual. Hips rising, she seeks me out. Guides me. I palm her ass and take pleasure in her taste, my erection straining hard against the bedcover, my body in a state of flow. Focused solely on her, I pour my soul into memorizing the curve and curl of her until I slip one, two fingers inside, wishing it were more.
Wishing I could fill her with me.
When I have condoms.
Next time.
There will be a next time.
“Oh, God,” she moans above me, her fingers going tight, one hand on my shoulder now. My spare hand goes up to find hers, the clench mirroring what's going on inside her, walls clamping down as I work to make her come. Mastery takes time, but Lily makes it easy.
Her orgasm is right there, ripe and ready.
“I haven't–it's been so long–this is, ohhh.” Splintering her words with a sharp inhale that cuts her voice in two, sliced by a rush of heat deep in her core, followed by her hips moving fast against me, I track her, giving her all the control as she comes and comes, free and unbidden by me.
With me.
How does she surrender like this?
How does she trust like this?
Wave after wave pours out of her until she stops, closing her thighs enough to send me a message. I stop. I wait.
I get ready to give her even more.
Rewinding time is outside of my wheelhouse. I can't do that.
But I can do more of this.
Abruptly, she stops me, pulling back with a smile, then moving to me, up on her knees like me.
The wrap of her hand around me makes me hiss.
“Your turn,” she whispers, head going down as I bend back, palms flat, body more than ready.
My journey is much simpler, her hands and mouth bringing me straight to the edge, nearly tipping over in seconds. Ending this quickly isn't what I want, but she's so damn fine. The perfect storm of smarts, perseverance, toughness, and beauty.
And naked. Can’t forget the gloriously naked part.
One hand's around the base of me, stroking up as her mouth performs sweet magic. The other hand moves up my abs, covering more terrain, just touching me for the sheer fact that she can.
I love that she can.
“Lily, I–” My pulse is between my legs now, in her mouth, clasped in her hand as I come, pouring myself into her, my own surprise turning to raw delight as she doesn't move, every nerve at attention, getting the full range of satisfaction. Her mouth is an indulgence, a refuge, a safe harbor–
It's fucking amazing.
When I'm done, I move over her, curling her body under mine, flat on her back.
She looks up at me like I'm the moon.
I kiss her like she's the stars, all of them in the universe, shining white-hot light just for me.
I bite her earlobe, half joking, half maniacal. “Next time, Lily, it won't be like that.”
“Like what?”
“So fast.”
Laughter moves her breasts against my bare chest. “No one's complaining here, Duff.”
Call me Sean, I want to say, stung by the reversion.
But I don't.
We crawl under the covers and I yawn, close my eyes, reach for her–
and that's all I remember.
Chapter 23
I’m standing in front of The Thorn Poke, doing my job. The streets are loud, the shop at an intersection with a light. The walk signal changes, the beep-beep-beep of the auditory warning system a monotony I’ve learned to tune out.
My earpiece crackles, but no one speaks.
My cellphone weighs heavy on the cotton seam of my pants pocket. The heat is just strong enough to make me start to sweat under my suit. It’s a warm day, but a dark, grey cloud forms off in the distance, above the treetops a few streets over. I see it only because it forms a thin, black line, too sharp and distinct to be a normal weather event.
Straightening as I stand on tiptoe, calves flexing, skin rolling into high alert, I arch my back and look everywhere. Peering towards the cloud, I watch as it balloons, puffing up like a marshmallow in a microwave, like dough rising, the yeast doing its job.
Clouds shouldn’t do this.
Soon the sun is blocked out, darkness taking over, the dull grey making it hard to see. A cool breeze begins. The edges of the old, wood-framed windows of the flower shop start to rattle.
Oddly enough, I don’t feel the breeze. The wind doesn’t move the hair on my skin. My eyes aren’t dry.
My body feels nothing.
A car drives along the road, staying on the right side of the yellow line. It stops at the red light, idling. Seconds pass as I look around. I notice the normalcy, parsing distances between two objects, evaluating whether the surreal sense I experience is just me or something more.
I look in the front window of The Thorn Poke, knowing full well that Lily and Jane are in the back. The perimeter has been checked, secured. I have no reason to think that today will be any different from other days.
Heightened security for Jane Borokov is my job. Vigilance is a tool, but when the dark cloud forms, funnels that move swiftly down into each and every car, prying open the lips of the drivers and entering them, turning people into dust and ash, I sprint into the flower shop, ripping the door off its hinges, the wind carrying it into the sky.
“Lily!” I scream. “Jane!”
But the room is empty, the flowers gone, arrangements vanished. The bank of coolers doesn’t exist.
I’m in a warehouse the size of a football field. I look up. There’s no ceiling.
It’s all dark abyss.
No stars, no light.
No hope.
“Jane!” I shout again. No response.
When faced with the impossible, I do the only thing I can.
I run.
I run as the black clouds turn into hair, thick and wavy, flowing down like a curtain. The roots are the sky, the tendrils brushing against me dry and silky, like a spider’s web.
I run through one more curtain until suddenly I’m back at The Thorn Poke, the greenery lush and abundant, the flowers vibrant and colorful. I take one step and squish into a puddle of viscous fluid, looking down, finding red. Lily’s body is splayed on the floor, her head on the concrete, the blood pooling and congealing.
I look up. Romeo comes in through the side door. A single red rose petal peeks out under the black sole of his shoe. He looks at me without so much as a glance at the body on the floor and asks, “What happened to Jane?”
A chill covers my skin as I sit up in bed, heart pounding, the dream visceral and real. My breath comes out in small pants, spurts of air that purge me of unconscious emotion. It’s as if the carbon dioxide in my lungs has a chemical component that attaches itself to feelings I just can’t store anymore.
I breathe, and breathe, and breathe, as if Lily’s life depends on it.
“Duff?” she says, sleepy, her body warm next to mine. I’m sitting up, naked. We’re under the covers. She’s in a t-shirt, the same one she put on after her shower. The one we took off together. How did it get back on her body?
Did I imagine the sex?
I sniff. No. I smell like her. Taste like her.
The only dream I had was that nightmare.
The sex was, thank God, very re
al.
She goes from confused to panicked in a space of time too quick for her to have any real sense of judgment.
“What’s wrong?” she says in a high, reedy voice, so close to a shriek I can feel her vocal cords scraping against my inner ear.
“Nothing. It was just a dream. Go back to sleep.”
“You’re shaking,” she says, touching my bicep. I haven’t had a woman touch my bare skin in a very long time, but I know damn well my reaction has nothing to do with that.
“I’m just cold,” I lie.
“Then get back under the covers,” she urges me.
The familiarity throws me off. The dream was too weird. The surprise of waking up with her in bed with me, the vulnerability of last night’s conversation, it all mixes together to leave me too unbounded.
I need clear edges around all of the pieces of me.
“Duff,” she says softly. “You asked me to trust you.” Searching eyes meet mine. “I need you to do the same.”
“It was just a dream,” I insist, the repetition a confession. I know it, and she knows it. But with Lily, all those hard edges are blurring in a way that feels freeing.
I fight it. I do. If I were one unified man whose base components were all in agreement about the path forward, I could click into robot mode and shut this conversation down.
But I'm not.
A drop of sweat starts a lonely journey from the base of my collarbone down my chest, pooling at my belly button. Lily watches it, entranced.
The sound of our breath is all I can hear. If all of the pieces of me were in agreement, I wouldn’t be here, half naked, sweating, debating whether to tell her what my subconscious just reminded me of.
“I can’t believe I missed it,” I admit. Feels like I just handed her my brain, pulsing and dripping.
Or maybe that's my heart.
“Missed what?”
She sits up, but stops touching me, leaning forward on her knees, giving me her full attention. Her hair must have still been a little damp when she fell asleep. It’s flat against one side of her head, curled and disheveled on the other. The rumpled look suits her.
For some reason it makes it easier to talk.
“I had a dream about Romeo and you.”
“Romeo and me? What about us?”
“About the day he shot you.”
“Oh.”
That single syllable has more emotion in it than a thousand words.
“What about that day? You dreamt about it?”
“I… yes.” My words are halting. “It was a combination of a regular crazy dream and reality.”
“You remembered something that you’d forgotten?” she asks.
“Something like that.”
“What was it?”
“I–I’m not sure it’s important,” I stammer. “But at the end of the dream we were at The Thorn Poke. You were on the ground. You had just been shot. Romeo came running in from the side door.” I close my eyes and remember the moment. “He ran in through the side door, and the first words out of his mouth were ‘What happened to Jane?’”
“And?” she asks, clearly expecting more out of me.
“Why would he ask what happened to Jane when it was you on the floor and Jane was behind us, screaming?”
Her eyes go wide. “Oh, God.”
I beat my fist against the mattress twice. Damn it, I missed it. I’ve known that all this time.
I close my eyes and remember what Romeo looked like that day. “He had a rose petal on the bottom of his shoe. How the hell did he get a rose petal if he was on his way for a shift change, coming in to work?”
“We don’t do roses through the side door,” she says to me. “Only through the back.”
“Exactly. This is what I mean. I missed it. I missed all of this.”
“Duff, it’s… it’s… they’re small details.”
“The details matter. Details are life and death in this business, and I missed these two.”
“You had no reason to suspect him.”
“Lily, I have every reason to suspect everybody. That’s how this life works.”
“I thought that’s how this business works.”
“Business, life. They’re all the same.”
“Not for me,” she says in a small voice. Her fingertips graze the stubble on my cheek. “You don’t have to live this way, Sean. No one does.” Our eyes lock. I see a world in hers I rejected a long time ago.
A world where I'm connected to people.
“I like my life just fine,” I lie. That statement wasn't a lie until I got to know her, though.
“Do you? Which life?”
“What?”
“The life with me in it? Or the life without me?”
She's touching me, our gazes locked. A gift is an offering. We take a piece of ourselves–time, money, emotion–and thrust it forward, into the space of the person who takes it.
We hope it connects us.
Her words are a gift. The chance she takes is the offering. What she's giving me is the opportunity to be with her. To share myself with her.
To stop being a wall.
She's finding my door, knocking on it, and asking for an invitation.
“Come here,” I say softly, the words a gift, too.
Lily's arms wrap around me, the closeness its own reward. We drift off to sleep entwined in each other. Words don't matter.
Being present together does.
Chapter 24
The gym is the best place to get out all your ugly emotions. Especially when it’s your job not to have any of them.
We’re back in California, Alice Mogrett’s ranch a recent memory. Once Drew and Silas declared that the ranch wasn’t any better for Lily in terms of safety and comfort, and after Bee made such a stink about Lily’s medical care, we decided to bring her back.
Rhonda is working with her on a balance ball. Other than us, the place is deserted. Clem’s here, but he doesn’t really count.
The goal is for Lily to be able to rest one knee on the large therapy ball and lift five-pound weights with her arms. So far, so good, as I watch them from across the gym in the squat cage, where all I care about is blowing my thighs to smithereens.
Muscles are works of art, but they are also finely tuned machines of science. Enzymes, hormones, and proteins all combine with kinetics to build a tool that can be used at will or an asset that can be destroyed by atrophy and abuse.
Neutrality has its costs.
Never using a tool–for good or evil–means that you never take a risk. Walking right on the line gives you a great deal of safety, but a very narrow existence.
Sweat pours off me like a guilt shower. It feels good. Some baptisms come when we least expect them.
It’s been three days since all the reveals happened back at the ranch. Drew and Silas have initiated deeper investigations, calling on undercover agents and field operatives, and calling in favors.
No one knows much about Romeo. That’s the whole point. We know that there’s no record of his birth. He's in his early thirties. He says he's from Romania. His accent gives that away, which means he didn't leave the country until he was older, probably shortly after puberty set in.
On the other hand, accents can be trained into us for subterfuge. There’s no paper trail on him: he’s stateless. That’s a term of art, one that we use in the field for someone without a document trail.
Stateless operatives are highly coveted. My particular interest in all of this–and the entire reason Alice invited me to work for her–has to do with the stateless.
Romeo has been a person of interest to me since long before this mess. Let's just say it's personal.
He served in the army, which means someone very high up had plans for him, because how do you serve if you don’t exist?
Now he’s working at the White House, hired specifically for that role by President Bosworth, who is either a damn fool or a cunning player at a level way beyond anything Drew has i
magined.
“Yo, Duff!” Rhonda shouts, pitching a lightweight ball my way. I jump and catch it, my t-shirt sticking to my sweat-covered belly.
“Damn, Duff!” old Clem shouts. “Some guys got a six pack. A few got an eight pack. You got a fourteen pack.”
I laugh at him. “How 'bout I give you four of those?”
“Make it six, and you got a deal.”
The guy’s eyes have been turning yellower with every encounter we have at the gym. Rhonda doesn’t say much about him, but I know men like that. I’ve seen them at the VA hospital. They come, they stay, they get their treatment, and then one day they’re just gone.
Guys like Clem make me question my life choices. There’s no room for ambiguity and regret in what I do.
There’s no room for a life, either.
Lily’s wrong about that, what she said back at the ranch three nights ago. Logically, I know she’s wrong. I feel it in my bones, but my heart and my bones don’t agree on this one, and I’m not willing to turn my heart off.
Not when it’s finally been activated.
John, the physician’s assistant who has worked with Lily the most since her discharge from the hospital, comes into the room, his nose wrinkling at the scent. A hot PT room with sweaty patients smells nothing like a clinical ICU ward.
I grab a towel, wipe my face, and join the group where Lily, Rhonda, and John stand in a horseshoe-shaped curl. I catch the end of John’s words as I get closer.
“...we’re worried about stroke at this point,” he says, the words making my already rapid heartbeat zoom through the roof.
“Is it bad?” Lily asks.
“No.” He shakes his head. “You're statistically at no greater risk of stroke than any other traumatic brain injury patient,” he says, laying out his words in a measured tone. “It’s not that you are at greater risk, it’s just that you are at risk. I want to stress this as you two go forward and push for more function,” he says, pointedly looking at Rhonda.
“I don’t want to back off,” Lily interjects. “I’m still not fully functional.”
“You’re damn close,” I argue.