As he knelt on the bed between her legs, his rigid, heavy cock bouncing, she grinned. “You look good, love.”
He grinned back—that beautiful, cocky as hell, lopsided smirk that she adored. “You, too, baby. I love your strong, fuckin’ gorgeous body, and…damn.” He pushed his hands under her ass and lifted her hips high as he bent down and, without preamble, shoved his face hard against her pussy.
“Oh, God! Isaac! Fuck!”
He sucked and bit, and licked and rubbed, his beard brushing against her thighs and over her clit, while he made a constant, rolling growl that vibrated against her most sensitive skin. She flexed and arched, reaching down to hold his head hard to her, grinding herself on him.
Gasping, he pulled back just enough to mumble, with his lips on her flesh, “Baby, I forgot. I thought I remembered, I thought about it every fucking day, but I forgot how fucking good you taste. Fuck, Lilli. How could I have forgotten this?”
She opened her eyes to see him staring at her from between her legs. She was so close, but she answered, dredging up the ability to speak from the far reaches of her head. “It’s okay. You won’t forget again. We’ll never forget anything about each other again.”
He nodded and focused his mouth again on her clit. He bit down on the meat around it and sucked, his tongue moving rapidly over the bud. He hadn’t forgotten that.
Sensation exploded right there and sent long, sparking tracers of ecstasy through every nerve, every vein, every tendon and muscle and cell of her body. “ISAAC! YES! GOD, YES!” she screamed, and then he dropped her and pulled the full length of his body up and over hers, plunging his perfect cock deep into her core. They had not needed birth control since Bo’s birth, which her womb had not survived.
The move kept her at her peak, and she gritted out through her clenched teeth and taut throat, “Fuck me, Isaac. I need it hard. Fuck me hard. Make me remember.”
He hooked a massive arm around her thigh, pulling it high up near her chest. “Hard as you want it, baby,” he growled, then tucked his head to her shoulder and clamped down on her with his teeth as he slammed his body into hers.
Both of them grunting like animals with every savage thrust, this fuck wouldn’t last long. But Lilli was so enthralled by the filling, brutal glory of his cock pistoning inside her that she didn’t need long to go a second time. Just the experience of his body on hers again, at long last—the hair on his chest, his arms, his legs, scratching against her bare skin, against her nipples, between her legs—just that was enough to have her throbbing and drenched, but his cock, so scalding hot and solid, hitting her deep with every grunting plunge, brought her so high she wasn’t quite sure how they were still on the bed. They had somehow found a new level of ecstasy.
Isaac released his teeth from her neck and groaned. “I gotta go, baby. Fuck, that’s it.”
She nodded and picked up her own pace, flexing her hips as hard and fast as she could, countering his frantic thrusts. As she came, she bit down on his shoulder, tasting his blood, clutching her hands over his back. Then, as her release exploded, his did, too, and he yelled incoherently and drove deep.
Isaac dropped his weight onto her, and they lay, drenched in sweat, silent and perfectly still, except for their uneven, desperate breaths. He was inside her yet, beginning to soften. She felt his full weight, his whole body. Lilli wanted never to leave this position again in her life.
But finally, he lifted up onto his elbows and looked down at her. “Hi, Sport.”
“Hi, you.”
“I fuckin’ love you.”
“Stay with me, then.” With her fingertips, she traced the scarring across this throat, and then lifted her hand and brushed it over his perfect face, lined now with care and hardship. He had been through so much.
He turned into her touch and kissed her palm. “I’m not goin’ anywhere.”
~oOo~
They stayed in bed together for another hour or so, touching and talking, renewing their memories of each other’s body, and then they joined the party that was being thrown in Isaac’s honor. He kept Lilli close for the couple of hours they stayed. Then, when she told him that she’d arranged for Gia and Bo to spend the night with Uncle Show and Aunt Shannon and Millie and Joey, Isaac kissed his children, hugged his friends, and led Lilli to his bike. They rode back to their home, Lilli wrapped as tightly around him as she could get.
He took the long way.
~oOo~
In the middle of the night, Lilli woke surrounded by Isaac. Her back to his chest, his thighs tucked behind hers, his arms coiled around her, his face in her hair on the pillow behind her. She opened her eyes and, in the bright light of the moon and stars beaming in through their bedroom window, saw, before anything else, his arm crossed protectively, possessively over her chest. The ink on his forearm: L’amor che muove il sole e l’altre stelle. And her name. Gia’s name. Bo’s name.
He was home.
They were whole.
She nudged her head forward and pressed her lips to the ink. At the touch, taste, smell of his skin, feeling surrounded and safe, feeling not alone for the first time in seven and a half years and overwhelmed with relief and love, Lilli began to weep. As the tears came, they came freely, a dam inside her giving way. She pressed her face to his arm, her own hands coming up to clutch him, and she cried years-old tears.
Isaac woke as soon as her tears came, but he didn’t try to stop them. He simply tightened his grip on her, and allowed her the comfort of his body, his presence. As she began to find the bottom of the reservoir of sadness, the full expression of which she had denied herself so that she could find a way to go on without him, Lilli felt his mouth on her shoulder. He kissed a line to her neck, then up. With his lips on her ear, his whispered, “I promise.”
She moaned at that, and fresh tears started. When she flexed backward, needing to be even closer, more surrounded, needing to be connected, to be one, to be indivisible—he pushed his thigh between hers with a feral grunt, and then, when she kicked her leg over his hip, he shoved his cock, steely and ready, into her.
It was exactly what she’d needed, and she cried out even as she wept. As they flexed and thrust and surged together, he kept up a steady whisper in her ear, like an incantation, a spell of protection against any trials of the future.
I promise. I promise. I promise. IpromiseIpromiseIpromiseIpromiseIpromise.
~oOo~
Kodi didn’t remember Isaac, and he had not yet decided whether he approved of the giant man who was not Showdown in his house. He clearly he did not approve of said giant man in his mistress’s bedroom, or of the fact that the bedroom door had been closed between him and her all night.
Because Lilli had accepted Isaac, Kodi was torn, watchful but not overtly aggressive. Still, whenever Isaac came near, the dog growled—just low, not quite a warning, more of an assertion. Lilli could see Isaac’s hurt at the dog’s suspicion. The two had been close when Kodi was a pup—he’d been more Isaac’s dog than anyone’s. On top of that loss, Kodi was labeling him a stranger in the house Isaac had literally been born in.
So, in the morning, home again after they’d made an early, quick ride back to the clubhouse for her truck, while Isaac took a shower, Lilli took Kodi out for a short run, hoping that paying some attention to the dog and wearing him out, while leaving Isaac in the house to be there when they got back, might realign his canine thinking. He was getting old and didn’t have the stamina for long runs anymore, but he could do a couple of miles. Then he’d probably crap out and be too tired not to give Isaac a chance.
Lilli realized that she was conniving to get both her son and her dog to love the man they’d once loved fiercely, and she knew Isaac was just as keenly aware of that as she was. She couldn’t imagine what it must be like for him to rejoin a life that had moved on without him.
When they got back, Kodi dropped, exhausted, to the rug in the front hall, and Lilli went looking for Isaac. She found him in their bedroom, sitting
on their bed, dressed only in jeans, his long, thick hair—still dark, but now threaded with grey, like his beard—loose and wet from his shower, spread over his bare back and hanging over his broad shoulders. He was deeply engaged in what he was doing and didn’t hear her approach. She took a couple of beats and just basked in the sight of him. Her man. Her beautiful, beautiful, strong, magnificent man.
Then she realized what had him so transfixed, and her heart fell to the floor.
He had her nightstand drawer out and on the bed, and he was reading the pages of letters she had not sent.
Seven and a half years’ worth of pain and loss and fear that had been too great and encompassing to burden him with.
“Isaac, no. Don’t.”
He raised his head at her voice and turned his stricken eyes to hers. “Lilli. God, baby. My God.”
ISAAC
I’m so lonely, Isaac. The pain of it is physical. It’s like all my muscles and organs and veins are full of rocks. Sharp, gouging rocks. I don’t know how to keep going.
and
Gia and I added pages to her calendar book today. She was stoic and brave, but God, her eyes.
and
I’m not enough. I can’t be enough for Bo and Gia both. He needs too much, and she lets me put her aside for him. I let her let me, because it’s too much, and I’m not enough.
and
Today was the day we first thought you’d come home. This is the worst day so far. By far. This day seemed so far away once. Now it’s here, but you’re still gone, and the days ahead without you just seem infinite.
and
I can’t do it.
and
I can’t do it.
and
I can’t do it.
And so much more. Page after page after page of pain, desolation, inadequacy, disappointment.
Isaac had come out of the shower to find Lilli and Kodi still gone and, feeling disoriented in his own bedroom—in his own house, his own town, his own life—he had started reacquainting himself. This room had seemed like a good place to start, the one he shared only with Lilli. There were changes, but not too many. New curtains—the ‘new’ cats, when they had been kittens, had torn the old ones up. A couple of knickknacks from the kids. A television on top of his dresser. He’d been looking for a remote when he’d come across the drawer full of the scented purple paper he loved so much. That drawer was chock full of the paper, all of it covered in Lilli’s handwriting. He’d seen his name on a top page and had pulled it out.
And then he’d fallen into a heaving, vicious vortex of guilt and sorrow.
She was there now, watching him, her face pale and stricken.
“Isaac, no. Don’t.”
His heart felt like it had been sliced open and spread wide. “Lilli. God, baby. My God.”
She walked over and tried to take the page from his hands. He let her. She gathered all the pages he’d taken out and read, and she put them neatly back in the drawer, then slid the drawer into its slot in her nightstand.
“I’m so sorry, Lilli. I don’t—I…” He let the sentence die. No words were worthy of the regret he felt.
She sat next to him on the side of the bed and took his hand. “It doesn’t matter. You’re home. That matters.”
Turning his hand and linking fingers with her, he pulled her onto his lap. She laid her head on his shoulder. “Your strength has always amazed me. You are a warrior, Sport.”
She smiled sadly and scoffed, a quiet, gentle sound without bite. “Not anymore.”
With a tug on her ponytail, he brought her head back up and looked into her eyes. “You are. I think you still know it’s true, even if you forgot. My life turned your life to shit, but you made it into something. You stuck it out and raised our kids and ran business and kept everything going.”
“Isaac, I’d say you had a harder sentence than I did.” She brushed her fingertips over the scar across the bridge of his nose, made by a guard’s baton, and then over another scar, in the corner of his forehead, earned in the stalls. “Wouldn’t you?”
“My choices, though. I made the choices you had to live. My life turning yours to shit.”
Something altered in her eyes then. They went hard, and she pushed off his lap and crossed the room.
Standing in front of her dresser, she muttered, “Don’t be an asshole, Isaac.”
Still reeling with guilt, he couldn’t comprehend the change in her, but he couldn’t tolerate the thought of her anger with him so soon. Every moment of their connection was precious. He stood and followed, standing directly behind her, his hands reaching for her hips.
“Lilli. I don’t understand.”
“It’s not your life and my life. It’s our life. Just one life. I’m not some fucking passenger in your life.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Yeah, it is. When I chose you, I chose all your choices, too. And vice fucking versa.”
He took her arm and turned her to face him. “You can’t tell me you haven’t been angry.”
Again, that stony chill in her lovely eyes. When she spoke, her voice had the sharp edge it got just before she erupted, and Isaac was surprised at his reaction to that sound—excitement. Pleasure. Arousal. He hadn’t seen fire like this in her in a long, long time, and it made his heart pick up and his cock stretch out.
She hit his chest with the heel of her hand, mostly for effect, he thought, but with some pop. “Yes, I’ve been angry!” She hit him again, harder. “I’ve been so packed with rage for so long that my soul feels stretched out of shape. I’m sagging with rage.” And again. “But not at you. For this, never at you. It would have been easier to be angry at you. That’s focus.” Again. “It would have been easier to be angry at myself. Something”—another hit—“I could take it out on. But there’s been nothing. Nothing.” Both hands, now, hard enough to make him grunt, but if she’d been trying to hurt him, she could have. “NOTHING.” The next hit had force enough to push him back a step, and then her eyes changed again, and Isaac knew that one of two things would happen next, and that his move would determine which. All of this was blessedly, intimately, fantastically familiar. He made a choice.
Moving fast, he shot his arm out just as she was winding up to hit him again, and he grabbed her ponytail. It was damp from her run, and his cock swelled more. God, he loved the smell of her after a run. So real, so hot, all woman and exertion and badass power. His hand around the long, thick fall of hair, he jerked her forward and crushed her mouth under his, shoving his tongue deep.
The heels of her hands dug into his chest at first, and then slid roughly up over his shoulders until her fingers snarled in his wet hair and pulled hard, toward her. She let out a breath like a growl, and he shoved his free hand into her tiny black running shorts and between her legs.
He flashed to the first time they’d ever fucked. She’d been dressed just like this, in little running shorts and a tight, midriff-baring running top. He’d been waiting for her, on the redwood porch of the old Olsen place. He’d known only her name and the way her mouth tasted, the way her ass felt cupped in his hands. She’d come back from a run around town, causing a commotion. And they’d fucked harder than he ever had before in his life. She’d been as ferocious and insatiable as he.
Fourteen years ago. More than half their life together had now been spent apart.
They had some making up to do.
He took his hand out of her shorts, loving her visceral whine of disappointment, and instead yanked her top up, breaking their kiss to get it over her head. As he did so, she toed off her shoes. He bent then and took a breast into his mouth, suckling her, drawing energy from her writhing, arcing body, the way her hands tangled again in his hair and held him to her.
His head rocked with caroming sensations and emotions. Ever since he’d come out of the bus station, he’d been in a constant state of hyper-stimulation, the world and its people so much brighter and busier, so different and unpredictable
. His world had been grey and brown for so long. For more than seven years, he’d lived a life a near-perfect routine, ruled entirely by counts and clocks, his sense of himself and the world constantly balanced on the sharpest edge. He’d been driven always by the need to both stand out and blend in at all times. To be someone who was not noticed but who was also acknowledged and respected. Keeping his memories of his real life and the emotions that went with them fresh and close without allowing them to drive him into madness. Becoming hard enough to survive the life inside without killing the things that made him the man who belonged in the life outside.
The perpetual and simultaneous denial and assertion of self.
His whole life had been driven by the need to get to the next minute. The next hour. Day. Week. Month. Year.
And now he was back in his real life. With friends and family who had spent those seven and a half years doing more than merely growing older.
And right now, right this second, his wife’s breast was in his mouth, and her hands were in his hair, and his fingers were inside her again, and he could see and taste and feel and smell and hear her, and she was beautiful and sweet and soft and earthy and moaning and real. She was real, and she was his, and he was with her.
When he bit down and sucked hard, she yelped and gasped, “I need your cock. Isaac, your cock. Your cock, your cock.” His mind stopped thinking and let instinct and need take over.
He spun her around and pushed her to the bed, yanking her shorts down and then shoving her forward. She fought him and stayed standing, then shimmied all the way out of her shorts and climbed up to kneel on the bed as he ripped open his jeans and pulled himself free.
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