Something fragile and small that contained, in its brilliant center, just us. Nothing else. Outside this bathroom there was nothing. Nothing that mattered.
“I can do this if you—” He reached for the first-aid kit in my lap as I just sat there, silent and wanting. And miserable with all of it.
“No.” I snapped into action. “I’ve got it.” I opened the first-aid kit too hard, and bandages popped out, rolling across the ground. Trails of pink stretchy fabric, leading into the bedroom, coming to a stop against the corner of the bed frame.
We were both staring at them.
“I’ll get those in a second.” I dug through things until I found the antiseptic wipes and some butterfly bandages that would work on the cut over his eye that kept opening. There were also some ice packs that, when cracked open, got cold. I put those on the edge of the sink, leaning past him, my hair up in its bun brushing his chin. My shoulder brushing his.
“Here,” I said, my voice breathless. My whole body breathless. I opened the antiseptic wipes with my teeth, reminded of how he’d opened the condom wrappers last night. Everything, ridiculously, was making me think of sex. Maybe because I could feel the end coming. The moment when he would look at me and it wouldn’t be kindness he felt. It wouldn’t be affection.
But right now, his ears were so red, his face flushed.
He was thinking the same thing. Not about good-bye. But about sex.
That settled me down inside my body. This I knew.
It was everything outside of the sex that had me rattled. It was the feelings and our past and the secrets I was keeping. It was hard just to breathe without any distance.
How were we going to do this and walk away from each other?
I pulled out the damp alcohol pad and pressed it to his forehead, wiping away the dried blood. Refolded the pad to get a clean edge and wiped away more. His breath brushed over my face, smelling like mint and him, and I felt like I could live on that. For a day or two.
We were so close. Closer even than we’d been while having sex last night. Or maybe I just wasn’t distracted, and I looked at his face like I was memorizing it. Fuck. I was memorizing it.
I could see the darker ring of blue around the lightest part of his eye. The whiskers of his beard were a different color blonde than the hair on his head. I put the butterfly bandage over his cut.
He hummed in his throat at the pressure, and I wanted to put my hand to his throat and tell him to do it again, so I could feel it against my body. “Do they hurt?” I asked, pressing lightly on the spot just under his eye that was swollen and smudged.
“A little,” he said. “Not bad.”
Because it was that moment, and because he’d taken care of me for two solid days, and because I felt so much for him I could barely contain it in my body, I leaned up and kissed that spot. Just under his eye.
“How about here?” I asked. My finger, the nail half covered in chipped green nail polish, touched the edge of his mouth, where the skin had been split.
“Beth,” he sighed.
I kissed the corner of his mouth, but as I shifted away, he grabbed my arms.
His hold wasn’t gentle, his fingers bit into my bare skin and I could feel the rough calluses on his fingertips.
“I want…” he breathed, his gaze making tracks over my face like he was memorizing me, too.
“Yes,” I said. And it was all he needed. He pulled me toward him as I threw the first-aid box into the tub behind me, and then I was in his lap, my legs straddling his, my chest against his.
His mouth on mine. I tried to be careful with the cut on his lip, but he didn’t seem interested in careful. He seemed interested in eating me whole. In drinking me in. He was hard between my legs, and I rocked against him, remembering how good he felt inside me.
I loved this moment, this anticipatory moment, this wild, empty thrill inside my body. I loved knowing how perfectly he would fill me. Just the right side of too much.
He stood up, his hands around my butt, my weight in his arms like it was nothing. And I loved that. I loved how my edges met his. And his met mine.
“Take down your hair,” he said against my mouth.
“What?” I breathed, distracted by the rub of my breasts against his chest as he took us into the bedroom.
“Your hair. Take it down.”
“Why?” I asked, kissing him. His lips and his chin and his cheek and the side of his neck. “It’s a mess.”
“Take it down.” He dropped me onto the bed, and I bounced against the mattress. His face as he watched me was hard, his eyes…everything…different.
Tommy the stranger was looking down at me. Unpredictable and strong and wild.
My body went up in flames, my clothes suffocating.
I took down my hair. The black and colored coils fell down around my face. I brushed them back, out of my way just as he pulled down my pants, taking my shoes at the same time. And then it was just me, my underwear and the inside-out howling wolf shirt.
“Your shirt.” He barely had the words out before it and the sports bra he bought me were tossed into the abyss on the other side of the bed.
“What else, Tommy?” I whispered and put my hands over my breasts. The nipples hard against my palms. I liked the way his eyes flared as I cupped my breasts.
“What else would you like to watch?” I asked, tilting my head, lifting my legs. “What else have you imagined over the years that I would do to you? That you would do to me?” I slipped my fingers down my stomach, my skin waking up in goose bumps at the touch of my own hands.
His eyes caught everything, the goose bumps and my fingers. My damp panties. His fingers trembled as they reached out for me, and I liked that. Loved it even. Loved how this stoic, big man shook. For me. And he always had.
This could be the very last time I saw that. The last time he shook for me. Watched me with his impossibly bright eyes. And I suddenly felt determined to make this something he would never forget. Even if he wanted to.
His fingertips, rough and callused, touched one freckle above my breast, another on my sternum, the small group of three just below my rib cage. The birthmark, the size of a thumbprint, at my hip.
And now I was shaking. Like he’d taken a hammer to a dam, I was leaking strength. I was leaking distance. I felt the press of his fingertip against my hip in all directions, in every part of my body. I had this sense, sure and steady and deep in my gut, that I would feel that touch forever in a way. A sensory memory like falling or the taste of Skittles, sunlight on my face on the first great day of spring. I would remember his touch like that—elemental and real.
I sat up, knocking his hands aside, and reached for him. The smooth skin of his stomach was warm under my fingers as I pulled at his belt. The button of his jeans. The cotton of his underwear and finally…
We both gasped as my hand went around him. Thick and long and velvet to the touch.
I shoved his pants down to his ankles, and he cupped my head in his hand in that way I liked.
“Jada,” he said.
“What?”
“That’s…that’s who I need you to be. How I need this to be.”
Oh. That’s how this was going to work. That’s how we were going to survive this. It was why my hair was down. He was fucking Jada, not Beth.
Well, I could sure as hell get behind that.
Jada wasn’t betraying him. Jada wasn’t sick with love and memory.
Jada was clean, pure sex.
I looked up at him through my lashes, leaned forward and licked him, the broad stroke of my tongue over the hard length of him. I licked the tip, watching him the whole time, my tongue wet, my lips wide.
Very Jada.
I took him all the way into my mouth, no warm-up, no teasing. I sucked him down, felt him against the back of my throat, a burn and a stretch.
“Jada,” he breathed, and I slid back and then forward again. Taking him deep every time. Suddenly, like he’d reached some limit, h
e stepped back, his dick red and damp and hard, jutting out in front of him. Obscene. It looked vulgar, more so when he stroked it, watching me watch him. He kicked off his pants. His shoes. Reached into his bag for the condoms and tore one off the strip.
He watched me with eyes that scorched my skin. And I felt all at once just how big he was. And how small I was.
“You want to know what I thought about?” he asked.
I nodded, beyond speech.
“Fucking you,” he said, his words crude. His voice cruder. “Everywhere. All the time.”
My breath shuddered, and my fingers slid down between my legs to the wet spot on my panties. I pushed against my clit, opening my mouth to breathe.
“I thought about that,” he said, watching me touch myself. “I thought about making you come. I thought about you sucking my dick. I watched porn and I jerked off and I thought of you all the fucking time.”
I moaned. He wasn’t even touching me and I could come.
“And I thought it would be better,” he said. “I thought if I fucked you, it would be over, this fever in my blood would be gone. I’d be done with it.”
“But it’s worse,” I said because it was worse for me, too. Wanting him before was an echo compared to what wanting him now was like. It was a knife right through the heart of me.
“It’s so much fucking worse.”
He stepped to the bed with all the power, and I didn’t know if he knew the control he had over me. But then as if to answer me, he grabbed me by the hips, lifting me and flipping me over at the same time. I hit the bed, and my breath whooshed out of me.
“Like this, Jada,” he said, the name a punctuation. A reminder. He popped my hips up, and I felt the bed dip under his weight. “I want to fuck you like this.”
He shoved my underwear aside, and his fingers, rough and blunt, found the wet heat of me. I cried out at his touch. The hard stab of his fingers into me, the wild grip of his hand on my hips.
He exhaled some word, some vulgar assessment of my beauty like this, and I gobbled it up with a spoon. I preened for him, sticking out my ass, stretching my arms out over my head.
“Jada,” he said again, like he was reminding himself. Both of us, maybe. Whatever.
“Fuck me,” I said. “Like this.”
His fingers left my body and I braced myself for the hard push of him into me, but nothing could have prepared me. Really. I put my face into the mattress and screamed as he rammed into me. I was wet and ready and he was still so big. So much.
“Do I need to stop?” he asked, easing out of me.
“Don’t stop,” I gasped. “Don’t fucking stop.”
His hands gripped my hips; his fingertips against the skin of my belly. And I opened myself up to all of it. To the pounding of his body against mine. The pull of my hair when he grabbed it from my neck, pushing it out of the way so he could see the side of my face. All at once I wanted to see his face. I wanted to watch him come, and I scrambled, trying to get away from him, to flip over on my back.
“No,” he said in his stranger’s voice, like he knew I wanted to get back some old connection. Dig up the ties between us and slip them over our heads again. He pushed his hand against my back, flattening me to the bed, and my knees slipped out from beneath me and his stomach was against my back, his cock so far inside of me I could barely move.
“Fuck,” he breathed, like this new position was better by multitudes. “Fuck, oh my God.”
He jerked against me. Random and hard, like he’d lost all rhythm and function.
I was ruining him and I loved it.
“Wait,” I breathed and I shifted my legs inside of his and I squeezed him with my pussy and my thighs and he put his head down on my back.
“I can’t fuck you…like this…oh my God, Jada.”
Jada. Right.
“I’ll fuck you,” I said, and I squeezed and pushed against him, undulating beneath him like waves under a cement dock. He was unmoving and I was nothing but fluid. His mouth was open against my back, my shoulder. I felt him kissing me, breathing. Heat and wet and slick and we were both a mess.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes.” Lifting up on my arms so I could find a new friction. And he took his hands and buried them beneath our bodies, his fingers finding my clit and squeezing it. Pressing down. Pushing and retreating. I fucked him and he fucked me and things would never be the same.
“You are so beautiful,” he said against my shoulder blade, licking the sweat that trickled down my spine. “You’re perfect. You’re so perfect…” His words faded into gibberish, and we were both falling to pieces around each other.
“I’m going to come,” I whispered, and he shifted, kissing my face, the corner of my mouth, my eyes. Every place he could reach.
“Come,” he breathed. “I want to feel it.”
It was like I was a coil that had been pressed down with more and more pressure and it was either explode or break. I held on, I held on for as long as I could, as if it were a dare, as if breaking were the point, and then with utter and ecstatic relief, I exploded.
My cries and gasps and moans were muffled by the mattress where I buried my head. He got one hand out from under us and pushed himself up, and the pressure on my clit was too much and I came again, bringing him with me. Tugging him along in my wake, jerking and moaning and crying my name.
But it was Jada he was crying out.
Even while everything crumbled, he clung to that distance.
And twenty minutes ago I’d admired that, I was thankful even for it; now… the distance stung.
Stupid. You can’t have it both ways.
He fell down beside me, gasping, his chest red and sweaty, his neck splotchy. I caught a bead of sweat as it navigated the swells and dips of his shoulders and biceps, brought it to my lips to taste.
“Are you okay?” he asked, staring at the ceiling.
“Fine.” Between my legs I ached, but not in a bad way. In a way I’d feel for the rest of the day and blush, thinking of what we’d done together. A hot secret, a dark memory.
He turned to face me, and I smiled at him. “Was it as good as you imagined?”
I expected him to smile or his ears to turn pink and red with embarrassment and delight, but none of that happened. His eyes stayed steadfast on mine.
“My imagination when it comes to you?” He shook his head. “It’s never enough. You are always more than I could ever imagine. Always.”
The words bloomed in my chest like flowers. Like rare and precious flowers, and I looked at my skin, feeling like they should be visible, that’s how clearly I felt the sting and beauty of their growth. But my skin was just my skin, freckled and pale.
I sat up, dizzy as blood rearranged itself around my body. “I need to go talk to Peter,” I said.
“Do you want me to come with?”
I shook my head, swallowing back the hysterical laugh that bubbled up from my belly. “No, I need to talk to him on my own first.” Peter was going to be mad. He was going to have a thousand questions, most of which I had no answer for. I didn’t need Tommy to see any of that.
“I need to make a few calls.” I heard the scrape of his hands over his face. “I gotta try and clean up this fucking mess.”
Me too.
“The service out here is really spotty,” I told him. “We get reception when a certain satellite goes overhead, but that’s only a few times a day.”
“Are you kidding?” he asked. “A satellite?”
“Don’t even ask about the Internet,” I joked. “Peter is not a technology fan.”
From the dresser on the far side of the room I pulled out some of the clothes I’d left here the last time I’d stayed. Red underwear, weirdly lewd after everything we’d done. A pair of black skinny jeans, one of the knees torn out. A tank top and a long, slouchy gray sweater over it. A pair of Converse were in the closet, and I shoved my feet into those.
In the bathroom was the deodorant I liked and the toothpaste. I
put my hair back up, and when I looked in the mirror, I was so completely Beth I almost couldn’t believe it.
No makeup. No elaborate hairstyle. Plain clothes. Beat-up shoes.
Beth.
I stepped into the bedroom, and Tommy must have seen how very Beth I was because he looked away, pretending a certain amount of busy-ness pulling his boxers from his pants and putting them on.
“I’ll be right back,” I said.
“Take your time.”
Man, we could not get this right. This after-sex thing. It was like we were strangers who kept bumping into each other on our way into the same elevator.
It was the Jada stuff; I was sure of it. Clinging to distance while being so intimate with each other—it was bound to have an effect.
Before I said something that made it all worse, I got out of there. The sun was dazzling and I took the steps down from the apartment above the garage to the parking area and then, instead of going in the house, I walked around to the front deck where I knew Peter would be.
While the back of the house was plain, the front of the house, with its view of the orchard and the ocean beyond it, was spectacular. There was a large wraparound deck, gray and splintery but still just about the most beautiful spot on earth.
I found Peter where I expected him, in the rocking chair on the far corner, creaking in the shade of a big pine tree. His coffee cup was on the top of the railing, steaming a little against the intense green of all the trees around us. He used to have an ashtray there too, but he quit smoking a few years ago.
“Hi, Peter,” I said, my hands in my back pockets. We had a pretty strict no-apologizing, we-accept-each-other-as-we-are kind of policy. But when he put down the paper he was reading, his eyes behind the reading glasses were piiiiiiiisssssed.
“I’m sorry,” I said quickly.
“Really?”
“I shouldn’t have come unannounced,” I said, starting with my smaller crimes.
“You know I don’t give a shit about that.”
I glanced behind myself as if to make sure Tommy wasn’t there.
“I’m sorry for bringing him here,” I whispered. “We didn’t have a lot of choice.”
Where I Belong (The Debt Book 2) Page 4