by Zahra Girard
“I will go slow,” he says, leaning down to give me a kiss. “Slow and gentle to start.”
I’m so tight at first — so nervous and anxious to finally have this man that I forget how happy I am to be having sex with him, but Snake is true to his word and gentle. When he fills me for the first time, holding himself thrust deep inside me, I’m so overcome that I gasp and I lock my legs around his back, keeping him there.
I never want this sensation to end.
He’s mine, all mine, and I will keep him.
For a moment, he indulges me.
Then, smiling a new smile that I’ve never seen before — one that’s mirthful and kind — he kisses me again and whispers, “Addie, you will have to unlock your legs. Cause we can either fuck or pretend we’re statues, but we can’t do both.”
I blush.
And release him.
“Sorry.”
“Don’t ever fucking apologize. If you want to play mimes or statues or whatever, I’ll do it. Anything to be with you. You make my dark life a whole lot brighter, Addie.”
Another kiss. One that makes me want to lock my legs around him again.
Carefully, he starts again.
In and out, slow and gentle, and his eyes watch my face in the same way I’ve watched his for so many years, alert to any shift in expression, any sign of concern, of pain, of joy, of lust.
This rough, hardened man cares so deeply for me and all he wants is for me to feel good.
And, for a time, I’m content with that.
I watch his body move as he fucks me. The way his muscles contract and release, showing off every firm inch of him, the way his handsome face looks in the dim light of my bedroom. I listen to his moans, listen to mine, as they intermingle with gasps and grunts and quick, hushed directions on just how we want each other.
But then I want more.
“I’m not so delicate,” I whisper to him. His eyes flash with hunger. “You can fuck me harder. Fuck me like how I know you want to.”
“Yes,” he growls.
And his thrusts grow in intensity.
He puts his hands on me, presses me, turns me, uses me in ways that I never imagined. Guiding my body into positions that allow him to fuck me so deep that fireworks of pleasure explode inside me.
The entire time, I’m smiling.
At least, when I have control of my lips, that is.
More than once, a little shockwave shakes my body and sends me into spasms that have me twitching and clenching and leaning up to wrap my hands around his strong shoulders and press my lips to his.
I kiss him a million times.
I moan his name just as many.
And then I hear a change come over his breathing; deep, full, shaking; this is the moment that I’ve wanted for so long; to feel him as close as I can get him, to have him complete; all because of me.
I’m flat on my stomach, prone and face-down with him fucking me from behind when I hear it.
I turn and look at him over my shoulder, see the change come over his face.
“I want to turn around, I want to see you when you come,” I moan.
“Hurry, Addie. I can’t hold it.”
He pulls out, and I flip around as fast as I can — eager, intent.
He enters me and I clench my hands around his back, pulling him against me, into me, while he fucks me deep. As I feel his body shake with the strain of holding back his orgasm, I lift my lips to nibble at the lobe of his ear and whisper, “I want your come, Snake. I want it so bad.”
“Oh Addie, fuck…”
This powerful man breaks.
With a groan that shakes his entire chest, I feel him let go. My lips meet his, and I throw my legs tight around his back, lock my ankles together, and keep him there until I feel the shaking and twitching stop.
He’s mine. All mine. And I’m never letting him go.
It seems like both forever and not-long-enough that I hold him there, until we separate and sprawl out on the bed, my head to his chest, his arms around me, encircling me, pulling me tight to him. The sound of his breathing — relaxed, deep, at peace — is all I hear. Content in ways I never imagined, I lie in his arms, for a while able to fight back any thoughts of the outside world.
But only for a time.
So many questions bubble to the surface in my mind.
Can I even hope to keep a man like him for more than a night? Should I?
If I become Snake’s old lady — if I tie myself even closer to the club — how can I ever hope to become my own woman?
Snake may have just taken my body, will he take my future, too?
Chapter Twelve
Snake
I don’t stay in bed with her once she falls asleep. I can’t. Because the second she drifts off and the light that comes from being so close to her fades, my dark thoughts return. They return with a vengeance that propels me to my feet and drives me to the other room.
I have the woman I’ve always wanted. But should I?
The club took me in after I left the military a broken man, Stone’s entrusted me to watch after his daughter, and this is how I repay their loyalty? By fucking Adella when she’s at her most vulnerable? When she’s shaking and broken from watching a man die right in front of her?
What the fuck am I doing?
My agitation leads me to shower, to want myself clean of what just happened, to wash away the betrayal of my honor and duty to the club — even though that means tangling again with the hot and cold water that has a mind of its own. Deservingly, it goes to scorching hot at the absolute worst time and nearly burns my junk; I have to drive my fist into the tiled wall to keep from crying out.
I dress myself.
Take up a post on the couch.
And keep watch on the door, like I should’ve been doing the whole time.
I faltered once in my duty, but I won’t again.
Hours pass in the same sense of alertness that I perfected while serving in Afghanistan. Where I’d be on watch in the most remote location, where enemies might not be present for hundreds of miles, where I’d need to be ready to kill at a moment’s notice, and yet also have part of my mind elsewhere — thinking thoughts of better times, better places, better company than whatever small squad of unwashed-for-weeks soldiers I was sharing the outpost with — in order to keep my sanity.
It’s easy to slip back into that mentality. Because, hell, I’ve been teetering on the edge of it ever since I heard that bomb go off, ever since I saw Goldie suffer the aftermath. My skin still crawls, my heart still surges uncontrollably in my chest, my teeth threaten to grind themselves to nothing at the slightest unexpected sound and, no matter what I tell my wayward and chaotic mind, it still tells me I’m back in that war zone. The same place where I saw my best friend and brother in the Rangers die in my arms.
Just like then, I find myself scraping the bottom of the emotional barrel to come up with positive thoughts to keep away the dark. Because I’m feeling damn dark about betraying my oath to the club.
Hours pass until Adella’s slender bare frame fills the doorway again. Until I see those eyes wide with confusion and longing and hurt. Until I see that expression — of pain, of anguished wonderment — on her face.
“Did I do something wrong, Snake?”
I want to kill myself for making her feel that way. That she should ever think that about herself is a fucking crime.
“No, Addie.”
“Then why did you leave me?”
“Because we shouldn’t have done that. You didn’t do something wrong, Addie. But I did.”
She approaches. Slow, hesitant, and sits next to me on the couch.
One delicate hand settles on my shoulder.
Two too-wide eyes threaten to swallow my soul.
“There’s more to it than just us having sex, Snake.”
I peel my eyes away from her. This woman — every little thing about her — strips past all my defenses and touches my wounded soul.
> “There isn’t.”
“Snake, I know you. I’ve known you almost my entire life. I know when something’s bothering you, and it’s been bothering you long before we had sex. There’s a way you clench your jaw, and there’s a vein that comes out against your right temple that only happens when something is really, really messing with you.”
She’s got a good eye. Too good. It’s helped her take some incredible photos, and it’s cutting through every lie I could try to throw in her way.
“Leave off it, Addie.”
“Why? Because there’s something wrong with being hurt? Do you want to know how hurt and scared I was to wake up earlier and find you gone? Not because I have some stupid expectation of cuddling. But because, when I opened my eyes, I saw in the dark that man who tried to take me. I saw his dead face. I saw his blood. I saw the wound in his throat from where Ruby shot him. I saw the way his eyes were just open and staring and empty. And I swear I heard the final shot that took his life. It was all so real.”
Addie lays it all out there with no hesitation, with no regret, and she looks at me in a way that says ‘why are you afraid to talk about it?’
She’s so brave in her innocence and kindness.
But my pain is something I’ve kept buried and at bay for years. I’ve used one-night stands, violence, alcohol, and a million other things to keep it away; and now she’s asking me to dig it up and bring it out into the light of day. To look at it and face it in a way that cuts past all the bullshit.
“Hey, I’m here for you. Right here. Right now. I care about you, Snake, and all I’m saying is that I’m ready to listen,” she says, squeezing my arm.
It’s the first time in my life I’ve heard those words with such sincerity. In the club and in the service, this pain isn’t something you talk about — it’s something you bury, you deny, you fight against tooth and nail, because to do anything else is a sign of weakness.
But she’s not looking at me like it’d make me weak.
“I need a beer and I need a minute,” I say.
Saying nothing else, she heads to her fridge, and she gets me a beer, opens it, and sits silently at my side with her hand on my shoulder and all the affection and kindness in the world brimming in her too-wide brown eyes.
More than minutes pass in quiet, time where I wrestle to force the pain that I’ve carried for years into something I can even express. These wounds are so deep they loom like black chasms in my soul.
Out of every fight and war that I’ve been in, this is the hardest.
Finally, I breathe. Ready.
As ready as I’ll ever be.
“It’s been fifteen years since I left the Army. Three months before that something happened that made me leave. The Taliban and all the other petty fucking warlords were on their back foot at the time, but things were steadily heating up. They’d just had their presidential elections the year before and that year, 2005, they were electing parliament and every fucking warlord wanted a piece of the power and the Taliban was out to fuck everything up. My unit was deployed near Kandahar. It was hell in every fucking sense of the word.”
I stop.
Even now, all these years removed, I can still smell the dust and grit of that blasted fucking wasteland. My skin prickles, hands clench into fists, and I take several deep breaths before I feel like I can continue on.
Just a thought brings on the feelings of war, and I have to fight for my life to keep from being swallowed by it.
I teeter on the edge of that black abyss.
If I didn’t have Addie here, it’d swallow me.
But maybe, with her, I can get a handle on it.
“My best friend and I served in the same unit. His name was Derek. Derek Mayfield. He lived three houses down from me back in Marietta, Georgia. We were just two fucking kids who used to ride our mountain bikes through Kennesaw Mountain Park and had our first beers Junior year of high school at Blake Fairchild’s graduation barbecue. Just two dumb fucking kids who happened to be excellent soldiers. In boot camp, he earned the nickname ‘Snake’ because he got spooked by a kingsnake that he thought was a coral snake. Screamed like you wouldn’t believe. So we kept sneaking snakes into his bunk at night. It was our duty. And it got him every time. Back then, I was just Logan Wood — soldier in the US Army Rangers. A dumb kid, a decent soldier, and someone who had the privilege of serving with his best friend,” I say, and I can’t help smiling at the memory. The snake prank got him every single time, and he had a hilarious scream. “So there we were, a couple of Rangers in Kandahar. We’d served during the initial invasion of Afghanistan and then we found ourselves back there all over again, stalking the smuggler’s trails in from Pakistan, hunting militants in fucking gorges and goddamn desert canyons.”
I look at her.
She’s watching me with her full attention, with nothing but concern and care in her eyes.
“You want to know what hell is?” I say, my voice burning in my throat. “Hell is weeks upon weeks of nothing but baking in the sun while you’re stuck in a fucking box that some fuckhead desk jockey decided was good enough to be an operating base. Weeks interspersed with moments, minutes, hours, of combat with people who think it is their holy fucking purpose to kill you. Hell is making it through that until it’s nearly the end of your deployment, when you’re out on patrol with your best friend, already talking about what you’re going to do when you get back home. Home. The land of beer, barbeques, friends, family. Love and life and everything good. It’s what you fight for and it’s what keeps you going. And then your friend thinks he sees something. So you steer the humvee off where he’s pointing, even though it’s off course, outside of your mission parameters, you do it because you trust him. He’s your best friend. And you listen to him. You listen, even though you fucking shouldn’t have. You shouldn’t have. And then it happens. Oh, fuck. Fuck. It fucking hurts.”
And I can’t go any further.
My voice catches, digs claws into my throat to keep from coming out and, even when I look at her — the woman who is the center of my fucking world — I see his face. See it as it was in those last moments. Shredded. Skin torn away. Bones cracked. Teeth — white stained with blood — shine out of the hollow mangle that used to be his mouth. That mouth that used to laugh at my jokes. Scream at snakes. That spoke for the best friend I had since I was a little kid.
I loved him like a brother.
And I can still feel the wounds. Still feel the shrapnel in my shoulder. Still feel the heart-twisting terror that ripped me apart when the bomb went off. Endless pain.
Adella puts her arms around me, gives me a hug that helps me find a center, something to hold on to amid the sea of pain I’m drowning in.
“Snake. Logan. I. Am. Here. For. You,” she repeats. Forceful. A command. Words that cut through the fog in my mind. “I’m here and I’m not going anywhere.”
How the fuck did I find a woman with a heart like hers?
And why does it have to be her? The one woman that I can not have, no matter how bad I want her.
I push that thought aside. There’s time for that later. I need to bare my soul to her. To the first person who’s shown that they care with all their heart.
“I should’ve told him no. It was off our designated patrol route. It was against orders. But he swore he saw something, and we both thought we were experienced enough to handle anything. So I listened. We took a turn, we went after what he thought he saw, and then an IED ripped apart the humvee and took my best friend’s life and put me in the hospital for a long fucking time before they sent me home with a discharge. It was my fault, Addie. My fault. I went against orders and it cost me my best friend. Don’t you see? Don’t you see why it fucking hurts? This was my fault.”
“I am so sorry.”
There is only compassion in her voice. No judgment. No expectations for me to keep talking; it’s why I can talk to her. She makes me feel all right with taking out the darkest sides of me. The parts of my
life that haunt me to this day. Take them out and set them in the cleansing light of her love.
Another hug. Voice warm as the midday rays of the July sun.
“Sometimes things take me back to that time and that place, Addie. It makes me feel like I’m about to crawl out of my skin. Like I’m in the middle of the war; no matter where I’m at, what I’m doing, I’m suddenly back in that hell watching my best friend die. And the only way I’ve found to get control of it is to do things that either hurt myself or hurt others,” I say, looking down at the floor for a while. “When I got out of the Army, I took his nickname for my road name because I never want to forget my best friend. I wish I could say I got my life together when I became a civilian, but I’d be lying. The first few years were the hardest; I did a lot of shit I shouldn’t have and it wasn’t until I met your father that I got my head straight. He reminds me of my old drill sergeant. It helps keep me in line.”
“I am so glad he found you. That you found the club. So that I could find you,” she says.
Hearing that should make me proud — that a woman like her would want a dark, wounded man like me — but it makes my heart heavy in my chest; talking to her about duty, about my failures to heed the mission, reminds me just how bad I fucked up earlier; it’s my mission to protect her, not take her virginity. No matter how good it feels, it’s a dereliction of my oath to the club.
And it will have grave consequences if I don’t get my shit together.
Which means getting away from her. Right now.
I stand. Pick up my bag containing the couple pairs of clothes and spare ammo I brought with me for my guard duty.
I am resolute. It’s time to do what I should’ve done the moment I felt myself slip.
“What are you doing, Snake?” She says.
“I fucked up once earlier, Addie. Broke orders, went against my better judgment, and it cost me so much; it left me with this black hole in my heart. I will not do it again. Because, in this case, it could mean you get hurt. I could not live with myself if that happens. I’d rather die a hundred times over. I’m leaving. I will tell your father to find someone else to keep you safe. Because I know if I stay, I won’t be able to keep away from you.”