I just never thought I’d get pregnant.
When he finally pulled out of me, he didn’t go far, sprawling right there on the floor, on his back.
He reached up, grabbed both of my hands, and pulled me to straddle him.
I knew what this was. He was giving me something of himself. Doing something that was uncommon for him. Allowing himself to be vulnerable. For me.
“Can I . . . ?”
He swallowed hard and nodded, putting my hands on his chest. “Yes. Touch me. I need your touch. It’s helping. The more you do it, the better I feel. Just . . . go slow. Not too much at a time.”
A feeling of pure, unadulterated tenderness shook through me.
It was kind of sick, but I couldn’t even decide if this need I felt to soothe him, to mend him was maternal in nature. Maternal, or else maybe that other intangible woman feeling we all have, the, oh this man is broken, let me fix him urge, because when I fix him, he’ll be mine.
Maybe it was an unwholesome combination of the two. I honestly didn’t care. He was covered on the outside by scars, but inside were the real wounds, the deep ones, and all that mattered was that I needed to help him heal every part that pained him.
I traced my fingers over the scars on his chest carefully, circling my hips on top of him, rubbing our spent sexes together until he stirred again, grew hard and huge again. I was so slick and ready, so keyed to every inch of him that it took no effort at all, no guiding hand, no careful shifting. I thrust my hips and sucked him back inside of me, where he belonged. It was beautiful.
I stopped touching his chest when I took him in, knowing it would alarm him. Too soon.
Instead, I grabbed both of his hands, cupping them over my aching breasts as I started to move.
He cursed. He praised. My stoic man even begged for it as I rode him hard.
I gave it my best, used every toned muscle in my body to rock his world. This was where all of my hard work at the gym paid off, where I finally got to show him that he wasn’t the only one with some spectacular moves in bed.
And then it happened again.
I let him empty himself inside of me. Again.
I guess at that point we were both just kind of thinking, ah well, damage is done, might as well enjoy the rest of the night like this.
Because, God, it was beyond divine.
He snaked a hand down between our sweaty bodies, gripping himself at the root, twisting his hand, rubbing against us both where we still joined.
“Jesus,” he muttered. “Fucking bare inside of you. I can’t take it. You don’t even know. We’re both going to be raw before I’m done with you this time.”
He wasn’t exaggerating. By morning we were both sore and aching.
And the entire night, all the times he came, he never pulled out.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
He was back two nights later, as desperate and needy as the last time.
“I didn’t expect you back so soon,” I gasped when we came up for air.
It was strange with how little I still knew of him how much peace I had made with our situation. Somehow, with him being mostly gone, I’d wrapped it all up and tied it with a nice pretty bow of justifications.
So many excuses that made our age difference, his lack of forthrightness, his random coming and going somehow okay in my mind.
I was good at talking myself into the most romantic explanations.
It was a talent, really.
Well, yes, he was young, and yes, of course, he was quite a bit younger than, say, me, but what toll did it take on a person to see the things he’d seen? To withstand the things he’d withstood? To do the things he’d done?
Yes, quite a toll, I could see. In every line of his tense, readied body, every word out of his cold, hard voice, in every thought in his fractured, paranoid mind, laid that toll.
What did years matter when held up to that?
Not a lot, indeed. Tragic as it was, violence had aged him more profoundly than years would ever touch the average human.
And, after all of that, who was I to push him? Of course he’d have secrets, but he could reveal them to me at his own damaged pace.
I’m a patient woman, I reasoned to myself.
I’d laid out all of the justifications for him in a scrumptious little buffet that he hadn’t even had to prepare himself.
He was on top of me, spent but still planted deep inside of me, his hips between my thighs, pinning me to the mattress.
He’d tied my hands, but he was already undoing the restraints, his mouth on my neck, tongue on my skin, while he worked at the knots with his agile fingers.
“I shouldn’t have come, either time,” he murmured, his voice rumbling into my flesh with every word. “What I’m working on right now—it’s very sensitive—I don’t have the right to be doing any of this, but none of that mattered enough, apparently, because here I am. Again.”
“Well, for what it’s worth, I’m glad you came,” I told him just as my hands came loose. I wrapped my arms around his head, cradling him to me.
“This can never be what we want it to.”
That sounded ominous, and I felt myself stiffening. “We?” I asked him. “We’ve never talked about what we want this to be, so how can you know that? How can you know we even want the same thing at all?”
“I think we do,” he said simply.