AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Too little, too late. I’m already a walking dead man.”
“To be fair, you aren’t exactly walking yet.”
He rolled his eyes and sighed, closing his eyes like he was disappointed in himself.
“You regret me already?” I asked, knowing what that look was from.
“No, no,” he insisted, looking me in the eyes so I could see the truth in it. “But why the fuck do you have to be Tommy’s little girl?”
“I’m not a little girl anymore, Ash.”
He barked out a disbelieving laugh.
“Don’t I fucking know it.” He sighed.
My hand lifted without my permission and pressed against his cheek, stroking through the short growth on his cheeks and chin that probably felt like quite the rebellion after so many years in the Marines.
Drawing him closer, I pressed a gentle kiss to his mouth, not sure if I was doing the whole after-sex thing right. Did he still want me even though we’d finished?
His fingers brushed my cheek and curled into my hair as he kissed me, slow and languid this time, as if we had the rest of our lives to explore the connection.
“Your head ok?” I asked after a full minute of that.
He nodded, but pulled further away until he could collapse onto his back against the pillows, naked and proud.
It was my turn to observe. The peek I’d gotten of him in the dark didn’t even compare to this, masculine body splayed out in complete relaxation. The sharp angles and smooth lines of his tattoos stood out this time, and I tried to pick out what each one was, but most of the ones on his sides and arms only showed a fraction of the art.
“Get a good eyeful?” he drawled, moving onto his side toward me so his scarred leg was resting on top of the other.
“Not yet,” I admitted. “I’m still exploring. It would take me days to see all those tattoos.”
“Not bad, considering it took something like a decade and a half to put them on,” he said with a chuckle. “Damn bomb fucked up my thigh though.”
My fingers trailed down the puckered scar, all the way up to where the shrapnel had shattered his pelvis and hip bone and where the scars from his preceding surgeries had healed to pink lines.
“What was it?” I asked, not sure what the design would’ve been before the scar flayed it.
“It was a design my buddy made, actually. Yamin comes from New Zealand originally, and he drew this up. Some kind of Maori design. It looked pretty sick before this bullshit happened.”
My fingers dragged past his thigh and up his hip, where what looked like the corner of an american flag peeked around from his back.
“Let me see the rest of them,” I begged, trying to pull him toward me so he'd roll to his belly.
He obeyed, letting me shift him around as if he didn’t weigh two of me.
The first tattoo that stood out on his back was a simplistic design of the Marine Corps insignia. I recognized it because my dad had one identical on his back, too.
“We got that one together, Tom and me,” Ash said, knowing what I was looking at because my fingers dragged along his back, same as my eyes.
“Yeah, I didn’t know you had one too,” I admitted.
On the other shoulder blade, I saw a smoking skull situated in a black diamond, trails of gray smolder coming up from its eye sockets. Beside it were five stars, strategically placed around it to finish off what I knew was the symbol of the Raiders. My heart bled for him, knowing that this huge part of his life was now over. He would have happily died for his country, but instead, his country had given up on him the moment he’d sustained massive injury. What a fucking tragedy.
The other tattoos kind of blurred together as my fingers stopped brushing his skin and started digging in, rubbing his back with vigor. The resulting moan of satisfaction was worth every single bit of effort.
“Do you have any siblings?” I asked absently, working on a particularly stubborn knot in his right trap.
He grunted with the pain I knew I was inflicting, but answered. “Nope. Just me.”
