“I’m not worth it,” she whispers, a terrible plea, flung into the space between us as she stares up at me with the night sky glistening in her eyes. “I’ll never be worth it. Just let me get the papers.”
A few days ago, I would have agreed with that sentiment. That Ami is trouble. That she always was and always will be trouble. That’s she’s selfish and insensitive. That she betrayed me and walked out on me. That she left me to fester in my shame and wallow in my own self-loathing for years. That I blame her for all of it.
Now though…
She’s just a girl. A young girl. Frail. Tiny. Willowy and lost. Her sass and fire have deserted her. The fearless mask she normally pastes on is gone and I see the underside, the cracked porcelain and flawed interior and the painful uncertainty. The hollow and the ache and the mortality of bone and blood.
I lean forward, until the heat of her bare skin melts against the denim covering my thighs. She trembles, but she doesn’t break away. Her eyes change, becoming two aching pits of uncertainty, fear, and self-loathing.
It’s all laid bare to me, all of her emotion and her pain, pain that I don’t understand. I don’t know how to soothe it away. If I could, I’d breathe that ache out of her. Suck it through her skin and meld it into mine until it’s a part of me that I can carry around forever.
The pulse hammers at the side of her neck. Her lips part and her eyes close and she waits. She waits for me, like she’s been waiting all these years. I always thought she was the one who needed to come back. Come back to Helena. Come back to me. Come back to atone. I realize, as I lean and tilt her face upwards and crush my mouth to hers, that it was me. All along, it was me.
That I was always meant to find her.
Chapter 11
Ami
This is happening again.
For the second time today, I’m being kissed. By Gage. Not just any kiss. I don’t know if I can even call what he’s doing to my mouth, kissing.
It’s more like a war he’s waging, his tongue pushing through the seams of my lips when I let out a gasp, stroking mine in a rhythm that I feel all the way to my throbbing core. It’s like he’s branding me with his hot lips that move in tandem over mine. I feel the possession in every single searing second of it. In the way his teeth nip at my bottom lip when he pulls back, nearly hard enough to draw blood. The way he sighs in disappointment, like that was his objective all along. In the way his hand tangles in my hair and he angles my head backward, giving him better access to my mouth, tipping and baring my throat to him like he wants to bite my jugular or lick at the pulse nearly tearing from my skin at the juncture of my neck and throat.
He takes his time exploring my mouth as he angles my head back to the point of pain. Tears form at the corners of my eyes and my scalp prickles and screams, but I don’t make a sound past the whimpers escaping my lips.
He tears away suddenly and my eyes fly open at the abrupt ending of a kiss I shouldn’t have enjoyed. My stomach clenches hard, like a ball of tangled knots that have no hope of ever being undone, when my eyes fall to his lips and I see how swollen andshiny with my saliva they are. The thought that I’ve marked him, this hardened beast of a man, astounds me.
Gage bends his head again and I stand frozen as he licks at my lower lip. He traces every detail with his tongue, until I’m hyperaware of the shape of my own mouth in a way that I never have been before.
“When I kiss you like this,” he growls, scraping his teeth over my sensitive lip before he pulls away, “I don’t want to sign those fucking papers.”
I’m fucked senseless by his words. I open my mouth to try and form words, a denial of that statement, to tell him that he has to sign, that he said he would, that he came all this way to tell me he’d do it, but nothing comes out.
Instead, my eyes flick down, down the massive breadth of his shoulders, over the expanse of his chest, where his t-shirt strains too thin across the impressive granite of form, past his waist. My eyes widen when I notice the bulge straining against jeans that never looked too tight before. As if it likes the attention, his cock throbs beneath the denim and my mouth goes bone dry. Swallowing is an impossibility. Breathing isn’t much better.
I want to turn to go to the kitchen, to get those papers, papers that feel more and more like a curse, like a stone tied around my waist as I’m about to be thrust into the black, inky waters of the ocean, but Gage grabs me again. One hand grips my hip and hauls me roughly up against him.
I let out a garbled gasp of surprise and shock, and my hands fly out to try and brace myself. They splay across his hard chest, and holy shit, he’s so warm it’s like falling headfirst into apit of fire. I tilt my head up to say something, anything, but his mouth crashes over mine.
I can’t help the whimper and then the moan of pleasure that escapes the back of my throat. He licks it away, swallows it until it dances with his own strangled noises. His tongue tangles with mine again, both hands sliding and knotting in my hair, tugging at the strands, pulling and aching and throbbing deliciously.
Gage slides his tongue over my lips and nips me hard. I taste blood and my senses fire into overdrive, my vision swimming somewhere between black and red. My head feels like it’s going to float off my body and my heart beast out a brutal rhythm against my ribs. I mewl and lean in and while strange lights flicker behind my closed eyes and my blood surges so hard through my veins that I can actually hear it, I lean in and bite back.
I wage my own war, attacking Gage’s mouth like it’s mine to do with as I please. Like it’s mine to pleasure and brutalize in turns. Like I’ve been waiting years to do this.
Like it’s been years since I’ve kissedanyone.
The thought sobers me like a bucket of ice cold water dumped on my head. I lean back, trying to tear myself away, but Gage keeps one hand at my hair and sweeps the other to my hip. He drives me back in hurried steps, until I’m slammed back against the wall so hard that the breath nearly rushes out of my lungs. I let out a rush of air that betrays just how brutal being pressed up between that wall and his rock-hard body actually feels.
He attacks my mouth, swallowing the sounds while his hands rove over my hip, exploring the bare, burning skin of mythighs. I can feel my flesh tremble against his hands, and all the reasons I’ve just had for not wanting to do this, all the memories that assaulted me just a minute ago, are banished by his brutal, wondrous touch.
The last man who touched me like this ended up ruining me.
I know that I shouldn’t. That I shouldn’t do any of this. That you can never truly know another person, so you can never truly trust them.
Still.
