Page 30 of Thunder

Up close.

His head tipped back against the tub, his throat bared under my hands, and there in the low light is the rattlesnake.

Dark and coiled on the side of his neck, still healing at the edges, and beneath it the script I read a lifetime ago in a bar and never said out loud.

He marked himself with me.

I put my mouth on it.

On the snake, on the ink he carved into himself while I was busy hating him.

He shudders underneath me, his hand tightening on my hip hard enough to bruise, and I understand all the way down what it must’ve felt like for this closed-off man to wear me where the whole world could see.

"Presley." My name comes out of him like it hurts. "Keep doin' that and I'm not gonna last, and I need you there first."

He gets his hand between us.

His thumb finds me and he works me exactly the way he's always known how, rough circles in time with the slow deep grind of him inside me.

His other hand leaving my throat to band around my back and hold me together, and the coil in me pulls tighter and tighter until it's almost too much.

"Let go." His mouth at my ear. "You've been holdin' on so tight for so long, rattlesnake. Let go. I've got you. I've got you."

And I do.

It breaks over me so hard my vision goes white at the edges and I clamp down around him and cry out into his shoulder.

He curses and grabs my hips with both hands and drives up into me through it, chasing it, and two, three strokes later he goes rigid underneath me and follows me over with my name in his teeth and his forehead pressed to my collarbone, his whole big body shaking.

For a long moment neither of us moves.

The water's gone lukewarm and there's more of it on the floor than in the tub.

My knees are going to have bruises and his hip is going to make him pay dearly for this and I don't care about a single thing.

Because his arms are around me and his heart’s slamming against my chest and I feel, for the first time in so long, like I'm not standing in the wreckage of my life alone.

Which is the fucking problem.

"Hey." He tips my chin up. His face has gone gentle in a way almost nobody on this earth gets to see. "Where'd you go just now?"

"I'm right here."

"You went somewhere. I felt it." His thumb strokes my jaw. "Talk to me."

And I want to lie.

I want to stay in this warm wrecked bathroom with this man and not say what's sitting cold in my chest even now, even wrapped around him with him still inside me.

But I've had enough lies to last me a lifetime.

"Nothing's changed," I whisper.

"That's where I went. We just—Thunder, I did the one thing I swore I wasn't going to do, and none of the reasons I swore went away. My family's still broken. You still lied to me. I'm still—" My voice catches. "I'm still going to have to walk out of here and go back to being a person who can't have this."

His arms tighten around me.

"Or," he says, low, "you stop walkin' out."