Page 163 of Pucked Around and Found Out

I know he's no good, the world has made that abundantly clear, but he's good for me in ways no one else has ever been. He pulled me out of the comfortable numbness I'd been living in. Ripped the rose-colored glasses clean off my face so I could finally see the monsters hiding in plain sight and somehow, standing next to the most dangerous one, I'd never felt safer.

When he presses the pad of his thumb against my clit, I break the kiss and cry out. My release builds rapidly, cresting like a wave I've been riding for what feels like forever. I wrap my arms around him and drag my nails down his naked back, relishing in the sharp hiss of pain it pulls from him, proof that I can unravel him even a little.

Not one to be outdone, he drops his head to the crook of my neck and bites down on the tender flesh, pulling a scream from somewhere deep inside me—equal parts want and anguish. When he soothes the ache with his tongue, I nearly lose all sense of myself. I feel my body clenching around his fingers, desperate and greedy, but it's not enough.

It's never enough with him.

I need him.

“Xaden, please…” I pant, and there's more in those two words than I'll ever be able to say out loud.

He draws back to look down at me, his gray eyes dark, not just with passion but with something heavier. Something he won't name. I inhale sharply when I realize what I'm seeing—he's letting me look beneath the carefully constructed mask he keeps bolted in place for the rest of the world. The raw, unguarded need written across his face unfurls something inside my chest. Something tender and aching and terrifyingly close to grief.

“What do you need, Tink?” he asks, his voice rough like gravel and velvet.

“You.” The word comes out without hesitation, without shame. I've been saying it so much lately, but repetition hasn't dulled the truth of it. He's all I want. All I'll ever need. And that's exactly what's breaking me.

He searches my face for a long moment, long enough that I feel exposed, like he's reading every secret I've tried to bury, before withdrawing his fingers. I almost whimper at the loss of him. But when he rises to his feet and removes the last barrier between us, every coherent thought dissolves.

The lean sculpture of his body has my mouth going dry. He's devastating to look at, sharp angles, quiet violence, and underneath all of it, something unbearably human. The world sees a monster. I see the man who saved me from my family. I don't fear the devil. I revel in him, in his presence, in the way danger clings to him like a second skin and somehow never touches me.

The ink that covers his chest tells a story he'd never tell with words. The cherry blossom tree at the center, fragile blooms on dark branches looks like life forcing itself out of something that should be barren. The two koi fish flanking it are so him, the endless war between his light and his dark, circling each other, never winning, never surrendering. The samurai mask across his abdomen used to seem random to me. Now I understand. It's a portrait of how the world sees him. No one knows the man beneath and that's not an accident. He designed it that way. He can't voice what lives inside him, so he lets the art speak instead.

I drop my gaze lower and the sight of his cock makes every thought scatter like ash in the wind.

When he lowers to his knees in front of me, my breath turns choppy. Excitement and anguish crash together inside me… indistinguishable, inseparable because I understand what this is. This is my goodbye. This is me saying farewell to the man who dragged me back to life when I had quietly accepted dying. Who reached into the darkness he calls home and pulled me out of it, blinking and gasping and alive in a way I'd forgotten was possible.

He nestles between my thighs, braces his hands on either side of my head, and just... hovers. Looking down at me. The moment stretches and I feel my heart bang against my ribs like it's trying to get out, like it already knows something my mind is refusing to accept.

There's a look in his eyes I've never seen before. Something cracked open and raw. Something that looks devastatingly, achingly like vulnerability.

Whenever we’ve had sex, it’s been like a race, almost like he just wants to get on, get in, get out. But not now. Now he's cataloguing me. Memorizing me. Pressing the image of my face into some hidden place inside himself like he already knows I'm about to slip away, like he's preparing for the absence of me.

His mouth opens.

I stop breathing.

Please.

I beg silently, screaming the words inside the confines of my own chest.

Give me one reason. One tiny, fragile reason to choose differently.

I pour everything into the look I give him, the desperation, the hope, the love I've been swallowing for months.

Let me in.

The words sit unspoken in the space between us.

Then he closes his mouth. Swallows whatever he was about to say back down into that place where he buries everything that might make him human. The disappointment that crashes through me is violent but then his lips find mine, and he forces me out of my own head and back into my body, back into now, and I stop fighting it.

When I feel him push inside me, I moan and he pulls back just enough to watch me. I start to feel self-conscious. He's never done this before. He usually avoids my eyes like prolonged contact might cost him something. But not tonight. Tonight his gaze doesn't leave my face as he slowly, deliberately fills me. The burn is present and I sink into it, arching my back, welcoming it.

“Eyes on me,” he orders, low and rough.

I obey without thinking. I lock eyes with him and the self-consciousness dissolves because what I find in his gaze is not detachment, it's the opposite. Unfiltered. Ferocious. Like looking directly at something you're not supposed to see. It ignites something vile and primal in me, and for once I stop hiding. I let him see all of it.

I let him see my inner vixen, needing to see him break and lose control, I taunt him.