Page 35 of Breathe Like Hell

He’d been the one to come onto me, to pursue me, and thinking about that part of my life now made my stomach clench with a combination of emotions. Lust, misery, hatred, pain, more lust.

Our relationship had initially started to serve a single purpose, and it wasn’t romance.

It was sex.

Micah’s head turned to face me, surely noting the change in my scent, my kapnos flooding the room like a horny tidal wave. My dick was getting stiff in my sweats, tenting the thick fabric, and I hated how easy it felt to get like this with him.

He got me so fucking hard I couldn’t think straight.

It’d always been like that.

I remembered the first time he fucked me like it was yesterday, remembered all his low words in my ear, breathed into my mouth, licked onto my naked skin, every filthy promise he’d made and kept. Everything had been so foreign back then, so exciting. So nerve-wracking.

Not yet so agonizingly painful.

Micah’s eyes drifted down to my groin, where I’d crudely started palming my growing erection over my sweats.

He didn’t say anything, but I caught the stutter of his breath.

I could smell all the ways he was affected by this, and I couldn’t help but wonder if he was thinking of the same thing I was—the first time we’d done anything together. Before sex, before touching. Back when I hadn’t known his name. I’d learned what his cock looked like before I learned what to call him.

It was strange to think there was ever a time when I existed without knowing him—to think there was a moment when he’d made eye contact with me for the very first time. It hadn’t always been like this, even though it felt that way. Micah Killshaw was so integral to every single part of me, still flowing in my veins like ichor, regardless of the years that we’d been apart. All my thoughts and needs and desires were tied up with him, whether or not I wanted them to be.

Any emotion I ever had towards Micah was powerful, purely because he affected me that fucking deeply. I couldn’t feel anything less with him. There was always something in my brain turning up the intensity. What used to be love was now anger. What used to be care was now hatred.

Never indifference.

The lust was the same, though.

And I wasn’t the one who left.

That fact could never be hidden, and it existed in every interaction between us. Noiseless, but there. Like barbed wire around my throat, pricking razor-sharp into eternally bruised flesh.

I’d never chosen this life for us. It was Micah.

I would’ve stayed with him forever. No matter what happened.

He knew that.

I hated that he knew that.

My cock gave a fierce throb, thickening against my hip, my palm pressing hard into the tip.

I watched Micah, waiting to see what he was going to do.

Finally, he looked back at me, eyes drifting down my sprawled body, then he reached for the ties on his shorts, tugging the string free and hooking his thumb under his waistband as if he was going to push it down. He didn’t though. Not yet.

“Me first?” I taunted, keeping my voice low.

His eyelids lowered halfway, the look in his eye tipped with arrogance.

“You always were this easy, weren’t you?” His tone tightened the barbed wire encircling my neck. “You’re fucking her all the time, and still ready to get your dick out and show me whenever you think I’d like to look.”

Heat rushed to my cheeks, staining my skin. I prayed he couldn’t see it.

“You should hear yourself when you’re pretending not to want me,” I responded, keeping my own tone unbothered. A lie. “I think you miss when I used to listen to you.”

Without warning, Micah shoved his waistband down, his heavy cock springing free of his shorts.