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Our bodies were smashed together, our breaths coming hard and fast, and my blood roared in my ears while I waited for her response.
She flung her arms around me as tears streamed down her cheeks. Her mouth crashed to mine, and she kissed me like she hadn’t kissed me in years. She fucking breathed life back into me with that kiss.
We didn’t need words.
We never had.
They just got in our way.
All Ivy and I needed was this.
We needed hands and mouths and to just shut the fucking world out while we showed each other our feelings.
And so my addiction only grew.
My drug of choice came back to me.
The problem with addictions is that in the end they always get you. They shred you, rip your life apart, eat you the fuck up and spit you back out. They consume you, and before you realise what’s happening, you hit rock bottom, and you’re left with nothing. You’re out in the cold without any hope of ever getting another hit.
8
King
* * *
I surveyed the Christmas tree standing in my lounge room. “Jesus fucking Christ, Ivy, this must have cost the fucking bank.” The tree touched the roof and felt like it filled half of the room. And the number of decorations on it was beyond anything I’d seen on a tree before. A fucking rainbow had vomited in my lounge room.
“Stop your bitching, King,” Annika called out from the kitchen where I figured she was helping Ivy cook dinner. “You told Ivy to sort the tree so she sorted it.”
It was Christmas Eve, and Ivy had insisted she wanted to start a new tradition of Christmas Eve dinner at our place. It had been two months since we’d patched up our relationship, and she’d reached out to her mother a few times, but Bethany didn’t want anything to do with her. Not while she stayed with me. I’d done everything I could to try to fix the situation. Nothing worked. It pissed me off that this would be Ivy’s first Christmas without her mother. However, I kept my anger to myself in an effort to keep the peace in my home.
I entered the kitchen expecting to find my mother having words with her daughter over her language. Frowning when I didn’t see her there, I asked, “Where’s Mum?”
Ivy glanced up from the potatoes she was chopping and leant over to brush a kiss on my lips. I slid my hand around her waist and down to her ass as she did this. The last two months had consisted of my hands on her and my dick in her as often as I could manage. We’d had a lot of time to make up for, and I’d made sure I showed her just how fucking much I wanted her. Shit was improving between us.
Mostly.
Her mother had managed to get her hooks into us without even trying. While I’d done what I could to fix the divide between Ivy and me, some cracks remained. My woman still held me at a distance some days. I wasn’t giving up, though. Far fucking from it. Thank fuck I had decades ahead with Ivy—I was sure as shit gonna need them to peel back all her layers.
She smiled up at me. “Margreet dropped the girls off about an hour and a half ago. She said she had something to do so that our first Christmas Eve dinner here could be perfect.”
Keeping my hand on her ass and her body against mine, I reached for the glass of whisky she had on the counter. I threw some down my throat as I watched her. “Did you have a good day?”
“Yeah. I finished wrapping all the presents, did all the laundry, made shortbread, and packed for our trip. Did you?”
She didn’t want to know what I’d spent my day doing. My hands had gotten dirty today, taking care of club business. I let her go so I could pour myself a drink. “My day is done, and that’s all that matters.”
She frowned at me. Ivy never pushed me to share club shit with her, but that was because I usually gave her something. Nothing I shouldn’t, but some story about what I’d done during my day. Since we’d reconnected two months ago, I’d shut down on discussing Storm business. Things had changed for me at the club—Jethro had me doing all kinds of things I’d never talk about—and all I wanted to do when I came home at night was get my fill of her. Sex at night balanced out the violence of my days, and it eased the tension that club problems knotted in my body.
Reaching for the hem of my shirt, she tugged it gently and asked, “Did you have a bad day?”
“No. I just don’t want to discuss it.”
Her frown deepened and hurt flashed briefly in her eyes. Letting go of my shirt, she turned back to the potatoes. I knew by the way she started a conversation with Annika about girl shit that she’d erected one of her walls between us again. She was blocking me out because I hadn’t engaged how she wanted me to. This was classic Ivy, a game of silent treatment she liked to occasionally play. One that pissed me off. Not that her games played a huge part in our relationship anymore, but I’d noticed some shit creeping back in over the last couple of months.
Swiping my glass of whisky from the counter, I left the room and headed upstairs to take a shower. The peace and fucking quiet would help me get my shit together. That we still swung between good and bad so fast and easily did my head in. Would we always be a hurricane of emotions like this? I liked some fight in my woman, but the moods our relationship suffered exhausted me.
I pulled my shirt over my head as I took the stairs two at a time, dumping it in the laundry basket and then stripping the rest of my clothes from my body. Blood from a beating I’d given one of Storm’s drug customers earlier had splattered on my jeans, so I kept them to the side. I’d wash those rather than leaving them for Ivy. I’d rather avoid her questions.
