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Huck was quiet beside me, save for the beating of his heart. But I felt his hand on my back, his presence and his warmth, and it was all I needed to purge that darkness from my soul. He understood this feeling on a level nobody else ever could. Long after her death, my mother’s murder continued to haunt me.
Ace and I both took a drink from the shot glass, and then he topped us off.
“I think it would be easier,” I said, “if you just tell me what you know about my life. Let’s just open that can of worms and make a fucking mess and leave it all out in the open.”
He sat in his own thoughts for a few moments, staring off into the distance before he unleashed all the information he’d managed to gather on me.
“I know that you like pink,” he began. “You get bored easily, and you flirt to get what you want. You like wine and dessert, and you always expect people to see the worst in you. You don’t like to talk about yourself, and you’re at your kindest when you think nobody is watching. I think you’re terrified of your own anger. You don’t want people to see you for who you really are because you’re afraid they won’t like it.”
“Gee, is that all?” I replied sarcastically, even though everything he said was so true it scared me.
“I know that Ricky Montoya was your stepfather,” he continued. “He was a piece of shit who didn’t take care of you girls, and I know he let his friends… touch you.”
His voice was rougher than I’d ever heard it, and I couldn’t bear to look at him. I couldn’t witness the emotions that admission brought up in him for fear of condemning myself to a lifetime of shame.
“Birdie.” Ace reached for my face. “Look at me.”
I shook my head, silent tears falling down my cheeks. “I don’t want to.”
“I need you to.”
Slowly, he turned my head toward him, and I held my breath, afraid of what I might see in his eyes. But no matter how hard I tried to find his disgust, his revulsion, his impending rejection… it wasn’t there.
“You aren’t what happened to you.” He dragged me into his lap, murmuring against my lips. “You have nothing to be ashamed of. And nothing they did to you could change the way I see you. Do you understand that?”
I nodded, and he rested his forehead against mine, breathing me in like I was his salvation. There was still a lot more he didn’t know. He hadn’t heard the worst of it yet. He hadn’t mentioned the thing I’d done. The thing I couldn’t escape from. And I wondered if it was because he just didn’t want to believe it or if he really didn’t know.
He reached around and grabbed the bottle of tequila, and we both took another drink straight from the bottle before he discarded it altogether. Our lips came together in a clash of lightning. We were all hands and teeth and heart and breath at that point.
Ace scrambled to get my robe open while I fumbled with the button on his jeans. We were drunk on tequila and each other, but in my mind, I knew I would never feel this again. Never would anyone else affect me this way. And for a moment, I almost blurted it out. I almost begged him to make me feel this way forever.
It was crazy, but the closer we became, the further I felt like I was drifting away from myself. I was lost at sea. Lost to these emotions I couldn’t understand or accept, yet with every breath, I paddled harder and harder to hold onto them. Our time together felt doomed, just as everything else in my life had. Good things didn’t happen to me. And they sure as hell didn’t happen to Huck either.
So I clung to him desperately as he thrust inside me, filling my body and soul with a sense of urgency to honor every second we had together. I closed my eyes and breathed him in. I kissed him. I worshipped his body with my hands. For so long, I had dreamed of this man with the whiskey-colored eyes. But how long did I get to keep him?
I didn’t find my release in our feverish romp on the sofa. At least, not in the way I expected. Instead, I cried when I curled into the sacred space between his neck and shoulder. Ace thrust deep, coming inside me on a sigh as he wrapped his arms around me and squeezed me as if he’d never let me go.
I didn’t know how long we stayed there like that, wrapped up in each other, both of us refusing to break away. He was still inside me, and I never wanted him to leave. But in the wake of my emotional reckoning, sleep took me captive.
