This kiss is burning out of control.
This kiss is parting every button on my shirt.
This kiss is stirring my eager fingers to action, caressing his muscled chest the second he tosses his shirt away.
This kiss will be my undoing.
“We shouldn’t,” I whisper. My too-cautious self trying to quiet the fire.
“We can stop any time. But for that to happen, you’ll have to take your hands off my cock.”
My eyes open wide. My pupils trail down my arm to where my left hand is resting expectantly over the thickness growing beneath his jeans.
“Is that so?” I say, surprised at myself and how far and fast I’ve let myself go.
“Seems like you don’t want to stop. Good. Because I sure as hell don’t want to. You’ve always been hot, Tiffany. Even back then, when you did your best to hide behind your good grades and your stuck-up attitude. But now that you’re willing to let yourself go a little? Fuck, you put all other women to shame.”
His lips travel down my body in a slow slide as he whispers to me, leaving kisses that make me shiver and moan and make my own lips betray my common sense by urging him to go further, to go lower, to go faster.
I try to fight it. Even put my hands on his chest, but my push turns into a caress, a hungry touch that traces lines across the tattoos on his pectorals and charts a path down his chiseled abs, back to the pesky belt and buttons of his jeans.
“Not too fast,” he whispers. “You’ve got such a tight body, and I want to take my time and make up for all these lost years.”
Then he grabs my wrists. Firm. Controlling. And he pins them above my head, hard, to the desk.
And, like that, the fire is extinguished.
And like that, old memories come roaring back.
Memories that I try to bury every single day, yet they always claw their way to the surface.
“Stop,” I say.
He freezes, head between my breasts, eyes looking to me with all sorts of questions sitting incandescent within them.
I expect him to keep going — a man like him, a situation like this, how can he not? — but he reads me. He pulls back. He puts two strong, yet gentle, hands on my shoulders.
“Are you OK?” He says.
No recriminations. No exclamations about how I’ve ‘worked him up’ and need to ‘finish what I’ve started’ — exclamations that I’ve heard once before; exclamations that led to pain and shame. Instead, there’s nothing but concern.
I’d answer him, except there are tears in my eyes that I can’t blink back.
I’d answer, except the only sound I can make with my mouth is some ugly-sob as I try to hold back the memories.
A man like him isn’t supposed to be a comforter. A carer. But he is.
“Is it OK if I hug you?” He says. Voice so low and calming I can hardly hear it.
I nod.
I’ve never wanted anything more in my life.
Two warm arms wrap around me. Surround me. Shelter me from the outside world.
I spill my heart out against his chest.
And he doesn’t say a thing. Doesn’t ask questions. Doesn’t offer opinions.
All I get from him is the sound of his heartbeat and the divine feeling of his arms around me as my mask of being the smart, good girl suffers the crack that finally breaks it, and everything I’ve done my best to hold back behind the rickety dam I’ve constructed inside myself out of pride, vanity, and denial, comes spilling out.
God, how I cry.
And God, how he holds me.
Nothing more. Nothing less. And it’s everything.
When his loving arms and my stubborn pride finally still my quaking heart, the men at the front door are long gone. Driven off by Eleanor’s acid tongue or the threat of the police, I don’t know. I don’t care.
Slowly, he lets me go.
Through glassy eyes, I look up at him. My vision might be blurry, but I see him as clear as I’ve ever seen anything. Behind that mask he wears — bravado, bluster, banditry — is a man who knows what it’s like to be hurt.
“Where were you back then? Where were you my senior year? Why couldn’t you have been there? Why?” My voice breaks into a sob. “I told them what happened, and they said I was making it up. That he would never do anything like that. They said it was a party, I must’ve been drunk, I must’ve wanted it and, besides, he was such a talented athlete, the football team needed him, it would be irresponsible to punish him over some made-up allegations. Why is it now that someone actually cares to listen?”
In my head and my heart, I’m screaming at the cruel fate that cursed me with my supposed-friends back then; friends who were suspicious, doubting, who heard my claims and my cries and dismissed them as hysteria and lies, the words of a petty woman.
They didn’t believe me. Didn’t care. Discarded me as so much shrill waste.
But he cares. He believes me.
I don’t even have to say what happened, and yet he understands.
“I’m sorry, Tiffany.”
That warm thunder of his voice draws me to him. My head finds its rest on his chest and I release a sigh I’ve held inside for years.
“Will you hold me?”
“Whatever you need.”
Chapter Twelve
Blaze
This
