“Thanks for coming over.”
She nodded a little by dipping her chin down.
“It has to be getting harder. Phil’s prognosis wasn’t very good when he left the hospital.”
I stopped by her side and reached out to put a finger under her chin. I forced her to look up at me, to meet my gaze. There were darker slate shadows behind the pearly gray as she looked up at me.
“I was just helping a neighbor out, you know that, right?”
She let her lids droop down so that I couldn’t really see what was going on in that complex mind of hers.
“It doesn’t matter. We don’t have that kind of claim on each other.”
There it was. I wanted more and she didn’t want anything. I felt my stomach drop and I stepped away from her. She followed the movement and frowned at me.
“That’s too bad, Saint. I wanted that kind of claim. I don’t know what this”—I motioned between us with a hand—“is all about, but it means something to me, and if you can’t say the same, then I don’t want to just be the dude you hook up with because I can get you off and no one else can. That’s not enough for me anymore, and frankly it makes me feel like shit.”
I walked to the front door, ready to pull it open and send her on her way for good. I was mad and upset and not bothering to hide it. I wasn’t in any kind of head space to separate how much of it had to do with her and how much of it had to do with what I was feeling because of Phil.
“I wanted to spend the night with you tonight because the only person that ever made me feel like I was worth anything is dying and I have to watch it and do nothing about it. Nothing makes that better. Nothing fixes it, but when I’m with you …”—I rubbed a hand over my face and used it to grab the back of my neck—“it hurts just a fraction less. You make me want to focus on the good, on the memories I have that make me happy, but this clearly doesn’t mean the same thing to you. You can’t even be bothered to stay the entire night with me, Saint. I get it, you aren’t into this the way I am, so you can go. Thanks for coming by.”
I had my hand on the knob and a sweltering heat was pulsing under my skin. I hated to see her go, but for my sanity and peace of mind, it was the right call. I was getting ready to yank the door open when she was suddenly between me and the wood. She put her hands on the center of my chest and splayed her fingers wide open. My heart sped up, started thumping harder, like it was trying to burst out of my chest and put itself in her hands.
“Nash.” Her voice was barely a whisper.
“I can’t do it anymore, Saint. I don’t even know what it is.”
“I’m sorry. I really am. I don’t mean to push you away, to dismiss whatever it is we have. I just don’t know how to do this with you. I don’t want to be the jealous, fearful girl, but I am. I saw Royal and wanted to turn right around and never come back.”
Her hands moved up my chest and cupped each side of my face.
“It makes me feel better to think it wouldn’t matter if you were doing something questionable with her because we don’t mean anything to each other. It can’t hurt if we don’t have any kind of real feelings for each other.”
Her logic was ridiculous. Of course it could still hurt, because even if she convinced herself she didn’t have any feelings for me, her reactions still tore me up because I sure as shit had feelings for her.
“All I can see is you. Why can’t you understand that? No one shines as bright as you in the sky I’m looking at. To me there is no sun, no moon, and no stars in the sky, just endless miles of storm clouds and pretty, pretty gray.”
She moved her hands up higher and used her fingers to trace over the flames above my ears. She was trying to soothe me, trying to make the frayed edges come back together and put sutures in the wounds she had unwittingly inflicted.
“I want to believe that so badly, Nash. I can’t explain it to you, but part of me wants so much to see me the way you do, but a bigger, louder part refuses to believe it’s possible.”
I put my hands around her delicate wrists. My fingers overlapped because her wrists were so fragile, and I felt her pulse hammering under her pale skin.
“What do you want, Saint? What do you really want?”
She moved her hands off of my head and let them rest on my shoulders. Her eyes were swirling gray as she fought for control of the emotion whipping in the depths.
“I want your dad to be okay and for you not to have to watch him suffer. I want to be able to enjoy the time we spend together like a normal person and not constantly be waiting for the other shoe to drop. I want to get promoted at work. I want my mom to get over my dad and stop hurting. Mostly I want to make sure that this thing we’re doing doesn’t leave either one of us sad and full of regret.”
I couldn’t fault her honesty, but I also couldn’t give her any kind of guarantee or affirmation that any of those things she wanted were possible. In fact I knew some of them weren’t.
“What do you want from me?” I sounded a little like I was being strangled. I was already stripped to the live nerve center of my emotional threshold for the day. Doing this with her was the last thing I needed or wanted.
She sighed and finally all the shadows and fog in her eyes cleared and left behind the crystalline gray.
“I want you, Nash. I always want you; this is just the only way I know how to do it and feel comfortable.”
“Why are you so certain I’m going to hurt you? That I’m going to fuck up and disappoint you?”
She gave me a lopsided smile and she worked her hands under the collar of my shirt so she could stroke the base of my neck.
“Because it’s bound to happen, but I really want to enjoy what we have before then.”
How did I fight against that? How did I convince her when she seemed so certain that if she let go and trusted the feelings building between us instead of worrying about what might happen or what had happened, we could make the here and now something that lasted forever?
I wanted to keep arguing, to keep pushing her to see that this was more than a fling, more than two people who were sexually compatible. I wanted her to feel, to know I wouldn’t have been able to make it through everything going on with Phil and the shop without her kindness, her gentleness and care. However, she had her hands under my clothes and her mouth settled over mine, and even though I knew she was trying to distract me from the conversation, I decided not to stop her.
If this was the only way she was going to let me connect to her, I would just have to make do with it for now. I was a guy after all … and there were far worse things in life than having a gorgeous girl want you for sex. Plus, she wanted me, had proven that time and time again. I guess I would just have to ultimately decide if what she wanted me for was going to be enough when I felt like I needed to give her everything else I had.
CHAPTER 14
Saint
I was going to screw all of this up. I felt it all the way down to the marrow of my bones.
I had to touch him. Had to try and soothe the way I was cutting into him and making him bleed. There was no hiding the way my hesitation, my resistance, made his eyes go dark and his mouth go hard. Even with his obvious disappointment, he never lashed out, never got nasty, which made everything even more convoluted in my head. I did what I knew would make it all go away for a while, I kissed him, started pulling at his clothes and pressed up against his hard body. He was stiff and unresponsive for a half of a second, but like always when we got together like this, his big frame started to loosen.
Seeing Royal making herself at home on his couch had made every concern, every worry, every insecure part of me want to run away from him and never look back. All those questions of why he would want me, of how long would it take until he found someone without my hang-ups, someone not stuck in the past, barreled through my head like a runaway boulder falling off a cliff. If there hadn’t been real joy, real gratitude glowing out of his violet eyes when he saw it was me at the door, I would have bolted
and never spoken to him again. I hated that this thing with him made me feel that way, brought such a ridiculous weakness to the forefront of my mind. It made me feel like I was stuck in time. I just couldn’t handle that, so I blew him off when he tried to explain. I was protecting myself, insulating my heart, but little did I know my words were drawing a line in the sand where he was concerned and his heart very well might be just as fragile as mine.
When he had told me to go, walked to the door like he was really ending it all, my breath had been sucked out of my lungs and my blood had frozen still in my veins. I couldn’t give him everything he wanted, that left me far too vulnerable, but I had to make him see this was just as important to me as it was to him. The only way I could do that without getting stuck on words was with my body. Sure, I wanted him and he knew it, but I don’t think he knew it was so much more than that. I just couldn’t figure out a way to explain it all to him without sounding like a nut job or an uncertain and immature child.
I made a startled noise when he pressed me back fully into the door and tangled his fingers in my hair. His eyes burned down at me in endless rivers of purple and blue.
“This is a conversation we are going to have to finish at some point, Saint.”
I put my hands under the hem of his shirt so that my palms could skate up the divots and hollows of his rib cage. His skin was always so warm. He always felt so strong and vital, so resilient and secure. That he let me call the shots, let me set the pace when we were together, made me feel like the most powerful and most desirable woman in the world. It was intoxicating. I couldn’t just walk away from it even if that was ultimately what was best for both of us.
“But it can wait, Nash.” I brushed my lips across the base of his throat and felt him swallow. I hated that he felt like he had to deal with me and all my issues on top of everything he was struggling with in regard to his dad.
He kissed my temple and then used his tongue to trace the shell of my ear. It made me shiver all over even when he whispered, “No, not now. But soon.”
He pressed even more fully into me, making me spread my legs. He let his hands fall to the round curve of my ass and I gasped when he shifted, hefted me up, and urged me to wrap my legs around his waist. I was tall and not a petite girl. There wasn’t much about me that I would ever consider dainty, but he was a monster in comparison, so he didn’t even seem like he noticed my weight when he moved away from the door and headed down the hallway that led to his bedroom. I curled my arms around his shoulders and sealed my mouth over his while he walked. I loved the way the motion rubbed our bodies together. Even through my work scrubs and the layers underneath, I felt my nipples pebble, felt his body respond through the thick denim of his jeans. I twisted my tongue around his, twirled them in a sucking, breathless kiss that had both of us needing to come up for air by the time he got to the bedroom.
He leaned forward and dropped me on the center of the bed while pulling back and pulling his shirt up and off over his head. Now, that was a sight that would never get old. The muscles and golden skin stretched so tautly over them was always mouthwatering and made my fingers tingle and itch to stroke all over, but the designs, the markings that defined him, decorated him, and made him his own walking art gallery were just as alluring. The ink that curled and twisted up and down his arms was brilliant and eye-catching, but it was that dragon, that other part of him, that I always wanted to touch. The wings, the fire, the scales that covered so much of his big body … it was like he had a second skin and only a few got to see it in all its grandeur and I was one of the lucky ones.
He popped open the tab on his belt and lifted an eyebrow at me. I sat up and pulled my top off. Hospital work clothes were not the most flattering thing a person could wear but he didn’t seem to mind them. His gaze did that thing where it went almost all the way black when I was left in front of him on the bed in nothing but my underwear. He reached out a single finger and trailed it down the valley between my breasts.
“I love your freckles.”
It made me shiver, but the look in his eyes, and the expression on his face, had my body going liquid and warm all over. I went to reach for him, to pull him over me, but he bent down and used the same finger to pull the cup of my bra down off of one of my breasts. The tip eagerly surged up to meet his descending tongue. I squirmed and wiggled under him as he licked at it, circled it, sucked it into the warm center of his mouth. I was pawing at his nonexistent hair, tossing my head back and forth across the comforter because he was being so meticulous, so thorough with his attention to what he was doing to me. I lifted my head to tell him to stop, to get his pants off and get the show on the road, when he moved on to the other breast and that one was the other end of his pleasurable torture.
By the time he was done, I was panting and ready to explode just from his attention to my breasts. He pulled my bra all the way off and pushed me back farther on the bed. I thought he was going to just pull my panties off and get on with the sexy time. I wanted him desperately, felt my body weeping in welcome and anticipation, but Nash seemed like he was in no hurry and he wasn’t letting me call the shots tonight. He let his jeans drop, and I took a minute to really appreciate the bulge that was in the front of his boxers. There wasn’t anything I would change about him, and the wings inked all along his sides seemed to flutter when he took a deep breath and let it out slowly while working the last of my clothing out of the way.
His eyes were indigo and there was a flush under his burnished skin. Something was going on in his head, something I wasn’t privy to, but when he crawled on the bed between my legs and put a biting kiss on the inside of one thigh before lifting it up and over his shoulder, I knew.
We had had plenty of sex over the last several months, plenty probably being an understatement. Nash using his mouth on me was no longer foreign or scary and new. He was good at it, I always enjoyed it, but this was different, all of it was different. He wasn’t just making love to me, he wasn’t just trying to turn me on or wind me up. He was worshipping me. He was trying to show me in yet another way just how beautiful and perfect he saw me as being.
“Nash?” I said his name … well, more like choked it out, because his mouth and his hands were doing things that were making me come undone. I felt my hands twist into tight knots in the sheets as he stroked the flat of his tongue over a particularly sensitive bundle of nerves.
“Hmm?” He hmmed back at me and it made me cry out because when he did it he trapped my clit between his teeth and the vibration made my eyes roll back in my head.
His hands were on either side of my hips, both my legs were dropped over his wide shoulders, and his dark head was buried quite thoroughly at the heart of me. It felt wanton and decadent because of how intent he was on proving his point. I tensed, felt small tremors start in the base of my spine, and when his mouth was replaced with exploring and stroking fingers, all it took was a gentle shove and I dropped over the edge. I vaguely felt him kiss along my quaking stomach, felt his fingers moving, playing with me to draw out the response, but it was his eyes, so dark, so focused on me, that had my heart surrendering and all the noise rattling in my head finally going quiet.
He let my legs slither to either side of him and traced a pattern on the soft skin right below my breasts.
“You are so sweet. Inside and out.” His voice was gruff, so I reached down so that I could pull him up and over me.
He always said stuff like that to me. Told me I was beautiful, told me I was nice and fun to be around. He often told me I was his favorite in bed. I never replied to any of it, but there was no getting past what he had just given to me.
“Thank you.” It sounded rusty and underused to my own ears. Taking a compliment shouldn’t be that hard. The way Nash saw me, the reflection of myself in those endlessly purple eyes, was the most beautiful thing in the world, and I was having a much harder time pretending like I didn’t see exactly what he saw in me.
My simple words had shadows and
light shifting in his beautiful eyes. He levered himself up and over me in a stiff push-up so that I could work his boxers off and around his straining erection. It sprang free, thick and ready, wearing a new adornment. I blinked at it and then looked up at him in question.
“Why is your penis wearing a ring?”
He snorted out a laugh that I think had more to do with the clinical term for the body part in question than it did with my actual question.
“I just switched out the barbell.”
Behind the ridge of the head of his engorged erection was a thin hoop that circled the entire circumference of his cock. The little silver ring was fascinating. I wasn’t an expert on body piercing by anyone’s standards, but I had never seen anything like it, especially paired with that piercing at the tip that he used to its full advantage and I had to admit I was a huge fan of.
“Your dick is wearing jewelry.”
That made him laugh for real and he hooked an arm around my shoulders and rolled us over so that I was straddling him. He stacked his hands behind his head and grinned up at me.
“I like to switch it up. It’ll feel good, trust me.”
I didn’t doubt it, and for the first time since we started having sex, I really wished I wasn’t so scarred, so scared about talking to him about what this thing we were doing really was. If it was a relationship, a committed partnership, I would be on birth control and get to feel all that hard and hot flesh against the cool slide of metal without latex between us. That sounded divine and I was mad at myself for being my own stumbling block in figuring my life out, in figuring out what I was doing with this gorgeous and engaging man.
I leaned back and dug around in his nightstand for the box of condoms I knew was in there. While I was all stretched out he used his thumbs to trace the line of my ribs on each side of my body. He was always so reverent, so tactile, when he put his hands on me. Even a simple caress like that had my heart rate speeding up and my blood heating in anticipation.