The way I thrust into her was no less loving for its brutality but this kind of love—the strange, stitched-together one we'd found together—wasbrutal. Though there was no excuse for the way I teased her ass while my cock fucked the oxygen out of her lungs. That was plainly impolite and how she liked it best.
"I'll be more precise in my requests next time, Miss Besh."
I pulled out with the intention of making her gasp and beg but made the fatal error of glancing down at my shaft and staring as the bare skin glistened with her arousal and it stretched her open. As her body worked to take me inside, keep me inside.
Fuuuuuuck.
If this was nothing more than a quick romp in the shower, I would've come right then. Blow it all and promise to make it good for her the next time. But this was Zelda and Zelda was everything.
"If you had any idea how you looked to me right now, you'd thank me for lasting this long," I said, my words twisting out in a snarl. "If you don't get there soon, you're going to miss out. You're going to wiggle this precious ass all through the ceremony. You'll be begging me to yank up your skirt and rub your clit before they cut the cake."
"So arrogant," she whispered.
"What was that?" I added another finger to her ass while the smooth suck of her flesh around my cock made my vision hazy. "You want me to make you wait for it?"
Zelda clenched her inner muscles around me and I was lost to every sight, sound, and thought beyond this woman.
"Don't you dare," she said.
I released her hair and closed my fingers around her wrist, bringing it between her legs. "Let's get you there." Our joined fingers parted her, settling on that sweet, swollen button. "This is what you'd want me to do, isn't it? After I've left you empty and wanting all day, you'd want my fingers right here."
A frantic noise burst from Zelda, one that vibrated through my fingers, up my arms, into my chest. I wanted to pin her to the wall and I didn't care if I dislocated my shoulder again in the process. I wanted to hold her down, mark her and claim her in every way I could. I wanted to be a little mean and I wanted it to hurt in the good ways, and I wanted her to know she was safe with me. I'd deny her and I'd tease her and I'd invent new ways to defile her—and I'd protect her from everything.
I pumped into her in a fanatical, frenzied rhythm and dropped my head between her shoulder blades because I was dizzy and senseless, saying, "Come for me right now or I'm putting this cock in your ass."
That was all it took.
"Oh my—Ash," she cried, her hands slapping at the shower wall.
She came the way a tangled knot unfurled from the inside out—one small, nearly imperceptible loosening somewhere near the center, then another and another, and then she was fully undone.
As if my shaft knew its place in the pecking order, I exploded inside her the second those spasms slowed. It was a devastating sort of orgasm, the kind that made me wonder whether it was actually possible to fuck my brains out. Heat and prickles filled my limbs, white noise was still playing in my head, and words failed to form on my lips despite my best efforts.
Then my watch buzzed to notify me I'd closed a few activity rings. Well done.
We didn't move for several minutes, save for straightening into a position that didn't require Zelda to take the brunt of my weight, and that seemed right. I hadn't known until now that love was a full-bodied action, a response requiring everything inside me like a sacrifice. I hadn't known I'd want to sacrifice everything.
She reached back, patted my thigh. "I needed that."
I kissed her neck. "I know."
"You always do," she whispered. "Thank you."
I gave her backside a thorough squeeze. "You're welcome."
"I know you said we don't have to talk about, you know, everything," she said. "But maybe we could grab some lunch and—"
"And you can tell me as much or as little as you want," I added, meaning every word of it. Part of me wanted to live in a universe where I knew nothing of that bastard because the mere thought of him gave me ideas about digging a shallow grave. The other part of me needed to hear this so I could help her recover from everything he put her through—and that side won out. "We'll eat. You'll get this off your chest. Then we'll enjoy the hell out of this insanely expensive party my sister and Rob are throwing."
The soap and shampoo and leg shaving came along eventually, the awkward choreography of it all too, and then we found ourselves locked together under the spray once more.
And that was how we operated best—snuggly then rough then awkward then love.
25
Zelda
There wassomething inherently naked involved in explaining an unhealthy relationship to a person who knew very little about it. In sitting down at a perfectly ordinary table in a perfectly ordinary café and conducting a postmortem. But it was the worst kind because you had to live through the process of laying out all the ugly, misshapen bits of yourself while praying that person never determined those bits were too dreadful and misshapen—youwere too dreadful and misshapen—for their affection.
