“You’re killing me,” he said, restraint cracking in his voice.
A new wave came, wrapping its arms around us.
And after the tide pulled back, my legs were wrapped around his hips.
Then he plunged himself inside me. The sand felt like concrete at my back and a cry tore from my lips, my body jolting upward from the pressure.
Another wave came, another deep thrust, and I grabbed fistfuls of sand and skin.
Stone didn’t speak. He pressed our foreheads together, pushing his lips against mine with strangled emotions raining down his features.
His sand-covered hand slid down to the space between my thighs where we were connected. Then he grazed the skin around my opening that was hugging his cock as he fucked me. Feeling me, marking me, marking himself, memorizing us, this moment, and when he thrust into me again, his thickness in all its entirety shoved to the hilt.
The sensation tore a cry from my lips, and Stone swallowed it with a kiss.
I pressed myself closer to him, begging him never to stop touching me, never to have his warm naked fingers leave me.
And while we fucked, the ocean made love to us.
On the shore of Bone Island, he came quickly. Without warning.
I was filled with Stone, sand, and the sea all at once.
His body shuddered in my hands. I pulled his chest to mine, my nails sinking into his back with each jerking plunge inside me. Stone dropped his head into the curve of my neck when a moan tumbled out of him. His beautiful cock convulsed inside me, and I tangled my fingers in his hair, kissing his neck and tasting brine at his pulse as he came.
And when he lifted his head to look at me, he dropped to his side, taking me with him and swinging my leg over his hip. My head lay in the crook of his arm as he sucked my bottom lip, his cock sliding in and dragging out.
“You weren’t supposed to let me go,” he pushed into my ear, fingers curling into my flesh as he fucked me slowly, small waves crashing into us.
I thought the intensity of the moment to be unbearable, but neither one of us dared to pull away first because the thought of being without it was painful, too. What a war to be fought—a war neither of us wanted to win.
“I wish—” I started to say, finding myself in his eyes, then emotion robbed my words. I sighed, looking for something that could make this easier. “I wish I didn’t have to choose.”
“Spare me,” Stone muttered, pulling out and slipping out from under me.
He was standing by this time, yanking his wet trousers up until they hung from his hip bones. Then he walked to the dry part of the beach to snatch up the fur blanket.
When he returned, he dropped it around my shoulders.
I looked up into the black sky, trying to catch my breath with an orgasm on the edge that I wouldn’t allow myself to have.
Stone had become the balm to my twisted life, and I knew, without a doubt, I’d surely go mad without him.
But the Heathens were coming, and there wasn’t much time.
“The Heathens will be on this island by morning. If these monsters find you here, they will kill you. You have to get in your boat and leave, Stone. You can’t stay here anymore.”
Stone looked at me, his gaze hard, his expression resolved. “Monsters do not fear other monsters,” he said with such defeat that I almost didn’t recognize his voice. “Let them come.”
“Don’t say that.”
He was standing over me, shirtless and trembling, with his fingers digging into his hip bones. “So, this is it then?”
“Wistoragic,” I blurted, unable to stop shivering as Mom’s book dawned on me. “Sadness following a great story. This is what it means, and maybe I’ve always known, and that’s why I’ve been writing it in my sleep. This is the last chapter of our story, and it hurts because it’s ending, and there is nothing we can do about it.”
Stone looked at me with hollows in his eyes.
The rest of his face held sadness and despair.
