“January? What friend?”
She straightened up and ignored my question. Her hands grasped my biceps, her fingers dug into my skin, her face upturned to mine. “I want you,needyou to take it away, this hole in my heart, this pain, this … everything! All of it, all these months, all this life. All the mistakes, all theshit! BecauseIdon’t give afuckanymore, Oliver.” The voice she had raised up until now broke when she added, “Doyou?”
We were the mirror image of twenty years ago, and it was January this time who reached the point of having no fucks left to give. She had absorbed my pain and rage with her body back then, and now she wanted me to do the same for her.
Chapter 21
January
“Not a single fuck, January,” Oliver rasped his answer against my skin. “Not a single one,” he breathed, right before gripping my nape and crashing my lips to his.
I couldn’t wait another millisecond. I pushed my tongue into his mouth, longing to taste him, and he might have felt the same, because he did, too. We stood there, gripping one another, ravenous for each other, my back arching under our height differences.
Until he took me in his arms, I didn’t know how much I needed this crust that hid the volcano in Oliver to shatter tonight. But once he did, I wanted to get burned so hard that I wouldn’t feel anything else but this, but him.
I didn’t even know if it would be rage, or pain, or love that would erupt.
I knew that the rage I had seen in his eyes all those years ago was still somewhere in there, lurking, looking for fault lines to erupt from. Right now, for the first time in my life, I had enough rage in me to meet his.
If it was pain, then I had plenty of my own to work with tonight.
And if it was love, then I had loved him all my life, even when that love was buried under my everyday existence and the belief that there was nothing else for me but the daily struggle.
Tonight, it didn’t matter. I just wanted to let go. I needed him to erupt.
Instead of trying to veil everything in light, to look for the positive, to find the silver lining even when it was obscured by a shit ton of dark clouds, tonight, I wanted to give in to the darkness in me.
We stumbled back toward the cabana’s open door without letting go of each other.
Only when one of Oliver’s arms left me, and I felt the force he exerted, I shifted my gaze to see him sweeping everything off the kitchen slash dining table and onto the floor. A chamomile tea mug I had drunk before he arrived crashed to the floor, too, but neither one of us cared.
Oliver pinned me to the edge of the table, my legs spread to fit the width of him.
Wrapped in his arms, I kissed his neck while he pulled my skirt up to my waist and caught both sides of my forest green lace panties that I had worn to feel fancy earlier that day, without knowing what that day would bring or how it’d end. He yanked them off me, then lifted me, and sat me on the edge of the table.
I grabbed his pullover at his waist and lifted it, helping him take it off and then throwing it behind him. Oh, to have the full terrain of Oliver’s hard, warm chest exposed and all there for me to revel in with my mouth and hands. I kissed that area between his pecs, and then the one that his heart was beating under, all the while roaming my hands over everything, from his corded arms to his chest and down to his solid abs where I began unbuckling his belt. My fingers worked ineffectively between trying to undo the thing and slipping to smooth over the hard-on that challenged me from the other side of the fabric.
Oliver removed his hands from me and undid the belt himself. Then he stripped my blouse off me in one pull, exposing the matching bra to the panties that were thrown somewhere on the floor. Now that he had most of me naked, Oliver chafed his hands over me from my neck to my shoulders, down to my breasts. He kissed me again, and it was even hungrier than it had been.
My hands glided down his body, and I slipped one into his open jeans and dark gray briefs, grabbing the hardness that I needed inside me. Oliver groaned into my mouth. He then pulled back and looked at me, his eyes dark. I retreated my hand.
“Is that what you wanted?” he breathed out. He looked almost angry, like he had lost a battle and I was to blame, and he was now questioning me if that was where I really wanted him—defeated.
“Yes.”
“Then take off your bra,” he commanded with a slight gesture of his chin toward the garment, his eyes piercing me.
I reached behind me, biting my lower lip, and undid the clasp. I looked at him. He didn’t budge. He waited for me to take it completely off. Just likethen.
The anticipation to feel his hands on me again was searing. He didn’t even have to touch me for me to go ablaze under his gaze. I needed him inside me.
I removed the bra and threw it to the floor, watching Oliver watch me.
I was completely exposed, fully naked, my legs wrapping his hips, my inner thighs pressing the rocks that were his outer thighs.
Oliver took my chin between his fingers, tipping my head further up, and with his eyes never leaving mine until we had to close them, he bent and kissed me deep.
This time, his mouth and hands both traced down my body, from my jaw to my neck, to the curve of my shoulder and farther down as Oliver bent down to devour the convex of my breasts. He then closed his palms around both and brought the left one into his mouth. I cried out, not words, just syllables, from the sheer pleasure that rippled through me.
