I was a wreck of convulsions and laboured breaths. In the drawn-out seconds it took me to reorient my brain, he was already smearing my release into his skin.
Into mine.
I watched, entranced by his filthy fascination. “Dirty bastard.”
He gave me a grin that was somehow wide-eyed and hooded rolled into one. “It’s part of you.”
It was all he said, and it made sense, but I was fading fast, fatigue catching up with me.
Like always, he saw it. He held my hips while I eased off him, then lay me down. “Give me a second.”
He left the bed, opened a window, and came back with the damp flannel from the shower. I could tell it pained him to clean the mess from us both, but he did it anyway, and dropped the cloth on the floor.
Then we stared at each other in the dark as it hit home that we’d gone from nought to sixty in a split second. That afteryearsof pained nothingness and that catastrophic first kiss, we’d thrown ourselves out of a plane with no parachute.
A flicker of that horrible fear returned to his fiery gaze. He was about to ask me if I was okay. If he’d hurt me, and I was not fucking here for that.
I closed my eyes as a summer breeze filtered through the window, the sounds of the truck stop three floors below distant enough that I could block them out.
When I looked at Mateo again, he was fiddling with the friendship bracelet Ivy had tied around my wrist a few days ago. It was cerulean blue. The matching one Mateo wore was burnt orange, but he’d retied his around his ankle for reasons he’d never shared.
His concentration face was the best, but I wanted his eyes on me again.
I tapped two fingers beneath his chin and coaxed him to look at me. “I didn’t think about it once. The whole time you were inside me, it was only you.”
Mateo gnawed on his bottom lip. “What about now?”
“Only you.”
The repetition seemed to reach him. He even smiled, as much as he ever did, the scar on his face twisting with the rise of his full lips. “I, um. It wasn’t like that... when I did it before with that dancer from Gigi’s.”
“Wasn’t like that when I fucked my cellmate in Woodhill either.”
Mateo blinked.
I let it happen. I didn’t talk about the six years I’d spent in a Category A prison much, and never more than the simple things, like the food and education. But maybe that was part of the problem. I kept the horrible shit locked up so tight it hurt more when it came out.
Mateo went back to playing with my bracelet. “Did you fuck him a lot?”
“For a while. Then he got moved and I never saw him again.”
“Did you miss him?”
“No.” It was the truth. “We fucked because we were bored, and I realised after that it made me feel worse than ever.”
“Was there anyone else?”
“In prison?”
“Or after.” Mateo’s fingers drifted from my bracelet to the underside of my wrist.
His touch tickled, but the good kind that reminded me we were still basking in the afterglow of the most intense sex I’d ever had. “Someone tried inside, when I got downgraded to Cat B. I wasn’t feeling it, so I kicked the shit out of them and got sentenced to an extra year in the big boy prison. I went off dudes after that.”
It had been long enough that I could say it with humour. And Mateo had lived a grim enough life that his dark grin kicked in too. “Knowing you, bet no one ever tried to bang you in the shower block twice.”
“They did not.”
“And just girls after that?”
