I don’t have to do any of this alone anymore. I can finally just…just take a fucking break without feeling a titanic amount of guilt. And on those days when I can’t provide like I want to, I know Knox will be there to support me.
“Thank you for loving me. For healing that broken girl who spent every Valentine’s Day wishing for a love that would transcend time. I never saw my future as anything more than spreadsheets and iced coffee runs, but you took a chance on me even when I was so cruel to you in the beginning,” I tell him, briefly glancing up at the gunmetal cataclysm balanced overhead—eerily reminiscent of the day when I convinced myself to carry my grudge with me into the afterlife.
Luckily for me, I wasn’t going to be a resident there just yet.
His tears have retreated, replaced with a smile that rounds out his cheeks. “Hey, hey. You had every right to be. I don’t hold it against you, and you should give yourself some grace. It’sbeen my greatest honor to hold your heart in my hands. And I’ll always be gentle with it, Ace.Always.You’re stuck with me for good.”
“There’s nowhere I’d rather be,” I promise, running one of my hands through his wet hair, wringing water from a strand with my forefinger and thumb.
I finally address the elephant on the lawn. “Where did you get all of these flowers on such short notice anyways?”
“Let’s just say I know a guy.”
“Where am I supposed to keep them?! There are hundreds of them.”
“A thousand, actually. But preferably in a storage unit when we get our penthouse together. It could be your own little garden that you never have to water because it’ll never die. Something permanent.”
Aside from the fact that he just admitted he wants to move in together, I can’t help but fixate on the usage of “permanent” in his sentence. Oh, and “a thousand” is definitely an honorable mention.
“You paid attention to that?” I blurt in shock.
Knox slowly lengthens his legs, rising to his full height yet still bowing his head to meet me halfway. A six-foot-three behemoth curving over the girl he’s vowed to protect. Predator and prey that shouldn’t work together under the law of nature but do.
“I pay attention to everything when it comes to you. It may be the first class I ever ace.”
I rise to my tiptoes with polished confidence, brushing his lips with mine. “There’s still one more test left.”
And then, for the first time in my life, I seize the fucking moment. Kissing him is even better this time around, which I didn’t think was possible. A head rush of pleasure and pain dance parallel to our hungry mouths, and a pantheon of starsskips over my vision as love twinges somewhere deep in my belly.
It’s the perfect length for a kiss, with additives to sweeten it. There is no urgency, for I know thatmyKnox isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. We don’t use it as a gateway into something more—it just is. A love letter condensed into a single gesture.
And the craziest part? I’m more than okay with it. The girl with the endless to-do list has finally checked off the last box. Little did she know that her once self-proclaimed archenemy would be the one to get her to set down her pen.
32
REAPING THE BENEFITS
KNOX
ONE WEEK LATER
“If this is my reward for finishing with an A in Lit, I would’ve done it a lot sooner,” I say, rills of water jetting down my back from the shower head, a flash-steam of heat in my skull superseding what’s left of my patience.
I’ve got Staten pressed up against the glass, her ass nudged between my thighs, and her cunt choking the length of my erect cock. There was no appetizer to the main course—no foreplay. I needed to be inside of her before lunacy blowtorched all my senses.
After our reconcilement, studying for the last test of the semester came easily to me. In fact, I’ll probably sound insane for admitting this, but it was a nice distraction from all the shit of the past few weeks.
I gave it my fucking all. And my dad, well, he motivated me in a way that didn’t involve fear. I did it so I could bebetterthan him. Now I’ll never let my self-worth be connected to that son of a bitch ever again.
Desperation oozes from Staten’s pores, and the liquid hasprimed her pussy for the ridges of my piercings, which tickle her internal nerve endings with each hurried stroke. Nothing separates us anymore—no latex, no unremedied miscommunication. She’s diligent on taking her birth control, and it was her request to do things…raw.
The glass door shakes each time our combined body weight slams against it, and I slither my hand around her side to palm the soft swell of her stomach where there’s a bulge in her anatomy, carved out to accommodate my pulsing girth.
“Glad my incentive worked,” she quips through a chopped string of words, bearing down on each one of my thrusts with premeditated murder.
A bruised sound rumbles from deep within the fallstreak hole in my chest, and I grind into her at a relentless pace, my heavy balls slapping against the backs of her thighs. “Ace, if you think I wouldn’t go to the ends of the earth to feel that perfect pussy of yours riding my dick, then you underestimate how fucking obsessed I am with you.”
There’s an insatiable creature pacing behind the bars of my ribs, hungering, grinding its fangs together in preparation to feast on soft flesh and an even softer artery. When I pry her open on my dick, I swallow her cries as residual tremors go off like artillery fire through my body.
