It’s as though the kiss wakes me up from a deep, numbing slumber. For the first time in weeks, I don’t feel wooden inside, like the shadow of the man I used to be, like a puppet merely surviving. I’m alive. I’m real. I’m me.
And still, it isn’t enough.
Releasing her wrists, I wrap my arms around her and pull her onto me, adjusting our angle to kiss her deeper. She reaches up, grabbing my nape and clutching my hair as she tugs me closer. I feel her lips part under mine and then the wet warmth of her tongue. I don’t need more to unlock my jaw and give her what she wants—what she needs as much as I do.
We’re not subtle or tender. We don’t take our time rediscovering each other. This is hungry and desperate. We take what we thought we’d never have again, kissing like it’s the first and last time wrapped together. It’s intense, dirty, greedy, sinful… And it’s the most beautiful, most incredible thing I have ever experienced.
My heart hammers a primal beat, my chest swelling, expanding to make room for all the emotions wrecking me. She’s in my arms again. The most perfect creature who’s ever graced this Earth is plastered against me, her needy little tongue sampling me with ravaging intensity. Lost in the moment, she bites my lower lip, making me groan at the sting of it. My hands lower down her back, filling up with her extraordinary ass and pulling her closer. The thin fabric of her pretty dress allows me to enjoy its softness, my fingers digging into it.
She moans in my mouth, greedily pressing herself harder onto me, her hands grazing down my sides, only to slither their way back upunder my T-shirt. I grunt her name and feel her weight increase in my hands, her knees giving out.
I’d say we’ve lost control, but I’m not sure we ever had it.
I almost forgot how untamable and flammable this thing between us is. There’s never been anything like it before her, and I know I’ll never find it again with anyone else. Not even if I lived for a thousand years.
She pulls me down in her need to get more, making me lose our balance just a little. Before we can stumble over and hurt ourselves, I grab her behind the thighs and lift her. Her legs part with the fluid motion, and I settle her against me, right over my aching cock. I can almost feel through the layers of our clothes how fucking wet she is for me.Always so fucking wet…
A few steps later, I’m by the couch. I carefully sit, keeping her right on top of me as we never break our kiss.
She’s everything.
She’s mine.
Eager to experience her taste again, I rip myself away from her lips and drop my mouth to her throat, sampling her skin there. My hands are clutching her hips, which undulate in small but undeniable sways over me. Her moans, now free of obstacles, fill my ears as I kiss and lick every inch of skin I can access.
I’m traveling back up to her jaw when she moans my name, her hands pressing against me.
“What?” I grunt.
“We can’t do this,” she protests, pushing harder to set some distance between us.
I let her go and lean back, admiring the small details of her overheated face. “Why?”
She stays right there, pressed where I need her so fucking much it hurts, looking at me with glassy eyes full of need and frustration. Her lipstick is smudged, and I’d venture I have some all over me as well. I pass the back of my hand over there, hoping I’ll get most of it. It makes her do some damage control on herself, wiping away the redness.
“We can’t because I only came here to get answers. I wanted to hear you say it, to know I wasn’t completely delusional. I’m still… I’m still leaving Kelex, still moving on.”
“You want to leave?” I ask.
“You fucking broke my heart, Lex. It would take a lot more than one kiss to fix that.”
Her earlier mood, her fierce determination, has returned. When she tries to get away from my lap, I prevent it, keeping her right there. My hands are on her hips, under her dress but over the thin pantyhose she has on, and I graze its texture with my thumbs.
I was okay with protecting her by keeping her away. I was fine with watching her bloom from afar. But I can’t accept her leaving. If my options are either that or being with her, then I don’t really have a choice, do I?
“What would it take?” I gravely ask.
“To fix us?”
I nod. She thinks about it for a moment, her eyes gliding over my face. “We’d need to go slow. And I’d need to trust that you won’t panic and pull that kind of shit ever again. I’m a fool-me-once kind of girl, not a fool-me-twice. So, if you can’t convince me of it, we won’t move forward.”
I squeeze her hips for a brief moment before letting go and finding a more proper position for my hands—over her dress and along her thighs.
“And if you do, then maybe, just maybe, I’d let you have another shot at my heart, Lex. But you’d need to mend it back to the way it was. I wouldn’t accept anything less. You’d have to glue every single piece back together, one by one.”
Again, I nod. My hand travels up the blue fabric to rest right under her left breast, over the organ I tore in half. I want to fix it. I want her to trust me again and to give me a second chance. But I’m still not entirely confident this is the best thing I can do for her.
“Are you sure you don’t mind the way I am?” I ask, balanced between hope and worry.
