“You’ve done so much the past two days,” Riggs whispered, trailing his hand to a new spot, another pinch. “You’ve done so much for me.”
“I don’t?—”
He cut me off with a quick flick of his wrist and a painful twist of my skin beneath his fingernails. I let the words die in my throat.
“That’s what I thought,” he murmured, pressing his mouth against the edge of my nipple and leaving a soft kiss in the wake of his fingers.
He moved like that for another minute, his mouth peppering kindness after the cruelty of his fingers, and I was covered in gooseflesh and sweat by the time he reached my hip. Riggs slid his hand around to the inside of my thigh, searched out a pressure point and dug his fingers in so deep I saw a completely different kind of stars around the edges of my vision.
“I didn’t know I needed you until you were here,” he confessed. “Whether you’re passed out on my chair or coming in my hand with your cheek pressed against the door of a bathroom stall…there’s no denying how much I need you.”
He released the pressure point and my entire body sagged in relief, but then he took my balls into his mouth, toying at them with his tongue and I was ready to beg him to put an end to us both. Riggs sucked my sac and licked my cock, then worked his way up the other side of my body, hitting the same pressure points, the same beats, until he was back at my chest, finger twirling around the chain that held the clamps on my nipples together.
“You make my life better,” he whispered. “Broke me out of a holding pattern I didn’t even realize I’d fallen into.”
“I love you,” I told him back, but it was more a plea than a promise.
It was easy for Riggs to say I’d done that for him, but he’d done the same for me and he’d done it tenfold. I’d walked into his shop looking for a way to be anyone besides Marshall.
I never expected to actually findmyself.
“I know, baby,” he said, nodding his cheek against mine.
His fingers tightened and he pulled, taking the clamps off my nipples with one sharp pull. If his body wasn’t on top of mine, I certainly would have broken through the rope and the bed itself. But Riggswasthere and hewasstrong, and he used his body to keep me steady as another terrifyingly hard orgasm unfurled out of me, this time with no hands.
The wet spread of cum between us must have taken Riggs by surprise because he lifted off me enough to look down, then reached his hand between us and swiped up some of my spend with his finger.
“Look at me,” he said, and I did.
I pried my eyes open in time to watch him trace my cum across my lower lip so he could lean down and lick it off of me. I tightened my fingers around the ropes that kept me pinned to the bed, desperate to be released while never wanting Riggs to let me go. There was simplicity in the dichotomy of it, the duality of wanting opposite things and finding a way to have them both at the same time.
“Thank you,” he said to me, leaning down and pressing a kiss against the corner of my mouth.
“For what?”
“This life.”
“I hardly?—”
Riggs cut off my protest with the hard press of his cum-sticky fingers against my mouth. “Don’t argue.”
“Okay,” I mouthed against his palm. “Okay.”
CHAPTER 38
RIGGS
SIX MONTHS LATER
It was a short drive to the cabin I’d rented for the weekend. A small little thing tucked into the mountains of Riverside County, set on four acres of land which meant complete privacy for as long as we wanted it. Since it wouldn’t take long to get there and I didn’t want to tire Smith out before dinner time, we’d had lunch with his best friend Asha before packing the car and hitting the road.
“I feel sometimes like I should send her flowers,” I said, reaching over and giving Smith’s leg a squeeze.
“Why’s that?”
“She was the one who brought you to Rapture in the first place. I don’t know if I would have ever seen you again after your tattoo if she hadn’t.”
Smith smiled, staring out the window.
