“Pretty good,” he said, shocked to realize it wasn’t really a lie,not after all that light she’d let pour all over him. “Especially if I can get you to come like that again.”
She had her eyes on him, all over him—his hair probably a mess from her fingers, his mouth wet, his pulse a hammer at the side of his neck. If he took off his shirt, his pants, she would see it all, parts of him that didn’t look different with sex: skin that didn’t sweat or flush with pleasure, skin that might respond all wrong to her touch or not respond at all, skin that he knew would feel strange to her, inelastic and alien.
“You probably can,” she said. “I’m—I can do that. I’m lucky. I have this toy—”
“Oh,Christ,” he said, his whole brain scrambling away from his scars with the thought of it—Layla with a sex toy between her legs, lighting up a room all on her own, multiple times—and he pushed off her to stand at the foot of the bed, lifting his right arm to grab at the back of his shirt and pull it off, tossing it somewhere to the side.
But even an image of Layla getting herself off couldn’t quite stop the flood of panic he felt when the air hit him. First, there was the familiar sensation of unevenness, that desperation to do a scan.What hurts, what’s starting to hurt. What kind of pain, what number out of ten.
(Shoulder, knee, ass cheek, maybe also shin. Dull pain, one buzzing spot at the back of the thigh, four out of ten now.)
Second, there was the not-very-familiar sensation of letting someone see. Scars but not the kind most people pictured, not even really like the kind you saw in the movies, the ones with heroic combat veterans or comic book villains dipped in acid or whatever. Griff’s scars were worse than that, more confusing than that. There was the part of his arm—his whole bicep, really—that almost looked decorative, an inexplicable pattern baked in when yougot close. There was a strangely untouched patch on his elbow, one of his most pain-reactive spots, and then the shock of his forearm, bald and gnarled and multicolored, mostly dead-feeling. There was the place on his pectoral deformed by a skin graft that hadn’t gone well, a bad infection after, an ugly, unignorable dent where the muscle gave way to his armpit. There was his abdomen, his side, part of his back. Nothing to be said about it, really, nothing to describe it. It was a city destroyed, not quite flattened but reduced to rubble.
But Layla Bailey wasn’t any someone.
She pushed herself up, one elbow, then two, one of her bent legs falling open to the bed, and if she meant to distract him it fucking worked, at least for a second. God, he couldsmellher, what he’d done to her. He wanted that smell all over him, and soon.
She didn’t pretend not to see it all, but also, she didn’t make any of the faces he dreaded most, not a furrowed-brow doctor face or a wet-eyed pity face, not even one of thoseoh, sorry, I looked by accidentashamed faces. She looked at him whole, both sides, and she let herself be both sides, too. A person who’d come all over his face, her eyes hungry and her chest and face all pink, but also a person who could look straight at him, who could reckon with the ways he was different.
“You’re like—fit,” she said, and he breathed out a laugh, relieved at what she’d decided to comment on directly. A good confidence builder, even if she did sound surprised by it. He reached for the button on his pants.
“I do a lot of fucking yoga,” he said, which was true, but also he didn’t want to talk about it. “What kind of toy?”
She smiled and sat all the way up as he lowered his zipper. Set her hand on his stomach, right side, running her soft hand over the ridges of muscle there, her lashes lowered.
“Just a toy,” she said, a teasing, false sheepishness in her voice. She waited until he hooked his thumbs into his waistbands—pants and boxer briefs, both, might as well do it all at once—to add, “It goes inside.”
He practically tripped over himself to get naked. Shoes, socks, pants, briefs, all of it came off in a balled-together bundle. He did not care about his hip, his leg. Wasn’t any worse than what she’d already seen. If she had that toy in her hotel room they should’ve stopped there first. The picture in his mind now, with her legs open like that…
“What’s it made of?” he growled, not waiting for her answer as he turned back toward the door, strode over to get the pharmacy bag. He was pulling it open as he stalked back to her, stopping at the foot of the bed and tossing the box up by the pillows. If he thought of it, he wouldn’t have stopped; he would’ve kept moving, climbing back over her right away so there couldn’t be too much looking.
But he didn’t think of it. He thought of how she hadn’t answered. How bad he wanted to know.
And how she was doing a different sort of looking now.
“What’s it—?” she repeated, obviously distracted.
“Made of,” he finished for her, setting his hand beneath her chin. Tipping her face up.
She licked her lips. He tried to make the breath he blew out discreet, but honest to fucking god, that mouth being so close to his—
“It’s not that big,” she said.
He looked down at her. Tried not to laugh.
About this one thing, he did not lack confidence.
“Um, my toy, I mean!” she yelped. “It’s…I mean, what I was trying to say was, you are much…well! You’re very—”
He pulled her up, one hand under her chin, the other beneathher elbow. Kneeling on the bed like this, with him standing, they were almost eye to eye. She shuffled closer, pressed all her bare skin along his, and if it hurt anywhere, it wasn’t too much. He kissed her, moved one of his hands to the outer edge of her breast, which he’d already learned was sensitive.
“Big,” she whispered, when he gave her enough space, and he bit her lip.
“What’ll work?” he asked her, between kisses that were growing messier, wetter, hotter. “To get you there again?”
Shehmmed against the edge of his mouth, and he clutched her, shaking his head slightly—that was risky, that kind of vibration; that got his wires crossed. But now, she wasn’t so tentative with him—she just backed off, moved over to his right side, kissed along his neck.
“If it’s deep,” she finally said, which made all the remaining blood leave his brain. “And if I—can I be on top?”
