He releases my cheeks, shoving my head back into the pillow roughly.
“Wrong,” I say, suddenly that same anger is bubbling below the surface of my skin. The lighting in the room is the same, so low it’s almost a dark burgundy. “You are always that close.”
Silence, his eyes still on mine, and just when I think he’s going to snap at me again, he throws his head back and laughs so hard his hand has to go to his belly. “Go to fucking sleep, Dea. I’m not fucking you.”
I absently hear my phone vibrate on the bedside table but ignore it. I know I shouldn’t look too much into his words, but I can’t help it. They’ve already sunken into the areas of my brain that won’t let anything go and are staying there.
“Eli would…” I whisper, rolling onto my back. I don’t even catch the moment it happens, but instantly his body is covering mine, the heaviness of it pressing me into the mattress, his hand covering my mouth with one leg between mine.
“Say it one more time.” His voice is low, dropping to a level I’ve never heard. “Go on, do it.” He releases my mouth, his lips grazing mine. “I fucking dare you.”
I bore my eyes into his, the will to not back down too strong to submit right now, and with the rejection still an open wound, I feel like being brutally honest. Not to shock him, or because I’m being reckless, but because it’s the truth. I know it, he knows it, Eli knows it. Though I know it’s not something I should be proud of, since I get the feeling it wouldn’t take much to have Eli jump into bed with you, but I say it anyway, because again, it’s the truth.
“Eli. Would. Fuck. Me.”
Before I can even cringe at the crass word leaving my mouth, his teeth have sunk into the side of my neck and I yelp in pain, my fingernails sinking into his back.
“Brantley!” I meant to yell at him, but it leaves my mouth confused.
My eyes close and I move my other leg. I almost think he’s going to fight it, but he doesn’t, sliding his leg over mine so both of them are between my thighs. I wrap them around his waist, the pain in my neck long since being replaced by his tongue circling slowly. He brings his head up, his nose against mine. I catch the red smudge on his upper lip, but I don’t think anything of it.
“You’re a fucking pain in my ass,” he growls, and before he can slide off me again and go back to being the corpse he is ninety-nine percent of the time, I lean up, wrap my arms around the back of his neck, and press my lips against his.
His body stiffens, but I don’t release. It’s not until I carefully run the tip of my tongue across the slit between his lips that he snaps, opening and kissing me back. His tongue is against mine, sliding together as our lips move in perfect rhythm, as if they’ve done this before. As if they’ve been starved of each other for centuries and are finally reunited. He swells between my thighs and my hips tilt, a thick throb penetrating all of the sensitive areas that are already well acquainted with what he can do.
A soft grumble vibrates off his lips, but I swallow the sounds. I fight with his protesting and push him further toward the edge. I want him to let go. Need him to.
Our kiss doesn’t stop. It has to be the longest ever recorded. The slow strokes sensual enough to charge my heart in my chest but filled with enough passion to drown me. Finally, he pulls back, resting his forehead on mine while he latches his hands around my wrists and pins them above my head.
He rolls his hips into me. “Saint.”
My name. The name he chose before I even knew how to speak, he spoke before I knew. It conjures every bit of my untouched soul, and I know I would do anything he asks. He could use my submission as a whip and beat me senseless.
My eyes roll to the back of my head, my nails sliding down his back, over all of his muscles.
“You don’t want this.”
“Brantley…” I reach up and kiss him softly. Just once. Not deeply and with no tongue, just a simple kiss. I rest back against my pillow and burn my eyes into his. “I’m seventeen. Old enough to know what I want right now. I do not want this to be with anyone else.”
His lips do a half-smile, displaying a sliver of his white teeth. “But that’s just the thing.” His head dips as he drags his teeth over my bottom lip before coming back up to glare down at me. “There will never be anyone else.”