I jerk out a nod and swallow that I’m sure he can feel on his rough palm. “Yes.”
“Because you’re not an innocent flower anymore. I don’t need to tell you to hold on to your dress. Or to hide your pussy from me.”
I’d forgotten.
I’d forgotten how filthy his words can be. Or at least what they made me feel when he talked to me like that. How they affected me.
How they sent currents running through my body, my stomach, my limbs. How my skin would tremble and become coarse with goosebumps.
“Yes,” I reply, swallowing again. “It didn’t work the last time. Protecting me, my body. So I think we should d-do it.”
“Do it.”
“I think we should get each other out of our systems. Get closure. So we can move on. We can —”
“Yeah, you said that.” He squeezes my throat again. “You already said how you wanted to fall for someone else.”
“Reed —”
He cuts me off again. “So you want me to fuck you, fuck that thing between your legs, so you can offer it up to someone else. A good guy. A guy who doesn’t hurt you like I do. Am I getting it right?”
At his angry words, jealous words, a great, mighty tremble rolls through my thighs, through the thing between my legs, and I have to press my thighs together to keep my balance.
But then, I shouldn’t have worried about falling because he’s got a good hold on me.
A possessive hold.
“I didn’t mean it that way. I just meant that we have to end this and —”
“And you’ve already done it, haven’t you?” he growls, his wolf eyes narrowed. “You’ve already offered it up to fucking Toby. Toby with his brown fucking eyes and his fucking kindness. He was kind to you. Isn’t that what you said? Toby was kind to you and so you went wherever he took you. And when he asked you, you spread your legs for him, is that it?”
“Reed —”
“Toby tell you that though? That you have to fuck someone to get over someone else. He teach you that?”
I tug on his hair. “Reed, that’s not —”
This time he cuts me off not with his words, but with his actions. His fingers shift and ripple around my body and he comes ever so much closer to me.
His mouth breathes fire over mine as he rasps, “Let’s see then. Let’s see what that motherfucker taught you.”
Before I can respond to that, he puts his fire-breathing lips on mine.
For a second I’m so shocked, I’m so taken aback, that I freeze.
I don’t know what to do.
I don’t know if I should move or breathe or what. And I guess he has the same problem because he doesn’t do any of those things either.
He only presses his mouth on me.
But then slowly he breathes.
Slowly, he opens his mouth over mine and his sweet and smoky breath fans over my lips. And his life-giving air goes down into my lungs and slowly resurrects all the dead spaces inside of me.
Slowly, I come alive and I breathe too.
I not only breathe, I open my mouth and I gulp down all the air he gives me.
And when I’m all alive for the first time in two years, I kiss him.
I kiss the guy I fell in love with when I was almost sixteen, and the sky opens up.
Exactly like it did two years ago.
Two years ago, when Reed Roman Jackson kissed me for the first and only time, the sky broke into pieces and scattered around us in raindrops. The same thing is happening right now and it’s a shock to my body.
It’s a shock to his body too but he doesn’t take his mouth off like he did that time, and I thank God for that. I wasn’t about to give him up. I can’t. Not yet.
And it looks like he doesn’t want to give me up either.
He doesn’t want to let go of my mouth, so he keeps kissing me.
Although the rest of the things, he does them exactly as before.
Last time, he picked me up from the ground and cradled the back of my head. He made me take shelter in his big body before he carried me to his Mustang to protect me from the rain.
This time too he does all of that.
He picks me up and my thighs go around his waist. He cradles the back of my head but only to press our mouths closer and I wind my arms around his neck only so I can let him.
Still kissing, he takes me over to his Mustang.
And God, I’m going to start crying.
I’m going to start sobbing because he’s still doing it, isn’t he?
He’s still protecting me.
After all the things I said to him just now. After how I’ve angered him and hurt him and invoked his jealousy and violence, he’s still taking care of me, and my heart squeezes in my chest.