“So this is all my fault? You think I’m being inflexible?”
“I think you’re being a bullheaded asshole who would rather put her life in danger over and over again if it mean she doesn’t have to admit that maybe, just maybe, her husband is right about something.”
I pretty much stopped listening after bullheaded asshole.
I picked up a pillow from the couch and walloped him in the head with it. Mostly because I really wanted to hit him right then, and it was the only way I could release that urge without throwing something hard.
He blinked at me for a second, then grabbed a pillow of his own and smacked me with it, careful to avoid hitting me anywhere I was hurt.
At any other level of anger, I would absolutely recognize how hilariously stupid this was.
In this moment, though, I wanted to smother him.
“You don’t get to make these choices for me.” I hit him several more times with the pillow, and he stood there, patiently letting me have a one-person pillow fight.
The second I stopped, panting to catch my breath, I could tell all of the anger had leached out of him, and he was just my tired, doting husband again. In the face of that, it was impossible for me to hang on to my own rage.
I dropped the pillow onto the floor.
“I can’t live without you, you idiot,” he said. “I beat this same dead horse every time because I worry one day you’re going to get yourself killed, and I won’t have been able to save you. And if that day ever comes, I will stop breathing, and I will sit down somewhere and turn to fucking stone. I mean it. I can’t live without you.”
I looked down, because the weight of his earnestness was crushing. “Oh.”
He was right, I was a bullheaded asshole.
He sighed. “I know I drive you crazy, and I know I’m a dick about it, and I know you want to shake me until I see your perspective, but I can’t see through my own. Which is, I want to know you’re coming home alive every night.”
It was like he had reached into my chest and squeezed my heart until it hurt. And that’s not an analogy I use lightly, considering I have literally had that happen to me before.
Desmond kept speaking, and I’m sure whatever he was saying was lovely and moving, but I couldn’t hear a word of it. My heart was beating too loudly. Instead I looked up at him, his form now blurry thanks to the tears in my eyes, and I lunged.
I wrapped my legs around his waist, arms around his neck, and I kissed him so ferociously that any thought of speech was gone. My bruises groaned, and my knee screamed, but I so desperately needed to be on top of him right then that the pain didn’t matter.
He was taken aback by my sudden attack and fell back on the couch with me still clinging to him. His confusion was short-lived, however, because soon he was meeting my urgency with a desperate need all his own. The heightened emotions thick in the room shifted and changed into something new. The charged energy around us was now alive with fiery hunger, and he dug his fingernails into my bare thighs, pulling me even tighter to him.
The hardness of his erection was a welcome surprise, as I hadn’t been sure when I leapt that he would welcome this particular advance, but his body at least was telling me it was very keenly into this.
I ground my pelvis against him, only the thin material of my underwear and the raspy denim of his jeans keeping us apart. His kisses trailed from my mouth down my neck, where he nibbled at the delicate flesh above my collarbone. He released one of my thighs so he could bury a fist in my hair and drag my head back, exposing my whole throat.
It was a vampire-like move, one that left me exposed to the sensual drag of his teeth and the artful way he traced my skin with his tongue.
My body kept trying to remind me I was recently injured, and a lot of this was supposed to hurt, but we had found a line between pleasure and pain where even unpleasant things felt good, because my body simply craved as much of his touch as it could handle.
I undid his jeans and slid my hand inside his underwear, letting out a guttural purr when I felt the full length of the hardness that awaited me.
Soon we were a whirlwind of arms, with shirts being ripped off, my bra sent sailing across the room, and his pants joining mine on the floor.
I’d been on the pill since becoming human, thanks to my previous experience with unexpected pregnancy when I was a teenager. It also made it a lot easier to have spontaneous sex with my husband wherever we wanted without needing to worry about condoms.
So when he braced himself on his elbows over me, I didn’t need to tell him to stop. Instead I said, “Fucking do it,” right against his ear.
There was a ferociousness to his thrust that arched my spine and made me claw at his back instinctively. His hips quickly fell into a rhythm only my heartbeat and breathless gasps had known how to ask for.
“You make me crazy,” he whispered into my neck.
“Same.”
I lifted my hips to meet his next thrust, and we both found our home in one perfect moment, coming apart at the seams until all that was left was particles and satisfaction.