“Shhh,” I say. “I may be your husband, but I still don’t want your father waking up and hearing what I’m doing to his daughter.”
She giggles and buries her face in my neck, kissing and licking and driving me crazy as I carry her up the stairs to her bedroom and lay her down on the bed.
She kicks off her red heels and squiggles out of her Dorothy dress, tossing it onto the nearby chair and pulling off her bra. Her tits are mine for the taking, so I push her back and suck on one and then the other, running my hands over the incredible smoothness of her skin until she’s panting and squirming against me. I move up to her lips, sliding my tongue into her willing mouth as she pulls up my shirt to run her hands over my ribs.
“Take this off,” she says, breaking the kiss to tug at my Scarecrow costume. I undo the overalls and kick them off, then unbutton the flannel and toss it aside so I can press my bare skin to hers. When we’re back on the bed, lying face to face, I slide a leg between hers as our mouths meet again. After a while, she rolls over onto me, pulling her knees up to straddle my hips as she runs her nails over my skin, making goosebumps rise and my nipples harden. She smiles down at me, and my cock throbs against her center.
This is my penance. As much as I love seeing her enjoy me, giving up control is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I need to be the man in the bedroom, to be the one who holds her down and fucks her until she can’t see straight, until she cums so hard she blacks out. But for her, I’ll give that up. It’s a sacrifice I would never make for anyone else, but after what I did, I owe her this—giving up the one thing I need most so she can have what she needs most. And what she needs is to feel safe.
Leaning down to kiss me, she covers my pecs with her palms, and I reach for her tits again. I roll her nipples between my fingers until she’s squirming against me, her hips rocking on mine. I sit up, holding her body against mine with one arm while I keep squeezing her nipple with my other hand. She throws her head back, riding me in a way that makes me imagine the clothes between us gone.
The sensation of the softness between her thighs against the hardness of my erection makes me want to cum in my pants like a fucking virgin. But this is for her, so I ignore the ache in my stiff cock and let my lips play over her throat in that way that always makes her sigh with pleasure. I help her keep rhythm, gripping her hip as she moves faster, her hips rolling against my cock.
I massage her tit, pinching her nipple a little harder. She gasps, tensing like she’s going to jump off me the way she always does.
I release my grip on her nipple and wrap my arms around her, cradling her close but not too hard, so she’ll feel comforted, not trapped. “It’s okay, you’re safe,” I say quickly, stroking her hair back from her cheek. “We can stop if you want, but you can let yourself go with me. I’m here,carina. I won’t hurt you. Can you keep going?”
Her eyes clear, and she relaxes. I begin to move her against me, adding a little motion in my own hips to rub my cock right at her center. After a minute, she closes her eyes and drops her head back, her beautiful hair falling in waves down her bare back to brush my hand that holds her hip. I watch her rock, her tits rising and falling, the little freckles that dot her skin like a constellation on full display. I take her nipple between my fingers again, squeezing it gently while I massage her breast with my palm. When I apply pressure, a stitch pulls between her brows and her pink lips part in a little “o.” Her fingers dig into my skin, and she tenses up, but this time, it’s not fear gripping her. I can feel her cunt throbbing against my cock, and I can’t help myself. I explode with her, cum rushing from my cock as she lets out helpless whimpers of pleasure, her hips jerking against mine as she rides out her orgasm against me.
I watch her cum, and it’s everything I thought it would be. Breathtaking. Triumphant. Agonizing.
twenty-four
Eliza
As I come down, I’m terrified by what just happened, by what I felt for King in that moment. I’m past thinking he’s the enemy, but I realize as he’s holding me that he’s something much more dangerous than an enemy. He’s a lover. And a lover can destroy you in ways an enemy can’t even begin to imagine. You know better than to let an enemy in, after all. A lover is already in. They may not even mean to cause you harm, may not hold any ill will toward you. And yet, you can see their soul like the trap that it is, open and ready to pull you and swallow you whole, drown you in pleasure, trap you in bliss like a fly in amber.
I love him. The realization shocks me. Sometime in the last few months, he didn’t just earn my trust—he earned my heart. I’d rather spend an evening doing nothing with him than an evening clubbing with anyone else. Hell, I’d rather stay home stitching up his wounds than doing anything else, no matter who it was with. Instead of showing him that, I let him walk out the door thinking he was somehow undeserving of my love. He’s more than deserving of my love, respect, and my time. But if I tell him that, I lose all power, all control over this relationship.
“What’s wrong?” King asks, smoothing my hair back and looking at me with those dark eyes like wells I could fall into and no one would ever find me. His brows furrow with concern that could drown me.
I push him away and roll toward the far side of the bed, trying to get away from his caging hands.
“Why’d you do that?” I demand. “You know I didn’t want to do that.”
“I asked if you wanted to keep going,” he protests, sitting up.
I jump up from the bed and turn to face him. “You made me want to do it!”
He gives me a look that says I sound just as crazy to him as I do to myself. “You didn’t want to orgasm?”
“No,” I say, throwing my hands up. “I knew once I started to believe in this marriage, once I started to feel something, I’d never get away. That’s why I don’t want to come home. I don’t want this tiny life. I don’t want to be a maid or a cook or a sex slave. I want my own life, my own freedom. And I can’t have that and this, too.”
It’s everything I always feared about sex. Like when he made me cum in Bora Bora, it makes me weak, makes me need it, craving it already like a junkie needing a fix already after the first hit. I knew it could trap me, I just didn’t know how fast it could happen, or that it could happen without me even noticing. Maybe that’s why I kept holding back, why I stopped every time King got me right to the edge. I knew once I went over, once I began to depend on him for that pleasure, I’d want more. Less than that will never be enough—never again.
After the first time, I knew it was a trap, but it felt so good that I let myself be caught. And now he holds me in his arms so gently, as if they aren’t teeth waiting to snap shut on me, consuming my life until I don’t even remember what it was like before, until I want to stay home and make him spaghetti and clean his house, and one day I’ll look back on the big dreams I never had a chance to even imagine, and I see that all that’s left on the path behind me are little shards of bone that he picked clean and spit out.
I want to go back in time ten minutes, to take it all back. I want to stop myself from coming so I can stop myself from realizing my heart already belongs to him, that it’s too fucking late. I want to go back to the life we had before I left, before we dated and he made me fall for him, trust him, without even realizing it. That life wasn’t ideal, but it wasn’t scary like this. I’m vulnerable now. I’ve let him see too much, know too much. I need to know his secrets, balance the scales.
I can tell he no longer thinks of me as just a bratty, spoiled princess. I’d rather be that than damaged and sad. I can’t unsay what I said, take back my secret like I took back the lie I told on our wedding night to make him leave me alone. I can’t make him forget my trauma or that he still wants me. How do I do damage control when the damage is so deep and irreversible I don’t even know where to start? How do I make him stop pursuing me when even telling him the most shameful thing about me didn’t kill his desire?
“Eliza,” he says, looking so earnest it makes my heart twist. I turn away so I don’t have to see him when I hurt him. I don’t want to hurt him. I already care about him way too much. But I know this is my last chance, and it makes me desperate. I’m falling in a way I’ll never get up from. This is worse than when he forced me to lie there while he fucked me. That was just my body. Now he’s tricked me into giving up my heart.
“What?” I snap, hating the sympathetic tone in his voice. I don’t want pity. I want a life where I’m in control of my own choices. Why didn’t I run when he gave me the chance? Why did I let him back into my life, let him win me over, let him so much deeper inside me than he ever was before? Why didn’t I realize that this was where it would lead? I love him, but it doesn’t feel good. It’s terrifying, and even though I know I’m sliding backwards into the way I was at first, I can’t stop it. The instinct for self-preservation is too strong inside me.
“I never asked you to be any of those things,” he says. “After everything that’s happened over the past few months, you’re really going to accuse me of wanting you for asex slave?”
“That’s what marriage is,” I say, repeating the words I’ve been saying since I was too young to understand their meaning.