25. Adrian #3
I should have pulled away. This was a hate fuck. Hate fucks didn't involve hand holding. Hate fucks didn't involve the sudden, gut punch tenderness of someone's fingers lacing through yours while you were buried inside them.
I held on tighter.
“Come for me,” I murmured against his lips. “Let go.”
He whined and started pushing back against my thrusts, rutting into my fist, desperately chasing it. I held him tighter—arm locked around his waist, keeping him pinned against me—and gave him everything I had. His fingers squeezed mine so hard the rings bit into my skin.
His whole body seized, clenching around me so tight I saw stars. He came with a shout, spilling over my hand and the sheets, shaking through it while I fucked him through every wave. His grip on my hand never loosened. Not for a second.
The sight of him—undone, wrecked, absolutely ruined—dragged me over the edge. I buried myself deep and came with his name on my lips, filling the condom while my vision whited out and my heart tried to hammer its way out of my chest.
After a long moment, I pulled out carefully, dealt with the condom, and flopped onto my back beside him.
The hotel room was dark except for the glow of Osaka through the window—neon bleeding pink and gold across the ceiling, the city still wide awake below us even though it was past midnight.
We should have been asleep. We had practice ice scheduled in the morning. Instead we were tangled in sheets that smelled like both of us now, Nicky's head on my chest, my fingers trailing up and down his spine because apparently that was a thing I did now. Absently. Like his back was mine to touch.
He couldn't stop touching me either. He was currently occupied with tracing the branch of cherry blossoms up the side of my neck, one bloom at a time.
“You're petting me,” I said.
“I'm admiring the artwork.”
“My face is up here but thank you.”
His finger reached the last petal at my jaw. “Why cherry blossoms?”
I thought about deflecting with another stupid joke.
“Sakura only bloom for a week or two,” I said instead.
“Then they're gone. Their beauty lies in the fact that it doesn't last—if they bloomed all year, nobody would travel across the world to look at a tree.” I could hear my own voice going somewhere I didn't usually let it.
“My grandmother taught me that. My mom's mom.
She took me to see the cherry blossoms in Stanley Park every spring.
Just the two of us. She'd pack these elaborate little lunches and we'd sit under the trees for hours while she told me stories about my mom as a kid, back when she was apparently a real person with a personality.”
“She sounds lovely.”
“She was. She was the only one who never—” I swallowed, not sure how to continue.
“She didn't care about my dad’s empire. She cared whether I was eating enough and whether I was happy, and she watched every one of my competitions on a laptop she barely knew how to use.
She's the only proof I have that my family is capable of love. It just skipped a generation.”
He didn't say anything. Just pressed his palm flat over the blossoms, warm against my neck, and I felt my own pulse beating up against his hand like it was trying to reach him.
“She died when I was 19. I got the tattoo the week after.” My voice stayed even. My heartbeat didn't. “You don't get to keep the beautiful things. You just enjoy them for however long they last. That was her point, I think.”
“That's beautiful.” He kissed the blossoms on my neck. Soft. Unhurried.
The moment was getting heavy—the kind of heavy that made me want to bolt. But then his hand started wandering south, across my chest, over my stomach, down to the serpent coiled around my hipbone, and I could have kissed him for the change of subject.
“And this one? Does it have some deeper meaning?”
“God, no. I was 21. Bash and I were in Tokyo and got wasted at a karaoke bar, then wandered into a shop in Shibuya at two in the morning.” The grin arrived on its own. “I was feeling drunk and slutty and this was the tattoo I chose.”
“Well. It certainly draws the eye.”
“That was the entire design brief. And for the record, Bash got a gigantic wolf on his shoulder so I got off easy in the drunk tattoo department.”
He laughed into my shoulder—that real laugh, the full body one I was becoming embarrassingly addicted to pulling out of him—and settled back against my chest like he belonged there.
My thoughts were racing in time with my heartbeat.
Tomorrow we had a competition. Tomorrow we'd be back to being rivals. Tomorrow this would get shoved into a box labelled mistake and buried under layers of professionalism and competitive focus and whatever bullshit we told ourselves to make it make sense.
Except I already knew that wasn't going to work.
The realization hit me like a missed landing—hard, disorienting, the kind of impact that knocks the air out of your lungs and leaves you staring at the ceiling wondering what the hell just happened and how you're supposed to get up from here.
I didn't hate Nicky.
Not even close.