Chapter 33 All the Ways
All the Ways
Gemiah
Okay. So maybe I didn’t think this whole getting-railed-in-the-woods-by-Rocket’s-massive-dick thing through.
The bark of the tree is rough at my back, and my ribs are reminding me they’re still bruised.
Josha’s legs are vibrating with a scant tremble that travels up his torso to shiver over my neck with each exhale, and his fucking cock is nothing like the glass plug.
It throbs in my ass, hot and huge and alive.
This is a fullness far beyond my—admittedly naive—imaginings.
The fact that it’s about a thousand times better is the only thing stopping me from flying to pieces.
I desperately want him to move, but I’m afraid there’s nowhere left for him to go.
“I need—” he says, and his hips stutter convulsively, instantly proving me wrong. He can get deeper, and oh god, it’s incredible and too much and everything I fucking asked for. A broken gasp rips from my lips, and my thighs tighten instinctively around his waist.
“Again,” I plead.
He grunts through another short thrust.
“I—you’re so fucking tight. I’m gonna hurt you if you don’t relax for me,” he says.
Relax?
I’m a fucking high wire, ready to snap. My balls are already aching to unload, and my dick is drenching my abs with precum.
“Breathe, Quill,” he begs, and two of his fingers find my stretched and straining hole.
I’m not convinced more stimulation is going to help, but then he circles the base of his cock, fingertips tracing my rim with featherlight brushes, and something unlocks inside me.
Capturing my mouth, he sucks gently on my lower lip as he pries my clutching fingers from his side and guides my hand behind me.
“Touch us. Feel what your incredible body is doing.”
Oh.
I shiver as my hand finds his cock. Everything is warm and slippery and oh so sensitive.
Spreading my pointer and middle fingers around his base, I marvel at the heavy pulse of it and the silky texture of my entrance taking every inch of his girth.
Then my thumb slips behind his balls to tease his taint, and he makes one of those sexy-as-sin Rocket sounds.
A bolt of pleasure spikes through me, and the involuntary clench that follows has us both cursing.
“I’m gonna fuck you now,” he warns, shifting his hold to hike my thighs higher on his ribs. The change in angle has his shaft rubbing over my prostate, and my head hits the tree behind me as filaments of desire flare all along my limbs.
“Do it,” I growl. “Fuck me hard and make me come on your cock.”
“So bossy,” he murmurs, rolling his hips in a slow wave that is not at all what I asked for but absolutely lights me the fuck up. Twining my hands back into his hair, I use the leverage to grind my ass on his pelvis and chase that perfect friction.
It’s strange not to be the one doing the fucking—a surrender of control at once weird and wondrous. He’s splitting me wide open in layers that peel back to my very core, the dark depths of me threatening to combust under the light.
“Josha.”
He rocks his hips again, and I surge up to claim his mouth, rolling his bottom lip between my teeth before whispering, “Please.”
Adjusting his grip, he wraps one arm around my waist and braces the other on the tree above my head, and I have just enough time to appreciate his strength before he draws back with a searing drag and plunges in to the fucking hilt.
“Oh.”
Again.
“Fuck.”
And again.
“Yes.”
“Touch yourself,” he commands through gritted teeth. “I’m not gonna last like this, and you promised to come on my cock.”
I take my weeping shaft in hand and stroke myself to the rough rhythm of his pounding hips.
His breath comes in sharp pants that end with these little whimpers, and I’m falling completely apart at the seams. I can’t tell if night is dropping around us or if my vision is blacking out as surge after surge of euphoric pleasure carries me away.
We were made for this.
My orgasm hits like an avalanche, locking my limbs as I shout to the sky and paint his heaving chest. Despite the warning about his own stamina, he rides me through it, punishing my prostate with short, brutal strokes that drag the ecstasy to the edge of agony.
“You’re-so-good-you’re-so-fucking-good-I’m-gonna-fucking-come-inside-you-baby-I-can’t—fuck—god.” His final thrust drives me back against the tree, his body flush with mine as he shudders and buries his face in my hair, and hot cum floods my ass.
Holy fucking fuck.
“I’ve always preferred ‘Star-Lord,’” I murmur into his fluttering pulse when I can speak again, and we both groan when his shoulders shake with reluctant mirth, jostling everywhere we’re connected.
“I’m going to put you down now, Star-Lord.”
“How are you even standing right now?” I ask, letting my legs slide free until I’m wobbling on my feet.
His arm at my waist and the tree at my back are definitely the only things keeping me vertical.
Well, and the fact that I’m naked and covered in a sheen of sweat and cum, and the ground is a mess of forest detritus.
“I’m not.” Tugging his jeans up over his ass, he collapses at my feet. I tilt my head, admiring his flushed skin and the evidence of my release caught in his chest hair.
“You know what would be fucking awesome right about now?”
He leans back on his palms and squints up at me. “A hammock?”
“A hammock.”
We make the short drive back to his trailer in the dark.
He rests his hand on the back of my neck while he guides the truck down the driveway, the gesture’s casual ownership setting butterflies aloft in my chest. I’m pleasantly sore and used, happy to bask in the afterglow, but the niggling little voice in my head is waking up, telling me that, while the sex was amazing, it started with another fight.
It’s also reminding me how long it’s been since my last fix, and ratchety tension is creeping back into my languid muscles.
“Well, how was I?” I ask when I can’t sit still any longer. “Good enough to make you forget the SFO Radisson?”
His fingers tighten, digging into my pulse, before he pulls his hand back with a sideways glance.
“Are you trying to pick a fight right now?”
“You’re the one who told me sex doesn’t fix anything. I’m just trying to figure out if you’ll ever forgive me for all the shit I pulled before we started fucking. Or ever trust me again.”
“You’ve only been sober for two days. Which is also exactly how long we’ve been fucking.”
“Do you know the last time I voluntarily went more than twenty-four hours without a drink?” I sure as hell can’t remember. It has to mean something.
“I’m not sure if that’s helping or hurting your case.
And I don’t know how long it will take me to fully trust your sobriety.
My dad sometimes went months between benders.
You’ve barely started. But,” he sighs when I slump in my seat, and his hand drifts over to stroke my knee.
“I forgave you as soon as I heard your voice on the phone and knew you were alive.”
“Could’ve fooled me,” I quip, but I capture his fingers with mine so he can’t pull away again.
“I never said I wasn’t angry.”
“Forgive but never forget, huh?”
“Do you really want to forget?” He pulls into the parking space outside the trailer and kills the engine, then turns in his seat to study my face in the dim light from the porch.
“Our history is part of us. We both made mistakes in the past, and I don’t mind paying for mine if it means we get to say we survived the worst of each other.
As long as we learn from it. As long as we do better moving forward.
I’m not ending up like my parents—trapped in the same patterns of resentment and avoidance until one of us dies. ”
I shake my head. “You never make mistakes. Unless this is one now. What if I can’t do it? What if I hurt you again?”
“Stop. You’re already doing it. Look at us.
We’re worlds beyond the SFO Radisson. And don’t tell me I never make mistakes.
I selfishly pushed you on my birthday when you weren’t ready.
I enabled your addiction that night and a hundred nights before.
Hell, I made all your shit with Shilo worse because I wanted her approval so badly.
I failed you so many times, Gem. I was so worried about being in love with you I forgot how to be your friend. ”
“You were everything I ever wanted in a friend. I strung you along for so long it’s a miracle you didn’t snap long before your birthday.
That wasn’t selfish. It was brave. I fucked it up with my bullshit.
I fucked up ENC all on my own. You were never gonna stop me from drinking back then, and you couldn’t have stopped my mom from leaving or from falling in love with Cheyenne. ”
“I could have set better boundaries and paid more attention to what was going on with you, rather than letting my own fears write our story. I could have fought harder for you. Fuck, at the very least, I could have taken your side after your mom came home.”
“You were fucking starved for parental affection, Rocket. I was an asshole to be jealous of you when you found it. You deserved to be the favorite.”
“Good parents don’t have favorite children, Quill.”
“Only least favorites.”
“Wait until you see how they react to having you back tomorrow, and then talk to me about ‘least.’”
Tomorrow. Fuck.
I’m not ready.
I give his hand one last squeeze, then let myself out of the truck and head toward our temporary sanctuary, trying to steel myself for the inevitable invasion.
It’ll be okay. I’m working on my shit, and this is one more piece of it. And I have Josha on my side now. I’m not alone.
“They want you to be happy, Gem,” he says, catching up to me. “They fucking love you, whether you want to believe it or not.”
“They’re my family. They have to love me.” It doesn’t mean they like me.
Grabbing my arm, he spins me around to face him.
“What about me?” he asks. “Do I have to love you?” Taking my face in his hands, he kisses me once, soft and sweet. “Because I do. I love you. I always have. In all the ways a person can be loved.”
My eyes burn and my heart swoops, and I bury my face in the crook of his neck as our arms wrap around each other, the night breathing an impossible future into being.
“I love you too,” I tell him. “In all the ways you want, for as long as you’ll let me.”
I am not alone.
“Hey. What are you doing?” The sleepy question rumbles out of the dark.
“Nothing.” Instinctively, I drop my phone to my chest, hiding the screen.
He shifts—all that naked, masculine muscle against my side setting off the confusing mixture of guilt and dopamine I usually associate with getting high.
“I’m blocking and deleting all my dealer contacts,” I confess, leaving out the part where I stared at the oh-so-subtly named ‘Jon Snow’ for ten minutes, wondering if he was still local and bringing up clean coke from SF.
“Okay,” Josha says, definitely more alert now. “Having trouble sleeping again?”
The amount of gratitude I feel at the lack of judgment in his tone makes my throat ache. “Yeah.”
“Do you want to load up the boards and drive to Jughandle?”
I do want to hit the surf again, especially with him, but…
“No. My body is exhausted. It’s my brain that won’t shut up.”
“How can I help?”
“Lobotomize me?”
“I don’t think so.” Plucking the phone from my unresisting fingers, he rolls away to set it on his nightstand, then nudges my shoulder until I turn onto my side and he can snuggle in behind me.
“You can talk to me, if you think it would help,” he says, rubbing his stubbled chin along my shoulder. I shake my head.
“There’s nothing good going on in there.”
His hand strokes down my arm and over my hip. “Need me to distract you, then?”
“Please.”
He reaches back to the nightstand and returns with the bottle of lube. When I try to face him, he stops me.
“No,” he says, slipping his arm under my chest to keep our bodies flush, then sliding his other hand down my thigh and coaxing my knee up. “Like this.”
I hug the pillow to my face, muffling a small, defenseless sound.
“Are you sore?” Dipping a finger inside me, he probes gently, testing the sensitive tissue.
“No,” I lie, because I don’t want him to stop.
He huffs into my ear—an amused, affectionate sound that reminds me of the time he tried to teach me how to drive stick in his sister Hannah’s old Camry and I stalled out three times trying to back out of the parking spot.
Like he finds me adorable instead of hopeless.
Like he’ll never give up on me.
He coats his cock, then guides it between my ass cheeks and rubs the silken head over my entrance. I’m still soft and open from being railed against the tree earlier, and my body welcomes him back like a missing piece.
This time, he takes me with one smooth glide, humming his approval in my ear when I arch and moan.
It hurts a little, but in a satisfying way, like pressing on a good bruise.
My dick twitches and starts to thicken against my thigh.
When I go to grip it, he laces his fingers with mine and brings both our hands up to my thudding heart.
“Shhh,” he says. “I got you. Go to sleep.”
“With your dick in my ass?”
“Mm-hmm.”
I squirm, and he tightens his arms and stills me with a soft chuckle. “Not distracting enough?”
“Definitely distracting. Are you really not gonna let me come?”
“I’m gonna let you sleep, Quill.”
I’m not convinced, but after a moment of lying there, caught by our connection, my body starts to grow heavy, and my brain fuzzes out.
Like some sort of wizard, he not only stays hard, keeping me full, but also senses every time an intrusive thought claws at me and lulls me back to lethargy with a leisurely rock of his hips.
Safe.
Loved.
His.
Cocooned in his embrace—both inside and out—I drift away to the low timbre of sad country love songs whispered in the dark.