Chapter 5 Four #2
We stayed like that. Him in my lap, my face in his neck, his hand in my hair.
I breathed him in: smoke and cold air and sweat, and underneath all of it, skin.
I pressed my mouth to his throat, right next to the bandage, right where the pulse ran under the surface, and I stayed there with my lips against that beat.
“I thought you were dead, and I’d left you.
Don’t ever make me leave you like that again. Never. I can’t…”
Something caught in his throat, quiet and broken, and he tightened his grip in my hair.
"I'm here," he said. "I'm right here."
Those were supposed to be my words. I was supposed to be the one holding him together. Instead, I was falling apart in his lap with my mouth on his pulse while he comforted me. I couldn't even be embarrassed. The relief was so enormous that it had flattened everything else.
I pulled back. His face was close, his eyes wide and searching mine. I looked wrecked. I knew it. It was all over my face, and I didn't have the energy to fix it.
"Okay," I said. My voice sounded scraped raw. "Okay. I'm done falling apart now."
"You sure?"
"No." I cupped his face with both hands. "But I need to put my mouth on you more than I need to keep falling apart, so this is me making a tactical decision."
He blinked hard. “I…what?”
“Your dick, guapo. If you don’t let me suck you off right here and now, I’m going to lose my damn mind. That clear enough for you?”
Instead of answering, he leaned forward and kissed me, and I kissed him back the way I'd been wanting to for months. He opened for me immediately, and I tasted smoke, weed, the coffee he must've had hours ago, and underneath all of it just him. I kissed him like I was trying to climb inside.
He kissed me back, and it wasn't careful. He bit my lower lip and pulled, and the sound I made was embarrassing, and I did not care even a little.
I pulled back. He tried to follow, but I held him in place with my hand on his neck.
"Strip," I said. "Everything off. Now."
He blinked at me like he was trying to process the command through the haze.
"You heard me. Get those clothes off, or I'll do it for you, and I won't be gentle about it."
He stood and started pulling at his clothes, jeans first, awkward, hopping on one foot, then his shirt. I took in every second of it. The reveal of pale skin, the scars I'd wondered about, the lean muscle, the way his cock stood hard and flushed against his stomach.
Mierda. He was beautiful. And he was letting me see him like this, this man who armored up just to walk into a kitchen, standing naked in a shitty hotel room because I'd told him to.
"On the bed. On your back."
He climbed onto the bed, lay back, and looked up at me. I'd spent two months trying not to drown in those eyes, and now he was naked on a hotel bed giving me every single thing I'd been too chickenshit to ask for.
I stood and stripped off my own clothes. He ran his gaze down my body, caught on my cock, and swallowed hard.
I climbed onto the bed and knelt between his legs.
ran my hands up his thighs, and the heat came off him in waves.
My hands knew engines. They knew locks and tumblers and the particular tension of a latch about to give.
Jasper's skin under my fingers had that same quality, like something about to open, and the mechanic in me wanted to be careful, and the rest of me wanted to feel every single thing that happened when it did.
"You're shaking," I said.
"It's been..." He stopped, then started again. "It's been a long time."
"Yeah?" I leaned down and pressed my mouth to the inside of his thigh. His skin jumped under my lips, and I stayed there, breathing against him, tasting the salt. "How long?"
"Brussels."
Two years. The anger hit before the tenderness did. Two years of this man alone with nothing but his hand and his cigarettes and whatever grim efficiency he brought to taking care of himself. Knowing Jasper, that meant barely at all.
I wrapped my hand around his cock and he gasped, hips jerking up into my grip. He was hard and leaking and when I dragged my thumb over the head, he gasped, and the sound went straight through me, low in the belly, behind the ribs, everywhere.
"Fuck." I dropped my forehead against his hip and just breathed because the sound of Jasper losing control was doing things to me I was not prepared for.
I stroked him slowly, pressed my mouth to the cut of his hip. He made that sound again, quieter this time, like something pulled out of him against his will.
"Two years, guapo." I spoke it against his skin. "That's criminal."
"I didn't exactly have..." He lost the sentence when I twisted my wrist on the upstroke. The moan was low and broken. My grip stuttered because I was trying to take this man apart while my own hands kept forgetting how to work.
I leaned down and licked a stripe up the underside of his cock. He tasted like salt and skin, and I wanted more. I took him into my mouth, just the head, and sucked.
"Fuck!" He grabbed my hair and gripped tight. "Diego, I can't... I'm not going to..."
I pulled off. "Already?"
He nodded, flushed, breathing hard. The sight of him like this, the most dangerous man I'd ever known, desperate and wrecked because of my mouth, scrambled every smooth thing I'd planned to say.
I wanted to tell him something filthy and commanding.
Instead, I took him deeper, letting him feel the back of my throat.
He tightened his grip in my hair and pulled.
The groan that came out of me vibrated through him.
I was hard against the mattress, grinding down without meaning to, and I couldn't make myself stop because every sound he made wound me tighter.
I pulled off and stroked him with my hand, kept the pace slow, kept him right on that edge.
"Diego... please..."
"Yeah." My voice cracked. "I've got you."
I took him back into my mouth and worked him with my tongue while my hand covered what I couldn't reach.
He was babbling now, Russian mixing with English, words I didn't understand, but the meaning carried.
My name kept surfacing in the middle of it, and every time he said it my hips jerked against the mattress like my body was answering him without permission from the rest of me.
He came hard down my throat with a shout he tried to muffle with his hand, his whole body going rigid before the shudders took him.
I worked him through it, swallowed everything he gave me, kept going until he pushed at my shoulders.
I pressed my face into his thigh and breathed through it.
I was so hard it hurt, and my whole body pulled toward him, toward friction, toward anything, but this was about him.
I stayed where I was and let the ache burn through me until I could think again.
I crawled up his body and settled my weight on him. He was still shaking. His eyes were wet.
"Hey," I said softly. I cupped his face. "You okay?"
He nodded but couldn't seem to find words.
"Good." I kissed him, letting him taste himself on my tongue. "That's good, guapo."
He made a small sound and turned his face into my neck. I held him. His breathing started to even out. The tension finally drained from his spine.
He reached for my cock, but I caught his wrist. The effort it took to say that word nearly broke me.
Every nerve I had was screaming yes. My cock pressed against his hip.
He was warm and wrecked and willing, and the smart move, the easy move, was to let him touch me, take the relief my whole body was begging for.
"Next time. You can return the favor next time. "
"Why?"
Because if I let him make this transactional, he'd find a way to turn it into a debt and then a reason to leave. Because he needed to know someone could want him and not take.
"Because I wanted to take care of you," I said. "Let me have that."
He searched my face, looking for the lie, the trap, whatever he'd learned to expect from people who said they cared.
He wasn't going to find it. Not from me.
"Okay," he said finally.
I kissed his forehead. "Get some sleep. I'll take watch tonight."
He curled into my side like he'd been doing it his whole life. I pulled the blanket over us and held him while his breathing deepened and slowed. I was still hard. That was going to be a long, uncomfortable while, but it was worth it.
I stayed until I was sure he was actually asleep. Then I extracted myself carefully, trying not to wake him. He made a small sound of protest but didn't stir, just curled into the warm spot I'd left behind.
I found my clothes on the floor and got dressed quietly as I could. Then I looked back at him one more time: naked, wrecked, trusting me enough to sleep.
I wanted to stay so badly it ached through my whole body. But Eight was in the other room, and Lorenzo was bleeding, and I had responsibilities that didn't stop just because I wanted this man more than I wanted my next breath.
I made myself walk away from him. That was the hardest thing I'd done all night, and I'd spent four hours thinking he was dead.
I unlocked the connecting door and stood there with my hand on the frame for one second. Whatever just happened in that room was mine. I wasn't bringing it through this door where Eight could pick it apart with those eyes that missed nothing.
Eight was exactly where I'd left her, cross-legged on the carpet with a crayon in her fist like a weapon.
She looked up when I came in, looked straight past me to the door, and back to my face. She took in my neck, my mouth, the way I was probably standing, all of it in that same sweep she used for security checks. She narrowed her eyes just slightly.
"He's fine," I said, trying to sound normal. "Beat up, exhausted, sleeping in the other room tonight. You can see him first thing in the morning. Promise."
She held my gaze for another beat. Then she picked up the crayon and went back to work.
I checked Lorenzo's bandages. He still looked like something I'd scraped off the road, but the stitches were holding and miraculously there were no signs of infection.
“So,” Lorenzo asked when I was done, “What’s the plan?”
"South tomorrow. My grandmother's expecting us."
I got Eight onto the pullout. She curled on her side, pulled her knees up, and tucked one hand under the pillow around something she'd been carrying since the farmhouse. I'd learned not to ask about it because she'd tell me when she was ready or she wouldn't and either way was fine.
I pulled the blanket to her shoulders. She held still and let me.
It still surprised me every time she did.
My mother tucked blankets the same way: snug at the shoulders, one pass to smooth the wrinkles. Carmen Reyes had tucked me in a thousand times, and every single time she'd said the same thing.
God holds what I can't reach.
I didn't say it. Eight didn't need my mother's God. She needed a blanket and someone who was going to sit by the window all night, making sure nothing came through that door to hurt her.
I could give her both.
I went to the chair by the window and sat with the shotgun across my lap. The parking lot below was orange-lit and empty except for one car at the far end. I'd clocked it when we arrived. It had stayed in the same position for four hours without moving.
It was probably nothing. I kept watching it anyway.
A shape crossed the carpet.
Eight climbed into the chair beside mine, pulled her knees to her chest, and turned her face toward the window, keeping watch beside me.
I was going to change that for her somehow, some way. If it was the last thing I did, I was going to teach her that the world had more in it than violence and escape routes and people who left.