11. Evangeline
CHAPTER ELEVEN
evangeline
W ithin twenty minutes of arriving home, I’m curled on my couch in pajamas, a cup of steaming tea on the coffee table, my Kindle in my hands. Everything is exactly as it should be. I’m relaxed. Alone. My peace restored.
No one will ever know that when I got home, I ran around like a crazy person turning on every light, opening every closet and door, until there were no more shadows.
What happened tonight— what almost happened —has gone the way of all my other memories of Wilder. Locked in a box, chained closed, and thrown into the Mariana Trench of my mind.
I refuse to go back to the dark place I was in after I left the band, when dwelling on the loss of him and everything we’d shared felt like slow suffocation.
Never again.
I’m so engrossed in my book, my ears dismiss the first knock as a part of the music playing on my nearby speaker. It isn’t until the song ends that I register the sound of a fist pounding on my front door.
Then his voice. “Evangeline!”
I rocket to my feet. My stomach doesn’t come with me, clinging to the couch cushions, most of the blood in my head racing to join it. For ten frenzied seconds, my body is a statue while my mind erupts like Vesuvius.
He’s here.
Why is he here?
Oh God, he’s here.
Another song starts. Wilder’s voice pushes into my ears over the intro. “Open the door, Fairy!”
The nickname is what propels me into motion—what breaks chains and locks and releases what I’ve been trying to forget. I stalk to the front door, unlock the deadbolt, and yank it open. Wilder’s head whips up, relief etched on his features.
I look around pointedly. “Sorry, no Fairy here. Just some girl .”
He catches his lower lip in his teeth, wincing. “I panicked. Can I come in?”
It’s ridiculously hard to ignore the puppy eyes he’s giving me, but I manage to scoff. “Absolutely not. What happened in the bathroom was a mistake. Momentary insanity. Go back to your girlfriend. Or, wait—did she dump you? Good for her!”
His lips twist as he smothers a smile. “Kendra and I have an open relationship. She knows I’m here.”
I blink a few times, hoping the words will become less presumptuous. Nope. They don’t.
“You think I’m going to sleep with you?” My voice rises with every syllable. “You’re out of your mind. I don’t even like you!”
He steps closer, hands lifting to grab the top of the doorframe. Ducking his head, he pins me with a heated stare. “You may not like me anymore, Evangeline, but you still want me. You told me not to stop.”
I used to love that he was one of the few people who called me by my full name. Now it feels aberrant. An unwanted intimacy.
Wilder’s gaze travels down my body, lingering on my braless breasts. I cross my arms over my white T-shirt.
“It’s cold out,” I snap.
Leaning toward me even further, he murmurs darkly, “Don’t lie to me.” He licks his lips, a quick flick of his tongue that echoes as a pulse between my thighs. “We’ve been dancing around this for years. There’s no pact anymore. Let’s get it out of our systems. Tomorrow we can go back to strangers.”
“Get fucked,” I snarl.
His brows twitch up. “Trying to, actually.”
With a growl, I swing the door closed. His boot catches the wood, then he’s pushing into my house. He slams the door behind him, locks it, and faces me. My heart gallops, my darting gaze capturing him in ecstatic bursts like furious notes on a piano. Flushed cheekbones. Heaving chest. Twitching fingers. Eyes full of naked longing.
He’s a siren song of chaos and desire, so beautiful my conviction disperses like sea foam. I’m swept away.
“Evangeline,” he whispers.
We reach for each other at the same time. It happens fast but feels like slow motion. I’m waiting forever— I’ve waited forever —for his hands on my waist. They clench and lift me, slamming our chests together. My legs wind around his hips, my arms locking around his neck. Planting one hand on my ass, he sinks the other into my hair. With a sharp tug, he angles my head and brings my mouth to his. So close I can feel the condensation of his breath.
“Kiss me, Fairy.”
It’s a plea. A prayer.
I can’t resist.
His lips are exactly how I remember them from our brief kiss when I was sixteen. Silky soft and warm, firm and full. They part slightly but he doesn’t kiss me back. Doubt surges, but when I start to pull away, the hand in my hair tightens to hold me still.
“No,” he whispers.
His thumb finds my chin and presses down, opening me to him. He breathes into my mouth. Hot, heavy, slow. Sucking me in, filling me up. Shivers wrack my body. My fingers and toes vibrate.
His groan expands my lungs, and then he’s kissing me like I’ve never been kissed before. Like he’s pouring the entirety of our lives into my mouth. Our tongues tangle like our verses used to: seamlessly, effortlessly.
I had no idea a kiss could feel like this. Like arriving somewhere I’ve never been but where I’ve always belonged.
I don’t notice we’re moving until we’re falling onto my bed, until the weight of him reminds me I have a body instead of only lips and tongue. I gasp when he breaks the kiss, instantly bereft without his lips on mine.
He rises above me and tugs my shirt up my chest. Hot, rough hands slide over my bare stomach to encompass my breasts. He squeezes them gently, his expression rapt in the too-bright room.
“I’ve thought about touching these for so long. Fucking them. Giving you a pretty pearl necklace.”
A choked moan leaves me as he circles my nipples with his thumbs. Lightly at first, then with more pressure until my breasts ache and my nipples are flushed and tingling. With a satisfied hum, he lowers his head. When his mouth covers one peak at the same time he pinches the other, I gasp his name.
“You like that, huh?” He punctuates the low words with flicks of his tongue and finger. His teeth scrape over hypersensitive flesh—I whimper. My hips lift, searching for him, but he shifts out of reach.
“I know you can be louder,” he says, dark amusement in his voice. “Let me hear you sing.”
He devotes himself to making me lose it, suckling my breasts, blowing onto wet skin, biting and massaging and feasting until I’m giving him what he wants. Making sounds I’ve never made before. Feeling sensations I’ve never felt, like my breasts have a direct line to my clit.
Suddenly there’s pressure right where I need it, a heavy hand rubbing roughly. Fireworks explode in my head and I explode with them. He swallows my cries, kissing me with feverish intensity until I melt, boneless and twitching in the aftermath.
I open my eyes to find Wilder smiling down at me. His real smile. A little lopsided, one dimple deeper than the other. I haven’t seen the expression in so long, my heart tugs in my chest, aching and overfull. I touch his face, my fingertips dancing over his cheekbone where a single, small mole rests.
His smile falls. “Don’t,” he whispers. “This doesn’t end like one of your romance books. I’m no hero.”
Another tug in my chest, this one a scythe slicing through old, stale hopes. The maybes and could have beens. Silly wishes of a girl for her perfect love story, her perfect prince.
The pain fades fast, though, more nostalgia than anything else. I grieved that girl and her foolish dreams three years ago. I grieved the idea of him. Right now I’m not interested in a pretty, boring prince.
I want the villain.
I swallow, finding my voice. “Trust me, I know. You’re an asshole, and I’m ghosting you tomorrow.”
His lips twitch even as darkness flickers in his eyes. Tension ripples down his body. To break the unbearable moment, I arch into him. His gaze lowers to where I’m rubbing myself shamelessly against his erection.
“What are you waiting for? An invitation?” I angle my hands between us, coasting my palm over his cock before grabbing his belt buckle. “Fuck me like you hate me, Wilder.”
“Jesus Christ,” he hisses.
The next seconds are a blur as we tear off our clothes. His hands and mouth are everywhere. My stomach. Neck. My ankles, knees. Thighs. He shoves a foil packet between my teeth, his hand transferring to my throat and staying there as he slides down my body. One of my legs is yanked up, my knee shoved outward and held to the mattress. I spit out the condom foil, which slides off my chest.
He bites my inner thigh, then covers me with his mouth.
I gasp, arching. “Yes.”
He eats me out like it’s his calling. No hesitation, no tender exploration or reading my cues. He takes my pleasure like he owns it, and before I know it, I’m bucking against his mouth and crying out his name through another orgasm.
I’m still twitching with aftershocks as the hand on my throat releases, calloused fingertips floating over my chest and stomach and lifting goosebumps. He rises from between my legs like a fallen angel, all chaotic hair and straining muscles and inked skin. The lower half of his face glistens with my release, speckled green eyes catlike with smugness.
He licks his lips. “You still taste like sin.”
I’m useless, panting and drugged by back-to-back orgasms, and can only watch as he straddles my hips. His hard cock juts out over my stomach, and of course it’s as pretty as the rest of him. He strokes himself slowly, his grip loose over the long, thick shaft and a broad, flared head that shines wetly at the tip. Something else shines, too—silver balls that disappear and reappear as his hand passes over them.
My eyes widen.
“Apadravya piercing,” he says with a smirk. “Consider those orgasms appetizers to the main course. I’m about to blow your mind.”
I squirm, an uncomfortable emptiness taking up residence between my legs. His other hand plays with my breasts lazily, but I can’t focus on his touch because I’m fixated on his cock. I wish his hand were my mouth. I want to roll my tongue over the silver balls and taste them. Taste him .
But when I try to rise, to reach for him, his hand plants on my chest. “That’s not on the menu.”
“You don’t want a blowjob? Who are you?”
He doesn’t answer. Doesn’t look at me as he begins to tease my nipples again until my breaths turn to pants and I’m making small, needy sounds. His too-perceptive eyes lift to mine.
Shaking his head, he tsks softly. “How many men have tried and failed to read your music? How many have left you unsatisfied?”
The words rattle me, but they anger me, too. If he thinks I’m the same girl he shocked in his childhood bedroom, he’s about to find out that I abandoned her on the floor where we used to write songs.
Stretching my arms over my head, I fake a yawn. “Sorry to break it to you, but you’re not special. I’m one of those lucky girls who gets off easily.” I nod at his hand, still working over his shaft. “Are you going to do something with that or just wave it in my face?”
For two absolutely perfect seconds, he stares at me in shock. Then he laughs. It’s not a nice sound, though, but a sinister chuckle.
“You’re such a fucking liar.”
I glare at him, but he only smiles slightly and reaches for the condom. He tears it open and rolls it on with brisk efficiency.
Don’t think about how many women have watched him do this. Don’t think about it…
Too late.
I grimace, my eyes closing.
Hands grab my face. My eyes snap open as he covers me with his body, blanketing me with heat. The tip of his nose touches mine, his eyes so close I can count the freckles like stars in an alien sky. I grab his forearms for stability because it suddenly feels like I’m plummeting down from space.
“No,” he whispers, pressing a soft kiss to my mouth. “You stay right here. It’s just us. You and me. Like it’s supposed to be.”
My body goes rigid. “You can’t have it both ways. And you’re not a hero, remember? So stop acting like one. Either fuck me or get the fuck out.”
An emotion crosses his face too swiftly for me to name, but it bounces in my chest like I’m an empty chamber. Heavy and hard.
His jaw clenches. “You want me to treat you like them? Fuck you like I don’t give a shit about you?”
No.
“Yes.”
He bares his teeth. “Fine.”
I yelp in surprise as he flips me onto my stomach. My hips are wrenched into the air. His knees bump mine apart. My hair is gathered, spiraled into a chord, and yanked until my spine bows. He shoves two fingers inside me and pumps hard.
“Fucking dripping.”
He says it like it’s a curse, like he’s angry my body likes his aggressive handling. I’m a little confused myself, but there’s no time to think about it because the head of his cock drags over my center. Up and down, up and down.
“If it’s too much, tap my thigh,” he growls.
“Wh—”
The rest of my question is lost— I’m lost —as he slams inside me with one brutal thrust.