Chapter 20 #2
She wraps her legs around me, hooking her ankles around my back.
I grind against her sweet pussy. It causes her to smile against my mouth.
Her hand dips into the waistband of my sweats, heading straight for my cock.
She grips my length, forcing my pants down with her other, determined to set it free.
I bite down on my lip, stifling a groan.
“Fuck me,” she pants. “Fuck me, please.”
“So eager.” I give her a devilish grin. “You aren’t worn out from earlier?”
“Well, no.” She runs her thumb over my tip, sweeping the bead of precum. “It’s been ten years since you’ve fucked me, and now that you have, I’m not ready for you to stop at just the once. The past eleven days since the bridge have been torture enough.”
“I knew you missed me,” I tease, sliding my hand over her perky tit and rolling my thumb over her pebbled nipple.
She hums in agreement, biting down on her lip to stifle her moan. I’m dying to hear her sing again.
Unhooking her ankles, she opens her legs wider for me.
She grabs my hand and guides it into the waistband of her shorts and pulls down until my hand reaches her already soaking-wet pussy.
“Yes, like that,” she breathes against me, clutching my shoulders.
I start working her, burying my nose into her hair.
I want to keep this going, I do, but something inside me is dismantling after years of hating Julianna, loving her, then hating her again.
It’s a roller coaster ride I’ve never been quite sure I want to stop, because without the hate, I never would have loved.
I want this with Julianna. I want to feel the high of sinking into her, working and bending her body to my will.
But it feels as if there’s something still standing between us, like a giant elephant in the room—one we’ve become experts at ignoring.
I try to be present and in the moment, focusing on my hand touching and my lips tasting her skin, but another intrusive thought creeps into my mind, forcing me to slow things down.
“Lark, wait.” I sigh, pulling back.
“W-What?” she pants, sliding her hands across my shoulders and around the back of my neck. She tries to pull me in for another kiss, but I jerk back.
With a pinched brow, her expression turns to one of hurt and rejection.
“We need to talk about earlier.” I force myself to get through this. The last thing I want to do is push Julianna away, but the fear and hatred that once crippled me isn’t in the room with me now. I take the opportunity to push her more than I have been these past few days.
“You said you didn’t want to talk.” She tries to pull me in again, her gaze falling to my mouth. “I’m good with that, Rome.”
“But I’m not sure I am.”
I pull my fingers away from her and use my other hand to stroke her cheek. Her blue eyes have softened and whatever structure been dismantling inside me has come undone even more. I hate seeing the pain in Julianna’s gaze.
She sighs, averting her gaze from mine. “What do you want to talk about?”
A sizzling sound comes from the stove, and Julianna looks down at it to her right to see the water in the small saucepot boiling over.
“Shit.”
I step back, allowing her to hop off the counter. She scrambles to turn down the temperature and contain the mess while I rake a frustrated hand through my hair.
There’s nothing I’ve wanted more than to be able to erase the pain Julianna and I have suffered all these years, but we can’t get past it if we never go through it.
With her back to me, she picks up the box of macaroni and pours the noodles into the pot.
“Julianna,” I say quietly, stepping close to her.
She spins around, frustrated. “What is it, Rome?”
“I’m just…” I run a hand down my face, then take another step toward her, close enough to where she can feel my sincerity. “I’m just trying to get a read on you. You’ve always had this wall up, and at one point I was the only one you fully trusted. But now…”
“Now you aren’t,” she states plainly. Her confession is a punch to the gut. I guess I deserve it. If it weren’t for my choices that night our marriage essentially ended, we wouldn’t be here.
“I deserve that.”
My confession clearly shocks her as her pupils dilate and her eyes spread wide.
“What?” I ask.
She blinks rapidly, shaking her head. The noodles are boiling over again, with water sputtering and spilling over the edge of the pot. I sigh and reach around her for the wooden spoon on the counter, then stir the noodles, but Julianna doesn’t break her attention away from mine.
“I don’t understand why you suddenly want to talk,” she finally answers. “I thought this would have been the perfect situation for you.”
“Perfect, in what way?” I drop the spoon and spin around to face her again.
“Fucking me without all the baggage. It’s what you prefer, isn’t it?”
I curl my hands into tight fists at my sides as emotions I’ve refused to acknowledge for years threaten to spill over.
“Tell me.” I lower my voice, trying to remain calm. “Explain to me in what fucking universe you think I would prefer that sort of arrangement with you.”
Pressing her lips together, she huffs through her nose before she finally says, “Macy and all those other women I’ve seen you with over the years.”
It isn’t the pranks or the constant surveillance she’s annoyed by? It’s goddamn fucking Macy?
“I apologized for what happened with Macy. I accepted my role in that. But what other women are you talking about?”
She scoffs, cackling in disbelief. “Oh, don’t tell me you haven’t had women fawning over you for ten years.”
“Maybe.” I shrug. “But if I have, I haven’t noticed.”
“Bullshit.” Her eyebrows rise. “Don’t lie and tell me you haven’t fucked anyone since me.”
“I haven’t.”
“It’s been ten years, Rome. That’s fucking insane.”
“You may think it’s insane, but that doesn’t make it any less true.”
“Seriously? You haven’t fucked anyone else?”
I stare at her blankly.
She lets out another cynical laugh, but the moment she realizes I’m not joking, she stops. The muscles in her jaw ticks as she clamps her mouth shut and looks back at the stove. “Look, can we just make this mac and cheese and eat without talking?”
She’s running, hiding from our demons, but the structure disassembling in my chest won’t let her walk away easily.
“You never want to talk,” I press. “I try, and you shut me out every time.”
“Oh, and you’re the picture-perfect example of talking?”
“I’ve tried, Julianna.”
“What about the past eleven days?” She looks back at me.
Her brows pinch and heat spreads to her cheeks as she raises her voice.
“You ignore me for over a week after what happened on the bridge, then you take me out to practice shooting, and suddenly you have me bent over the bathtub, fucking me, demanding I scream your name. You still haven’t told me who is after us.
You have me hiding out here without telling me a single detail as to why.
Now, the only thing you’ve actually told me is you haven’t been with any other women since me, and you just expect me to believe that?
You expect me to open my soul to you? I did that before and it took me years to recover. ”
“Well, we can’t keep up with this charade.”
“What charade?”
“Us.” I wave my hand between us. “Ignoring each other. Pretending we hate each other when we both know that’s always been furthest from the truth. All we’ve been doing these past ten years is live a lie.”
“I haven’t been living a lie,” she argues coldly. Her expression softens, eyes welling with immense pain and devastation. “I’ve been doing what it takes to survive.”
Her voice cracks, and I’m on the verge of breaking. Seeing her in pain after all these years tears me up from the inside out.
“I know, but I don’t think we’ll ever get past this if we never talk about it.
” I feel like I’m talking to her as the old me.
Eighteen-year-old Rome. The vulnerable one who went from hating Julianna Capuleti to worshipping the ground she walked on, hanging onto every word that came out of her pretty mouth.
“You don’t understand. It’s hard for me to talk about.” She raises her shaking hands, gesturing toward her chest. “It pains me to even think about it.”
“I get it, I do.” I press my hand to my chest.
Her gaze drops to the snake wrapped around my wrist and up the length of my arm. “I don’t think you do.”
“I lost her, too, Lark.” I raise my voice, emotion thick in my throat. I’m tired of holding back the darkness that’s lived inside me for years. “I lost her, you, my mother, all in the same fucking week. You don’t think that hasn’t fucked me up?”
“Losing me was a choice.” She points a stiff finger in my direction. “You did that. The other two you had no control over. But me? Losing me was a choice.”
I don’t argue with her on that point. She’s right.
“I know.” I fucked up and I owned up to it the day we agreed to separate.
“But I won’t apologize for how seeing you, my wife, out with William Trent three days after we lost our daughter didn’t fuck with my head.
I wasn’t even in my body when I went to that party.
My heart and soul were with you, nowhere else. ”
She grinds her teeth, her rage turning to anguish.
“You know my dad spent years trying to set me up with William Trent. You knew I only went out with him because I had to keep Dad appeased until you and I were ready to tell him about us. I was practically a zombie when I got home, and he told me he had a date for me already set up. What was I supposed to do? I was a shell too, Rome.”
“Yeah.” I blow out a heavy breath and run a frustrated hand through my hair. “I get it. But you had a choice, too. You could have told him no.” It’s been years since I’ve spoken this out loud.
“Why?” She presses the heels of her hands into her eyes before lowering them. Her bottom lip wobbles as tears stream down her cheeks. “Why do you want to talk about the one thing that broke me?”