Chapter 14 #3
He tastes like whiskey and fury and the specific heat of a man who knows he is losing an argument he cannot win with words so he is trying to win it with his mouth. His teeth scrape my lower lip. His tongue demands entry. I give it—then take it back, biting down.
Hard.
He hisses against my teeth, and his hands tighten in my hair, and the sound I make is angry, hungry—the sound of a woman who wants to be seen by the man who is kissing her blind. My nails rake down his chest, catching on buttons, and I hear one pop free and ping against the nightstand.
He pulls back just enough to look at me. His lips are swollen, a drop of blood blooming where I bit him. His chest heaves. His grip in my hair does not loosen.
"Is this what you want?" The words come out rough, scraped raw.
I do not answer with words. I grab his collar and yank him back down.
Our mouths collide again, and this time there is no pretense of tenderness.
This is combat. This is two people trying to consume each other because they cannot conquer each other with conversation.
My hands shove his shirt off his shoulders—he shrugs it off, arms freeing, and then his palms are everywhere, dragging down my sides, pushing up my satin nightgown, rough palms against my bare thighs.
I arch into him, furious, wanting. My hips roll against his, and I feel him—hard through his dress pants, the thick length of his cock pressing against my core. A groan escapes him, vibrating against my mouth, and I swallow it like a victory.
He yanks my nightgown up over my hips. I am bare underneath—no panties, nothing between us.
His fingers find my pussy, and I am wet, soaked, embarrassingly ready.
He groans again when he feels it, when his fingertips slide through the slick heat of me, and I hate that my body responds to him like this, hate that he knows exactly what he does to me.
"Fuck—" The word tears out of him, half curse, half prayer.
I grab his wrist, not to push him away, but to angle him where I need him. My hips buck against his hand, demanding, chasing. He gives me two fingers, pushing inside, and the stretch makes me gasp, my head falling back against the pillow.
His mouth finds my throat. Teeth. Tongue. The scrape of stubble against my pulse point. I am shaking already, my body wound tight from anger and want and the unbearable ache of needing someone you cannot fully trust.
I shove at his chest. He lets me push him onto his back, and I follow, straddling him, my knees bracketing his hips. My nightgown is bunched around my waist, my bare pussy grinding against the hard ridge of his cock through his pants. I rock my hips, slow and deliberate, watching his face contort.
His hands grip my thighs, fingers digging into the muscle, hard enough to bruise. Good. I want the marks. I want proof that this happened, that he was here, that I made him feel something he cannot talk his way out of.
I reach between us and work his belt. The buckle clinks. The zipper groans. I shove his pants down just enough to free his cock—thick, flushed, already leaking at the tip. I wrap my hand around him, and he hisses, his hips jerking up into my fist.
"Nova—"
I silence him by sinking down onto him in one brutal motion.
The stretch is intense, almost too much, my body struggling to adjust to the sudden fullness. A moan rips from my chest, raw and unfiltered. He fills me completely, his cock hitting deep, and I have to pause, hands braced on his chest, breathing through the intensity.
His hands find my hips, holding tight, and I can feel the tremor in his fingers. He wants to move. He wants to flip me over and fuck me into the mattress. I can see it in the tight line of his jaw, the tension in his shoulders.
I do not let him.
I roll my hips, slow and punishing, taking my pleasure, using him the way he has used me a hundred times before. Each drag of his cock inside me sends sparks cascading through my body. I lean forward, changing the angle, and his grip on my hips tightens to bruising.
"Look at me," I demand.
His eyes snap open. Dark, desperate, the mask stripped away. For this moment, he is not the charmer, not the deflector, not the man with a quip for every occasion. He is just Romeo—raw and wanting and mine.
I ride him harder. The slap of skin against skin fills the room, wet and obscene. My thighs burn. My breasts bounce beneath the satin, nipples peaked and aching. I want his mouth on them. I want his teeth. I want him to mark me the way I am marking him.
He must read it in my face, because he sits up, pulling me against his chest, and yanks the neckline of my nightgown down. His mouth closes over my nipple, hot and wet, and I cry out, my fingers tangling in his hair, pulling hard the way he pulled mine.
He groans against my breast, the vibration shooting straight to my clit. His hips snap up, meeting my downward rhythm, and the pace changes—no longer controlled, no longer measured. This is desperate, furious, two bodies trying to fuck their way through a wall that will not crumble.
He flips me.
My back hits the mattress, and before I can react, he is over me, inside me, driving deep with a force that pushes me up the silk sheets. I wrap my legs around his waist, ankles locked at the small of his back, pulling him deeper, refusing to let him retreat even an inch.
"Tell me," I gasp, my nails raking down his back, leaving red lines in their wake. "Tell me the truth—"
He silences me with his mouth, swallowing the words, swallowing the demand.
His hips piston, relentless, each thrust a punctuation mark, a period at the end of a sentence I am not allowed to finish.
The headboard cracks against the wall. The wet squelch of his cock pounding into my soaked pussy fills the room, obscene and undeniable.
I bite his shoulder, tasting salt and skin and the cedar that clings to him like a second skin. He growls—a low, animal sound—and his hand finds my hair again, yanking my head back, exposing my throat.
His mouth descends. Teeth on my pulse. Tongue soothing the sting. His other hand slides between our bodies, finding my clit, and I shatter.
The orgasm rips through me without warning, a white-hot detonation that starts at my core and radiates outward.
My pussy clenches around his cock, spasming, and I scream—his name, a curse, a sound that does not belong in this penthouse with its silk sheets and city views.
It belongs to the girl from the fourth-floor walk-up, the one who learned that wanting something does not mean you get to keep it.
He follows me over the edge. I feel him swell inside me, feel the hot pulse of his cum flooding my cunt, filling me. His groan vibrates against my throat, raw and wrecked, and his hips stutter, losing their rhythm, grinding deep as he empties himself.
We lie there, tangled together, breathing hard. His weight presses me into the mattress. His cock softens inside me, and I feel his cum leaking out, slick and warm against my thighs. The evidence of what we just did—angry, desperate, unfinished.
I push at his chest. He rolls off me, onto his back, one arm thrown over his eyes. The silence stretches, thick and suffocating.
I stare at the ceiling. My body is satisfied in the way a fire is satisfied after it has consumed everything in its path—hollowed out, still smoking, waiting for the next thing to burn.
He did not tell me the truth.
I did not make him.
The wall between us stands, built of a secret I cannot see and he will not name. We fucked around it, not through it. We used our bodies to say what our mouths could not, and it felt like victory and defeat at the same time.
I turn my head to look at him. His chest rises and falls, the muscles of his abdomen still twitching. The bite mark on his shoulder is already purpling. My mark. My claim. As if claiming his body could ever be the same as claiming the truth.
"You still owe me," I say.
He does not answer. But his hand finds mine in the dark, his fingers threading through mine, gripping tight.
Neither of us lets go.
Afterward.
Silence. The wrong kind.
The wall is intact. Reinforced. Whatever Romeo carries about his father is still locked behind that door and all the passion in this bed cannot pry it open because passion is not what he is withholding.
Trust is what he is withholding.
And I cannot keep colliding with a man who gives me his body like a sacrifice and keeps his truth locked in a vault.
My decision crystallizes in the dark. Clean. Final. The way my decisions always form — in silence, in stillness, in the hours when the people I love are sleeping and I am the only one left awake doing the math.
Guido. Tomorrow. The brother who told me Romeo deserves the chance to say it himself — which means Guido knows what it is. He knows and he has been waiting, the same way I have been waiting, for Romeo to crack open on his own.
Romeo has had his chances. I gave him the hallway. The kitchen. This bed. I gave him every opening a woman can give and he smiled through each one and walked to the window.
Tomorrow I go to Guido. I ask the right question. I carry the answer back and I set it on the counter between us and I give my husband one final chance to say the words with his own mouth.
Because I did not marry a performance.
I married the man behind it.
And I am done waiting to meet him.