Chapter 30
CHAPTER 30
WREN
I awake to Ellis’s mouth on my bare hip, his shirt tucked up around my waist.
“You okay?” I whisper sleepily as he slides down the bed in our dark room.
“Starving,” he murmurs back. “You keep making these little sounds in your sleep.” My breath hitches when his tongue coasts over to my inner thigh and he gently bites me. “Yeah. That sound,” he says darkly. He kisses a path down the outside of my thigh, and I roll onto my back, legs pressing together. I feel myself start to shake half a moment before he does, and he immediately stops.
“What is this?” he asks, so quietly I almost convince myself I imagined it. “How come… how come you start shaking before I touch you now?” He takes his hands away, and my throat pulls tight. “That’s new, Byrd. Is it… is it me? Am I too…? It feels like you’re scared.”
He sounds scared. “It’s not you,” I say, still hushed. “It is you, and it’s not.” He lays his head on the pillow beside mine, and I can just make out his face in the dim light. The temptation to lean over and kiss him until we’re too needy to have this conversation is there. But he gave me his exposed moments last night, and I’m going to give him mine now.
“I think,” I start, then pause to swallow. “I think I was just so used to what sex was like with us. I was always so comfortable. And… and I don’t know, Ellis.” I put a hand over my face. “You’re sure you want to hear about this?”
“I want everything,” he says plainly. Not whispering anymore.
I take a deep breath and blow it out slowly. “There are some stone-cold weirdos out there. And I’d only ever been with you, so I didn’t know anything, I guess. It just. Wasn’t like it was with us. With anyone else. I was never not disappointed. And part of me kept thinking it was me. Like, maybe those years when we were trying… maybe they took the sex out of sex, and I was ruined or broken somehow and I’d never get to enjoy this again.” A stupid tear escapes, and I turn my face into the pillow to wipe it away. There are some things I still can’t say out loud. Like how every single time I felt someone’s weight settle on me, I thought about someone else feeling Ellis’s weight on them. How, the first time I slept with someone else, I cried so hard I gagged. I can’t even remember his name now. “I am scared,” I admit. “I’m scared this isn’t real. And terrified of how badly I want it to be.”
He’s still and quiet at my side, his chest lightly nudging my arm with every inhale he takes. His forehead comes down to rest on my shoulder, and he kisses the side of my breast through his shirt. “I’ll be right back,” he says.
I scowl into the room, the bed jostling lightly when he gets up and walks to the door in his briefs. “ Seriously? ” I ask his retreating form. “ That’s how you respond to everything I just said?!”
He pauses in the doorway, limned in a twilight sky. “I have a lot to say about everything you just told me, Wren. I’d like to resolve some of it with more than words.” And with that, he slips outside. I hear the truck door open and shut, and I’m sure I’m still wearing an indignant expression when he comes back in with a smile and something in his hand.
He climbs onto his knees on the bed. “I can’t go back in time and fix everything, baby. I would if I could. I’ve spent so much time wishing I could erase mistakes… And I hate that we lost five years together.” He crawls closer, something still clenched in his fist. “But we’re here now.”
I’m still miffed, but intrigued. “Explain.”
He dips, laughing against my stomach and dragging my shirt up a few inches with his teeth. “We’re getting a lot better at our explaining, aren’t we?” He kisses my scars. “We can talk. We can write. And maybe we can tie you up and you can come on my tongue enough to make up for some of the times you weren’t taken care of.” His tongue circles my navel, and I start to pant.
“Since you’re begging,” I say. There’s no bluster in it when it’s as breathy as that, though.
I feel his laugh stirring through him. “Oh, I’m begging. I’m so hungry, Byrd. Please.”
I sit up and peel off my shirt, and he chases me with a frantic kiss. Before I can tip my legs apart, he’s got a knee braced on either side of my hips, big body hovering over mine.
Watching him focus on his task makes my thoughts go liquid and drippy like hot fudge. He’s quick and eager about it, muscles shifting beneath his skin and sending shadows dancing across him. He takes a flat, soft strip of rope in his fist and loops it behind my neck first, before crossing it over my front between my breasts, bending down to lick my nipples lazily. He brings it back around and starts to braid and knot it in a complicated pattern, stopping just above my belly button before it splits and goes around each ankle, then each wrist, and weaves it back through the middle. He briefly surveys his work before he gingerly tugs on the tail end of it, pulling my ankles an inch wider and a quiet gasp out of me as he does. His smile goes molten.
He walks on his knees back down the bed, pulling the rope a little more the farther he goes, spreading me more and more.
When I’m wide enough to accommodate him, he wastes no time bringing me to his mouth. My thighs close a fraction around his jaw, and he gives the rope another rough tug, my heels digging into the sheets. He kisses my clit like he kisses my lips, soft, adoring, devouring. Like he’s missed me and can’t wait to hear me and taste me and see me in every way. He hums encouragingly at every noise I make, every writhe and circle.
“Do you still like—” He takes his thumb and pins my clit to the side, lapping at me in one specific spot, at one exact, maddening angle.
I mutter a string of garbled curses.
“Yeah. You still like. God, I love it when you cuss.” He rubs his face against me in that unpracticed, hungry way of his, his stubble rasping against my most delicate skin, and I let out a guttural, desperate noise. “My sweet baker with a filthy mouth. I missed you so much.”
He makes a beseeching sound against me and goes at me again with his tongue, strong and slick and so damn familiar. My body bucks off the bed, and he brings a palm to press me down.
“I need it, Wren,” he says, almost apologetically.
He stays at my clit tirelessly, keeping me spread and close until I’m moaning and cursing and thrashing against him. I spiral up impossibly high and shatter into sparks and he never lets me down, only changes his angle to come at me again and pushes two fingers up into me with a groan. “Again, honey. Need to feel it.”
I sob an incoherent sound and fall apart again, clasping around his fingers greedily and trying to twitch away, everything too sensitive on my skin. He gives me a moment of reprieve, kissing and nipping at my inner thighs.
“Five years,” he grits. “I think we can start with five.”