20. Briggs
Chapter 20
Briggs
“I hate and I love. And if you ask me how, I do not know: I only feel it, and I am torn in two.” ― Catullus
“ I can just pick whatever I want?” I leaned against the doorway of my closet, watching as a beautiful, towel-covered Rose looked through my shirts.
“Whatever you want,” I reiterated.
“Some of these look too expensive.” She pulled on the sleeve of one as it hung on the rack. “Like…really expensive. Is this cashmere?”
“Probably.” I shrugged, still staring at her ass, picturing her coming on my fingers again. I didn’t really want her to get dressed at all. But the moment I passed her the towel from the counter and grabbed one for myself, I realized why I was covering her body. I wanted to know her, and not just the ways I believed I knew her. I wanted to know it all. And if she didn’t get dressed, I wouldn’t be able to focus on that.
By the time I snapped out of my thoughts, she was buttoning a blue shirt from the bottom up, still wearing the towel underneath like I hadn’t just seen her naked and felt her perfect pussy clenching around my fingers.
“This one is comfortable.” She shimmied her shoulders and started adjusting the sleeves. I liked that she still left a few buttons undone—it was enough to show the way I marked her as mine, yet also gave me a great view of her perky breasts. “What about pants?”
“Don’t need them,” I replied without hesitation, making a blush spread on her perfectly angled cheeks. God, what part of this woman wasn’t utter perfection? That’s what I needed to know. I needed to right the thoughts in my head and know there was an ending to this maddening sensation coursing through me. Yet, even as the idea formed in my mind, I knew it was wrong. I never wanted to let her go. I wanted to keep her all for myself like she should have been all this time.
“Underwear?” Her voice was low with her question. I just stared back at her, letting my eyes dance over her exposed legs .
“Don’t need those, either.”
“Briggs, I can’t just be naked in your house.” Her eyes darted around the closet and then landed back on me. “Are you going to change? You’re dripping everywhere.” Not like you just were minutes ago, baby girl.
I cleared my throat. “I’ll change. And you’re not naked. You look too clothed, in my opinion.” As much as I wanted to know about her, I couldn’t stop my cock from twitching at the idea that one word from me for her to undress, and she’d probably do it. Instead of opening my mouth, I reached up and pulled my shirt off, then went for my pants. She started to squeeze her eyes shut, and I laughed. “Relax, Rose. It’s just a body. Don’t you see them in your studies?”
She opened one eye, then popped the other open as I finished fastening the towel around my naked hips. “I…yeah. I guess I do.”
“Tell me about that. What made you want to study art history?”
Her brows scrunched together like she’d never been asked that before. My jaw tightened at the thought. “When my grandparents took me in, I didn’t talk a lot.” A lot was modest. She didn’t talk at all—too traumatized to voice the thoughts that came into her pretty head. She looked down at her feet, her toes flexing against the flooring.
“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.” Though I really wanted to know. She paused longer, bringing her head up to look me over.
Her drying hair swayed with the shake of her head. “No, I want to. If I can’t be open with my boyfriend, then what kind of a girlfriend would I be?” I smiled back at her but stayed silent because I didn’t know the answer to that. The one time I had a girlfriend, it was forced upon me, and she reacted by cheating on me. This was all as new to me as it was to her. The fact that I put a fucking label on us was astounding in itself, but that was more for her benefit than mine. To her, I was her boyfriend, but to me, she was simply mine.
Rose continued, “Anyway, they took me on a trip to Nashville, you know, Music City . Thought maybe if I couldn’t talk, I would sing.” A soft giggle left her. “But the second day we were there, we went to see the Parthenon. Have you seen it?” I nodded, my thumb rubbing my bottom lip as I watched her light up. Not just her eyes, either. Her entire body gave off an entirely new energy. I wanted to strip her bare all over again just to see her shine. “It’s amazing, isn’t it? The statues, the artwork. I mean, I know it’s all replicas, but we must have stayed there all day because I refused to leave. I remember sitting in front of the huge Athena statue until my grandfather had to pull me from the ground because they were closing.” She laughed at the memory and didn’t try to cover her lips when her real smile came out.
It was beautiful.
She was beautiful.
“Ever since that day, I’ve been obsessed with Greek and Roman artwork. Hopefully, when I get my degree, I can work in a museum, studying them more until I get my graduate degree which will allow me to become an archivist.” She turned and started looking through a stack of sweatpants, then threw a pair to me.
“What, no shirt?” I asked, giving her a grin that suggested I didn’t want one at all .
Her eyes roamed my chest, stalling on the red marks from the animal she became in my arms. “Nope. If I don’t get pants, then you don’t get a shirt.”
“Underwear?” I taunted.
She grinned back at me. “Don’t need those, either,” she repeated. She turned her back to me as I got dressed and fought the urge to make her turn back around and watch me as I dropped the towel to the floor. “So, what about you? Why is Ovid your go-to? Are you an art history buff like me?”
My face fell before she turned back around. “That book was the only thing my mother left behind. Besides, well—”
“You and Beck,” she finished, her face matching mine. It sent a jolt through my chest—the way she could say things yet also feel just as deeply as the person the words were about. Her empathy was unmatched, or maybe I’d been deprived of it for so long the slightest bit was enough for recognition.
“Yes.” She waited for me to continue. I swallowed and glanced at the clothes behind her briefly, unable to meet her eyes. “I’ve read that book more times than I can count. I ended up reading and collecting more by him and then got into Virgil, and then Catullus—”
“The funnier, much dirtier one.” She giggled. “So you do like to laugh.”
I fixed my focus back on her and cocked a brow. “Of course, I like to laugh.” She laughed again, and I could swear on my entire existence I’d never heard a laugh I liked better than hers. The therapist who brought her voice back was going to be thanked profusely one day .
She walked up to me, and my back straightened. There was a question in her eyes as she lifted her hand to my arm. I dipped my chin, allowing her to trace her fingers over the tattoos. “This one here”—She found the back of my bicep and tapped—“isn’t Roman or Greek, though, is it?”
I shook my head. “No, Rose. It isn’t.”
“Do you want to talk about it?” I tried to pull my eyes from her baby blue’s, but I couldn’t.
Raising my arm, I tapped on a set of hands. “This is the month and day my mother left us.” Us. That was the first time I’d referenced it as an us type of thing in a long time. I could almost feel Beck’s presence as I continued, “And this—” I pointed to another set of hands, and tears started to form in her eyes.
She lifted her hand to cover her mouth but whispered through it, “The day your brother died?”
I nodded, dropping my arm and using that hand to wipe under her eyes. My other hand joined until I was cupping her jaw. “Don’t be sad for me, Rose.” My brother died the summer before my second year in high school, and Dean suggested a tattoo to remember him by—something that would numb the pain of his loss briefly but leave a lasting mark. The numbing feeling of the needle and ink quickly became an addiction. As the years went on, I filled the scars along my body with exquisite pieces of artwork, covering the monster I’d grown to be, giving me a false sense of beauty to the rest of the world. But something told me that beauty, that thing that seemed to drive other women mad, went deeper with Rose. She saw beneath them—looked through me in ways I couldn’t fathom.
“I used to look at that tattoo, wondering what it meant. I should have noticed the date your brother died from that article and put the two together, but—”
“Shh, babe.” I pulled her to my chest. My hands threaded in her hair as I breathed out a soft laugh.
She whipped her head back to look at me, her brows furrowing. “What’s so funny?”
I grinned down at her. “You were watching me in high school?”
Rose slapped my arm lightly. “That’s what you chose to focus on? I thought something was seriously wrong with you for a minute there.”
“Oh, Rose.” There was a lot wrong with me, but not because of my mental state. Somehow, that was pretty intact. “No. I think it’s funny because I was watching you, too.”
“You were?” She smiled brightly up at me.
“Yeah.” I’ve always been watching you.
She lifted onto her toes, and I met her halfway, brushing my lips over hers. “So, now that you have me here, what are we going to do?” she whispered before I gave in and kissed her deeply, loving the way she moaned with just my lips on hers. I couldn’t wait to hear her screams when I fucked her the way I wanted to—the way I needed to.
“Eat.” I scooped her up in my arms and carried her to the bedroom while she giggled and wrapped her legs around my waist. Her brow quirked up when I placed her on the edge of the bed. My dirty, good girl. “Breakfast, Rose. ”
She didn’t bother adjusting the edge of my shirt from where it rested over the tops of her thighs. I turned and filled my hands with the trays instead before my cock would lead me back to that bed, where I’d spread her thighs further apart from where they were already parted, seemingly waiting for me to do so. I wanted to devour her , not the food in my hands.
She scrunched up her nose at something on the tray, and I pulled it back. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
I groaned. “Don’t lie to me. Tell me what it is that you don’t like here, and I’ll remove it.”
She glanced at the tray in my hands and then back at me. “Blueberries.”
“You don’t like blueberries?”
“I hate them,” she admitted. “But I like everything else there. It’s just…blueberries remind me of something kind of terrible now.”
I placed the tray back down, removing the blueberries from hers and adding them to mine before passing it back to her. “I get that. I don’t like caviar, or champagne, or anything that’s—”
“Rich people shit?” she said with no hesitation and then burst out laughing. “Sorry. I couldn’t help it.”
“No, you’re right.” I took up my tray and sat next to her on the bed. “I prefer things more casual.”
A forkful of eggs hovered right in front of her lips, her body noticeably tense.
Shit.
“Casual like…just sex? ”
“No, Rose.” I removed the tray from my lap and cupped her chin, pulling her gaze back to me as she lowered her fork. “I won’t be casual with you. Not with how I feel about you, and not with how I’ll be with you, and certainly not how I’ll choose to fuck you when that time comes. You’re mine just as much as I am yours in the least casual sense there could ever be.”
She swallowed audibly. “I just don’t know how this all works now.”
I released her chin. “Start with eating, baby.”
“Are you mad?” she breathed out.
“No.” I settled the tray back onto my lap, but it wobbled a bit. I groaned, trying to think of the heavy snowfall outside or driving my car to the gas station. Maybe Jim’s floors? Yeah. That seemed to be working.
“What is it, then? I feel like I say things sometimes, and you just—”
My eyes snapped to her, and all those unsexy thoughts flew away. My tray started to slide down to the bed. “Oh.” She glanced at my lap, her eyes wider than the plate that was about to crash to the floor.
My hand slapped down on top of the tray, making her jump a little. “Eat,” I gritted out through my teeth. “Then we can go to the movie room.”
“You have a movie room?” Her lips popped open and I fixated on the way they were naturally red and full. And how full they’d look wrapped around my cock. Yeah, thinking of Jim’s floors wasn’t going to help with her sitting right beside me. Nothing was .
“Yep. You can pick whatever you want.” Her eyes lit up, and I had to force myself not to wonder whether August denied letting her do what she seemed so happy to do or not—make decisions. I thought giving her that freedom to use her voice around me—to put me in my place—was going to be my biggest downfall. I hadn’t even considered the way it would make her feel.
She loved it just as much as I did.
“Except for Attack of the 50ft Woman. We have to do that in the theater.” Some things just had to be rectified, and I’d be damned if she remembered the theater as a place where I almost abandoned her because she was still agitated over another man. I’d even rent the entire place out just so I could bend her over the seats in front of us and take her on every single one of them.
The looming dread the estate held over my shoulders, the reason I refused to sleep with her even on a new day August hadn't planned for, was turning into the biggest burden of my life.
“So, I can pick a chick flick?”
“Yeah, of course.” It wasn’t like I’d be watching the movie that intently in the first place. I’d be watching her. “Like I said, whatever you want.”
She bit down on her lip and glanced back down at my lap, then blushed as she whispered, “Even Pretty Woman?”
“Why do all the rooms look like you never go in them? ”
“Because I never do.” I pulled out a blanket from the closet and made my way to where she was sitting.
“Because of your dad?” I tossed the blanket over her and then sat beside her in the other large reclining theater chair. “I’m sor—” She stopped on the word before I had a chance to stop her. My good girl was learning. “I just…I have a lot of questions.” She gathered the blanket up by her neck.
“Ask whatever you want.” I tapped on the leather armrest that divided us. “But to answer your question—some of it is him, some of it is just…this house doesn’t feel like my home. It hasn’t in a long time.” She looked me over, probably holding back on more questions. “Is it my turn to ask a question?”
Rose licked her bottom lip and nodded, still holding the blanket up. “Yeah, I guess we can do it that way. It’s only fair, right?”
“Right.” I grinned back at her as I searched for the movie she requested. “What’s on your mind right now?”
She blinked in apparent surprise. I pressed play on the remote and put it down. She was still silent but blushing now. Against the white fluffy blanket I threw over her, she looked just as red as she had in the shower.
“Do I have to answer truthfully?” she all but whispered through the blanket that now covered her lips.
“Well, now I’m even more curious.” I raised my brows and leaned over the armrest. “What’s on your mind, babe?”
“The shower.” She kept her voice low, still covering her lips. I pulled the blanket down from her face, watching as her bottom lip caught onto the fabric .
“What about the shower, Rose?”
Her gaze darted down to my lap, then back up to my face. “Everything.”
“No, I think there is something particular you’re thinking in there.” I reached over to cup her face in my hand, then dragged my thumb across her bottom lip. She leaned into my touch, fueling me further. “Tell me.”
“I just…don’t you want something in return?”
“Fuck,” I muttered as I let my eyes roll up to the ceiling. I didn’t expect that to be her question.
“For, you know…what you did. In the shower. To me.” She lowered the blanket to her lap, her fingers playing with the fabric. She looked at the movie, then shimmied in her chair. “I want to learn what makes you feel good, too. And it’s not like we can go anywhere right now.”
“Are you saying you want me to teach you how to please me?” A slight smirk toyed at the edge of my lips.
“Yeah. I mean—” She rolled her shoulders back, not paying any attention to the opening of the movie she picked. “Yes. Yes, that’s what I want.”
Most men would jump at that, but my girl had to learn what words to say. And I had a feeling I was going to be the perfect teacher—the only one she’d ever have or need. If Rose wanted to know how to please me, it was going to start with freeing her from the strict confines of the walls she learned to put up. Telling me off was no issue for Rose, but words of praise, of desire and lust? She was about to dive headfirst into a world I knew she’d thrive so well in.