33. Bohdan #2
“Yeah, your lips, Zlatí?ko. They new, too?”
“Yes,” she whispers. “I hate them the most, because they’ve never touched you.”
“I’m going to change that. How does a new first kiss sound to you?”
Those lips part—they’re still fucking perfect and I hate that she thinks they’re anything less than that because of me—the bottom one bowing in the middle, weighed down with all her perceived failures, but I think it used to be weighed down by how much she loved me.
She gives a little nod, and my mouth is on hers before I can listen to that broken part of my brain, sharp and stabbing, that tries to remind me I’m not good enough for her anymore.
It doesn’t feel like I’m not good enough.
I think for the first time since I cracked my stupid head three years ago, I feel a bit like me.
My lips on hers, tongue sweeping across the seam, looking for permission before she meets it. Hands tangling and tugging in the hair at the nape of her neck.
Sloan, perfect the way she’s always been perfect, every single swell and angle exactly the right shape and size to fit against me.
Her fingers, curling into the cotton of my T-shirt before her hands scramble across my back, nails digging into my shoulders.
A tiny moan into my mouth, and I’m done for.
She doesn’t feel like this person carrying around all this heavy baggage I saddled her with when I pick her up. Her legs wrap around my waist instinctually, and she might as well be weightless, actually.
We’re probably floating above this boat. In the stars, where we were definitely written for each other.
My hands leave bruises on her thighs, and hers tug sharply at my hair.
I kick the bathroom door closed behind us, and I kick the door to her room open, too.
I think the view of the ocean looks beautiful, but it’s not really anything compared to her.
Not when I lay her down on the bed, unmade sheets swirling around her, and the last inches of sunlight drenching her skin.
“I’m going to talk, and you’re going to listen,” I tell her, lips still against hers.
Sloan says nothing, but I think her mouth shifts, maybe into a smile, right when I start to move mine along her jaw.
My teeth find the lobe of her ear, tugging gently three times, my cock throbbing against my shorts with each one.
“These ears? The ones that you use to listen and learn and take in so much about the world around you? That find something interesting and something wonderful in everything? So fucking perfect. So fucking enough.”
Her hands find my shoulders, her breath catches in her throat.
I move down her jaw again, over the lines of her neck, to the crook of her shoulders, dragging my tongue across her skin.
“Flawless skin on flawless shoulders that might be the strongest part of you because they carry so much more than they have to. But they never collapse, even when you feel like they do.”
Her back arches, chest straining against the lace of her bra, and I press my lips across the whirling edges, all the way to the curve of her left breast, teeth grazing her. “Your heart? Don’t even get me fucking started.”
I spend some time up there—thumb stroking her through the lace, brushing over each perfect, peaked nipple until she starts with the breathy moans, her hips shifting under me.
She gets a bit impatient when my hands grip her waist, thumbs stroking upwards across her skin in these tiny, gentle sweeps I know she likes.
I could spend all day—the rest of my days, actually—just like this, mapping her body with my tongue, but there’s a lot I need to tell her.
“Here? Where all these things that keep you alive live?” I move down her stomach, resting my chin right above the lace of her underwear, tongue swirling across the band before I flick my eyes up.
She’s propped up on her elbows, hair tumbling across her shoulders, a flush on her cheeks.
She blinks at me, and I say quietly, “Where I hoped a piece of me would live one day? This body? The home you’d give a baby?
Perfect. Dokonalá. Very, very, very much enough. ”
A sharp inhale. Her eyes shift to cerulean, and I know she’s trying not to cry.
“Ty jsi dokonalá,” I whisper, brushing my mouth along the edges of the lace again before, very regrettably, leaving the spot so close to between her legs and propping myself up on the pillow beside her.
“I don’t know that one,” Sloan says softly.
“I won’t make you guess.” I give her a smile, half rueful, half sad. “You’re perfect.”
A furrow puckers her brow and she shakes her head. “It’s weird because I don’t feel . . . perfect or anything close to it, really, most days. And that’s by and large because of my brain, but it’s also—”
“Because of me.” I don’t let her finish, partly because I’m selfish and I don’t think I could take hearing it from her. Not right now, not when I’m this close to her for the first time in over a year.
But mostly because I want her to know—I’m keenly aware every second of every minute of every hour of every day what I did.
“Yes.” She sniffs, but then her face softens. “But right now, with you touching me, I feel about as close to it as a human being could possibly be.”
It’s a bad idea for so many reasons—and I am as horrible as everyone thinks I am, because I say the next words before I even give my brain a chance to remember that I’m setting her up for disappointment and failure again.
“Then I guess I shouldn’t stop.”
I don’t.
She looks at me, a bit imploring and a bit hopeful, before I’m kissing her again.
It’s like it used to be—I’ve got no idea how much time does or doesn’t pass.
I just know it’s her I’m kissing.
The love of my entire sorry fucking life.
Her tongue sweeping against mine.
Her moans I get to swallow because my hands wander—I can’t help it, I’ve got a lot of lost time to make up for.
Gripping her jaw, just this side of rough, across her chest, over her bare skin because we lose the bra as soon as she arches up in permission, skating across her ribs, flared and open to me because of her ragged breath, but I’ll pretend it’s so I have access to her heart again.
I trail my mouth along the whirls of lace at the top of her underwear.
Her teeth bite down on my bottom lip, and I groan, cock twitching in my shorts—I’ll probably fucking die soon—and she whispers into my mouth, a tiny plea, “Bohdan, please, I need you to—I need—”
“Whatever you want, Sloan.” I pull back, one hand gripping her chin. “Same rules apply. Whatever you want, whenever you want. You say stop, I stop.”
I’ve thought a lot of things might kill me in the last few years, but none has come as close as her next few words. “Please don’t stop, ever.”
I groan again, mouth back on hers, devouring every small noise she makes when I slide my hand down her underwear, pausing right where she likes, moving my fingers in small circles—the way she writhes under me, how her fingers dig into my shoulders, the others clawing at my back, tells me at least that hasn’t changed.
My luck might have drastically shifted—someone different was rolling the dice out there in the universe, because the other thing that seems like it might be the same is how her body responds to mine.
Sliding my fingers down the centre of her, I moan, pleading with her really. “Sloan, you’re fucking soaked. I’ll die if I can’t eat you out.”
She inhales, half a barely audible moan, half a laugh, and I pull away, my own breathing heavy, trying to get a look at her.
Flushed cheeks, swollen lips, and the constellation of freckles sparkling under her left eye.
“Sure,” she says, like she’s conceding something.
“Sure?” I repeat, voice strangled.
“I mean, sure. If you have to.” Sloan nods, but I see the corners of her lips tilt upwards, fighting a smile.
It makes me smile, too. Forget for a second that I’m so hard and so gone for her I might explode.
But it’s a bit like I’m looking at the person she was before I trampled all over her: soft, funny, but wildly stubborn.
“There’s my girl.” I grin, kissing her, roughly, before moving down her body again—hands tight against her waist, teeth scraping skin and tugging the lace down her legs so she’s bare, right in front of me.
I inhale, eyes roving back up to Sloan’s—she’s propped up again, watching me, deep breaths heaving across her chest. So beautiful. Too beautiful, probably.
“Relax, Zlatí?ko. I remember what you like.”
“You didn’t forget?” She tips her head to the side.
“I couldn’t forget anything about you, even if I tried,” I tell her, never mind the fact that I wouldn’t try, and if memories were something you could hold, they’d be prying the ones of her from my hands when I died.
She smiles, soft and sure.
I don’t wait any longer, I can tell by the way her shoulders roll back, how her fingers grip the sheets and her legs tense, that she’s impatient.
I inhale again before sliding my tongue up her centre, stopping where she likes and making slow, almost lazy circles.
There’s nothing lazy about it. Everything I do with her is intentional, right down to the slightest shift.
Her hands tangle in my hair when a moan catches in her throat.
“Perfect—” I groan, tongue flicking against her. “Fucking—”Her back arches and I bury my face deeper. “Pussy.”
“Bohdan.” She says my name, over and over again, her fingers tugging tighter on my hair with each stroke of my tongue.
I can feel when she’s about to come—I know the way she moves, shoulders rolling back into the bed, bowing against it, how her moans get breathier, how she tastes right before—and I take two fingers, teasing, sliding them inside her, slowly, and start to move them in time with my tongue.
She does shatter, tightening, coming all over me.
I pull back, even though I could stay between her legs forever, but her hands tug gently on my hair, and when I look up at her, she’s watching me, flushed and curious.
“You didn’t forget,” she says, words quiet when I lie down beside her, propping my head up on a hand.
“No.” I shake my head, tracing her lips with my thumb. “I didn’t forget.”
Her shoulders rise, and she looks at me, resolute. “I want to do something for you.”
“That was something for me,” I reassure, throwing her a wry grin. “Trust me.”
“I’d like . . . you inside me. All of you. Together, the way we were.” She pauses, considering with a thoughtful blink. “I haven’t been with anyone since you and I still have my IUD so—”
“I wasn’t lying. I haven’t been with anyone else either,” I interrupt, and I think my heart might beat out of my chest. The idea of being inside her like that again—I shake my head. “Why would I ever want to be with anyone else when I’ve been with you?”
Sloan gives me a flat look—another flash of that funny, obstinate person. “You don’t want me to answer that. Trust me.”
“Sloan . . .” I start, but she cuts me off with a press of her mouth to mine.
“Please. I don’t want to talk about any of it right now.
The Polaroid, the ring, the night you . .
.” she trails off, and it hangs heavy in the air between us.
The night I left. But she blinks, and I think she closes the door on wherever she keeps that chapter of us in her brain.
“I just want to be with you,” she whispers, her lips traversing mine slowly, her palms sweeping across my shoulders, down my chest, and to the hem of my shirt.
I just want to be with you.
“I want to be with you, too.” I groan when her hand slides down the front of my shorts, over my impossibly aching cock.
She’s all I think about all the time—being with her like this, sure—but mostly just being with her.
When her hands rove across my back, guiding me back home, suspended over her in this bed, I imagine it’s just another morning.
When I reach behind my head and tug my shirt off, and our skin touches, chests pressing together, I imagine we’re back in Seattle.
Her hands, undoing the buttons of my shorts, gripping me and moving up and down, guiding me between her legs.
When I angle my hips, pushing inside her, inch by inch, and she gasps, nails digging into my shoulders, lips crashing against mine—maybe we’re in Michigan.
Still together, just somewhere else.
With her—always with her—but maybe in a different world and in the body of the different me, and when her hips move up to meet mine, I bite down where that one piece of me still lives in the form of an old tattoo and try to swallow back the words he’d get to say.
I love you.