Chapter 27
Lyse
Icouldn’t stop shaking. My skin didn’t feel right, like it was simultaneously too big and too tight at the same time.
The red stain in the sand where my cousin had been, which I could still see from the window, was obscene.
How the man had escaped with that much blood loss was astounding.
He’ll probably bleed out before he gets back to Miami, I thought. Good.
My face was tacky with blood, but when I reached a shaking hand up to touch it, Omar gently stopped me. “You don’t want to do that,” he advised.
“Right.” The shaking was getting worse. “Jesus tried to kill me.”
Omar nodded. He was keeping his distance. Why wasn’t he touching me? I needed him to touch me. None of this would be real until he did. I would just be stuck in this awful limbo. “He did, but he didn’t succeed. You’re alive.” Omar said the last part just as much for himself as he did for me.
“I’m alive.”
“Yes.” His voice was barely a whisper.
I was still trembling, and my skin was getting itchy. “You aren’t touching me.”
He clenched his hands into fists. “Do you want me to?”
I nodded, almost snapping my neck violently. “I need—”
Omar swept me up into his arms before I could finish the sentence.
His mouth found mine, and we kissed, deep and searching.
It tasted like blood and sand, but I didn’t care.
I looped my arms around his neck and jumped.
He caught me easily and wrapped an arm around my waist, keeping me pinned against him.
Without pausing in the way he was devouring my mouth, he climbed the stairs, and I never once worried that he would drop me. “I need to turn the shower on, conejita,” he said softly against my mouth.
“No.”
He smiled, and it was an ugly thing with the amount of blood on his face, but my body burned with desire.
It was macabre, but I didn’t care. This wasn’t about a simple want anymore; I needed him.
“We have to take a shower, Lyse.” He cupped my face, unafraid of the mess sticking to it.
“I won’t leave you alone for a second,” he promised, “but we have to get clean.”
I glared at him as he set me on my feet. “You better not leave.”
He shook his head. “Never.”
True to his word, as he shuffled around the bathroom, he didn’t leave me alone. He didn’t take his hand off of me. In the cavernous space, I was never more than a few inches from him. His hand stayed on my shoulder or pressed against my lower back, or his fingers stayed threaded through mine.
When the shower was steaming, Omar stripped us both with mechanical precision. “I’ll just…burn these,” he muttered, mostly to himself, tossing our clothes into a pile on the floor. Then he moved us into the shower. I groaned under the perfectly hot water.
“Do you want me to wash your hair?” he asked, and it reminded me so much of the time he bathed me after throwing me off the dock that my chest felt tight. Was this going to be our pattern? Violence and then sweetness?
I wasn’t sure if I could handle it.
“Sure,” I said, despite my racing thoughts.
His shampoo was a little masculine for me, but as he worked it into my hair, I moaned softly.
It felt so good. “Tip your head back,” he said, and then helped me rinse out my hair.
“I don’t have any conditioner in here. I don’t really use it.
I could get you some?” I lamented the knots my hair would work itself into, but I shook my head.
“You said you wouldn’t leave.”
“I did,” he agreed. He cupped my chin, making it so that I had to look him in the face. “What do you need tonight, Lyse?”
It took me a long while to figure out what he was asking. Because wasn’t I being obvious enough? “I need you to touch—”
“Touch you, yes,” he said, tightening his grip on my chin just a little, jostling my head back and forth playfully. “But how? We could get dry and climb into my bed, and I could hold you, if that’s what you wanted.”
It sounded nice. It had been a rare occurrence so far; I’d gotten the impression that Omar wasn’t used to holding anyone.
But it wasn’t what I needed. “Make me feel good,” I begged him.
“Make me forget.” Omar didn’t crack a smile or a joke.
Instead, he kissed me again before he dropped to his knees. “What are you—?”
Omar’s eyes dragged up my body; I could feel it as surely as I would have felt his hands, and I shivered again, but this time from want. “You asked me to make you feel good,” he said. “You didn’t specify how.”
He slung one of my thighs over his shoulder and buried his face against me. I cried out as he licked me with the wide flat of his tongue, almost working me into overstimulation, but then he backed off a little and used the tip of his tongue against my clit. I trembled and whimpered.
There was nothing to hold onto, and my knees were already weak from before. “Omar, I can’t stay standing.”
He pulled back to look up at me. “Don’t lock your knees, conejita, you’ll pass out.” Then his tongue returned to torturing me lightly, sending zips up my spine. Pleasure was building in my lower belly, and my hands scrambled across the tiles, trying to find somewhere to grab onto.
Omar grabbed one of my hands and put it into his hair. “Grip it as tight as you want. We aren’t moving until you come on my tongue.”
I tightened my grip, gasping as he circled where I was wet and ready for him with his tongue before dipping it inside, tasting me.
His thumb slipped lower, brushing against the untouched furl of my back entrance.
He didn’t press inside, just kept a pressure there that sent a confused pleasure through me.
I was barreling toward an orgasm that somehow felt bigger than any that I’d had so far. I was nearly tearing at his hair, nearly screaming, and he was panting against me as if I was doing something other than taking whatever he had to give me.
“I—” A wail ripped from my throat as my body exploded into sensation.
I nearly lost my balance, but Omar pushed himself to his feet, keeping me steady.
I stared at him, eyes wide, as I turned off the shower taps without looking.
“Take me to bed,” I demanded and dragged him in for a kiss.
I gasped a little when I realized that I could taste myself on his mouth and tongue.
It shouldn’t have been shocking, but it was heady to the extreme. “Now, Omar.”
“Of course.”
We didn’t even bother with towels. He pulled me out of the shower and, kissing me, walked me straight to his bed.
I lay on my back and spread my legs for him, needing him to be inside me, but he seemed content to sit there, pumping his fingers into me lazily. It felt good, great even, but I needed him stretching me to my limits like only he could. “Omar.”
He smirked. “That sounds like a complaint,” he said, slipping in a third finger, and I bit back a whine. “After the way you shook apart in the shower, are you still so needy?”
I was, and I wasn’t ashamed of it. “I need to be close to you.”
A look broke through his teasing. Something incredibly soft and fond…and maybe a little afraid. “Okay, conejita,” he said, but then he helped to turn me on my side, facing away from him.
“I want to see you,” I protested, even as he lay down with his chest to my back.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “You won’t feel far away when we’re like this.” He lifted up one of my legs and snuggled in close. I did like it: we were twined around each other like string. Then, as he seated himself inside me, it got even better.
I let out a gasp as he filled me. Like when he took me on my knees, he felt even bigger this way.
“This is good,” I moaned, throwing my arm up so that I could loop it around his neck.
When he began to move, it stole my breath.
“Omar, oh God.” The sound of us moving together was heavy and primal, flesh hitting flesh.
“I’m so wet.” I reached down between my thighs and played my finger over my clit.
“Fuck, Lyse,” Omar moaned. He hooked his chin over my shoulder and stared down the length of my body. “Touch yourself for me. Make yourself feel good.”
Shame bubbled in my chest for a moment, but then he moaned again, soft and tempting, in my ear, and I couldn’t make myself care anymore.
I circled that little bundle of nerves, shivering at the combination of the feather-light touch and the heaviness of his hips as he carved a place for himself deep inside me.
His lips tickled at my shoulder and the back of my neck, and it felt sweet…but it wasn’t what I needed. “Bite me,” I commanded him.
Omar snorted. “What?”
I wriggled in his grip, and he tightened his hold on me until I squeaked. His hips, if anything, were going faster, as if to punish me for interrupting his rhythm. “Give me marks,” I demanded. “Give me something to remember you by.”
Omar growled against me. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“You can’t promise — oh shit, keep doing that, please — can’t promise that forever.”
He reached between my thighs and took over for me by touching my clit. He mouthed at my neck now. It wasn’t teeth yet, but it was getting there. “I can make any promise I want,” he said. “I’ve kept promises for years.”
“Bite me,” I pleaded. “I want to be yours.”
His hips slowed, and I almost wailed. He shushed me and petted my thigh. “I’m going to get you there,” he said. “I just needed a second.” That made me giggle, which in turn made him hiss when my inner muscles tightened around him. “You’re not helping.”
“I don’t want to help,” I complained, rocking backward against him. “I want to come.”
He growled and finally set his teeth in my shoulder, over the exact spot that he had lightly bitten the other day.
He was less afraid to hurt me now, and the sudden pain was eclipsed in the face of the pleasure that broke over me and ran through the length of my body.
I shook and cried out, and somewhere in that, I heard him moan out his own climax.
He rested his head between my shoulders, panting, and I did the same with my face pressed into his pillows. When Omar flipped me around so that I was tucked against his chest, I could hear his heartbeat against my ear as I lay there.
We lay like that for a long time. The sky was turning a pink-golden color, and it was getting harder and harder to stay awake. As my eyelids fluttered closed, Omar’s whispered words washed over me.
“Go to sleep, conejita. I’ll be here when you wake up.” He sighed, stroking his hand across my cheek. “And then we have to talk about Miami…”