Chapter 10 #2
He sat on the edge of the mattress. She stood between his knees, her hands on his shoulders, looking down at him.
The lamp on the desk cast amber light across half his face.
The other half was in shadow. He looked up at her with those blue eyes, and the expression in them made her breath catch—not desire alone, but something deeper. A question he was asking without words.
Are you sure?
She answered by pulling her shirt over her head and tossing it aside.
His intake of breath was audible. His eyes moved over her—the tank top beneath, the ink on her arms, the collarbone he’d been caught staring at the night before. But he didn’t reach for her. His hands rested on her hips and he waited.
She pulled the tank top off, too, to stand in front of him in her bra and jeans and bare feet on the cold floor, more exposed than she’d been in front of anyone in years.
Not just physically. He could see her tattoos now—all of them.
The florals on her forearms. The serpent on her inner arm.
The dragon on her ribs that she’d done herself at nineteen in her apartment with a hand-poke needle and a mirror.
The ink was her autobiography, every piece a chapter, and she was handing him the whole book.
His thumb traced the crescent moon on her ribs. Gentle. Precise. The marks on her body were sacred and he treated them accordingly.
“Turn around,” he said. Not a command. A request.
She turned. Felt his breath on her shoulder blade before his fingers made contact.
Penn’s tattoo—the crescent moon caught in branches, the rite-of-passage piece her brother had spent four hours inking while Bowie played in the background.
Sebastian’s fingers traced the branches the way she’d traced his scar.
Carefully, with full attention, learning the language of it.
“He was talented,” Sebastian murmured against her skin.
The words landed between her shoulder blades and her heart. He touched the place where Penn had left his mark, acknowledging its beauty. He’d killed the man who’d made this art, and he was now honoring it.
She turned back to face him. Took his face in her hands—jaw rough with stubble, the split lip a dark line against his mouth.
She kissed him again, deeper this time, and felt his self-control fracture by degrees.
His hands tightened on her hips, drawing her closer.
She felt the solid heat of his chest against hers, the ridged muscle of his abdomen, the scar pressing against her stomach like a brand.
He eased her onto the bed, his mouth on her neck, tracing the line of her jaw.
Her hands mapped the planes of his back, the architecture of muscle and bone she’d been imagining since the first time she’d seen him without his jacket.
His fingers worked the button of her jeans with a patience that made her want to scream and savor the moment in equal measure.
The rest of his clothes came off, as did hers. Every place he touched, he touched as if it mattered. Every sound she made, he heard, absorbed, and responded to. He paid attention with his whole self, and the focus of it was overwhelming. She’d never been looked at like this. Seen like this. Known.
When he settled between her legs, his upper body braced on his forearms, his eyes inches from hers, she felt the last wall between them crumble. “Hi,” she whispered.
The corner of his mouth curved—that ghost of a smile she’d been chasing since the compound tour. “Hi.”
She pulled him down. What followed was both slow and urgent.
The press of his body against hers. His mouth finding places that made her gasp.
His hands—those steady, capable hands moving across her skin with a tenderness that contradicted everything she knew about him.
They caressed her breasts, moved lower, parting her.
His fingers were deft, and she moaned as they entered her. His thumb found the sensitive bundle of nerves at her junction and worked it in circles until she pleaded for release.
As he positioned himself to enter her, she ran her fingers over the scar again, the fresh bruise. He shuddered—someone was touching the wound willingly, without revulsion, without the clinical detachment of a doctor. Touching it like it was part of him, because it was.
“Stay with me,” she said. It wasn’t about this moment. It was about all of it. About whatever came next.
He pressed his forehead against hers. “I’m not going anywhere, Ink.”
She believed him.
When he pushed inside her, it was a homecoming. The sound of his breath in her ear and the grip of his hand on her hip grounded her. The way he said her name made her cheeks heat, as if it was a word he’d only just learned and wanted to practice until he got it exactly right.
She held on to the fragile, impossible thing growing between them in the ruins of the past.
Her orgasm hit hard, her back arching as he built an incredible rhythm. Her vision whited out, and she cried his name. As she moved her hips under him, milking it for every last drop, she felt him tighten and follow her over the edge.
“Sutton,” he ground out.
“I’m here,” she whispered, kissing him. “For all of you.”
She lay against Sebastian’s right side, her head on his chest, her hand resting on him. Her fingers traced the edge of the scar in a slow, idle pattern, careful not to touch his bruise. She was thinking about the scar, the bullet, the man beneath her hand, the brother who’d pulled the trigger.
Sebastian’s arm was around her. His thumb moved lightly over the ink Penn had given her. The symmetry of it wasn’t lost on her—his hand on Penn’s tattoo, her hand on his scar. Two marks left by the same man on two people who’d found each other because of him.
The sheets were tangled at their waists. The desk lamp threw a soft circle of light across the floor. His heartbeat was slow and steady under her ear.
She traced the scar again, felt the ridge of tissue under her skin. “I’m sorry he did this to you,” she whispered.
The words had been sitting in her chest since the bathroom. Since before the bathroom—since the parlor, since the porch, since the first moment she’d understood that the man in front of her carried a wound her brother had made.
She’d been angry about it. She’d been defensive. She’d resented him for surviving when Penn hadn’t.
But underneath all of that, buried deep, she’d needed this—needed to touch the scar, needed to feel his heartbeat, needed to lie against him in the quiet—to find what had always been there: sorrow for what her brother had done to him.
Sebastian’s arm tightened around her. She felt his chest expand with a breath that was longer than the ones before it. His thumb paused on her shoulder. “Let’s make a pact,” he said.
She tilted her head to look up at him. In the lamp’s amber glow, his face was relaxed in a way she’d never seen—the jaw unclenched, the surveillance in his eyes replaced by something softer.
He looked younger. He looked like the man he might have been if one day in a fundraiser ballroom hadn’t rewritten the rest of his life.
“No more regrets about the past,” he said. “Yours or mine. We can’t change it. We can’t undo it. But we can stop letting it decide what happens next.”
She held his gaze. Those eyes, steady and certain, were asking her for something he’d never asked anyone—to let go of the guilt, the anger, the endless loop of what if and if only that had been the soundtrack of both their lives for six years.
She rose and pressed her lips to his scar. A kiss so light it was barely contact. A seal on a promise. “No more regrets,” she said.
He pulled her closer. She settled against him and closed her eyes. The carousel was still. The noise in her head was quiet. There was only the warmth of his body, the rise and fall of his breathing, the steady beat of a heart that had taken a bullet and kept going.
She fell asleep with her hand on the scar and his arm around her.