Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
When I finish, I place one last kiss on his cheekbone.
It’s like kissing the sharp edge of a knife, that cheekbone. That jaw. I always knew it would be though.
I did.
What I didn’t know was what he would do when I did kiss him.
I didn’t know that he’d slowly straighten up. That he’d slowly, with deliberate movements, let go of my hair and that when he does, I’d actually miss his tight grip. I’d miss the leash of his fingers, feeling unbalanced.
“Arrow, what –”
My words cut off when he puts both his hands on my waist and picks me up like he did back in his office.
But tonight, there’s no desk where he can set me down.
Tonight, there’s only his body and he makes me climb it.
My arms go to his working and corded shoulders as he boosts me up and causes me to wind my thighs around his waist before moving.
Without taking his eyes off me, he begins to walk with me in his arms.
He doesn’t tell me where we are going and I don’t ask him about it either.
Mostly because I’m panting and I’m busy adjusting my body in his lap and feeling all his hard and corrugated muscles.
But also because strangely, I know.
I know where he’s taking me. And when my spine hits the wall, I’m proven correct.
We’re standing under my window.
His favorite spot.
“You want to be my rebound girl?” he asks when I’m settled between him and the wall.
“Yes,” I whisper, my hands sliding down from his shoulders to go to his chest and rub circles.
“You want to spread your legs for me when I need it?”
His chest moves, jerks up and down, and I feel it all under my palms, in my own chest even. “Yeah.”
“You want me to use you to fuck all my frustrations out,” he keeps repeating my own words to me and somehow, it ramps up my restlessness.
“Yes. All of them.”
I even arch up against him to tell him that I really mean it.
And it’s not a hardship, see. It’s not hard to tighten my thighs around him and bow my back and rock against his athletic body.
It’s not hard to let him know that I need him.
What is hard and has been hard was to hide it.
My need for him. My love. For eight whole years.
But not anymore.
I won’t stop myself. I won’t even feel embarrassed about my love for him.
Because I’ve realized something.
Something very important about myself.
My sister called me a whore. She said that if I ever made a play for him then I’d be a slut.
But that’s the thing, isn’t it? I’m not making a play for him. I’m not trying to steal him.
For the past eight years, I’ve been living in this fear that one day my love will make me do the unthinkable.
My doomed love will make me so desperate, so dangerous that I will try to get him, grab him, keep him for myself.
But now I know that I never would have done that.
Because in this moment when he’s hurting, I’m hurting. When his pain makes his jaw clench, my insides clench. When anguish burns his eyes, my skin feels it.
In this moment, I can see everything clearly.
I can see that I never ever would’ve made a play for him. I never ever would’ve tried to wreck his relationship so he could be mine.
Even my attempt to kiss him on the bridge wasn’t born out of malice or because I wanted to steal him away. It was born out of pure, overwhelming love.
A love I didn’t want to fall in but I did anyway.
I didn’t do it to hurt anyone. I didn’t fall in love with my Arrow to hurt my sister.
I fell in love with him like dead leaves fall from the branch of a tree and rain falls from a swollen cloud. I fell in love with him like tears fall when you’re sad and like blood oozes out of your skin when you step on broken glass.
It was natural.
So it’s natural for me to heal his pain, or at least put a balm on it. Love him when he can’t love himself and thinks he’s a failure.
And when the time comes for him to leave, to go back to where he belongs, it will be natural for me to let him go.
Because his happiness is my happiness.
Until then, I’ll be a girl in doomed love and I won’t be ashamed of it.
Until then, I’ll stay here and love him.
“And then what?” he bites out, his dark eyes glittering, his hands kneading the flesh on my waist where he’s holding me. “Discard you? Fuck you and forget you? That’s the job of a rebound girl. You know that, don’t you? She’s supposed to be a fuck doll. She’s a girl who gets fucked and forgotten.”
His words are his namesake.
Arrows.
They pierce my heart. The heart that’s not so witchy after all. They make it holey. They make it bleed.
But still, I forge on. “Yes. I know.”
He shakes me, my spine rubbing against the brick wall. “And do you remember what I told you? What I can do to you. What I’m capable of doing to you.”
“I remember.”
I remember every word he said. That he can burn everything down. That he can wreck things.
I know.
He shakes me again. In fact, he pulls me forward before shoving my spine into the wall, almost making me moan with his strength and dominance. “So what the fuck are you talking about?”
“I-I’m talking about being your rebound.” I grab his chain and pull him closer to me. “This isn’t going to be a relationship, is it? You’re not going to be my boyfriend and I’m not going to be your girlfriend. So it doesn’t matter what you said.”
He exhales a sharp breath and I feel it pushing into me, his breath, his chest. His whole body.
We’re in a more secluded spot now, I think. Darker and hotter. I feel sweat beading on my skin, his leather jacket drowning me.
I feel him drowning me too, the way he’s staring at me, keeping me pinned to the wall with his large hands.
“I don’t want your fucking pity,” he snaps.
And I can’t help but swat his chest. “This is not pity, you idiot. If I wanted to pity you, then I would’ve said yes to your stupid proposition days ago. You were pretty miserable back then too.”
“So why?”
Because I love you.
Because you’re my Arrow.
My broken Arrow.
“Because you’re my friend,” I tell him, a version of the truth.
At this, he comes even closer. So close that his hard abdomen moves and presses against that place between my thighs and I gasp.
His eyelids flicker and he notices my parted lips. “You fuck all your friends?”
“No.”
He lifts his eyes then. “So, what, I’m special?”
“Yes. And because I have a right.”
“What right is that?”
I get up in his face, grazing our noses together.
“I lived with you for years, didn’t I? Those girls that you pick up at a bar, they don’t know you.
You said it yourself. They don’t know who you are.
They don’t care about you. But I do. I care about you.
I know you. I know who you were and who you are now.
So I’m going to be your rebound girl and no one else.
Because I have the right. I dare anyone to even try. ”
So maybe I sound like a jealous little groupie but whatever.
Those girls don’t love him. I do. They don’t know how to take care of him. But I do.
He’s my Arrow.
So if anyone’s going to ease his pain, it’s going to be me.
Arrow watches me, studies my face. My messy hair, my nose, my lips.
He even goes down to my heaving chest, my bow-shaped body. My thighs that are spread out around him.
It’s both a lazy perusal and over so quickly that I’m left abandoned when he comes back to my face, my skin throbbing and tight.
“No,” he clips.
“What?”
“I’m not going to fuck you.”
“Why not?” I almost whine.
I mean, I’m willing and available and I want to.
It’s my right.
And I’m ready to explain that to him again but I notice something.
A change in him. A change in the air, even.
It becomes heavier, darker. More heated.
Like him.
“Are you pouting at me?” he asks softly, his eyes on my lips.
At his low tone, a hot shiver skitters down my spine and I arch up even more.
I wasn’t aware of it.
I wasn’t aware that I was sticking my lower lip out in disappointment. Maybe because I’ve never done it before.
I’ve never pouted. I do not pout.
But somehow, I’m doing it right now.
Somehow, I’m doing it for him.
“You are pouting at me, aren’t you,” he concludes.
He is right. I am.
And it feels so… provocative, so seductive to be doing that. To be pouting at the guy I love because he won’t fuck me.
Like he’s the man of the house and I’m a na?ve teenager.
He is the man of the house though, isn’t he? He always has been.
Big and protective.
He even saved me from those girls and took me on my first motorcycle ride.
So I raise my eyebrows, feeling bold. “So what if I am?”
My boldness makes him sharper. It hollows out his cheeks and somehow juts out his jaw. It makes the blue in his eyes buzz and hum.
“Then I’d tell you to stop,” he rumbles out a warning; his hands on my waist shift and get under the vintage leather jacket that I’m wearing.
“I don’t want to.”
“You think you’ll get your way like this? You stick out your lip like a bad girl and I fuck you like a dying, desperate man.”
A throb, big and pulsing, clutches my body and travels down my scalp all the way to my toes trapped in woolen socks, and I twist my hips. I undulate between him and the wall and I do something really bad.
I do something worse than inadvertently pouting at him.
Staring at him through my eyelashes, I put my hand on his, where he’s gripping me at the waist and make him let go.
Well, make him is wrong; I can’t make Arrow do anything if he doesn’t want to.
But luckily, he wants to and he lets me.
Suspicion clouds his features but he lets me take his hand off my waist and bring it up. And then, he lets me put that large hand of his on my breast.
I don’t know what I’m thinking or what I hope to accomplish by putting his hand there but as soon as I do that, as soon as I direct his hand onto my soft, bouncy flesh, his fingers move on their own.
They close over my mound and he squeezes it, making me whimper and causing me to clutch his wrist.
It also makes me spill a bad secret. “I’m not wearing a bra.”