27. Oliver
27
My lips were stiff. Unyielding. Not ready to give in to the taste of heaven. Because once I did, how would I ever give it up? Mya’s kisses used to wreck me in the best possible way. Nothing had ever been able to match how skydiving made me feel until her. Until Mya and I kissed, and the feeling being with her gave me became incomparable to anything in my past.
Eyes squeezed closed, I tried to resist the pull of temptation to kiss her back. To not experience what I’d been missing for so long. No way could I go into withdrawal again.
“I’m okay,” she murmured against my lips, clearly worried I wasn’t relenting on her behalf.
I mean, there was that. Of course. But how could I tell her the truth without also telling her I was still so very much in love with her. That it’d destroy the last piece of sanity I had left in me to lose her again. And I would. How could I not?
For a second, after I’d unburdened the weight of my past by the lake, I’d thought maybe we could have a second chance. But then The Collective came for us, and I just . . .
“Please,” she begged, and I almost swallowed the word as it vibrated into my partially open mouth.
With her ass firmly settled on my dick, my cock gave zero fucks about my pain or my past. I was stiff and ready to go. Biting down on my back teeth, I fought the urge to surrender to the primal need to kiss her back, to ravish her. To come inside her if she asked, her consent meaning everything to me. I didn’t need a lesson from what happened to my mother to know and understand that.
My hands remained tethered to my sides as my lips defied every compulsion to give in. Resist. Don’t do this. It’ll hurt us both too much after if we do.
When she shimmied on my lap, rotating her hips while her breasts remained pinned to my chest, urging my lips to open, I lost it.
Like in the past, when her tongue twined with mine and she moaned into my mouth, my eyes went to the back of my head, like I’d been shot up with the best drugs money could buy.
Eu-fucking-phoria. That was this moment. I was motherfucking high as we kissed. Free-falling-in-the-sky high.
“Mya.” Her name came out in the form of surrender. The will to live, and a life worth living, shot through me, propelling me forward.
I untied her braid. Threaded my fingers through her thick locks. Tipped her head back and deepened the kiss. Trailed my lips along her jawline and down the side of her throat while gently tugging her hair.
My chest ached, not from pain, but from the chains disintegrating from around my heart, allowing me to feel something else, something other than guilt and regret.
I was free in that kiss. Free to not hate myself, or the world that produced such travesty.
Her hands slid up and down my chest, her touch gentle on my bad shoulder. She continued grinding against my cock, and I did my best to prevent accidentally slipping inside her as we continued to make love with our mouths.
Four months of being unable to so much as get hard, let alone jerk off, and I was on the verge of coming without even being inside her.
“I’ve missed you so much,” she cried.
Same. Fucking same.
“Oh, God.” Clutching the nape of my neck, she rocked her clit up and down against my pelvic bone, creating friction over her sensitive spot as I kissed the column of her throat, holding the sides of her arms. “I’m going to come.” She moved faster, and a breathy moan followed as she dipped her chin to peer at me. Her jaw was slack and eyes glossy as she fell to pieces on top of me.
When she shifted back and secured a grip of my cock and began stroking, my first instinct was to stop her. She didn’t need to do this. Not that I could get out the words, not after watching her come.
Wrapping a hand around the back of her neck, I leaned in and kissed her as she finished me off in under sixty seconds. After four months of being away from the love of my life, who’d jerked me off after orgasming on my lap, my body had been ready to fucking go. Over and over again so it would seem.
With both of us breathing hard as we came down from the high, I lowered my forehead to hers, seized both her cheeks between my palms, and closed my eyes. “Are you okay?” I croaked out, worried about her, that she’d regret what happened.
“I’m more than okay,” she whispered, and I opened my eyes and lifted my head to look at her. To ensure she was telling me the truth. “Hurting more?”
Just my heart since I can’t keep you.
We’d quietly cleaned up and dressed in the clothes Vanessa had provided. But knowing Mya had no panties on beneath the sweatpants was going to fuck with my head all night. I didn’t need any other fuckery there. My thoughts were crowded enough.
Now that this woman had made me come, I’d be fantasizing about tugging those pants down to taste her. Not the best thoughts to have when introducing her to my father’s friends.
Mya was sitting on the bed, combing her fingers through her hair. She’d washed it in the shower after our bath, and it was hanging wet over the Spelman College sweatshirt, which was Vanessa’s alma mater. At least it was thick enough to conceal her nipples since she was also braless. Vanessa hadn’t provided undergarments for either of us, and I supposed it’d be weirder to wear someone else’s underwear than go without any.
Barefoot in sweats that were a bit too big for me, no shirt on yet, I walked over to the bed and sat next to her, worried there was something new weighing heavily on her mind.
Was it what happened between us in the tub? Too soon?
She’d yet to talk in the fifteen minutes since we’d left the bathroom, and that was probably my fault. I’d gone silent myself. Frustrated and desperate to hide the truth—that I was terrified that as much as I wanted a second chance, I couldn’t have one.
I knew what she’d do if I told her that. She’d argue and protest. And if we fought, we might actually wind up having makeup sex, which wouldn’t be a good idea.
“Are you reeling from what happened in that tub as much as I am?” she asked, surprising me by breaching the quiet first. She fidgeted with the hem of her sweatshirt instead of meeting my eyes.
“Are you?” I asked instead of answering her, unsure whether to hold her hand or not. I was confused on how to act after what happened in that tub. I was supposed to be pushing her away, not having her explode into an orgasm on top of me.
“I feel in control again.” She twisted on the bed, her knees knocking against mine. Her gaze swept over my bare chest before returning to my face. “This is hard for me to say, and it’ll probably be hard for you to listen to, but I think I need to do it.”
I gulped and probably noticeably. Not the best words for her to start with, but if she needed to share something, I wasn’t going to bolt. I promised her in the gym I’d help her however she needed, I just asked her not to do the same for me. Today proved she was doing it anyway, by reminding me of who we were together before everything happened.
She rubbed her hands up and down her thighs, her eyes tracking the movement of her fingers. “I felt so out of control in that room in Thailand.” Her voice was somber, guarded, but she pushed through the anguish I knew she was feeling. “He gave me a choice, but in my mind, there never was one. I had to give him what he wanted or you’d . . .”
My stomach tucked in, preparing for a gutshot as I became physically ill. I closed my eyes, wishing darkness would blanket my mind, erase the images from that day, but they were etched there in perfect detail. The sounds, the smells, the feelings. Everything right down to the wood grain of the floorboards. Imprinted there for all of eternity.
“That wasn’t the first time a man has hurt me.”
I finally knew what it meant when someone said they experienced that soul-leaving-your-body feeling. It happened to me the second her words made it to my ears. I dropped my head, everything inside me hurting. For her. For my mom. For every woman who’d dealt with evil before.
“You don’t need to know details,” she went on, her voice trembling, “but I had some bad encounters with men when I was nineteen and in my early twenties.”
Her pause gave me a second to remember I needed to breathe or I’d pass out. Without opening my eyes, I reached out, offering her my hand, and she took it, locking our fingers together.
“One tried to rape me, but I got away. I escaped. He just . . . he was close to succeeding. I thought I’d moved on from that, but Thailand brought me back to it, and I think I just broke down a bit.”
I sat there like a statue, working through my emotions, unsure which to tackle first. Cry for what she’d been through, or kill for her. Because so help me, when I found these men from her past . . .
“But today, in that tub with you, I was able to make my own choices again. You helped give me back the power that man, and my memories from before, took from me,” she choked out, and I felt the sob coming.
I pushed away my own issues to help her get through this in the only way I could think to.
Opening my eyes, I gathered her in my arms, smoothing my hand over her back as she let go, as I gave her the safe space to do that. I couldn’t believe this had been weighing on her mind in that tub, yet she’d prioritized my pain over her thoughts. I hated she’d ever had one single bad memory, let alone a closet full of them.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said into my ear when her crying slowed down to a trickle from the storm. “But Mason and his brother already handled everyone who ever hurt me when I was younger.”
I wanted to hate Mason for knowing her most of his life. For experiencing the way her mouth felt against his. For being someone who drew out that dimple in her cheek on those rare occasions during her laughter. For also being the one who had her six when she was reckless and her curious self got her into trouble in the past.
But instead of hating him, what I really needed to do was thank him for being there for her. Protecting her. Taking out the scum who’d hurt her.
I knew I could trust him with her life. It’s why I’d texted him the day I’d taken off, imploring him to watch over her when I couldn’t.
“I don’t think this is why I had commitment issues, though.”
Had. Past tense. Now I’m the one having all kinds of issues.
“When I was dreaming today, after we jumped, well, I—I have a feeling that was actually a memory I may have blocked.” Her voice quivered over those last words, and I pulled back to meet her eyes. “I’m sorry to lay this on you after what you told me today, but I?—”
“Don’t apologize, please,” I rasped, blinking back tears, trying to make sense of everything. The sheer evil of the world constantly trying to swallow us whole. “I took off and left you when you needed me. But I’m here right now, so let me be here for you.” I had no idea for how long, but I was there.
I trailed my knuckles along her cheekbone, swiping a few tears away, wishing I could take her pain with the movement, too.
“Maybe it’s the fall, and the knock to the back of my head . . . or maybe it’s not, and maybe what I was dreaming about isn’t real. I was running from someone and then fell. I remember sobbing and being terrified.”
The idea that something else happened to her, and it was so bad she’d blocked it from her mind, had me drawing her right back into my arms, needing to keep her safe. To protect her forever.
She turned her cheek to my chest and continued her train of thought. “I guess the reason why I think it’s a memory is because this isn’t the first time I’ve had this nightmare. It was the same dream I had in middle school. Over and over. It started happening so often I was too afraid to go to bed. My parents had me see a hypnotherapist to help me, and it worked. I haven’t had the dream again. Until today. I’d honestly forgotten all about it.”
“I’m so sorry.” I slipped my fingers through her hair, trying to soothe her as I wrapped my head around everything she’d shared. We’d been through the wringer today in so many ways.
“What if something happened to me when I was younger, something traumatic, and my parents don’t want me to remember?”
I opened my mouth, but before I could say anything, there was a knock at the door. Two quick raps. They jolted me back to the past, to that room in Thailand, before I saw Mya being brought into hell with me.
“Your dad’s here. Earlier than expected.” Malcolm’s voice on the other side of the door rescued me from going down the path to that dark place again.
“Be right down,” I called out as Mya untangled herself from me to stand. I climbed off the bed and took her hands, giving them what I hoped was a reassuring squeeze before dropping them again. “We’ll figure this out, I promise.”
She chewed on her lip, working her eyes up my body, making her way to my face. She brushed away the rest of her tears. “I just want to be happy again.” She sniffled. “And despite all the craziness, one thing I know for certain is I feel happy when I’m with you.”