26. Daphne Fallen Angel
twenty-six
Daphne: Fallen Angel
“I don’t want this to be some revenge fuck against Wolfe,” I spoke into the shadows of my small kitchen, watching the way Thay drank up the world around him while he hovered between my legs.
The buzz of their mouths left my body wrecked and hungry, but sleeping with Thay the first time nearly destroyed me.
Having so much of him, only for him to retreat behind his steel walls, was a game I would not survive a second time.
I understood Maine broke things and the need to put them back together, but not if this was a lie.
The last thing I wanted was for him to tell me that he is going to fucking keep me and then return to Seattle just to handcage me all over again.
No, thank you.
“Why? Are you willing to let him go?” Thay asked, the gravel in his throat scraping along my insides.
“Wolfe?” my chest squeezed, and my eyes moved to the bedroom.
“I get that he is a side effect of all my shitty choices, but would you?” Thunder rolled into my center before flooding my ears with static. “Let him go, I mean?” Thay clarified.
“No,” I admitted fully. Maybe one day. Maybe never. But… “No,” I said again.
“Exactly,” Thay’s brow lifted. “Which is why he gets to fucking watch.”
We sat in silence while the sounds of Wolfe moving around my bedroom spilled into the kitchen.
“Watch you do what, exactly?” I asked, feeling defensive. “Prove that I am yours? Thay, he already knows.”
“Daphne,” he uttered, sliding his hand across my cheek until the tips of his fingers played in my hair. “I am not planning to fuck you.”
I swallowed, confused.
“I am going to make love to you.”
He moved forward, curling one finger under the middle of my bra and hauling me upright to meet his eyes.
Make. Love.
Had he ever done that before?
Had I?
“I am going to break all my fucking rules inside of your body, and give you everything you always wanted. My monster. And when I do,” he breathed, breaking his letters into breaths that smashed into the sky.
“You will fall, and that pretty fucking halo you’ve been clinging to since I met you will be all mine. ”
Thay thumbed the corner of my eyes, as if they were drinking in their light for the last time.
“This isn’t about Wolfe. Though we need a witness.”
“To what?” I asked, taking a breath.
“Your unholy descent,” he growled into my lips. “To the moment I fucking marry you!”
I gasped, everything hitting me all at once.
“What do you mean, marry you?”
“What about those words don’t you understand?”
Lightning crashed between us. And just like that, Maine’s blue eyes faded into the industrial tint of rain on rust, filling up all the spaces with the gray fury of the Pacific.
“I am not interested in being your boyfriend, Daphne. I want forever or nothing at all.”
“Thay?” I blinked, wondering if this was real.
“But before you take me into your body, Daph, I need to know that you know I am never getting out,” Thay said, pulling the universe taut.
My eyes stretched in the center of his storm, and I couldn’t move.
“Do you understand? You will never save me from this. The things I have done, the man I am. There is no cozy house at the end of the world where I can heal from all this shit. I know that is what you want, what you’ve been waiting for, but it is impossible. The most you will ever get… is me.”
I placed my hand over the pounding of his heart and splayed my fingers around the way he thrashed. He was right; I did dream of a life where nothing would ever take from him again. One that left us alone to play in our shadows.
“That is fine because you are all I ever wanted,” I confessed into the void that made us. There was a sleepy way in which the next words fell from my lips. “You’re enough.”
Thay wanted to fight it, I could sense it in his muscles like a reflex trained to keep my head in the light, but he didn’t. For the first time in our entire lives, he let my words be true. And that is when I knew this was real.
“I remember the very first time I saw you in the window. You were twirling on your mattress in a dumpy tank top two sizes too small for your body, drawing circles in the Seattle light. My father had just come home, gin on his breath and reeking of five-dollar pussy. But instead of hating everything about that moment, I wanted to be in the middle of whatever world you were creating. A place where only you existed.”
“Thay,” my voice cracked.
“Even then, you pulled me in, Daph. I was yours long before I ever worked up the balls to crawl through your window. Knowing you existed was the only time in my life I truly felt safe.”
“And when our spines touched for the very first time,” I said, peering up into the smudged edges of the memory, “was the first time I felt whole. You made me a real person, and in that moment, all of me melded into all of you. I became yours.”
Thay searched for a lie, a crack, or anything he could hold on to, but found nothing.
“So is that a yes?” His jaw twitched when a heated breath hit his lungs. “Are you saying yes to me, Daphne?”
A heartbeat.
A rush of blood.
A slow exhale, leaping from a dying cliff.
“Yes,” I whispered, and before I could pull his mouth to mine, Thay turned, stalking to the door where two black backpacks rested against the wall. Wolfe must have dropped them there, and I hadn’t noticed.
Thay grabbed the one on the left, slinging it over his shoulder before making his way back to me.
“What is that?” I asked, but he did not answer when he took me into his arms and veered toward the bed.
When we entered, Wolfe was where Thay had put him, watching me in reverence as the other half of my soul laid me carefully against the pillows, fluffing them behind my neck just the way I liked them.
“She said yes,” Thay announced, kicking off his boots and dropping his pants to the floor.
“I heard,” Wolfe reclined, leaning back into the chair with Thay’s belt draped across his lap as instructed.
“Not ready to let you go, though,” Thay glared, tossing the black backpack next to my thigh.
“Yeah,” Wolfe said with a wink and something else easing in his expression. “I heard that, too.”
I eyed them both from the center of the mattress, attempting to connect our messy dots into some sort of shape, but nothing formed inside me. It was just gravity, pieces of me pulling from all parts of them.
“Shhh,” Wolfe soothed, trailing his rugged gaze down the arc of my thigh as he stroked himself. I gulped, leaning into the sparkles of wind breezing across my core. “I am going to enjoy watching Threx unmake you.”
My attention shifted left to the shadow at the end of the bed, and the way his silhouette carved into the darkness.
There was no denying that Thay was beautiful, tragic in all the ways you want to hold in your mouth.
From his warm skin to the ink playing along his valleys, every bit of him was muscle and death.
And yet, his body was merely a cage for all those dark, violent things that created us.
But it wasn’t him.
What I wanted was underneath.
The air moved when Thay dropped to the mattress, crawling over me to trap me in the flex of his forearms. Goddamn. The way the vein popped from his wrist made me want to lick and bite, yet I knew better than to lean into my impulses while his gaze went searching.
My lips parted when he angled my neck, thumbing my pulse before falling to my collarbone. Thay’s fingers were rough, calloused, and I loved the way they bruised.
“What are you doing?” I asked when he took the center of my bra and pulled it apart, releasing my breast in a shivering release.
“Mmmh,” he groaned, ghosting over my nipple with the heat of his mouth before palming the sensitive skin underneath. This man had seen my body in all ways, and yet each time he touched me, it came to life.
“Of all the art on your body, this is my favorite,” his tongue licked over three freckles that played at the side of my left breast. “It’s so pretty how they wreak havoc across your perfect skin.”
I watched him tilt his head at the tiny triangle.
“Like tiny bits of anarchy,” he praised, dropping his mouth into three breathy kisses before meeting my eyes. “Lift your tits and stay still.”
My brows met in confusion when Thay dumped out the contents of the gray backpack onto my mattress.
It was the tattoo gun he stored at my apartment, which he lovingly referred to as “the machine,” needles, tiny caps of black ink, and the exact brand of condoms I kept in my nightstand back in Seattle.
“Were you at my place?” I looked up at him when he rose, straddling my hips while he rested his knees on either side of my body.
“More or less,” he commented, grabbing the machine and loading the needles into place. He went for a condom, but I knocked it from his hand.
Thay stilled.
“You want my cum inside you, babe?” he asked, peering down at me from the night sky.
“Have you ever put it in somebody else?” I wondered, but didn’t care whether he said yes or no. I couldn’t take one more layer separating him from me.
“What are you talking about?” he smiled. “We both know that I’ve never slept with anyone but you.”
“I am serious,” I panted, watching the way his expression dimmed with a kind of darkness most would run from.
“So am I,” he rasped softly, lurching forward just enough to show his teeth. “Any man can stick their dick in a hole, Daph. It doesn’t make the holes real. And it sure as fuck doesn’t make them you.”
A sparkle of light hit my tongue.
“But no. You’re the only one I’ve ever fucked all my stars into.”
I scratched his chest, wanting to break, needing him closer.
“Thay, what are you…” The words faded when he took the cap of ink and hunkered lower, the tip of his length pressing past my entrance.
I arched my back, lifting when the overwhelming sensation of him filled me.
“Daphne,” his eyes flashed when he rocked his hips. Thay was massive, and he loved to watch me squirm. “Do not move. Hold your breast and stay still,” he breathed in a velvet warning against my cheek. “Or I’ll fuck this all up.”
I whimpered, the edges of my vision going limp.
“Fuck,” his breath hit my ear while I attempted to keep my hips from taking what they wanted. “You’re so fucking perfect,” he rocked, until all of him thrummed into my marrow.
Was this man really about to tattoo me with his dick inside me?
Thay’s hand pressed into my ribs, stretching it tight, holding me when the needle met my flesh in a scream. I can’t tell you what it was. The pressure of his thighs, the way he filled me, or how my skin burned bright, but a strange storm built between my legs.
“There she is,” Wolfe praised from the shadows, and Thay’s head turned, his dick sopping wet with all my twisted need.
For a half-second, I wondered what he might think of me and all my other dark little kinks, but the chasm in his eyes sent me falling. It didn’t disgust him; it made him hungry. And that is when I realized all he needed was permission to obliterate me into stardust.
“Have you ever been fucked by a knife?” he asked, the buzz of the machine working between us. “You use the metal for pleasure and the hilt for pain,” he smiled, wiping the blood from my flesh, but I couldn’t look away. “No?” he concluded, tilting his hips into me to get a sharper angle.
I breathed.
“Wolfe’s just into belts then?”
I inhaled when the burn stretched, working its way under my skin.
“Good. Because if he ever used a blade against you, I’d lodge it in his goddamn throat.”
“How did you know?” I asked when he pressed harder.
“You think just because I do not fuck your body, I don’t pay attention to it?
” His brow raised, wetting his lips with the edge of his tongue.
“Why do you think you crave darkness, Daph?” My ribs ached, sending me into a still shiver as he wiped the blood from my ribcage.
“It isn’t the cut, or even the control, though you long for that, too,” he said, pulling the skin to inspect his work, applying more inky darkness just under my breast. “It is me.”
I shut my eyes slowly, tilting my head to glimpse what he wrote, but his hand swept to my throat.
“The pressure. The violence. The breaking. All your body knows is me, Daphne. I am all it fucking wants.”
A dark cloud fell overhead, scratching at the ceiling.
“You want to know how I know?” he asked, whirling me onto my stomach, making me clench around him in a full circle.
Thay moaned low, sweeping his hand up my spine before shoving my head down. “Because when I am inside you,” he palmed my heart… At the steady, safe song before pressing between my shoulders, “We’re complete.”
We moved in tandem. Every breath, every note matched my own.
Beat.
He kissed along my backbone, tangling his fingers in my strands.
Beat.
My eyelids fell open, and that is when I saw it: the letters of his last name written on my skin in forever-ink.
He did it. He marked me, and suddenly I couldn’t hold back the kiss of salt and sunshine striking through my core. My irises burst into clouds, making everything rain.
Beat.
Finally, his.
Beat.
“Now, angel,” Thay breathed, biting into the flesh below my collarbone before wrenching my head back against his mouth. “I am going to need those wings.”