Chapter 11 #2
We fucked under the spray until steam blurred the mirror and the walls sweated with us. Her back against the tile. Her leg hooked around my hip. My mouth at her throat, her chest, anywhere I could reach.
I took her against the wall, slow at first, then not slow at all, because Skylar told me to stop being careful in that voice that makes my control pack a bag and leave town.
She came with my name breaking out of her, her pussy tight around my cock, water running down both of us while I lost every decent thought in my head.
Then I came too, hard enough that I had to brace one hand on the tile and bury my face in her neck so I wouldn’t say something stupid and permanent.
Afterward, I half expected her to leave.
That was the part I didn’t want to think about, the part where she would leave shortly.
I stood in the bathroom, water dripping from my hair and a towel loosely wrapped around my hips, watching her wrap herself in another towel, and I waited for it.
The shift. The regret. The moment her eyes cleared, her mouth tightened, and she remembered that tomorrow was waiting outside the door with all the reasons she should walk away.
She didn’t.
Instead, she walked past me into the bedroom, opened the drawer where one of my old shirts was folded, pulled it on, and climbed into my bed without asking.
My bed. Our old bed.
The one that used to groan under us when we were young and stupid, convinced hunger could hold the world off a little longer.
Now she is curled into me under the sheet, her hair spread across my arm, and her cheek against my chest. One of her legs is tangled with mine, her knee resting on my thigh.
I guess some things in this miserable world are apparently allowed to stay the same.
I stare at the ceiling. I don’t even attempt to sleep, because sleep would waste this.
When she leaves me tomorrow, I want to remember this when morning comes to take it away. Every second. Every breath. The weight of her body tucked against mine. The way her fingers loosen and curl against my stomach as she sleeps. The warmth of her breath where it touches my skin.
Because morning always comes. It doesn’t matter how hard a man begs the dark to stretch a little longer.
Time is a cruel fucker. It doesn’t care who finally holds the woman he lost. It keeps moving.
Keeps turning one night into the next day, reminding people that the body can forget what the heart cannot afford.
Skylar shifts in her sleep causing her hand to slide higher up my chest.
I go still beneath it.
It’s stupid how touch gets to me.
After everything we did tonight, after having her, it is her sleeping hand on my chest that breaks something loose.
Because this is what I missed most. Not the sex, though fuck, I missed that enough to drive myself mad.
Not the dirty little sounds she makes when she comes, though those are burned into the filthiest corner of my soul.
The old bed creaks as I shift one arm around her more firmly.
Skylar doesn’t wake. She presses her face deeper into my chest, and I close my eyes, knowing I should feel relief.
Instead, fear sits in the middle of my chest with its boots on. I know how easy it is to lose her.
I look toward the window.
The glass holds only darkness now. No stars from this angle.
The roof would show them better. I thought about heading up there with her again, but the memory of who was in this room was enough, and I am not sure my heart could take any more of those memories.
And tonight, I have something more dangerous than stars in my arms.
I don’t move.
The hours pass slowly.
A car passes sometime after two in the morning.
My arm goes numb under her shoulders, and I do not move it because I am not a complete fucking idiot. At some point, my body drifts toward sleep and snaps itself back before it fully falls.
Old habit. Prison sleep. Ugly, broken fragments of rest that never fully trust the dark.
Skylar’s fingers twitch against my chest, and I cover her hand with mine.
“Go back to sleep,” I whisper.
She doesn’t answer, but her body settles again.
I stay awake.
Eventually, the room begins to change.
There it is. Tomorrow.
The day she warned me about.
The morning light slips through the curtains, touching her face first, soft and pale across the skin I spent half the night memorizing. It finds the curve of her cheek, the beautiful line of her mouth, the faint shadow beneath her lashes. It makes her look softer than she is.
Her lashes flutter once. Her fingers curl against my chest and her body shifts beneath the sheet, stretching slightly, still wrapped in the warmth of a night neither of us knows how to handle now.
Her eyes open slowly. A flutter. A blink. Sleep clings to her for one last second before awareness begins to move in. I see the exact moment she remembers where she is. The ceiling. The room. The bed. My arm around her. Her body pressed against mine.
“Morning,” I say.
Her eyes narrow. “Were you watching me sleep?”
I let my mouth smirk. “No.”
“Liar.”
“Fine. A little.”
“It’s creepy.”
“I’ve been called worse.”
For one fragile second, her mouth curves into a smile, before it fades, and I feel the loss of it. The room shifts with her expression, the warmth between us thinning as morning drags every ugly truth back to the surface.
Her phone starts ringing from somewhere on the floor. The sound cuts through the room, far too loud for the kind of silence we’re lying in.
Skylar sits up, taking the warmth of her body with her. The empty space she leaves against my side feels immediate. A cold little preview of what this bed will feel like when she walks out of it.