Chapter 18
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
OLIVIA
A voiding my mom becomes an intricate dance—especially with it being a slow week at the café—but I’m having a really hard time finding the confidence to talk to her about the wedding. I’ve thought about continuing on like nothing’s changed, pretending I have no interest in going to Charleston or meeting a whole group of strangers I happen to share a bloodline with, but after allowing myself to admit what I wanted with Rhett over the weekend, it feels like I’m burning with a newfound need to be honest about this too.
Still, the fear of Mom’s reaction scares me more than anything. I’m so worried she’ll feel like I’m choosing my father over her, which isn’t the reality at all. Every time I catch a glimpse of her long red hair floating somewhere back in the kitchen, my heart stops in a panic. I spin on my heel and bail, convinced she’ll see the truth of my feelings written all over my face if I let her look too long. When she’s out on the floor or rooted in front of the POS system talking to Teresa, I find a reason to be in the kitchen, pulling out more napkins or making small talk with Mark while he works on a meatloaf special that smells amazing. I move through every shift carefully, ensuring I never end up alone with her. But if she senses anything wrong with me, she doesn’t make it known. She’s calm and graceful as always, her easy smile bestowed on every patron who walks through the door.
Today the café is so slow after lunch that I decide to break out the Valentine’s Day decorations to keep myself busy. The holiday is still technically a couple weeks away, but people around here love getting in the spirit of—well, any spirit, really—and it’s the perfect distraction. Charlotte, who’s been working from the far corner booth all afternoon, eyes me with an arched brow as I unravel a giant pink heart made of tinsel.
“You have something you want to share, Liv?” she asks.
I throw her a look. “Do you ?” I’ve hardly seen her in weeks since she’s been spending a majority of her time at Ivan’s house. Their relationship is trapezing from casual to serious really fast, but I can tell it makes her happy. Even as she rolls her eyes now.
She rises from the booth and stretches her arms over her head before meandering over to check out the box of decorations. When she pulls out a roll of red streamers, she nonchalantly mutters, “Ivan asked me to go to Florida with him for Valentine’s Day weekend.”
I gaze at her. “A romantic vacation ?”
Her brows pinch. “Do you think it’s too soon?”
“How the hell should I know? The furthest I’ve gotten in a relationship is all the campaigning Shawn did to ask me to prom.” Shawn was in my senior year math class. He was definitely cute but super timid, and mixed with my overall lack of confidence with boys, nothing between us ever stood a real chance at amounting to much. He was my first kiss though and, later, almost my first time . . . but his intense nervousness sort of shut the whole thing down before it ever really got anywhere.
“What if he murders me? What if I end up on an episode of Dateline , my body lost at sea?”
I shrug. “Not the worst way to go—you’ve always wanted to be famous. And a mermaid.”
She swats my shoulder, laughing.
“Honestly, Char, if he’s making you happy, just lean into it. Take the chance. He seems to really like you.”
“What about you?”
I think about Rhett and everything that happened in that apartment four days ago and have to work to fight a blush. “He’s . . .” I say, not knowing how to finish the thought. He’s kind and warm? Sexy as hell? He knows how to work my body better than I do? “He’s good.”
Char gives me an incredulous look, like she knows I’m holding out. “Good?”
I sigh, looking around before making eye contact. “We had sex,” I whisper. “Twice.”
The roll of streamer drops from her hand, wheeling across the floor until it runs into the leg of the table the mayor’s wife currently occupies with two other ladies from town. “Shit,” she mumbles, running to pick it up and apologize to the women before coming straight back to me. “Spill,” she directs, her eyes bright with excitement.
Laughing, I try to explain as honestly as possible so she doesn’t get any wrong ideas. “I sort of asked him to,” I say. “After we kissed, I guess I decided if he was going to let me practice . . . things with him, I should take advantage.” The words taste bitter as they leave my mouth, but I’m not about to tell Charlotte how thoroughly he’d dismantled me in that apartment, both with his body and the things he’d said after.
“And he was happy to oblige?” she asks, wagging her brows.
Shame burns the back of my neck. “It wasn’t like that,” I quickly say. “It was . . . really nice. Thoughtful, even.”
The look on her face morphs into something rooted in confusion, and I can’t blame her. “Rhett Bennett was thoughtful with you?”
I nod. “He . . . cared about my experience.”
She smiles, a knowing gleam in her eye. “He fucked you good, didn’t he?”
“Charlotte!”
“I mean, it’s Rhett Bennett! If there’s anything he’d be good at when it comes to women, it’d be delivering memorable nights in bed.” She leans forward. “I want to know everything .”
My cheeks burn hot and I’m suddenly sweating. I should be comfortable telling my best friend all about my night with Rhett—lord knows she spares no details when she’s dishing about her own sexcapades. But something about sharing the way he was with me, simultaneously dizzyingly rough and tender, feels cheap.
I had to hide small bruises that wrapped around my wrists under an oversized sweatshirt the next day for work. And that’s not counting the half-dozen sprinkled fingerprint-sized marks he’d left around my thighs . . .
It feels wrong to give details about something I’m not even sure I fully understand for myself. The way the marks he left on my body don’t scare me. The way I liked all the things he did to me, how it made me feel powerful when he lost control. The way he held me afterward and told me that his heart raced . . . I had a hard time believing that would be normal for him.
Then again, do I really know him? Maybe it’s part of the reason everyone is so quick to warn girls about the Bennett brothers. Maybe he’s just playing with me and I’m naive for falling for it.
I sigh. “Another time,” I mutter. “I need to get back to work.”
Charlotte’s gaze skims over the decorations at my feet, picking up on my hesitation. “Okay.” She nods, a coy grin still plastered to her face as if to tell me my lack of desire to spill my guts about the whole thing won’t deter her for long. “Sure.”
When she eventually leaves to meet her parents for dinner, I’m still battling the onslaught of thoughts about Rhett and the things we did. At least it’s enough to drown out the worry about Mom and Céline and anything else I could possibly be bothered about.
I finally make it home around seven, immediately opening a bottle of wine I’d saved in the pantry. It’s too chilly to enjoy it on my front porch where I normally like to decompress, so instead I decide to pull a warm blanket over my lap on the velvet couch that takes up most of my living room, a candle lit on the coffee table in front of me throwing off a calming scent of jasmine. For the most part, I think it’s nice to live alone, to find reprieve in the quiet space that surrounds my little bungalow. But there are nights like tonight when a loneliness takes root, seeping through the cracks of my long-worn armor, and I wish for someone to sit with. To share all of these fears and dreams and thoughts with.
I’m about to call it a night just before nine when the unmistakable sound of an engine rumbles outside the house, somewhere in the distance. It gets louder with every heartbeat that passes, and soon mine is flying behind my ribs as I whirl to peek through the shutters of my front window. I’m stunned to find Rhett pulling up the drive like a black knight right out of my deepest, darkest fantasies.
I have the front door open before he even makes it to the porch. He tugs off his helmet to reveal a tired face, eyes worn and the skin around his mouth heavy. “Rhett,” I breathe.
His mouth curves just enough to make me shudder. “Peaches.”
“What are you doing here?”
He begins to say something before thinking better of it, his lips sealing shut with a tight press. His eyes bounce between mine before he eventually shrugs, his jaw tight. “Is this okay?”
“Of course! Come in.” His broad frame slips into the house. Where a cowboy hat normally sits on his head, unruly black waves stick to his temples in a disheveled mop. “Are you okay?” I ask, worry spiking as I take in the slow way he moves into the living room, where I urge him to take a seat.
“Yeah.” He nods. But I don’t quite believe him.
“You don’t have to work tonight?”
“Already off. It was slow.”
“The café too,” I say. “I’m glad you came.”
The corner of his mouth lifts as he looks around the room. He’s already seen my house, but the way his eyes trace the furniture and scattered plants, it feels like the first time. “Yeah?”
I nod. “I . . . we didn’t say when we’d see each other again, and I—” Oh god. I already sound clingy.
His eyes move to me, something dark pulsing behind them. “You thought I wouldn’t stick around after that?”
“Not exactly.” I force a smile. “I just didn’t know when I should try to reach out.” He’d given me his phone number when he brought me home after . . . well, after , but I couldn’t bring myself to use it.
“You can reach out whenever you want to, Olivia. Anytime.”
The words warm my cheeks. “I guess that’s part of all this, huh? Learning the ropes on how to communicate.”
His eyes pulse with that icy heat. “Guess so,” he agrees.
It becomes more and more obvious that something’s wrong. His hands are clenched in his lap, the hard set of his jaw sharp enough to cut glass. “Are you really okay?” I try again.
This time, he blows out a breath. “It’s been a really hard week,” he says quietly.
I lift my hand between us, braving a touch. The rough stubble of his cheek scrubs across my palm, and his skin—he’s freezing . I frown.
An idea hits me. “Do you trust me?”
His eyes flare. Whether he realizes it’s the same question he asked me before we went inside that apartment, I’m not sure, but his answer is almost as quick as mine. “Yes.”
I smile. Bite the inside of my cheek. “Stay here. Give me a couple minutes.”
I don’t wait for him to respond. Moving into the small bathroom in the hallway, I work to draw hot water in the tub, lighting the three candles I have spread around the bathroom. It takes about ten minutes to fill, the water hot enough for traces of steam to cling to the cold mirror above the sink.
When I steal a glance back out to the living room, I find Rhett’s head tilted back against the top of the couch, his eyes closed. There’s a low dip in the corners of his lips, proof of whatever it is he’s fighting through. It makes my heart ache. “Rhett?” His eyes snap open and he turns to face me. The moonlight paints half of his face, leaving the other half shrouded in shadows, and I see it then: the dichotomy of who he is. “Come here.”
I watch as he rises, long limbs and hard lines. He moves to follow me into the bathroom where the warm bath waits, eyeing it curiously. The surface of the water holds a layer of bubbles and, well, I may have gone a little overboard. “For you or for me?”
My heart pounds. “For you.”
He hums, the sound rumbling in the space between us. Winding my palms up his chest, I push off the work jacket he wears so well and unbutton the shirt beneath. He doesn’t help, but he doesn’t move away either. He watches me closely, and I feel the heat of that gaze like a physical touch.
When I work the shirt off of him, I reach for his pants. The silver of his eyes darkens to near black, a heated counterpart to the ice I saw out in the living room. “Sometimes I feel like the world is pressing down against me,” I tell him softly. “I’ve always tried to figure out where that feeling comes from. Maybe it’s the expectation for how the rest of my life is supposed to look? Pressure to make sure my mom knows how thankful I am for everything she’s given me? I’m never really sure . . . but it makes me feel heavy, like gravity’s pulling me into the floor and I can’t stand straight or breathe fully.” I give him a half-hearted smile. “I learned a long time ago that baths help. The warm water—it feels like a hug. Like an assurance, you know?”
It takes a bit of effort to push his jeans down the thick muscle of his thighs, the weight of his stare burning the crown of my head. When I’ve got them wrapped around his ankles, he lifts each foot, one at a time, and lets me pull them completely off. I stand again, reaching for the hem of his boxers. “Is this okay?” I ask.
He swallows, the apple of his throat dipping. Nods.
I take them off quickly, fighting the rush of heat that I know snakes up my chest and neck. “Get in,” I say when he’s bare, nodding toward the tub.
“Will you join me?” he asks, voice rough.
My belly swoops as heat sinks inside of me, a throbbing ache I feel everywhere. “Okay.”
Rhett steps into the tub, carefully lowering himself into the water with a low groan as I slip out of the sweats and T-shirt I have on. He holds out a hand for me when I step toward the tub and I take it, letting him ease me in with him. I settle between his long legs, resting my back against his chest as the water rises around us from the space our bodies create.
I try really hard not to take inventory of all the places our skin touches, especially not after he wraps his arms around me to pull me closer to his body, the tops of his arms skating under the swell of my breasts. “Tell me something real,” I murmur, desperate to keep him with me, to not lose him to the dark corners of whatever’s going on in his mind. It’s obvious something is looming over him, a storm cloud threatening to burst, and if he tells me what it is, I might be able to help.
I feel the way his shoulders slump. The way his body seems to sink further into the water. “Sometimes,” he says, so quietly it’s almost a whisper, “I just don’t know what the point of anything is.”
“What happened?” I ask more forcefully.
He sighs. “I don’t want to talk about it. Not right now.”
Disappointment spears through me, but I push it aside. “Okay,” I say. “Would you rather I distract you?”
His grip around me tightens. “How do you plan on doing that?”
I hike my shoulders in a shrug. “Maybe you can tell me how you learned to . . . do what we did.”
He stills for a moment and then he lifts his arm to trace warm, wet fingers along my skin. The scratch of his chin grazes the nape of my neck. “What we did?”
“You know what I mean.”
He smiles inside the crook of my neck and it feels like the first taste of relief. “Some experience,” he admits, voice thick like honey. “Paying attention when I try something new. Not being afraid to try in the first place.”
“Hm,” I hum, mind spinning at the easy confidence he exudes.
Be brave , he wrote to me only days ago. That small piece of paper I now covet.
“Tell me what to do,” I whisper. “Tell me how to help, how I can do things the way you like.”
A long moment stretches out around us and I begin to think he’s going to pretend the words didn’t leave my mouth. That he might go back to hiding in his own head. But then?—
“Touch me,” he murmurs, his breath heating the skin of my neck before his hot mouth presses to my temple. “I want you to touch me, peaches.”
I squeeze my eyes shut as goosebumps race across my skin. “How?”
His chuckle is dark and gritty. “However you want to. You can’t possibly go wrong.”
I lean forward, turning to face him as water sloshes back and forth between us. Even through the clouds of bubbles that ripple along the surface, I see the expanse of skin and long, muscled limbs beneath. He watches me with only half the grin I know he can produce, his eyes pure smoke, and yet . . . there’s still a void that sings along my senses.
I think back to our conversation on the water tower, to all he’s endured, carrying so much of the weight of his family’s struggles. Holding space for all the hate and vitriol everyone spews at them in a fight that he never belonged to in the first place. I’m not sure when, exactly, it happened, but I want him to know that I see him. And not just the version he shows the rest of the world, but the shades that lie within that are honest and careful and kind.
I watch his gaze move down my face, to my neck, my chest. His eyes linger there for a while, and my heart gallops with the strength of a full stampede with every second that passes. Reaching through the water, I lightly wrap my hands around his legs at a spot just above both knees, easing them higher with a pressure soft and teasing. He lets out a sharp exhale as the pads of my fingers whisper along his skin.
His eyelids fall, dark lashes fanning across a sun-kissed face. And I think I might remember him, picture him like this, for the rest of my life.
It’s the heat of the water and the sparking energy between us that sends a tentative hand between his legs, where he’s already hard. I trace the length of him, watching as his jaw clenches and brows knit. When I wrap a firm hand around him and tug, he hisses out a low “ Fuck ” as his eyes open, catching mine.
“Does that feel good?” I ask, tongue dry as I tug again.
Rhett’s eyes flash, pupils blown wide. Every cell in my body narrows its attention to my hands and what they’re doing. To the muscles clenching along his face and neck and the blazing confidence I feel at the sight of it.
I nearly yelp when his arms suddenly burst around me, hands gripping tight, and then he’s lifting me up, stepping out of the tub as water streams off both our bodies and onto the tile floor. His mouth is rough on mine, teeth scraping against my lips as he moves us out of the bathroom toward my room. Toward the bed.
He sets me down and breaks his mouth away from mine to lie in the center of my mattress, his still-dry hair spilling across a dusty pink pillow. “Come here,” he rasps, holding out a hand.
But I can’t stop staring at him.
I’ve never wanted sex like this, never wanted to feel someone move against me so badly. The need nearly buckles me. The cut of his jaw and the dip of his throat. The steeliness and strength and power that swirl together in the pools of those moon-like eyes. His calloused fingertips roughly dragging along my skin while the hard lines of him meet the soft curves of me.
The way his need pours out and collects in my heart, a chemical reaction that will inevitably bind the memory of him to my skin and bones forever.
And that’s just it. This thing we’re doing . . . it’s changing me.
“Olivia.” He says my name quietly, like it’s a secret. Like it’s the answer to a question he’s held for such a long time, and now that he has it, he wants to be so careful. My hand rises to meet his, still warm and damp from the water, and he pulls me to him on the bed until I’m on top of him, knees bracketing his ribs. His eyes devour me, hands settling on my waist. “I don’t think you understand how much you turn me on.”
My throat tightens.
“Your golden hair, the freckles on your face. The way the light brightens the flecks of amber in your eyes, like sunlight through the trees. Your skin . . . god, Olivia,” he rumbles, low and gruff. “Your skin . It drives me fucking insane to stop myself from touching you as much as I want to.”
My mind tumbles over the words. But I have no time to respond before he’s lifting me off his stomach. Pulling me up toward the headboard, so that my legs rest around . . .
Oh god .
There’s no time to process what’s happening before one large hand catches both my wrists, pinning them behind my back as his first lick spreads me open. There is nothing careful or teasing about the way he tastes me, his tongue greedy and cruel in what feels like a claiming, like I was made for him to do this . Made for him to feast from, to drown in. The sensation is at once too much and not enough as my hips writhe, the intense pleasure edging along painful.
A low groan rumbles out from him, vibrating against me, and I buck against the feel of it, lifting myself up with the strength of my thighs when the pressure of it all becomes too much. But he clamps me back down against him with a heavy arm, his teeth nipping in warning before another long stroke of his tongue blinds me. Forced to take the pleasure head-on, it doesn’t take long before the tension snaps and I scream as I fall apart around him.
Still, he doesn’t stop. One orgasm quickly tips into another and I swear I’m going to lose my mind if he doesn’t let me catch my breath. “ Rhett ,” I beg. “Please.”
The arm he uses as a band around my lap relaxes, and I reflex up and off of him. There’s a sharp inhale and a chuckle beneath me. “Come on, peaches. You can give me one more.”
But I’m a boneless heap.
I look down at him to tell him so, but there’s a grin tugging at his wicked mouth, a gleam in his eye that’s been missing all night. “I don’t think I can,” I say, chest heaving.
His grin only grows wider. “How ’bout you take over, then?”
“What do you mean?”
Rhett releases his hold on my wrists and wraps his hands around my waist again. As easily as before, he lifts me off of him and scoots me back to his hips, the impossibly hard length of him caught right between my legs. Right where his mouth just was. His eyes fasten there, wide and gluttonous, as he slowly glides me back and forth over him.
When he speaks, his voice is hurried. “You’re going to ride me like you mean it, peaches. Because you do, don’t you? You want me to be inside you?”
I nod, breathless.
“Say it,” he orders.
“I want you inside me,” I mumble, wholly focused on the friction and heat growing, despite being sure I’d had enough. Turns out I might be as insatiable as he is. I squeeze my eyes shut as the tension in my belly grows taut.
“You’re so fucking wet. I bet you’re soft enough to take me even deeper this time, don’t you think?”
The warmth of his hands disappears and the rocking stops. I almost whine from the loss of it, opening my eyes to find him studying me. “I want you inside me,” I repeat, firmer this time.
He winks at me . . . winks . “You know what to do.”
But . . . do I? I’ve only been on top one other time in my life and it was short-lived—and not because I’d rocked his world.
Rhett must see the hesitation on my face because his eyes sharpen. “Olivia. If you’re somehow worried about getting this right, trust me when I say you could probably just breathe on me and I’d come harder than ever from it.”
The words blaze through me like an inferno—enough to tame my insecurity, to grip him softly before shifting over him. The sound he makes when I sink down around him catches in my own throat, and the pinch of his jaw as he watches my body move lower is enough to fill me with the deep gratification I’d almost lost hold of. To see the proof of the effect of this—even when he’s not the one in control, not the one taking— blooms within me like a wildflower.
When I can’t possibly take any more, I roll my hips experimentally, finding the movement somehow eases Rhett in farther. He groans again, and I’m . . . enraptured. Utterly fixated on the feel of being stretched around him like this, on the sounds he makes from the way I move. I roll again, coming alive from the sensation, from the pure joy of it.
Rhett’s eyes shine bright as he looks at me, and I fall deep into his stare. I love the way he has no problem doing what he wants with me, the way it somehow still feels as much for me as it is for him. And now . . . now I understand how chasing my own pleasure can also drive him toward his. How it can be possible, with trust and communication, to create a physical dynamic that brings us both to the edge of sanity.
He makes no move to hold me in place like he’s done before, but his hands begin a light pursuit along my skin as I shift and tilt my hips. When one curls around my breast and squeezes, I nearly lose it. But then he gives my nipple a well-timed pinch as I sink down again, rolling his hips up to meet mine, and I shatter .
He does his best to wait, to let me keep rocking as I ride the wave of pleasure, pulsing around him and gripping tight. But soon he can’t stop his own release from barreling through him, the pressure of his hands on my waist squeezing hard as he pulls me off of him, just as he starts coming. I fall to the bed next to him, utterly spent, and watch his release with fascination.
It takes both of us a long, long while before we can move again.
* * *
When I wake the next morning, early enough that the light streaming in through the window is still a mere whisper, it takes only seconds to realize he’s gone.