28. River
river
. . .
the gloves come off
Because I’m waiting for it, I feel the moment Rue subdues her storm.
There’s no physical evidence, no stiffening or recoiling.
Her grip on my hand doesn’t falter. Her eyes stay a vivid indigo, glistening with empathy as she looks up at me.
But I’ve been aware of the weather since before I knew what weather was, and I don’t need to see the sky to feel it changing.
Her winds quiet. Her wildness withdraws. It’s wrong. A false catharsis, unnatural and uncanny. But I let it happen.
I want more than anything to explore the darkest depths of her chaos, but now isn’t the time to coax it free.
She’ll need me at full strength for that, and talking about what happened when I was seventeen took a lot out of me.
Far more than I thought it would. I’m cracked open, a soft part of me exposed to the air for the first time in decades.
So I let Rue retreat—a little bit.
As hard as it is, when she relaxes her fingers, I release them.
“Thank you for trusting me with your secret,” she says softly. “I promise it’s safe with me.”
I smile weakly. “I know. Thanks.”
She nods toward the plaque. “I’m okay with skipping the rest if you are.”
“No way. Stopping now would be like orgasm denial.”
I’m rewarded with a startled expression and an eruption of color in her face. She looks down, muttering something under her breath that includes “degenerate.”
My next smile comes easily. “Artistically speaking, of course. Get your head out of the gutter.”
She lets out the cutest harrumph. “Fine. ‘One asked and given free.’ What do you want to know?”
The defiant lift of her chin is so fucking sexy. Almost as sexy as the obstinance in her eyes. My gaze gravitates to her mouth and lingers. It’s perfect. Vibrant coral with cotton-candy undertones. Bratty and bewitching. Strong and smart and tender.
She has a freckle on the right side of her upper lip I want to lick.
“Stop it,” she whispers.
“Stop what?”
“You know what.”
The annoyance in her voice doesn’t disguise its breathiness one bit. Ignoring her command, I trace the subtle valley of her Cupid’s bow. The tiny creases along the inner seam. The changing texture as her lips soften and part.
“River…”
Her warning comes out as a plea. Another thread of my restraint snaps, and my hand rises to capture her jaw. She gasps, then holds still as I hover my thumb just above the cushion of her lower lip. As tempting as it is to see the look in her eyes, I keep my attention on her mouth.
“Don’t worry, Princess. I won’t kiss you. Not even if you beg me to.” I smile just enough to show her the canines she loves to stare at. “But when you kiss me? All bets are off. This pretty mouth will never forget the shape of mine.”
A quick exhale showers my thumb with heat.
In her speechless silence, wildness flickers as it fights years of denial.
I know she feels the potential—no, the certainty—of us, but she doesn’t trust it yet.
And that’s okay. I don’t care if it takes me years to rebuild what I nearly shredded seven years ago.
She’s mine. I’m hers.
I’ll wait as long as I have to.
Giving us both a reprieve, I finally press my thumb against the tiny scar interrupting the line of her lower lip.
“This is the secret I want to know. How did you get this scar?”
I lower my hand, curling my fingers around my tingling thumb.
“When I was eleven, I fell twenty feet out of a tree. Clipped a branch with my face on the way down.”
My heart veers sharply sideways. “Twenty fucking feet? You could have died.”
She nods, her eyes clouding with the memory.
“I caught the last branch long enough to slow my fall. Ripped up my arm and cracked a couple ribs, but I hit the ground mostly on my feet. Fractured my femur instead of my skull.” She lifts her left leg and shows me the faint scars on either side of her knee.
“Surgery souvenirs. I was young enough that it healed relatively easily. They took out the giant nails after a year.”
“I thought you were going to say you fell off a bike or tripped on a curb.”
She smirks. “I have different scars for those.”
My focus narrows. By the way her eyes flare in response, she hears my unspoken intentions loud and clear: I’m going to see and touch every single one of your scars.
Rue lowers her foot and her eyes. “Okay, my turn. Why did you and Elise break up?”
I told her last night, but I’m not surprised she doesn’t remember. Right afterward, she informed me the Little Dipper was scooping star noodles.
“Things started going downhill when we moved in together. A week after she dumped me, I found out she’d moved in with her other boyfriend.”
Rue gasps. “That bitch.”
Her indignation makes me chuckle, which makes her frown in confusion.
“I wasn’t heartbroken. Hurt, yes, but as shitty as it sounds, my ego was what suffered the most. I was more upset about the betrayal than losing her.
I don’t blame her, either. Not anymore. On some level, I think she knew I was performing love instead of feeling it, and she deserves someone who can really love her.
” I pause, wincing. “She was a bit of a bitch though. The kind of person who yells at servers.”
Perplexed blue eyes scan mine. “Then why? Why were you with her so long?”
“The short, pathetic answer is I didn’t want to be alone.”
Someday, I’ll tell her the rest. That I settled because I was too afraid to be honest about my feelings for her.
Rue’s indignation returns, this time directed at me. “You told your parents you were going to marry her.”
It might be wishful thinking on my part, but she sounds personally offended.
“I was a fool.”
“Bold of you to go with past tense.”
I grin. “This fool wants to journey to the stars with you. Shall we?”
She rolls her eyes, those pretty lips twitching. “If we die, my soul will haunt yours for eternity.”
“An afterlife with you isn’t the threat you think it is.”
I’m positioning my feet back on the pedals as I say it, so I don’t see her expression. But I hear the catch in her breath before she scoffs.
“Do lines like that actually work?”
I glance at her with a smile. “That’s up to you. Now hurry up and tell the stars a secret. You’re looking a little sunburned.”
She makes a face but closes her eyes. Her lashes flutter open a few seconds later.
“All right, done. Did you do yours?”
I nod. I’ve been shouting my secret at the stars for hours.
“Ready? Push.”
It doesn’t take long for us to realize the entire installation needs a bath in grease. The pressure required to move the pedals is immense, the grinding and screeching almost intolerable. But I don’t ask Rue if she wants to stop, and she doesn’t ask me. We’re the same kind of stubborn.
When the spokes on the ground begin to rotate, we share a grin and pedal harder. By the time they rise into the air, we’re panting and sweating and cussing.
But it’s worth it.
As the spokes lift to their highest point, the grinding sound fades, and a deep, sonorous whistle takes its place. The pedals also lose the majority of their resistance, allowing us to catch our breath and actually see what we’ve accomplished.
A tornado of spinning metal surrounds us. There are three different levels, all moving at different speeds and oscillating at different rates. Light flashes off thousands of tiny mirrors, creating the surreal feeling that we’ve defied natural law and summoned the stars to us.
Rue laughs, bright and loud.
“It’s incredible!”
I lean toward her so I don’t have to yell. “Told you we wouldn’t die.”
“We still need to slow it down somehow.”
Taking shameless advantage of the moment, I move close enough to nuzzle my nose into the soft hair behind her ear. As I speak, my lips accidentally graze her earlobe.
“Let’s worry about that in a few minutes.”
She makes a small sound, clearly involuntary, that goes straight to my cock. Then she nods and forces a few coughs under the false assumption I’ll doubt what I heard.
“Whew, it’s dusty, right?”
Biting my lip to abort a smile, I pull away before I do something I can’t take back—like ask her if she’ll whimper like that when I’m eating her pussy.
We continue pedaling.
Rue avoids looking at me.
Dropping my head back, I stare through the tunnel of sparkling lights and moving metal to a sky the same color as her eyes. I think about tasting her. Feasting. Her hands tangled in my hair as she rides my face.
Pedaling becomes increasingly uncomfortable, but I don’t care. Nor do I make a move to conceal my hard-on. I want her to see what she does to me.
I think about her thighs shaking. Sweat glistening on her naked body. Licking every scar. Mapping all her textures with my tongue. Sinking inside her. Filling her with cum.
I think about fucking her so slowly she hates me and so hard she falls in love.
My cock jerks, and the fabric of my shorts snags on my piercings. I hiss and sit up, shifting my hips to create some slack.
From the corner of my eye, I watch Rue’s head turn. I feel the weight of her stare on my lap. Hear the small sound she tries to swallow.
She sees.
She knows.
She looks away.