33. Ellie
Ellie
Imanage to get Tank's shirt about halfway up his ribs before physics defeats me.
He's too big. I'm sitting on the counter with my arms stretched over my head and his shirt bunches under his arms, refusing to go any further.
Tank rumbles with his low, gravelly laugh. It's a laugh I'm addicted to, but I get to hear it so rarely. He reaches back with one hand, grabs a fistful of fabric between his shoulder blades, and pulls the whole thing off in one motion that makes me wetter than any striptease ever could.
And then he just… stands there.
His shoulders are curled in slightly, his arms hanging at his sides as if he doesn't know where to put them. Then he reaches up with one hand and rubs at the back of his neck, still keeping his eyes off me.
He's a wall of muscle trying to make himself look smaller.
This massive, terrifying man who snapped a gang leader's neck with his bare hands is shy, standing shirtless and unmasked in front of me in the kitchen.
He has scars everywhere, and not just on his face.
These ones look like something tried to eat him alive.
And after what he told me about his past, I guess it did.
Most of them are bite marks, old and silvered, from being thrashed in the dog's jaws.
There are more patchwork skin grafts, some layered like the first ones didn't take, but the black-and-gray tattoos all over his arms and torso of feathers, wings, and dog skulls blend them in.
And I guess that was probably the point, as much as he always hated needles.
So many of the smaller scars are newer, pinker and still raised on top of the tattoos, and I assume he got those since my boys became the Kings of Ruin.
I look at all of it. And I make myself look slowly, because I want him to see me looking and not pushing him away or having second thoughts.
Then I lift my eyes back to his face.
I didn't get to really see him before, not properly, because I was too busy crying and he was too busy telling me the worst story I've ever heard.
Now the light is on him and there's nowhere for either of us to hide.
His bone structure is beautiful. He looks like a statue come to life, even with all the damage.
There isn't much of his face left unscarred.
He has a nice nose, a really nice nose, even though part of it on one side is torn down to the bone.
More than half his mouth is completely ripped away in a large jagged starburst that extends all the way to his cheekbone, his mangled ear, and the hinge of his jaw.
The entire left side of his lower face is nothing more than exposed teeth and jagged scars from skin grafts that didn't fully take.
The side where the skin grafts survived is a deep Glasgow grin, the scar running from his earlobe to the torn corner of his mouth branching up in a V, the one that pulls at his eye.
The corner of his lips keeps going, trailing scar tissue halfway to his ear, and when he opens his mouth, that side opens too.
All the softness is dragged out of his expression by scars that healed however they wanted to.
His eyes are still plenty soft, though.
They're warm and worried as I take him in.
"Come here," I whisper, pulling him closer.
He glances anxiously at the stove light switch.
"Don't," I murmur. I reach out and put my palm flat against the center of his chest, over his slamming heartbeat, my hand ghosting over the savage bite mark that came so close to tearing through his ribcage.
He steps in between my knees and his hands close around my hips. I pull his ruined mouth down to mine and kiss him the way he can kiss, with our tongues. I squirm against him as his tongue slips past my lips, his thick cock pressing against my pussy.
I start working on my sweater and he pulls it off over my head, gently, as if unwrapping a present he still isn't sure he's allowed to open. His breath stutters when he looks at me.
"You good?" I ask softly.
He nods. His forehead drops to mine and one huge hand splays across my back, covering most of it. There's a slight tremor running through him, but it isn't only terror this time.
The rest of our clothes end up somewhere on the kitchen floor. He checks with me the whole way. He can't ask out loud, so he asks with everything else. A pause before every touch or his eyes finding mine, waiting for the signal that tells him to keep going.
I give it to him every time, with my hands in his hair and my heels hooked behind his thighs.
When he finally pushes into me, we both stop breathing.
He's shaking. I feel it in his arms where they cage me in, in the fingers digging into the counter on either side of my hips because he still doesn't trust them on my skin when he's like this. I take one of those hands and pry it off the granite and put it on my waist where it belongs.
He's still gentle, because he can't help himself, and I love him all the more for it. He goes slow at first, deep and deliberate, his whole body wrapped around mine. I cling to his scarred shoulders and let him set the pace because this time is different.
It's the first time I've finally seen all of him, with no mask and nothing else in between us.
"I love you," I whisper into his hair, tangling my hands in the dark strands to tug him closer.
He shudders and buries his face in my neck before he goes harder, his tongue sliding up my neck and his teeth brushing against my skin, and I stop being able to say anything at all.
The counter edge digs into the backs of my thighs and I don't care. I don't give a fuck about anything right now except the way he moves inside me, slow and deep, his arms wrapped around me and his hands gripping my back.
Tank doesn't fuck like the others do. There's no playfulness or teasing here, but he fucks like he's worshiping me. Every movement is so damn careful, as if he's terrified of breaking me.
"More," I whisper against his ear. "I want more of you, Tank. You won't hurt me. You've never once hurt me."
He makes that sound again, low and unsure, rumbling straight into my chest. His hands tighten around me.
"Tank." I pull back just far enough to look at him. His face is inches above mine, glossy and flushed with sweat, his eyes blown black and desperate and still asking. As worked up as we both are, he's still waiting for permission he's already been given five times.
Fine. I'll give it to him a sixth.
"Stop being careful with me," I tell him, cupping his face in my hands. He freezes up slightly, then relaxes and nuzzles into my palm, his eyes sliding warily to mine again. "I'm not going to break, and if I do, you'll put me back together. Like you always do."
His eyes look darker, and I watch the carefulness recede from his expression.
The next thrust punches the air out of my lungs.
"Yes," I gasp, and that's all it takes.
His arm bands across my lower back and drags me to the very edge of the counter. He drives into me hard enough that the coffee maker rattles against the backsplash, hard enough that I have to grab his shoulders or I'm going to hit the backsplash too, and I cry out his name.
He's everywhere. There's just so much of him, and all of it is wrapped around me, over me, inside me. His scarred chest pushes against mine, his panting breath ragged against my neck, his heart slamming so hard, I feel it in two places at once.
"There," I choke out. "Right there, don't stop, don't you dare fucking stop, Tank."
He growls and his tongue drags up the side of my throat interrupted only by the collar, over the metal that says I belong to them, to him, and my whole body clenches at the thought.
His rhythm stutters.
"Not yet," I breathe, digging my nails into his shoulders. "Together. I want…"
He shifts his angle, one huge hand sliding between us, thumb finding my clit with a gentleness that should not be possible from fingers that size, from a man currently rearranging my internal organs, and my vision goes white around the edges.
"Tank!"
He presses his forehead to mine. Eyes open, watching me.
He wants to see me when I come.
A lifetime of hiding his face and being afraid to let me see him, and now he can't stop looking at me, his eyes locked on me like I'm the only thing that exists in this world at all.
I break apart at the seams with his name in my mouth.
The sound he makes when I clench around him is barely human, a broken rumble I feel in my core, and then he shakes, slamming deep one last time and holding there.
For a while, neither of us moves.
His face buries in my neck again, his arms wrapped so tight around me, I couldn't breathe if I wanted to. My legs stay wrapped around him, one sliding down slightly as my body goes boneless. His heart races against my sternum and mine answers in kind.
I wouldn't trade this exact spot for anywhere in the universe.
"Holy shit," I whisper, when I finally have words again.
His huffing laugh is warm against my throat.
He lifts his head to gaze down at me. All that scar tissue and damage, and somehow he looks soft.
This is my Tank.
He never left.
He pulls back enough to free his hands.
Okay? he signs. Even now, even after all that, he's checking on me.
"Better than okay." I catch his hand and kiss his knuckles, one at a time. "You?"
He stares at me for a long moment. He doesn't take his eyes off me as he raises his hand to sign again.
Best moment of my life.
"The kitchen counter's going to be hard to top," I agree, and he does the gravel-laugh again. I decide right then I'm going to spend the rest of my life collecting that sound like the Polaroids on my wall.
He grabs his shirt off the floor and, instead of putting it on himself, pulls it down over my head.
It swallows me to mid-thigh. He looks extremely pleased about this, which I can now actually get to see, the part of his mouth that's still sort of intact pulling into the cutest scarred grin I've ever seen.
I reach up and trace the line of his jaw, the seam where scar meets skin.
"No masks in the house," I murmur. "That's my rule. Okay? I know I don't get to make rules, technically, but I'm making that one."
His brow furrows worriedly and he glances around like something in the kitchen might object to that.
"They're your brothers, Tank. They've bled with you, and they'd die for you. Nobody in this house is going to—"
"Found him."
I scream in surprise and grab for Tank, who whips around so fast he nearly takes out the pot rack, one arm already thrown across me.
Cyrus stands in the kitchen doorway, staring at us both with his laptop balanced on his forearm. He blinks in confusion at our reaction, as if he didn't just materialize out of thin air.
"Jesus, Cyrus," I mutter, one hand pressed over my heart. "Wear a fucking bell. How long have you been standing there?"
"Just a second, but long enough to know we need to have a talk about proper boundaries regarding food preparation services," he says pointedly, looking at the counter we just fucked on.
His eyes flick back to Tank, who's already scrambling with his mask to secure it, and he blinks rapidly enough between us that I think this might be the first time in a very long time he's seen Tank's face.
In typical Cyrus fashion, the surprise lasts only a millisecond before he masks himself too and moves on.
"I found Kade."