Chapter Thirty-Nine
“...and then he fell like a wall,” Rook laughed. “He was a giant. You could hear him hit the floor from twenty feet away. I know you aren’t a fan of watching the fights, but I wish you could have seen me when I fought.”
“There is a certain appeal to you pummeling your enemies. Very manly,” I laughed, tossing back another shot.
Rook rolled over on top of me, reeking of alcohol as much as I did, and kissed me, the taste of tequila swapped between us. He’d convinced me I’d been too serious all week and that lounging around his house drinking all night was an appropriate escape from my solemnness.
“All this alcohol and reminiscing makes me horny,” he said, grinding his hips into mine. “I want you.”
Even though he refused to love me, I wanted him like something vital, like oxygen. It was like no matter what I did, I couldn’t jam him far enough under my skin. Words were fragile. He said he wouldn’t leave, but I wanted him so tethered to me that he couldn’t.
We were already naked, and my cock had swollen sometime in the last five minutes. He brushed my leg, reached down to cup my balls, and kneaded them with his deft fingers. He slid down between my bent knees and wrapped his mouth around my cock.
“I both love and hate your mouth right now,” I said, my voice straining past my lips.
He chuckled around my aching length and did something obscene to the underside of my dick with his tongue. The sheets bunched between my knuckles as my fingers curled so tightly I could feel the fabric coming loose at the edges of the bed.
“I’m going to come down your throat if you keep doing that.”
His mouth popped free from my dick and he raised his head. “You’re going to come with me buried in your ass.”
He crawled back up my body until we were face-to-face and sealed his lips against mine, driving his tongue into my mouth until I moaned.
I let go of the sheets I was strangling to thread my fingers through his hair.
When I pulled slightly against his scalp, he hissed in pleasure before he pulled away.
He bent one of my legs and rested it over his shoulder, baring me, opening me—taking easy access and promising to slide deep inside of me.
“I learned your little spell,” he said, slipping his lubed fingers over the tight ring of my arsehole. “It’s handy.”
When I jolted with the intrusion of two fingers at once, he kissed the inside of my raised leg and said, “Relax for me, baby.”
He drove his fingers in and out of me slowly, until I loosened and opened for him, and a third finger squeezed into me. He twisted his fingers inside me, making sure I could take the intimidating girth presently lying in the crease of my hip.
“That’s it, give in to me,” he coaxed. His fingers disappeared, and he kissed the bend of my knee as he eased his cock into me, seating himself at a deeper angle than before, until I gasped as he bottomed out.
“There you go,” he said softly. “Still with me, Austin?”
“Always.” Could he tell I meant it? Did he know how seriously I took what he’d said before—that we belonged to each other and I would never rid myself of him. I couldn’t imagine wanting him gone anymore.
“Touch yourself, babe. Show me how good I make you feel. Come all over those pretty nipples for me.”
When he moved, it was slow and teasing, a careless pace that left me aching as my hand glided over my length and drove me to madness.
“Faster,” I pleaded.
“No,” he said. “I don’t want you to come too soon.”
“You’re diabolical,” I groaned. My dick was so eager for release that the head of it flushed and ached.
“It’s no fun if we rush,” he grunted, but his pace increased a little, skimming delicious friction over my prostate that sent tingles through my body. He angled my leg even further, my hips tilting to keep up, doubling my pleasure.
“Fucking…bloody…Rook, I need…” My words turned into a string of incoherent babble, begging and writhing as I tried to decide between coming and holding off a little longer to draw out the satisfaction and please him.
“Fine,” he murmured against my ankle. “Spill all over yourself for me.”
His words catapulted me over the edge and cum squirted across my chest, dousing my nipples and leaking into the space over my sternum that separated my pectoral muscles. Rook reached forward and smeared it all over me.
“I like you best when you’re messy,” he said with a wicked grin. “Shit, I want to fill you.” His chin dropped to his chest and he fucked me harder, our bodies shaking with the force of it, his hips snapping against my arse and filling the room with the loud slapping of his skin against mine.
His pace stuttered. His body seized as he thrust deep, and I felt the satisfying twitch of his cock emptying into me.
“Tell me I’m yours again,” I said when we lay together afterward.
“You are mine,” he growled. “Tell me how to prove it to you.”
My head swam with tequila and that citrus scent that always clung to him. A slow laugh burbled out of me, everything pleasant and fuzzy. “I have a terrible idea.”
I bent to whisper and he chuckled. “That will make you believe me?”
“Too much?”
He climbed off me and picked up his phone from the nightstand. “Get some water and sober up. I know a guy.”
***
Only Rook could book a tattoo artist on short notice at five in the morning.
We were the only people sitting in a tattoo shop ten blocks from Rook’s apartment, where a man with a beard and colorful tattoos of his own had opened the shop for us. It took about half an hour for us to design what we wanted, and then I sat in the chair first.
I winced as the needle pierced the skin of my inner forearm. “I never thought I’d be doing this.”
“I’m still shocked you’re messing up your flawless skin for me.”
I stared at him. It was true, I’d never considered marking my body this way, but if I wanted him inseparable from me, permanent ink seemed like a good way to do it.
“You don’t have any tattoos,” I pointed out. When we first met, I thought he would. It fit his tough-guy persona, but I’d seen all of him now, and there wasn’t a line of ink on his body.
“I never found anything I wanted forever until now.”
My heart thumped harder than normal for one beat that made my world turn upside down. Forever. Because it didn’t feel like he was talking about the tattoo, not when he looked at me like the room had disappeared and I was the only thing left in it.
Black ink spread across my forearm for hours. I never realized tattoos took so long, but I would be patient if that’s what it took to mark myself with him.
His took hours too, and by the time we were both finished in the chair, it was almost lunchtime. He stood, and we held out our arms next to one another, admiring the almost-symmetry of the designs.
In bold black, I wore a dark bird and the letter ‘R.’ His arm bore a king chess piece and an ‘A.’
“You’ll never get rid of me now,” Rook whispered, not a threat but a promise. He thanked his friend and paid him extra for getting us in so early in the day.
When we stepped out onto the street that was filling with the lunch rush, we both wore coats that covered the tattoos, but the thought of a secret beneath our clothes—a promise etched on skin—lightened my steps.
“I love you,” I said because I couldn’t before with a stranger in the room.
He stopped dead in the street and kissed me, as if for one shining second he didn’t care if anyone saw. We stopped, and everyone else moved around us like we had captured a moment apart from the world.
It wasn’t an answer—not really—and it wasn’t love, but it was devotion, and maybe that could be enough.
But why? Why couldn't he just say it? I swore sometimes it was there, in his eyes, in the way he worried about me. I was more than a plaything, less than a partner. Romance infused the sex, so allies with benefits was bullshit. Allies didn’t mark each other with their initials forever.
The joyful buzz I’d had the night before and our hours in the tattoo shop went blurry and dreamlike.
“Your face is doing that serious thing again,” he said, and I hadn’t realized I’d completely gotten distracted when the kiss ended.
“I—”
“Lunch,” he said. “You’re going to get lunch with me, then you’re going to go to work and make that somber face at people and things less interesting than me. When I see you tonight, you’d better be wearing a smile because I don’t have time to stop work and get on my knees tonight.”
How could I resist when he smirked at me like that, like he knew every button to push to bend me to his will?
“There are fights tonight,” I said.
“So loiter in my office until they’re over and come home with me again. You look best in my bed, and I doubt anyone will try to kill you if you’re with me.”
“I can’t die,” I said, feeling like I’d said the words a hundred times this week. “You’re fretting like an old woman.”
“Humor me.”
“Fine.”
He clasped my arm and pulled me to a stop again, pushing back my sleeve and lifting the fresh ink to kiss it. “Tonight.”
Tonight, and as many nights as he would give me.