God.
I was totally at his mercy.
Totally with him.
Totally his.
The final barrier Gil had always hid behind shattered. I felt everything he did. I felt his regret, his worry, his love. I felt his teeth and tongue as they left me hollow. I felt his thrusting hips and pounding cock as he stole me from any other thoughts.
He invaded me.
Consumed me.
Made sure that I would never, ever forget him.
“Please, Gil.” I didn’t know what I asked for. But he gave it to me. He thrust deeper, kissed harder. Grabbing the back of his nape, I forced our mouths together. I spread my legs shamelessly, granting him space to sink further, drive faster.
My body flushed with wetness and want.
“Shit you feel...” His forehead crashed on mine. He clutched the floor beside my ears, pulling himself up and into me, pinning me to the floor with his hips. “You’re mine, O.”
I didn’t know how to reply.
I wasn’t his.
I couldn’t be.
But I nodded as his thrusts increased. His hips rolled. And his thumb found my clit again.
Fever sprang through my blood. Hot and hungry for the release he conjured. I purred, throwing my head back, scratching my nails on his hoodie.
Once again we fucked in the middle of blues and purples. Other paint bottles tipped over thanks to the sheet tangling beneath us.
We grew wild and furious.
The sensation of having him on top.
The hardness of him inside me.
The way his eyes sank into mine, begging access to my heart all while his body conquered my soul.
His paint had the magic to lie, hide sins, and camouflage flaws. He could create a masterpiece from imperfection. Too bad that tonight, our masterpiece was over, and the magic had to die.
“I love you, O.” His voice resembled a colour, a dark broody copper. Something that had dulled with reality but could sparkle once again if polished.
Our eyes locked.
Gil paused inside me.
The moment stretched for far too long, turning this from goodbye to something unbearably complicated.
“Gil...I—”
“Don’t.” He shook his head. “Don’t.”
With our gazes still locked, he pushed harder, rocked deeper. He thrust so hard, I cried out, squirming under him. The pinching, consuming pressure of him. The delicious discomfort that followed.
My core rippled around him, welcoming and rebelling against his thrusts.
This was dangerous.
So, so dangerous.
Already I felt the crack in my heart, the tiny hairline fracture that would keep growing, continue to spread until it just tinkled apart.
I clutched him closer.
Our foreheads pressed together as he rode me with awe and dismay.
He kissed me again, joining our mouths as well as our bodies. Carnal and crude, pleasure spiralled from every cell.
We both became lost to it.
Lost to the cresting, lusting release.
I rocked my hips up, grinding myself onto his thick cock, seeking solace from the overbearing connection we shared. This wasn’t fucking. This was something so much worse.
This was raw and bare. And it pushed me to the brink.
I wanted to surrender to him.
I wanted to give in to my heart and forgive and forget and promise I’d be there no matter what happened.
But then he shoved away the rawness, pulled curtains over the tenderness, and rutted into me. He deliberately shut down any feelings between us because feelings would ruin us.
His thumb rocked with single-minded determination to make me come.
My mind scrambled with the primitive instinct to mate.
I held onto his hoodie, throwing my head back and giving him utmost control.
Fireworks crackled in my blood.
I opened my legs wider, taking more of him. He sucked in a loud breath, stretching me, taking me. Our rhythm became wilder, brutally deep.
“Fuck, O. I need you to come.” His hips rocked against me; his thumb pressed with pain.
Fireworks became comets.
Comets became a supernova.
My neck arched, rising off the sheet. “God—” Searing pleasure split me in two as he drove as hard as he could. My core squeezed around him, over and over and over.
I came and it brought a whole suitcase of fears.
I cried out as another wave caught me by surprise.
And Gil lost it.
His lips descended on mine, hips surged upward, and he fucked me with mind-numbing need.
He gave up part of his humanity. He traded decorum for death. The death of love between us. The sheet crashed down from the wall where it’d been pinned, floating over us as his hips slapped against mine.
I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think.
All I could do was hold onto him as he broke.
His heart thundered against mine.
He seemed possessed, entranced, utterly broken.
Another wave of paradise shot up my spine, hinting that one orgasm wasn’t enough.
He felt it.
His green eyes gleamed, and his hips pounded unforgivingly into mine, punishing me all over again, dragging me up the mountain with him, coiling me, tightening me.
His cock grew bigger inside me, hardening, thickening.
And then, there was nowhere else to go.
We plummeted together.
Giving in to the rapture of release, knowing the minute it was over...we were too.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
______________________________
Olin
I WOKE TO heart pangs and belly pain.
My core was bruised from the rough lovemaking we’d indulged in.
My skin still held stars and feathers and a school of fish swimming up my leg.
Smudges ruined perfection and fingerprints smeared crisp lines, I didn’t need physical reminders that we’d had sex...my body shouted the truth in its painted defilement.
Along with my skin, my apartment had a paint-spattered sheet on the floor and evidence of emotional carnage.
But Gil had gone.
Along with his box of brushes, colours, and tricks.
We’d said physically what we couldn’t say verbally, and he’d left the moment we’d untangled ourselves and our futures, then said a faint farewell at the door.
If I let myself think about him, agony was a sharp arrow waiting to stab me in the chest and deliver a bolt of poison. So, I did my best to keep him on the outskirts of my mind. To stretch out the kink in my spine and climb into the shower. To wash away the final body paint I would ever wear.
It didn’t help that I stopped in front of the mirror before sluicing his art down the drain. Or that I traced the many images hidden upon my skin. Of a peach blanket with a baby tied to a kite string. Of a boy holding a bunch of wildflowers outside a house he couldn’t enter. Of a man watching a woman through a window he couldn’t open.
Of so many things that Gil treasured and couldn’t have.
Other images were ruined beyond recognition, bruised from reality to muddy memory.
But through the smears, I noticed dead girls painted and hushed upon my thigh. Tombstones decorated my hipbones. A prison cell glowed beneath my ribs. And through it all, a calligraphy stroke of letters looped around my belly like jewellery.
Love is misery. Lust is loss. Family is my failure.
Tears fell and mixed with hot water as I stumbled into the shower.
I cried all over again for things I could no longer differentiate. Every incident had blended into one painful despair.