Her breathing is uneven now, hitched and angry. How could I not react to her? It’s been abject misery, tending to her without having her. The misery is almost powerful enough to override the aching lust at the core of me. Goddamn it, I want her. I want so much from her that I can’t have. Too much from her. I’ve taken too much already.
I let my hands ball into fists and release them.
I don’t want to hurt Holly.
I can’t hurt her.
She’s already injured. She was shot trying to save me from an inevitable fate. Does she realize how much this eats at me? By the end of all this, I’ll be nothing but a flayed heart. I’d rather take a hundred bullets than mar her smooth skin.
Memory intrudes, shouldering its way past weakened defenses. In that apartment I wasn’t a man anymore. I wasn’t a soldier.
I was a child, three years old, watching my mother die in front of my eyes. I couldn’t save her then. I can’t save Holly now. The bullet wound might be healing but the threat that looms outside these walls can’t be stopped. It can’t ever be stopped.
Holly shifts closer to the edge of the cot, and my hands come up. Force of habit. I stop myself from touching her at the last moment as she eases herself onto the floor. “Don’t do this.”
“Don’t do what?” Her legs tremble with the effort of standing, and there’s high color in her cheeks, pain she tries to hide, but it’s so clear. It’s sketched all over her brown eyes like lightning across a dark sky. “Don’t move? Don’t talk? Don’t be a person?”
“Don’t hurt yourself.” It’s not often that I feel even an echo of desperation. I learned not to feel that a long time ago. But I feel it now, like a distant wave.
“You’re hurting me,” she whispers, and my heart clenches. Stops. Starts again.
I don’t know how to tell her that we won’t survive.
The right combination of words will never come. We’re sinking, drowning, and I’m going to smile and nod and reassure her all the way to the goddamn ocean floor. I’m not going to tell her that we’ll probably die. “I never said I knew how to love.”
Her eyes flash, surprise in the lift of her eyebrows. “You love me?”
“Why the fuck do you think I’m pushing you away?” This hurts more than the guilt and the shame. It’s an awful, tearing truth and it feels like sandpaper leaving my lips. It feels like fire in the lungs and steel through my gut.
“I thought it might be the other thing.” Both corners of her mouth turn down, vulnerability flickering through her expression and disappearing.
“Hate?” Every muscle reaches for her. Longs for her. My palms ache. “Yes, I think I hate you too. For making me want you. For making me weak. And most of all, I hate you for putting yourself in danger.”
Holly takes a quick step forward, too fast, and the hate detonates into fear. I grab for her without thinking and pull her between my legs. She gasps.
“That hurt.” She steadies herself with her small hands on my shoulders, and I’ll be damned, I’ll be fucked. She sounds wondering. Relieved. Not like I’ve just done the unthinkable and kicked her when she was down. “Finally.”
“Finally? Finally?” I’m so pissed at her, so righteously enraged, that I do the only thing I can think to do and wrestle her into a kiss. Damn her for being so reckless. Damn me for putting her in a scrap of cloth that’s barely a bra so I can see her peaked nipples pushing up the fabric. Damn us both to another circle of hell.
Holly kisses me back hard, groaning into my mouth. I have to be killing her.
I stand her up again, trying to push her away, but she digs her nails into the backs of my hands. “No,” she says. “No.” Then she reaches for me again.
“I’m hurting you.”
“Yes.” She follows this with a bite and I bite her back, then soothe the bite with my tongue. It’s been torture, not kissing her. Not taking her mouth. Not taking her. I’ve taught her plenty of lessons about the way she should behave, the way she should not fucking push me, and she hasn’t learned a single one.
With the taste of her on my lips my restraint shatters. It’s been weak for days. Weak since I brought her down to this crypt knowing that we were never coming out alive. I have felt every second pass us by. All of them. Ticking down to the moment when death takes us and wishing I could do this to pass the time.
I sink my teeth into the flesh of her shoulder and this time the noise she makes is so dirty, so filthy, that I do it again just to hear it. “The fuck is wrong with you?” I murmur into her skin.
“You’re what’s wrong with me.” She rakes her nails under the collar of my shirt. Four bright lines against my skin. I hope she scars me. I hope I never stop feeling her touch, not until I draw my last breath. “Hate me even more, sweetheart. Make me feel it.”
“I hate you so fucking much.”
“More than that.” I try to catch her by the wrist but she’s determined to get to my pants.
Which she does.
To my belt and my zipper, and then she’s fumbling with the waistband.
Damn us both.
I help her.
I help her because I don’t want her to move any more than she has to. At least that’s the excuse I give myself. There’s no good reason to be pulling out my erect cock when she’s injured. It’s a dangerous game with open wounds. Get too carried away and they’ll reopen.
If she’s not careful, she’ll do real damage, and all the time I’ve spent keeping her in that goddamn bed will have been for nothing.
The truth is I help her because I want her too much to stop. I need her too much.
If this is the end, and it is, then I’m not shuffling off the goddamn mortal coil without having her one more time. I’m already so hard it hurts when Holly swirls one finger around my tip.
This should be slow and gentle. I should hold my breath and try not to touch her. She should be ready to tap out when it gets to be too much, and it will get to be too much. Sex is always too much when you’re recovering from a bullet wound.
I can’t love her that way.
Not now.
Not ever.
Holly’s eyes light up when I pin her wrist in a firm grip and guide her closer. “Don’t fuck around,” I warn her. “Not unless you want to suffer the consequences.”
She bites at her lip. “I do want that. I thought it was obvious.”
Fine. Never mind the bullet wound, never mind fucking anything. An animal surge of adrenaline and need pulls my muscles tight. I’m dying of the need to fuck. Worse than that. To rut.
I’m an animal right now, and Holly doesn’t mind.
She sighs with what sounds like relief when I shove down her pants. Her panties. I kick them as far away from us as I can get them, and then I pull her into my lap. Spread her thighs wide. And notch the tip of me to the core of her, where she is very, very wet.
Goddamn it, she’s slick and hot and tight, and the minute I touch her there, I’m lost.
I fuck into her like she’s not hurt. Like we’re in those woods in France. Like the worst of everything is still ahead of us. Holly sinks down onto me with a hiss, hands braced tight on my shoulders, and I would take a thousand bullets to keep feeling the sweet grip of her pussy every minute for the rest of my goddamn life.