“Stone,” I say. “It’s what I want. It always was.”
“What you think you want.”
“You don’t know,” I say.
He doesn’t seem to be listening. He crawls onto the bed and grabs my hair. The strange, hard look is back in his eyes. With a guttural sound, he bends me over, pushes my face into the rough wool blanket. It feels like a kitchen scrubby on my cheek.
“Ass up. Now.”
“Wait…” I’d imagined it different. Us face-to-face.
He slaps my butt. “Up. You want roses and candles? Don’t tell me you’re chickening out already.”
Slowly I raise my butt in the air, reminding myself I trust him. He’s had all the reasons in the world to hurt me, and he never has.
He positions himself behind me. His hands are on me, but his movements aren’t tender anymore. I don’t understand what’s happening. Why does he seem mad at me? His fingers are between my legs, sliding my juices around between my legs, but his touch isn’t tender.
“Stone?”
“Wider. Jesus!” He pulls my thighs apart without waiting, wide enough I feel the stretch on my secret muscles. Wide enough that a blush burns my cheeks, imagining how much he can see.
I try to swallow past the thickness in my throat. My cheek itches from the abrasive fabric. I’m always doing things wrong, never measuring up. Did I do something wrong? I crane my neck around to try to see his face. Try to figure out what happened.
He’s kneeling behind me, chest rippling with muscle, every inch of him hard. But the look in his eyes is…torn. Or maybe grief. Pain.
I feel the fatness of him between my legs. He feels like a doorknob. Like something that definitely shouldn’t fit into the soft private place.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, a tremor in my voice.
He frowns down at me, fixes me with a glare. “Did I say you could look at me? That’s not how we’re doing this. You’re gonna kiss that scratchy blanket and take what I give to you.” He smacks my butt again—hard.
“Ow!” I say.
“Kiss the blanket! Or are you changing your mind?”
My heart hammers in my chest. This isn’t right. This isn’t right. He was rough with me before, during the blowjob, but it felt different. A little bit more like a game. A secret we both knew.
“Why are you still looking at me?”
Then I get it. The look on his face isn’t grief or pain. But it’s close.
It’s loneliness.
What he’s doing, the way he’s acting—if loneliness was a sport like field hockey or badminton, he would be an Olympic gold medalist.
Looming there behind me, he’s transformed into the loneliest person I ever saw. It feels like a knife twisting in me to see him so alone. Why is he so determined to keep me out? To keep me facing away from him? It isn’t because he wants pleasure. There’s only pain now.
“No,” I say.
“Had enough?” he growls.
I turn to face him. Move nearer. I slide my palms over his chest.
“What are you doing?” he rasps out. He grabs my wrists.
“Let me go!” I hiss. I shake him off.
He lets me go—more out of surprise than anything, I think.
I run my hands over the scars and the crisscrosses that mottle his chest. Some of them old. I lean in to kiss the largest, most angry of the white lines. He called them ugly. They’re anything but.
He shudders. “…the fuck?”
“I love this one,” I say and kiss it again.
“Don’t.”
“I love this one, too.” I kiss another.
“What’re you…”
“I love this one very much.” I press a kiss to a scar over his heart, press my face to his heart. I feel him trembling, shaking.
“Stop it.” He grabs my shoulders, holds me off.
Maybe he can keep me from touching him, but he can’t stop what’s true. “I love you.”
He seems to freeze, right there before me. “What are you doing? No.”
“I love you,” I say before I’ve even thought through the words. I’ve only ever said I love you to my parents. And not very often. They don’t like to say it back. “And I want you to fuck me however you want. I’ll love whatever you do because I love you.”
“You can’t,” he says. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”
I throw my arms around him and kiss him on the lips. Because love doesn’t have to be complicated and hard. It doesn’t have to hurt. This feeling inside me, something large and expanding, a lightness—it’s love. As ordinary as a speck of dirt. As magical as moondust.
And something strange happens.
It’s as if all the hardness melts out of him, and he pulls me to him. “Goddamn it,” he snarls. “Fuck.” He’s holding me to his ruined chest, clutching me hard enough I can’t breathe.
I make no move to stop him. I don’t want to stop him.
“Why aren’t you afraid of me?” he demands, but it feels a little desperate. Like I’d maybe solve everything if I just cowered from him. Like he’s imagined ways he could scare me.
I let him crush me, the way I might be hugged by a wild animal. A tiger or a bear. With his claws resting against my fragile skin. He could hurt me, but when you love someone, you don’t let that stop you. What’s the point of fear if it keeps you from living?
He isn’t going to let me go, so I turn my face, only slightly. His chest looked terrible in the moonlight. A tapestry of scars. But it’s only skin pressed against my cheek. I can barely even register his scar tissue from feeling alone.
There’s a message there. Something I need to understand about the man who holds me. He has been tortured and used. He has been hurt, but it doesn’t change the fabric of him. He’s still a man.
Only a centimeter, that’s how far I can turn my face toward him.
I open my mouth and graze his skin with my teeth. He sucks in a breath. He doesn’t relax, not exactly. It isn’t that the pressure around me loosens, but it changes. It becomes heavy with expectation, with the knowledge of what will come next.
Not my face pressed into the blanket, with him saying crude words to distance himself. But it will be sex. And it will be rough. Maybe even rougher like this, without him holding back.
“I’m not going to use that condom,” he says, his voice thick with lust.
The declaration saturates the air around us, the knowledge that he’s serious, the awareness that I’m going to let him. That I like it. I want us to be skin to skin. “My mother gave it to me.”
A growling sound. “She saw that fucker and gave you a condom and let you leave with him?”
Jealousy. It’s weirdly mundane, even as I’m naked in a wild hideout with a criminal. Like we’re an ordinary couple instead of a hostage and her captor. “Liam’s nice.”
It’s the wrong thing to say. Or maybe exactly the right thing to say. Because when Stone pulls away from me, there’s a dangerous light in his eyes. “Liam’s nice,” he repeats, his voice caustic. “He’s fucking nice.”
“He is,” I protest, not sure why I’m pushing Stone.