Yes, love. “I still feel her on my skin. I feel everything,” I turned to her, “You. You were everywhere. Now she is.” Refocusing on the task before me, I picked up the same pillow Bria laid her head across, “I hate it, Mia. I don’t like the way she makes me feel.”
The sound of the door closed, and I whipped my head back around to see Mia had left.
I pulled open the door and ran down the hall to catch up with her. “Where are you going?”
She turned to face me. Her brown hair fanned around her face, and a smile spread across her tender lips. “We need a little spring cleaning anyway. Come on,” she twirled back around. “Lucky for you, I know where the cleaning supplies are.”
An hour was spent drowning in bleach and the dirty confessions of my past. I told Mia about my time in the closet, the things I’d seen, losing my virginity, Oscar—everything. She took her anger out on the floors until I resumed the explanation of what happened with Bria.
Oscar had turned me into him, and for years I treated women like cattle. “You’re just as much a victim as they were,” she reminded me with a towel over her shoulder.
Another hour passed, and we propped the door open to air out the strong stench, the worries of my past blowing out into the hall along with it. Our deep conversation turned light, and smiles broke on both our faces. We joked, I tickled her, she used her towel like a whip on my arse, and Mia’s giggles didn’t let up while cleaning out my desk, going through every drawer and scrap paper I’d written across. She laughed lightly to herself as I pulled a new sheet over the mattress. “You’re high,” I said through a laugh and shook my head.
“On life,” she corrected, pointing at me with the spray bottle in one hand and my notebook in the other. A few people slowed as they crossed our room, sneaking a peek to see what we were up to. “This is too good to sit in a desk drawer,” she said, fingering through my notes. “Like, so good.” Her eyes peered up at me, and I sat over the mattress with a wide grin. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“I did something.” Vague. I did a big thing, but I did it all for us. I published my work. I bought us a home. I’d become something of myself because of her constant reminder I wasn’t ordinary. I was someone. Her someone. Each moment with her stitched back on another feather of my wings, and once we’d leave Dolor, together we’d fly.
“Something other than having your ex-girlfriend rubbing her scent all over my fiancé?”
Hearing her refer to me as her fiancé touched my smile, heart, and knob. She knew better. “Ex” and “girlfriend” were never words tied to Bria’s name. “Your fiancé?” I asked teasingly, both of us knowing damn well everything I was, belonged to the girl staring back at me from the desk chair with my poetry in the palm of her hand, but the way she called me her fiancé sent me into a breathless puddle of mess.
“My fiancé,” she repeated matter-of-factly. The spray bottle and my journal left her hands before she stood and walked over to me. I leaned back on my elbows, and my eyes drifted over her every angle, twitching like a fiend to see where her next steps would lead her.
As long as it involved her on top of me, me on top of her, or us pinned to one another, I’d be fucking cured of this craze swimming inside.
Mia stopped between my knees. Her finger rested under my chin as she tilted my head up to meet her eyes and my heart jumped into my throat. “I’m past the whole jealous part. Now? I’m just pissed,” Mia whispered.
“What are you going to do about it, love?” We were so close, all my senses filled with Mia, overpowering the bleach and the incident that happened hours before. Mia was all around me, dancing through me again, tickling every nerve, pumping every organ. My knob tensed with anticipation.
She dropped her hand, and my heart stopped. “Where are you going?”
My eyes landed on her cute little arse as she pulled the door closed, and my breathing labored as she pulled off the hoodie made for her. Mia’s smile illuminated the room, throwing the dullness of Dolor into color.
Her tiny fingers landed over my pants, sliding them down, and I lifted my bottom to allow her access. A gust of wind smacked against my stretched dick, begging to feel her warmth. Still, I stayed quiet as anticipation controlled my every breath.
“Dammit, Mia,” I moaned from my throat as she pushed her hands over my pelvic muscles. Pre-cum spilled unapologetically, and Mia traced her bottom lip over my tip. “Fuck, this is going to be embarrassingly quick.”
“Talk to me, Ollie,” Mia rasped out before wrapping her wet lips around me taking me slow.
I wanted to tell her that there were over two hundred thousand words in the English dictionary. Two hundred thousand. Easily, I strung words together in the journal with her in mind on a day to day basis, but not one word came close to the single utter of my name rolling off her tongue and how it swallowed me whole.
“Ollie,” she whispered again, and just like that, she seized my existence and reigned over me.
“I … I … I can’t,” I breathlessly said as her tongue stroked the sensitive skin underneath. As much as I wanted to watch the way she took care of me, my head fell back, and I closed my eyes. My tip hit the back of her throat, and all at once, the blood rushed to one place. My muscles strained, veins popped, and in half a second, I made a rash decision.
My hands fisted her jeans, and I ripped them off before yanking her knickers to the side. I grabbed the back of her thighs, picked her weightless body up, and slammed inside her. Mia’s warm, tight flesh consumed me, and I pulsed, spilling every fucking ounce into her with shaky hands entangled in her hair.
“Sorry,” I finally breathed once the waves crashed and dissolved into the beach of her and me. Mia’s wet lips grazed my jawline, and my knob jerked inside her.
My girl laughed lightly and kissed my dimple. “You say sorry like it’s a bad thing.”
“The things your lips do to me,” I ran my thumb over her bottom lip, “trust me it’s enough, but nothing—and I mean absolutely nothing—compares to the way I feel when we’re connected like this.”
Mia’s lips parted, and I dove into her mouth as my thumb fell over her little nub beneath her soaked cotton knickers. Her heavenly grind erased the hell of this place, and I was certain I could live inside the gates within her for eternity without needing a bloody thing.
Mia cried out, and I swallowed every testimony.
She shook, I anchored her.
She broke apart inside my arms, and I held all her pieces together.
Utterly stripped, unarmed, and exposed, the unity of us was a beautiful thing, and there was only one word to describe it.
Poetic.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“Perhaps you were here to remind everyone that angels are real,
in the shape of humanity and the color of grace.
And for a brief moment in time,
we all sang the same song.”
—Oliver Masters
mia.
IT WAS FEBRUARY 29TH.
Leap day, and a Saturday, nonetheless.
The sun still rose despite it being the coldest day of the year, streaming through the window and hardly able to warm my face. The light appeared behind my lids, demanding my lashes to part, but I’d learned it was okay to keep them closed a little while longer to soak it all in.