“Y-yes,” I say, and I’m rewarded with a kiss and a harder press of his fingers against my throbbing clit. “Couldn’t sleep.”
“Was that so hard?”
I shake my head, even though it might be a lie. If he knows, he doesn’t call me on it.
“I think you couldn’t get out of your head all the things I told you I was going to do to you. You’ve been wondering if they were just fantasies, or promises. And when you couldn’t stop, all those ideas running through your head became need. You need to be fucked, even though you’re so goddamn tired. And you need to know what’s real.”
He’s in my head. It’s terrifying and exhilarating. I’ve been on my own for so long. And now he’s in every thought like he’s always been here.
He was right when he said there’s no way to hide from him anymore. He didn’t just open my cage, he shattered it, and the first breaths of freedom burn in my lungs.
“Yes,” I admit, with more confidence this time. “It’s all true.”
Rowan’s long exhalation drifts across my shoulder, raising goosebumps in my skin. I know without asking that he’s relieved he doesn’t have to pull an answer from me, that as much as I trust him with my body, I trust him with my thoughts and hopes and fears, too.
“Stay right here,” he demands with a press of his hand to mine in a request to keep going.
He slides out of me and the mattress dips as he shifts away. I twist enough that I can watch what he’s doing as he heads toward our luggage. It’s the first time I’ve actually seen his back, and even in the dim light from the ensuite I can see that his skin is marred with several wide, long, scars, but something else spread across his shoulders.
My heart climbs into my throat and threatens to dump itself on the bed.
“Rowan…”
He stops, turning his head to watch over his shoulder as I sit up and look more closely at the black ink that flows over the thick muscles lining his spine. He twists as far as his neck allows to follow my line of sight, but can only see the tip of one wing.
“Is that…? Did you…?”
“Did I get the raven you left on the table tattooed on my back?” His smile is teasing, but there’s a hint of shyness in it as he finishes my thought. “Yeah. Appears to be the case.”
I swallow the vise that threatens to choke me. “Why?”
His grin widens and he shrugs before turning away to rifle through one of the bags. My bag.
“For one thing, I couldn’t really take the original with me. Might get damaged.” He lets out a little sound of triumph and faces me. My mouth is still hanging open with this revelation when I take in what he’s holding—my dildo in one hand, my bottle of lube in the other. “Seems like I still need to clear up a few things for you.”
Rowan prowls toward the bed. My heart ricochets against my ribs like a pinball.
“Turn around. On your knees.”
I swallow. “You’re very demanding.”
Rowan smirks. I give him one final, heated glance before I do as he says and turn my back to him. “Don’t even pretend you don’t enjoy it,” he says as he comes up behind me on the bed. He takes my good hand and folds it around one of the crossbars of the headboard, then positions my hips where he wants them, nudging my knees wider with one of his muscular legs. “Your pussy gives you away. It’s dripping for me, Sloane.”
“You were right. You’re no fucking angel.”
He slides the toy through my lips and presses it to my entrance. “Damn straight. And neither are you.” He guides it into my pussy and back out again in several shallow strokes before turning the vibration on. “I told you I was going to fuck your mouth and I did. I told you I was going to eat your pussy at the restaurant like it’s the best goddamn meal I’ve ever had, and I will. And I told you I was going to fill your ass with cum as I fucked you with a toy. And you know what happened when I said that?”
“No,” I say on the heels of a gasp as he works the toy in deeper thrusts.
“Your cunt gripped so tight around my cock that I thought I’d fucking explode. You were soaked. Dripping down your thighs.” The cap snaps open on the bottle. Lube drizzles down my ass and over the pleated hole. “Have you done this before?”
“Kind of—it was the other way around.” He presses his thumb to my hole, massaging the rim as he continues the rhythm of the toy.
“And you loved it.”
I nod again. “Yes.”
“Good,” is all he says, his tone definitive as he pushes his thumb into my ass to the sound of my gasp.
He loosens my tight ring of muscle, relaxes me into the sensation until I’m pushing back on him in a silent request for more. And then his thumb is gone, replaced with the lubed head of his cock as he glides it over the tight hole, pressing it against me until it slips past the resistance. He pauses as I breathe through the foreign sensation of fullness and then picks up slow and shallow thrusts, each one delving a little deeper against the vibration of the toy.
“Now that we’ve established that everything I told you is a fucking promise,” he grits out as he intensifies the rhythm of his thrusts, “we should probably clear up your other question.”
I’m shaking, sweating, lost to some mindless dimension where all I know is the feeling of intense pleasure twined with a hint of discomfort, but one I welcome because it only adds to the euphoric haze that consumes me. Rowan has picked up an unbroken cadence of deep thrusts and I don’t think I can even remember my own name, let alone something I said a few minutes ago. “Question…was…?”
I hear the smirk in his huffed laugh. Jesus fucking Christ. I’m incapable of stringing together a simple sentence and this man is fucking me relentlessly while probably able to recite the entire year-by-year history of the Napoleonic Wars.
Rowan leans closer, slows his thrusts, covers my back with the heat of his body. One of his hands finds my breast and he rolls my nipple between his fingers as he blows a thin stream of cool air across my neck to make me shiver. “About the tattoo, Sloane,” he says, his voice saccharine. “You asked me why I got it.”
I whimper as a deep thrust pushes me closer to an intense orgasm that’s nearly within reach. “Right…uhh…”
“Any guesses?”
My forehead presses to my arm as I let out a strangled cry. “…like me…?”
“Because I ‘like you’…?” Rowan cackles an incredulous laugh. “Like. You. Seriously…? Christ, Sloane. You are fucking brilliant but also the most willfully oblivious person I have ever met. Do you really think I just like you when I framed a drawing you left for me on a scrap of paper you tore from a notebook? The one I hung it in the kitchen so I can look at it every day and think of you? Do you think I just like you when I tattoo it on my skin? I play this fucking game every year and tear my heart out watching you walk away, only to do it all over again, and I like you? You think I just like you when I fuck you like this?”
The pace quickens. Rowan’s hot palm caresses my breast. He pistons into me. I cry out his name and he fucks me harder.
“I would kill for you, and I have. I would do it again, every damn day. I’d turn myself inside out for you. I would die for you. I don’t just like you, Sloane, and you fucking know it.”
Vicious thrusts throw me over the edge. Stars shatter across my vision. A sound I’ve never before made spills across my lips as the orgasm breaks me apart.
I don’t unravel. I detonate.
Rowan’s arm folds around my waist and he holds me close as he comes, my name dulled by my heart as it thunders in my ears.
His breath is still ragged, his chest shuddering when I turn off the toy and he whispers against my neck, “I don’t just ‘like you’, understand?”
I nod.
Rowan’s fingers trace my jaw, soft and slow, a touch I lean into when his palm stops to rest against my cheek. “And you don’t just ‘like me’ either, do you.”
It’s not a question. It’s not even a demand. It’s a need to be freed from a place where he thinks he’s been alone.
The key slides into the lock as Lark’s words echo in my mind above the riot of heartbeats.
Put some of that bravery to use for yourself for a change.
All the what ifs, I set them aside. All except one.
“No,” I whisper. “I more than like you, Rowan. I think about you all the time. I miss you every day. You appeared one moment and nothing has been the same since. And that scares me. A lot.”
Rowan presses a kiss to my shoulder as his thumb glides across my cheek. “I know.”
“You’re braver than me.”
“No, Sloane,” he says with a low chuckle as he pulls away. “I’m just more reckless, with less sense of self-preservation. I’m scared too.”
I watch as he climbs off the bed to head to the ensuite only to return with the washcloth and tissues. He takes time to clean my skin with gentle strokes, his attention caught on the movement of his hand and his brow creased as he seems deep in thought.
“What are you scared of?” I ask when the silence stretches so long that it feels like it’s tugging on my bones.
Rowan shrugs, not looking up when he says, “I dunno. Having my eyeballs sucked out of my head with an industrial vacuum is a recurring nightmare. Not sure how I came about that one.” When I slap his arm, Rowan’s stoic mask finally cracks into a faint smile. But it slowly fades, and he doesn’t answer until it’s gone. “I’m scared of you destroying me. Me destroying you.”
I blow out a dramatic breath. “Going straight for destruction, huh? Not the easy stuff to be terrified of, like the fact that we live in different states, or that we’re both crazy busy at work, or like, I have one friend and you apparently hang out with the entire city of Boston. Nope. Straight for destroy.”
His smile returns, but I can still see it in his eyes, how fear clings to his thoughts, finding its way into mine too. “None of those are insurmountable things. We just have to do what normal people do. Talk and stuff.”
“We don’t have a good track record of normal people stuff.” I point to my face. “Exhibit A. We could have gone for beers.”
“Then we’ll get good at it. We’ve just gotta practice.”
Seems simple enough, doesn’t it. Practice. Get a little better most days. A little stronger. It’s hard to imagine how to climb past these obstacles that seem like mountains when you’re standing in their shade. But I’ll never climb if I just keep standing still. And Lark was right, I have been lonely standing in the shadows.
So I keep asking myself the same question: What if I try?
I don’t let my mind wander to an answer. Because the real answer is, I don’t know. I’ve never really tried and meant it before, not like this.
Don’t answer the question. Just try.
That’s what I think when I look at my reflection in the bathroom mirror. It’s what I think when I come back to the bed and Rowan helps me into a tank top before putting my sling back on. It’s what I think when I lay down next to him. He watches me openly, and I watch him back. His eyelids are heavy, just like mine, but he refuses to look away. And still I think, just try.
I shimmy my right arm from beneath me and raise a fist between us. “Rock-paper-scissors.”
“What for?”
“Just do it, pretty boy.”