Authors: Kristen Kehoe
There are times in life when people never shed a tear and you watch them shatter in front of you. That’s Blue right now — her eyes are dark and hollow, her shoulders hunched protectively. I wonder if there’s a way to reach her, or if I should let her be. When her eyes meet mine my decision is made, and I stand up straight before scooping her close. Her hands find the front of my shirt and hold on as she burrows into me.
I wrap her close, as close as I can, my arms circling all the way around so they almost touch the opposite shoulder. I don’t think about the angle on my elbow, or the ache that’s spreading through my chest at the realization of just how hurt my siren is. For a second, all I do is bring her into me and hope that I can be the anchor to hold her here, to keep her from floating away, just like she did for me the first time I saw her.
“Why can’t I just let her go? We’ve always hated each other. Why does it matter that she’s leaving me, when the truth is I left her first?”
I’ve been good with words my entire life — that’s why I chose my major. I remember them, love the sound of them, love hearing the cadence each new voice can bring to them. Yet, standing here I don’t have words, none that will do this situation justice. She’s overrun with guilt and fear and hurt and I can’t tell her not to feel them, because I know she has to. There’s no living life without all of those things — it’s knowing when to set them down that separates the weak from the strong, the survivors from everyone else.
Despite what she’s been through, or maybe because of it, I know Blue’s a survivor and I know that eventually, when she gets past the overwhelming pain and shock she’s feeling now, she’ll find a way to move on and make her relationship with her mother as right as it can be before the end. Until then, it’s my job to make sure she remembers how to fight, for herself and everything she wants.
Leaning back, I say her name. When she looks up, I wait until her eyes clear enough to actually focus on me. “If you want your mom to stop blaming you, if you want her to accept you and believe in you, you have to do it first. Stop thinking you’re always wrong, Blue, and stop waiting for people to be disappointed.”
There’s fear in her eyes as she stares up at me, and I worry that she’s going to finally let loose and cry. My belly clutches and I breathe deeply. She’s looking at me out of wide, devastated eyes, eyes that have been ingrained in my memory since that first night when I couldn’t look away from her. For perhaps the first time since we met, though, there’s true vulnerability. There’s no anger, no shock, no annoyance or resistance — for once her eyes are open and clear and in them I can see more than I ever imagined.
“Why do you get it?” She’s still staring at me, her hands gripping the front of my shirt as she shakes her head. “We barely know each other and I haven’t been particularly nice to you, but you always manage to understand what I’m feeling before I do. No one’s ever done that before.”
I’m treading on dangerous ground right now. I’m so needy for her my body physically aches. Warring with my desire for her is my intense need to protect her, from me and everyone else, including herself. Carefully, I reach out and skim a finger down her cheek, my eyes watchful and alert to everything hers give me.
“I’m starting to understand you, Blue. And more than that, I care about you.” I swallow with a throat that’s gone suddenly dry. No time like the present to put it all out there. “I care a lot, Cora.”
The words are quiet, but they change the air around us even still. She steps closer until we’re molded together from chest to toes and looks up. She swallows and then her tongue darts out to wet her lips and my already aching body bursts into flame. “I don’t know why, or how, but I — I care, too. More than I ever have. More than I thought I ever could.”
I can’t hold back from her, not now. I know it’s not the time, that it shouldn’t be now after she’s told me everything she has, but I can’t step away from her, can’t make myself stop because whatever’s happened, this is real. Right now, her and me and everything we’re building between us, it’s fucking real and I need her more than I need air.
Leaning down, I stop a breath from her lips and look into her eyes. I need to know, to be sure, and I need her to tell me because I’ve lost the ability to walk away. She’s all I can see, all I can feel, and every second that passes I need her more.
“Yes,” she says, and again, bolder, “Yes,” and that’s all it takes. My lips are on hers and my hands are at her hips, urging her closer until I shift and boost her up. When she wraps her legs around me, I wrap my arms tight around her and head toward the hallway.
Chapter Twenty
Cora
I used to dive into a potential bedmate the way a swimmer dives into the water — quick, clean, effortlessly really, after following a very specific routine. With Jake, every move I have is obliterated until everything I feel is all I can think about. I have no moves, no protocol, no brain power to do anything but feel his words and see from his face that he means them.
Which is why I’m wrapped around him and meeting his lips with my own, rocking my center against his and praying to God he gets us wherever we’re going fast. After years of being cold, the fire smoldering between us is consuming, and he’s the only one who can make it better. I hear a door kicked open, a thud, and a curse from him. I pull back a little look around his room.
“Why not mine?” I ask. He grins and throws me onto the bed where I land in a heap of covers.
“Because I want you in mine.” And then his body is covering mine and I don’t know or care where we are as long as he never stops kissing me. His hands are sure, slow and thorough as they peel away my clothes and explore my skin, and just when I’m ready to beg, he shifts away and stands, walking over to snap on the standup lamp in the corner before he returns to the foot of the bed, his eyes blazing into me.
“I want to see you,” he says and I lay still, too mesmerized to speak or look anywhere but at him. Even with a tan, my skin is shades lighter than his, and I watch in euphoric rapture as he picks up my foot, skimming his hands down the length of my leg and back before pressing a small kiss to the inside of my arch.
“These legs have fascinated me since the first time I saw you.”
“You can barely remember the first night you saw me, let alone what my legs looked like.”
He shakes his head and places another kiss just above the last. “Not true. I didn’t want to remember you because you stunned me the first time I saw you.” Shivers ripple through my whole body as I lie here watching him watching me, my heart beating so hard I wonder I can even hear him over it.
“Your skin is so smooth, the muscles beneath so strong. And then I saw your eyes and I knew even from across the room that I had to be near you. I won’t hurt you,” he says and my breath catches in my throat.
My eyes burn and my vision blurs with unshed tears because I know he’s reassuring me that what we are together is different than what we’ve ever been with others. I’m not a virgin — the pain he’s talking about won’t be physical, and I wonder how I think I can know him and still be surprised by his tenderness, his thoughtfulness. His ability to know what I need, even when I don’t.
“I want to see you,” I tell him as he makes his way back up my body.
“Then you better get started.” There’s a smile in his voice as he skims my breast with his lips and I suck in a breath at the sensation. I don’t move instantly, too steeped in what he’s doing with his tongue to function, and then I feel his teeth on my nipple and my eyes snap open to meet his laughing ones. “If you keep closing your eyes, you’re going to miss it.”
I grin and shift so I can grip his T-shirt, yanking impatiently and reaching for the bared flesh when he pushes to his knees and tugs it the rest of the way off. His skin is warm and I feel it all the way to my core when he reaches for me again and our bare chests brush against one another.
A year ago, I had wondered if a small part of me had died inside and the connection I once craved through physical contact had forever altered my ability to feel anything anymore. Now, feel is all I can do.
Every time he touches me a fire ignites and my body bends to its desire. It’s as if Jake has reached inside and warmed all of those frozen places, bringing my passions back to life and nurturing them, and me, as I come alive with them.
What was once a fast and frenzied escapade with only the end pleasure in mind is now a moment made up of touch and taste, a time to discover one another in ways I’ve never known. He leaves no place of me untouched, unfulfilled, as he takes his lips on a tour of my body, reaching my hip bones, the inside of my thigh, the back of my knee and up again. I want to roll him and give him the same treatment, to make him feel the drowning pleasure and desire that I feel, but at this moment I can barely lift my arms. His tongue joins his fingers, pressing inside and curling up, and my body throws itself from the cliff, my back arching and my hips bucking until he uses his other hand to press them down and ride through the wave with me in place.
I’m shivering, my body absorbing the last aftershocks of my orgasm when he makes his way back up and kisses me. The pressure that was relieved just seconds ago begins to build again when his tongue twirls with mine and his thigh presses between my legs, igniting my sensitive flesh. His lips leave mine when I gasp, and then he shifts and I hear the crinkling of a cellophane packet before I feel him shift back.
“Look at me, Blue.”
I do and what I see is impossible. It’s as if I’m all he sees, all he wants to see, all he needs, and then he braces his weight on his forearms and kisses me long and hard as he begins to move, gently rocking back and forth, easing his way inside until he fills me all the way. The sensations that envelop me are too many to name.
I hear him suck in a breath and he pauses for a moment, our eyes locking, our bodies frozen. He feels it. I can see it in his face, feel it in the pulsing of his body all around and inside of mine. Whatever we are, this has inflamed our connection and smart or not, I can’t turn back. When he begins to move again with long and torturously slow strokes, I think I might die of pleasure. One hand reaches down and curls around my leg, pushing it higher as his movements become more forceful, more uncontrolled. My breath catches, my lungs freeze, and all I can do is hold on as he takes me to a place I’ve never been.
~
“Tell me this wasn’t a mistake.”
We’re lying wrapped together, my head on his shoulder, both of his arms around me and mine draped over his waist. His fingers are sifting through my hair and I’m more content than I ever remember being. What we just did… I’ve had sex before. Sex with Jake is something else, something more. Something I’ll never forget. Which worries me, and prompted me to ask for his reassurance. I’ve never needed reassurance before. It appears that this rendezvous, whatever it is, is new for me all around.
“Were you here with me twenty minutes ago? Because I can assure you, if you were you would
not
need me to tell you that this wasn’t a mistake.”
He rolls and I’m under him, our eyes locked. “No?” He shakes his head. “Then what was it?”
“Amazing,” he says and I smile, because he’s right. Scary? Yes. New? Yes. Amazing? Oh, God,
yes
.
Then his face gets serious and I reach my finger up to trace the line of his brow. “I don’t want you to think I’m like everyone else, Cora, or that you’re like the other girls I’ve been with. This? Us? It’s nothing like that.”
I nod, and though I don’t want to have this conversation, I know I started it because we need to have it. “I want to trust you, Jake, trust this, but I have to be careful, too. I told you once that I used to be a girl who believed everything because it was easier to convince myself it was true than it was to really look at why I was so needy for the words in the first place. I don’t ever want to be that girl again.”
“I get that, just as I get how scary this is for you. But you need to know one thing.” He waits until I look at him, and his eyes are blazing and serious as they bore into me. “I’ve slept with other women — some more than once, some once, some I remember, some I don’t. I’ve had one serious relationship that I thought might be forever, and then I lost everything and I didn’t think forever mattered anymore.” Now he rests his weight on his right elbow and brings his left hand up to cup my cheek. “Blue, one glance at you all those months ago showed me that I might not be able to see forever, but I definitely want to see tomorrow if you’re there.”
My heart rolls over, it doesn’t have a choice. Part of it’s from fear, but the other part is from something greater, something a lot like hope, which is pretty fucking scary. For a minute I try to decide if I can block the words and how they make me feel, and then I realize that even if I could I don’t want to. I won’t lie to myself that much, not anymore, and I don’t want to lie to him, either. Everything he’s said, I want, and so I tuck the words close, knowing I’ll take them out and remember them over and over again later.
But now, I take that last step and bring my lips back to his, pushing closer until I’m rolling him and shifting so we’re chest to chest with my legs resting on either side of his hips and my hair curtaining around us. I hear him groan and I smile before taking my lips on a journey over his face, down his neck and onto his chest, lower, absorbing the scent that is Jake, something tangy mixed with the smell and salt of the sea that seeps into my body as I taste him everywhere I can. When I move lower and take him into my mouth, his hips buck and I hear a groan rip from his throat.
His breathing is ragged, his chest heaving and he says my name, his hands fisting on the bed beside me, but I ignore him until we’re both breathless again, both ready to explode. Sliding up his body, I straddle him and take his lips again, reveling in the desire I can feel coming from him. One of his hands grips my hip while the other tangles in my hair, fisting there while he yanks me closer and fuses his mouth to mine. He’s not a gentle kisser right now, not the lover worried about finesse and smooth moves and I respond more because of it. I want him uncontrolled — I want everything that he feels to show in every way that he touches me.
“Now,” he says and I just grin and continue to torture us both. “Cora, Jesus, now.” He reaches over to the nightstand beside the bed, knocking something to the floor before I hear him rip open a condom before he sheaths himself. And then both of his hands are at my hips and he’s shifting me, sitting up in one fluid move so my legs are around his waist and he’s pushing inside, claiming me, making me his until we’re moving together in a rhythm all our own.
When I come apart, his lips are there and he swallows my cries, throwing himself over the edge with me.