“I’m crushing you.”
“No. You feel good there. Just the right pressure. God, you feel amazing. You are amazing. I have never felt anything like that before.”
“When you looked in my eyes, it was something supernatural, I know that much. You were so deep inside me. I felt like you were everywhere, in my chest, my heartbeat—I don’t know how to say it without sounding stupid. I felt exposed, completely.”
“So did I. I still do. Like you can see me, who I am, what I’ve done, and you still wanted me, wanted to take me inside your body. Layla, I feel alive. Like I’m more myself than I have been since before I went to Afghanistan.”
“Do you really mean that?” I asked, afraid to believe him.
“Yes,” he said, trailing his fingers up my back, playing at the ends of my hair, “and I should take you running every day.”
“I don’t want to go running every day. Or ever again.”
“Stay here with me,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I want to hold you. Don’t get up and leave.”
“Okay,” I said. I rested my head on his chest, traced the rows of numbers inked into his skin, “What are these about?”
“The top one is the coordinates where the IED went off. Then underneath it those are the rank abbreviations and serial numbers on each of my men who died that day. The top is Gibbons, then Nick—his name was Joseph Fury so we called him Nick, and Forester. My squad,” he said, his voice hollow, a recitation.
I laid my cheek on his chest, kissed my fingers and pressed them over the numbers. I covered them with my hand, “I can feel your heart. You carry the scars of that, but it’s still beating.”
“There’s been a hell of a lot of days I wish it wasn’t. I never could figure out a single reason why I didn’t die with them. Except a few weeks ago, I started looking forward to things again. I know that no one can—save me. That isn’t anybody’s job. But I know that the first stirring of hope I had, the first interest in what might happen was the day you brought those flyers and asked me to help hang them up. What was that about anyway?” he said.
“I was trying to flirt with you,” I said, “but if you couldn’t tell, it didn’t work.”
“I don’t know about that. Since I spent the last few weeks dying to be closer to you and I would rank having you in my bed as the best thing in my life—maybe your flirting did work.”
“It didn’t seem like it at the time.”
“You were unforgettable,” he said.
15
Tyler
She fell asleep on my chest, my arms around her. I pulled the sheet over us and felt her nestle into me with a sweet sigh. The warm weight of her pressed down on me and it felt like safety, like redemption, like everything I’d needed all this time. I drifted off to sleep effortlessly. Somewhere during sleep, she’d rolled off of me and onto her side facing me.
When she woke, I was already staring into her beautiful, peaceful face. The surprise and joy that flickered through her expression when she saw me was enough to make my day. Then I kissed her. Kissing her was essential, the way her lips locked with mine, her passion and curiosity. I held her in my arms, thinking this was the best way to wake up from that short nap. The next thing I knew, I was hard against her, and she reached for me. Without breaking the kiss, Layla wrapped her left leg over my hip, opened for me.
My palm went to her breast, my fingers plucking at her nipples, making her wriggle against me. “I want you again, but I don’t want to hurt you,” I said hoarsely. She took my hand, guided it between her legs. I felt the hot slickness there, how wet she was.
“You want me this much?”
“I always want you this much,” she said against my lips, sucking my tongue into her mouth.
I groaned and rocked my hips forward, penetrating her with a single, deep thrust. I went long and slow and deep, savoring every wet cling of her sex as I moved in and out, loving the way she touched my face and kissed me, the way she responded to my mouth on her neck, my hands on her body. We were honest with each other, laid bare and made whole. Nothing had ever felt like this, the acceptance, the joining, the blinding glory of it. My climax exploded before I was ready for it, taking me in ferocious claws and shaking me with its force as I cried out her name. Somehow, when I came so frantically, she bucked her hips and came too. The blending of our orgasms, the urgent kiss between us that was messy with a clash of teeth and tongues made it the most intimate, magnificent experience of my life. I groaned when she came around me, milking more from me, making my climax draw out. She thrashed in my arms with the force of her own, and I held her down, held her close until it passed.