Ink: Devil’s Nightmare MC

by Bourne, Lena

  Then his lips find them again, and I lose my trail of thought completely.

  He slides his hand down my stomach and into my panties, and I push into his hand, knowing one thing and one thing only—I need us to be one. Right now. I can’t wait a second longer.

  But he’s not done kissing and caressing my skin. He always like to do that, for hours, sometimes for days. I loved those days the most, the ones where we’d get so lost in each other we forgot about everything else.

  I love it now. But my need for us to be joined has a mind of it’s own.

  “I want you inside me,” I whisper into his ear once his kisses reach my neck again.

  I’m sliding my palm up and down his cock, causing his breath to hitch in his throat in between the kisses he’s giving me. His cock grows harder, the pulsing heat and heartbeats I feel through my palm erasing the rest of my thoughts that aren’t related to the need of the two of us becoming one.

  He grins again, the smile more lustful desire than love right now, but then again lust and love always went hand in hand for us. Pure passion. That’s what we had. That’s what we share.

  He positions himself between my spread legs, his cock now pulsing against my clit, and I’m already once again lost in the pleasant, sun-speckled shade of his eyes.

  I moan and whimper as he enters me, stars exploding before my eyes in all the colors of the world. He’s thick, and I haven’t been with a man since I was with him last a year ago. But the startling shock is momentary, the stars I’m seeing quickly melting into multicolored rivers of pleasure inside my mind. They join and flow down to meet the bliss his thrusting cock is stirring to life in my pussy. This is all I ever wanted, exactly what I wanted when I asked for it, and the one thing I will always want.

  I’m breathing hard, moaning and whimpering as I meet his thrusts, letting him fill me all the way, digging my nails into his muscles as I pull him to me and accept all of him. My eyes are wide open and locked on his, because right now, for the first time in a long time, my reality is better than the best of my fantasies, and I don’t want to miss a single moment of it.

  But the river of bliss has already filled my whole body, and is outside us now too, its waves crashing against us, the current taking me under, dragging me down to the very core of this pleasure our passion and love created, pressing against me until my mind and my body, my very soul, start bubbling and popping with explosions of pleasure, each better than the last.

  I can’t hold it back. I can’t fight it. I need to let this pleasure, this orgasm only he can give me, that only we can share, consume me.

  I let it take me, moaning and writhing and pulling him so deep into me as I come that I truly don’t know if we’re two separate beings at all.

  I needed this. I needed him. And that’s the last thought I have before I let myself slide off into rest, a respite from the soul cracking orgasm we just shared. It was strong and good enough to erase at least a month of missing him.

  * * *

  The buckle of one of the belts I laid out on the bed to pack for my trip is poking me in the hip, but it’s barely noticeable and certainly not annoying enough for me to move. His arms are around me, and I’m perfectly ensconced into his side, where I belong. Right now it feels like I never left this place, like the last year never happened, that he never left me, but that’s only because I’m coming out of a shattering orgasm-induced sleep. The last traces of the pleasure he gave me are still flowing through my body. But the more awake I get, the more clearly I remember the pain of missing him.

  I want him here, I still want all of him, inside me, with me, in my arms and in my bed and everywhere. I need his gentle closeness, his amazing kisses, his caressing hands, the powerful thrusts of his cock, the feel of his skin against mine, his hardness that never fails to bend for me, the rise and fall of his chest as I lay my head down to sleep. Moments like the one we’re sharing right now—sated from lovemaking, resting until we regain strength for more of it—are perhaps what I missed most of all. Having it back feels like no time has passed at all, but it has. Lots of time has passed, filled with lots of pain.

  It’s not smart to want any of what we had back. The possibility of it ending in sharp, unyielding, dark pain is too great. But I don’t want to move yet. I can let myself have a little more of this perfectness before I push it away.

  He’s not sleeping, just lying really still. I can tell from his breathing. That’s good. I don’t want to sleep either.

  “Do you want to talk?” I ask quietly, not sure why, because I don’t really want to.

  He makes a sound that could mean just about anything, and probably means no. But what the hell, we’ll have to talk about everything that’s happened between us eventually.

  “I’m glad you came back,” I say and pause, trying to get my thoughts together well enough to continue with what I have to say.

  He laughs, squeezing my ass and pulling me closer to him.

  “What are you laughing about?” I ask, more harshly than I wanted to.

  He chuckles again. “Just the way you said that. It sounds pleasant enough, but I know there’s a chiding a-coming.”

  He’s already started doing that thing he does, getting all poetic or whatchamacallit with his words. He does it a lot, but I know where it comes from—he does it when he’s nervous or uncomfortable.

  “I shouldn’t have left you. That was a bad mistake. Unforgivably bad,” he says into the silence I didn’t fill. “We should’ve just run away together.”

  I nod and shake my head at the same time, but he couldn’t have seen that, since it’s dark in the room.

  “You could’ve at least told me the truth before you left,” I say.

  I would’ve dropped everything and gone with him, there’s still no doubt in my mind about that, but a lot of hating him for leaving me stands between that day and today. I don’t want to talk to him from that hateful place now that he’s finally back, but I’m having trouble stopping myself, so maybe it’s best I don’t say much at all.

  “Would it have made a difference?” he asks and chuckles again.

  “Yes,” I say sarcastically, and manage not to say more.

  “At least that way, it was only me battling the unfairness of it,” he says. “All you had to worry about was hating me. It’s easier to hate a person than a thing you can do nothing about.”

  “Is it really, Ryan?” I ask snappishly. I rarely call him by his given name, I prefer his nickname—it’s so much more whimsical and eternal.

  He stiffens and inhales sharply, my anger finally reaching him fully, I think, but I don’t want that. As stupid as it is, he did believe he was protecting me by leaving the way he did, I don’t doubt that.

  I could never stay mad at him for very long, and I don’t want to be now, but somehow my anger isn’t ebbing away. Touching him might help. Touching him always helped.

  I run my hand down his stomach, making him stiffen and start to breathe in a completely different way. But the bumps I feel and don’t recognize aren’t just muscles. They’re scars, I realize as I run my hand across one more forcefully and he winces.

  “What is that, Ink?” I ask, breathless and worried, more concerned than I have reason to be.

  “It’s…it’s from…” he just lets the words die out before they exit his mouth. I’ve rarely known him to be at a loss for words like this. Something clever, or at least something poetic is always on the tip of his tongue. He’s changed, grown more serious, and that scares me, makes my heart beat even faster, because he’s clearly not the same man who left me and I’m afraid of what that could mean.

  I reach over him and turn on the nightstand lamp. He has a very tight and uncharacteristically empty expression on his face, but my eyes don’t linger long on his.

  There’s two large, tear-shaped scars on the left side of his torso, which look old, yet are still whiter than the rest of his skin. The one I touched, the one that made him wince, is round but has a uniformly jag
ged edge. It’s healed over, yet still really red around the edges. There’s two more almost exactly like it not far from it. One is too close to his heart for my comfort.

  “What are those?” I ask in a breathless voice, my heart rate growing and growing.

  “Oh, those,” he says in a voice that tells me he’s gonna try and make light of this.

  “Ink, be serious, please,” I say to forestall that.

  He nods, his face very empty still. “Fine. Those are the reason I’m here.”

  “You were shot?” I ask, since he’s clearly not gonna give me a straight answer, and what he did say sent my heart into a head-spinning thumping.

  “Yeah, three times,” he says in a very serious tone. “But I got lucky. The two knife wounds almost killed me too.” He points out the two large tear-shaped scars.

  I gasp and it sounds like a whimper.

  “But none of them killed me,” he adds. “When I woke up after getting shot, I knew I had to go back to you. And I knew that I made the biggest mistake of my life by leaving you, while I was still leaning against the kitchen doorframe of a stranger’s house, watching the blood flow from my stomach and pool beside me. But at that time, I mostly just feared I’d never get to correct it. I got the chance though, and here I am.”

  What? Where? When? Why? Why?

  The questions are looping through my brain, and they sound like a scream. For some reason he’s smiling serenely.

  “I’m here to tell you that I still love you more than anything, and that I’ll do whatever it takes to make up for the mistake I made,” he concludes, silencing the questions immediately.

  He takes my hand off his scar and kisses it, but all the strength I have is spent fighting back tears. My whole body is rigid, my thoughts stuck in knowing just how close I came to losing him forever. My voice is locked in my throat by the biggest lump I’ve ever felt. It’s making it hard to breathe.

  He waits a few heartbeats then grins at me, and it’s impossible for me not to smile back. It’s a tiny little smile though, and tears are now freely flowing from my eyes.

  “I think we’ve had enough talking for tonight,” he says and keeps smiling.

  I lay back down, rest my head on his chest and hold him tight, getting right back into that spot close by his side, the spot I belong in, the one made just for me.

  “I love you so much, Ryan. I always did and I never stopped,” I say, my voice much clearer than I expected it to be. That’s because I’m speaking the soul truth and the voice of that is always clear. “I’m pissed off at you for leaving me, but I’m so, so glad that you came back.”

  He chuckles at that, probably thinking about how I started this conversation with those exact words, only that now I also said what I omitted the first time. But he doesn’t say anything more and neither do I.

  I press my body as close to his as I can, and close my eyes, listening to his breathing, to his heartbeat, letting the reality of where I am and who I’m with, the reality of the fact that this is my deepest wish of the last year finally come true, wash over me until there’s nothing left but that.

  He told me some bad things, but I needed to know them. He almost died, but I can wait until tomorrow to truly face that truth. For tonight, him being back, me finally being able to fall asleep in his arms again after all this time spent waiting for it and dreaming about it, is enough. It’s more than enough. It’s everything.

  8

  Julie

  It’s still pretty dark outside, but dawn is breaking on the distant horizon. Ink’s still asleep, but I’ve been awake for a while, sitting next to him with my back against the headboard and my knees by my face. He’s lying on his stomach, and I can clearly see the three scars where the bullets exited his body. The bullets that could’ve taken him from me forever, but instead brought him back to me, as he says. I’ve just been sitting here wishing he never left in the first place.

  We talked about nothing, yet everything last night. But we need to have an entirely different conversation now.

  I straighten my legs and touch his shoulder. It’s time. I still don’t feel ready though.

  “Ink, wake up,” I say quietly, and shake him gently, much too gently to wake him. He doesn’t even stir.

  After a few more attempts he finally groans, and raises his head a little, then groans again as he rolls over to face me.

  “Are you OK?” I ask, reaching out as though to help him move although that’s completely unlikely. He weighs about twice as much as me. I couldn’t move him if I needed to. And right now, that thought is seriously scaring me.

  “Yeah, I’ll be fine, don’t worry,” he says, then groans and winces a couple more times, before he finally manages to sit up. “Mornings are always the worst. I just need to walk it off.”

  With that he gets up and walks to the bathroom and, as always, I’m mesmerized by the way the muscles in his back, ass and thighs flow with his movements, but today, I’m also worried. He doesn’t look like he’s in a lot of pain, but he’s always been tough. Those scars are still fresh, which means that the shooting happened recently. He shouldn’t be riding his bike so soon, we shouldn’t have had sex last night, he should be resting. But there’s no time.

  He comes out of the bathroom and the sight of his nakedness from the front very nearly makes me forget all about all those things we shouldn’t be doing.

  He’s thinking the same thing, because his desire and need for me is a physical presence, standing between us right now, hot as a mid-July afternoon, and starting in his eyes. I’m sure some of it is my own too, but there’s no time for this now.

  “I’ll make coffee,” I say and get up hastily, feeling his eyes shift to my breasts as they bounce under the nearly translucent night shirt I’m wearing. I want him to touch me with more than just his eyes. I want to touch him with more than just mine. But we’ll have more than enough time for that once he’s healed, once we’re far away from here, once we set right what my father did to his family.

  “You don’t wanna lie down some more?” he asks, grinning at me, but I shake my head and leave the room.

  “What’s going on, Julie?” he asks as he joins me in the kitchen where I’m raiding the fridge, just throwing everything he might want for breakfast onto the counter.

  “We should leave town as soon as possible,” I say. “Like right after breakfast. I have a room booked in San Diego for tonight.”

  “Cool. We’ll have us a little trip down memory lane. Is that what you had in mind?” he says, walking over to me to pick up some of the food. The cold from the fridge can’t possibly beat the heat that’s coming off his body. He’s standing so close we’re almost touching. God, I want to touch him.

  I went to college in San Diego and he practically lived there with me for the first couple of years before he just up and abandoned me for no good reason.

  No. I can’t keep thinking that. He had a reason. It wasn’t the best reason, but he was thinking of me. He should hate me for what my father did to his family, instead he tried to protect me by not telling me about it.

  I turn to him, my whole body shaking with this realization. His eyes are so peacefully green and welcoming, showing me what we used to be, what we used to mean to each other. Showing me everything I ever wanted. I can’t face that look ending, changing, morphing into something ugly. But what else can I do?

  “You should hate me for what my family did to yours,” I say and look away from his eyes, because I don’t want to see the change come into them.

  “I already told you yesterday, I—” he says and his voice is soft and kind, not how it should be.

  “Don’t you want revenge?” I interrupt.

  He inhales sharply. “What? Against you? Never!”

  He’s speaking sternly and harshly like there’s no arguing with his logic on this.

  “But what about against my dad?” I ask.

  He takes my chin and makes me look at him, and I wish he didn’t do that, yet at the same tim
e, I’m extremely happy he did.

  He just looks at me for a few moments, minutes probably, his eyes dark and full of shadows, yet I see the sun and warmth in them too. I can always see that. The sun’s always there in his eyes for me.

  “You want honesty?” he finally asks as though he’s been searching my eyes for the answer to this question, but couldn’t find it.

  “Always,” I whisper.

  “I did want revenge. For a long time that’s the only thing I wanted,” he says. “But like I said, I love you more and I won’t do anything that will tear us apart again. It’s hell wanting something you can’t have, but it doesn’t compare to losing you forever.”

  There’s no smile, no chuckle, nothing merry in his voice as he says it. It’s just a statement of fact.

  “I know,” I whisper, but I’m not sure he heard me.

  “I should’ve died a couple of times over since I left you, but somehow I managed to stay alive anyway,” he says. “And now I know it was because I was always supposed to come back to you. I won’t mess it up the second time around.”

  He was always so dramatic. It always excited me as much as it confused me. Right now, it’s making my heart race in fear I don’t want to face.

  “If it were me, I’d want revenge,” I say.

  He chuckles, though it’s more of a loud exhale than a laugh. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve seen revenge, Julie, real revenge, the kind that gets dealt out for the type of things your dad did. But there’s nothing pretty or poetic or even satisfying about it. It’s just darkness and blood and losing some more of your soul.”

  “I wish you’d just talk plainly,” I say, still shivering a little from the cold the images his words sent down my spine.

  “Taking revenge on your father will tear us apart, Julie. You couldn’t live with yourself if you were a part of that, and I couldn’t live with myself knowing I caused it,” he says and moves his palm from my chin, which he’s been holding this whole time, and cups my cheek. He even smiles a little and the way his eyes are seeing into me right now sends a whole new volley of shivers down my back.