Finding It

by Cora Carmack

  He gripped my jaw and pulled my face up to his. “You’re irresistible.”

  I would have taken it as a compliment if he didn’t seem so pissed about it.

  Okay, maybe I took it as a compliment either way.

  “That’s funny,” I said. “Then what the hell took you so long?”

  I curled my fingers over his shoulders, and his hands slid down my body. His thumbs pressed into my hipbones hard, his fingers splaying over the curve of my ass. And the only answer I got to my question was him tugging my hips forward to meet his. His strength undid me, sending every nerve ending up in flames.

  His arousal pressed against my stomach through his jeans, and I sucked in a breath. He took advantage of my open mouth, his tongue winding and flicking against mine.

  His hands explored my body, bold and strong like his kiss. My heart felt like a bird loosed from a cage, like it couldn’t stay perched in one spot in my chest.

  He slid a hand up my back, unsnapping the clasp of my bra with ease. He broke our kiss just long enough to pull the fabric from between us, before crushing me against him again. I heard the wet slap of my bra hit the tile floor.

  When my bare chest met his, a growl sounded low in his throat. His mouth pressed and pulled and coaxed mine into movement, and time seemed both too fast and too slow at once.

  When my lungs burned for air, I pulled back, panting.

  I said, “You’re the most confusing person I’ve ever met, and sometimes I hate you.”

  Not the most romantic thing to say, but it was honest.

  He pinned me back against the wall again, and this time gripped my wrists, locking them in place above me, too.

  He growled, “This counts,” before nipping my bottom lip.

  I didn’t know what he was saying, but I nodded because his leg pushed between mine, anchored at the juncture between my thighs, and every shift or movement caused something to rend and then mend inside me.

  “Say it.”

  I arched my body into his, pulling at his shoulders.

  “Say what?”

  “Say that this is real. Tell me it counts.”

  He pressed his forehead against mine, and that thing that tore inside of me was so loud that it had to be real. Something hung in the space between my heart and lungs, detached from where it had been.

  “This is real.” I shivered, suddenly cold under the spray of water.

  He released my wrists and turned off the shower, pulling me out into the bedroom. Water streamed down our bodies, forming a puddle on the floor, but he didn’t even give it a second glance. He wrapped an arm around my waist and the other around my thighs, lifting me up above him. His head was in line with my stomach. He paused to taste the wet skin just below my breasts, and I closed my eyes. I clenched his shoulders, every muscle in my body pulling tight as his tongue darted out to flick over the sensitive skin of my ribs.

  I said, “Jackson.”

  I didn’t know what I was going to say next. It could have been more angry words or confusion or a romantic declaration. But I forgot it completely when he lifted his head higher, and took the pebbled tip of my breast into his mouth. I cried out.

  Slowly, he loosened his grip, letting me slide down his body the way I had out on the path. But now, our wet skin melded together. My softness pressed against his hard muscle, and all I could think of were four-letter words.

  When our faces aligned, he said, “This is what I should have done out there. This is what I’ve wanted to do a thousand times over.”

  He claimed my mouth in another kiss.

  I opened to him immediately, his tongue tangling with mine. He tasted like warm summer days and hurricanes, like everything I wanted and everything I didn’t know I needed. He caught my bottom lip between his, sucking and nibbling, and I was reminded of the first time I saw him. That terrible kiss in the ruin bar brought Hunt into my life. I never thought I would be grateful for the worst kiss of my life, especially not while enjoying the best.

  He kept one arm banded around my ribs to hold me up, and the other dragged down my back to my ass. He cupped me, grinding me against his hips, and I wrapped my legs around his waist for better friction. But then I wished I hadn’t because my legs met his wet jeans, which I wanted off. Like ten minutes ago.

  My fingers found the waistband of his jeans. I was pressed too tightly against him to manage the buttons, and I whined into his kiss.

  I tugged on his jeans, and felt him begin moving toward the bed.

  He dropped me on my back without warning, and I bounced against the mattress.

  Shocked, I yelled, “You—”

  I swallowed whatever insult had been coming when he flicked open the button of his jeans and slid them down over his naked hips.

  When I managed to pick up my jaw, I followed his lead, slipping my underwear over my hips. I kicked them off, leaving us both bare before the other’s gaze. We were getting the sheets wet, but who the hell cared? For several long seconds, we both just stared at each other, drinking in the sight that for so long we’d denied ourselves.

  Hunt smiled darkly and said, “My imagination didn’t do you justice.”

  “Imagine me naked a lot, did you?”

  “Only every other second.”

  I smiled and the last of my frustration fled to be replaced by anticipation.

  I sat up so that my face was level with his abdomen.

  He ran a gentle hand through my hair. I turned into his touch and kissed his wrist. Then I leaned forward and licked a stray water droplet from his bare hip.

  His hand tightened in my hair, and he exhaled sharply.

  I circled my hand around him, and he choked out a groan. He stayed still for a few seconds, his eyes directed toward the ceiling.

  “Why didn’t you?” I asked. “If you thought about me so much, if you wanted me … why push me away?”

  He pulled my hand away from his body, kissing the back of my knuckles instead.

  “I couldn’t do this lightly. Not with you. I needed it to mean as much to you as it meant to me.”

  He leaned down and kissed me sweetly on the lips. So sweet it burned, like sugar around the rim of a Molotov cocktail.

  Gripping my hips, he slid me back farther on the bed, until just my feet were dangling off the edge. I sat up on my elbows and watched him as his eyes surveyed me from head to toe.

  He picked up my right foot, and placed a tender kiss on the inside of my ankle. That kiss started a fire deep in my bones that ran through the rest of me like a lit fuse. As he kissed my calf and the inside of my knee, my bones melted down to liquid. His hands started at my heels and ran up the backs of my legs, tickling the sensitive skin. I squirmed, pulling my knees together, and he placed a hand low on my abdomen stilling me.

  “Patience, princess.”

  I had no patience left. Especially not if he was going to do the same thing he did every other time and pull back when he came to his senses.

  I said, “You’re not going to change your mind, are you, Jackson? Because I can’t keep doing this.”

  He said, “I hope you can keep doing this. Because I don’t plan on letting you out of this room until my seven days are up.”

  22

  HIS MOUTH TRAILED up the inside of my thigh, and I was breathing so heavy that I was on the verge of hyperventilating. One of his hands still pressed into my stomach, and the other pushed my knees apart. His teeth grazed my skin, and my hips bowed up.

  He was going to kill me.

  I could actually die like this.

  “Please,” I said.

  “Please what, princess?”

  His breath fanned across my inner thigh, and just that was enough to send shockwaves of pleasure through me. The hand on my stomach slid down to the juncture between my thighs, and I completely lost it.

  I turned my head to the side, and swallowed a moan.

  His fingers drew me to the edge, working me until all I could do was whimper and breathe, whimper and brea
the.

  “Tell me what you want,” he said.

  My body clenched around his fingers, and all I could say was “You.” His thumb pressed hard against my most sensitive spot just like it had the night before, and I said, again, “Oh God, you.”

  All I knew was that he was too far away, and I didn’t need any more foreplay. Our whole damn relationship had been foreplay. I wanted him now.

  I reached a hand down toward him, and he laced his fingers with mine. I tugged, and he stood from where he’d been kneeling. I pulled again, and he put his knee on the bed between my thighs.

  He hovered above me, his body lean and muscled, and his eyes predatory. He looked like he wanted to devour me, and I was all too willing to be his victim.

  I released his hand to touch his waist, and then I pulled his body down on top of mine. I threw my head back and moaned at the contact.

  His mouth went to my shoulder, tracing along the line of my muscle to my collarbone. His thigh pressed up and against my center, and I held my breath. He lifted his head to look at me. When our eyes met, he pressed against me again, and the breath I’d been holding tore from my lungs.

  He bent to taste my lips, gentle and focused. I clutched at his back, marveling at the way his muscles flexed and moved as kissed me.

  “Please,” I said again. “Please Jackson.”

  His eyes softened, and he pressed his forehead against mine. His eyes closed, and he took a slow, deep breath. Then he leaned down and placed a kiss on my sternum, between the swell of my breasts.

  “Give me a second.”

  He slid off of me, and I felt like I was drowning every second that it took for him to grab a condom and come back to me.

  I rose up on my elbows, and he crawled above me. He kissed me sweetly, slowly, and the frenzy of our previous moments disappeared. There was a level of intimacy in just kissing him that I’d never experienced, and it left me excited and terrified of what came next.

  Sex had never been a big deal to me. But everything about Jackson was a big deal. I was afraid I wouldn’t be good enough, afraid that I wouldn’t know how to have the kind of sex that meant something. What if when it was over, he regretted crossing that line?

  His hand smoothed over my cheek and he said, “Don’t. Don’t do that.”

  I didn’t know if he knew the exact line of my thoughts or just that I was worried, but it soothed me all the same.

  He kissed me, and then slowly eased me back on the bed. He lay beside me, and I turned on my side to face him. I laid my head on his arm, and he pulled me into his chest, just holding me for a moment. We’d held each other like this before, but this time was different. My heart was thundering, and my skin sang. His hand traced down the line of my spine, and I arched into him. He continued over my hip and down my leg, his fingers curling behind my knee. A zing of electricity shot from my knee up to my core as he pulled my leg over his hip.

  Our mouths met and he said, “God, I love the way you taste.”

  He leaned into me, situating his leg between mine, and aligning our hips. He pushed inside me, and for a moment my whole body seemed to forget how to work. My blood forgot to pump, my lungs forgot to breathe, and my hips forgot to move.

  His hands tightened on me, and he released a low groan into my neck.

  He growled, “I love the way you feel.”

  Laying on my side like this with our legs twined together, he reached deep inside me. I’d never had sex like this, wrapped up in another person until it was impossible to find the divide between us. His hips withdrew and then pushed again, and the friction had me arching my back.

  My hips stayed aligned with his, but I bent backward until my head and half my back rested on the bed. Jackson leaned with me, curling around my body. His mouth burned a hot path from my collarbone down into the valley between my breasts. He kept a hand at the small of my back and used it to pull me in every time he surged forward.

  He rained kisses down on my chest, and I clutched the back of his head, needing to feel him, to hold him against me.

  He trailed up again, flicking his tongue over my collarbone and scraping his teeth against the column of my throat. My skin broke out in goose bumps, and I shuddered in his arms. He placed a kiss on the underside of my jaw, and I dipped my head down to meet his.

  His tongue plunged into my mouth, mimicking the deep movement of the rest of his body, and I clung to him as he wrung pleasure from my body with each slow thrust.

  “Kelsey,” he whispered.

  I had to pry my eyes open, and even then each time his skin slid against mine I had to fight to hold up my eyelids. He pressed his forehead into mine, and rather than falling into his dark eyes, they seemed to pour something into me. Confidence, maybe. Or affection. Whatever it was, I stopped worrying about how this would play out. I stopped thinking of the ways I was inadequate. I stopped everything that didn’t have to do with this moment.

  He said, “God, do you have any idea what you do to me? Any idea how long I’ve wanted you?”

  I didn’t have any ideas about anything, except that I was so close.

  I hooked my hand around his hip, my fingers splaying from his lower back to the curve of the rest of his body. I pressed my fingers into his skin, my fingernails spurring him on.

  “Harder,” I begged.

  His hips pushed forward, and I felt it all the way to my toes.

  He slid the arm out from underneath my head and lifted himself up. He kept one knee between mine, and our hips fitted together. He used the leg I’d had around his hip to guide me onto my back. Then clutching my leg to his chest, he gave me exactly what I asked for.

  His hips rolled into mine first, as I adjusted to the new position, then rocked forward harder. On his second thrust, I reached up and pressed my hand flat against the headboard.

  His pace shifted from slow and steady to fast and hard and the bed creaked beneath us. I sucked in a breath, holding it as I drew closer and closer, and then I was falling all over again. Falling from that bridge. My heart in my throat. Falling for him. My heart in my hands. Falling apart. Falling together.

  Falling into place.

  It felt like hours before my heartbeat slowed, and I was strong enough to open my eyes.

  When I did, my head was both clouded and clear. I couldn’t have remembered fractions or the state capitols or maybe even my name. Those things had been locked behind a wall of bliss. But Jackson’s face above mine? That was clear, as was the way just the sight of him made my heartbeat pick up again.

  He lowered my leg to the outside of his hips, so that he was cradled between my thighs.

  He leaned down and teased my tired lips with his own.

  He said, “I could watch that a hundred more times. A thousand.”

  I scrunched my nose up, certain that I’d probably made some hideous face in the throes of the moment. He smoothed the lines on my forehead with his thumb and said, “ I want to memorize the way your eyes clench shut and you bite down on your lip, so that I can sketch your expression from memory. I want to know the exact angle of the way your neck curves, and how many times your heart beats a minute. I want to know everything.”

  I swallowed, my heart speeding up when it should have been slowing down. There were things about myself that even I didn’t want to know, let alone share them with him.

  Changing the subject, I asked, “So you don’t regret crossing that line?”

  His mouth trailed across my jaw, and he hummed under his breath.

  “I can still think of a few other lines I’d like to cross before the night is through.”

  He rolled, pulling me on top of him, our bodies still intimately connected. The friction teased my sensitive skin, and I had to steady myself with my hands on his chest.

  He traced the curve of my body from my breast to my waist to my hip and said with a wicked grin, “You’re adventurous, right?”

  Now, this was the kind of adventure I was always on board for.

  Hours st
retched into days, and we only left the apartment in Riomaggiore when we had to. We got whatever food and supplies we needed, but we never lasted very long before our tastes turned away from food.

  Our seventh day came and went, and neither of us made any move to leave or end our time together. And I began to understand the Via dell’Amore a little more, that chair and all those locks. I realized it wasn’t the lock that mattered so much as the fact that it required a key.

  Jackson had found every little sensitive nook that made my toes curl and my eyes roll back in my head. He knew what made me hold my breath and what made me cry out his name. He unlocked my body, and in doing so unlocked doors that held nothing but stale air and bad memories.

  If I believed the stories I learned growing up, God made the world in six days and on the seventh day he rested. I wondered if, like me, the eighth day was when he watched it all begin to unravel.

  23

  I WOKE, MY breaths pushing from my lungs like broken glass. Jackson wasn’t in bed beside me, and I curled into a ball, glad for his absence.

  Pieces of my dream were slipping away, and I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to try to hold on to them to examine or to push them away so I wouldn’t have to.

  I’d been twelve again, but in that way that dreams don’t make sense, I was also twenty-two. Mom and Dad were arguing in the kitchen, and Mr. Ames, Dad’s business partner, had come upstairs. He said he was looking for a bathroom, but there were two on the bottom floor. He touched my shoulder. He told me I was soft. And like those animated flip books I played with as a kid, the sheets of my dream began to fan, and it wasn’t Mr. Ames’s hand against me, but the boy I’d lost my virginity to just a year and a half later.

  He trailed his fingers to my neck, and then down to my chest. The pages flipped. More hands, a different one on every page. Some looked familiar. Some didn’t. But with each page, the hands swept across my body. The pages flipped and the locations began to change along with the hands—the back of a pickup truck, my freshman dorm, my apartment, a few hostels.

  The scene shifted, and it was me and Mr. Ames in all those places, and I screamed and cried long after the dream had shifted on to a new person, a new place. And each hand carved away a part of me, sanded and chiseled until I was hollowed out, a wisp of a girl.

  I pulled away, crying, and stumbled from a hostel bed to my parents’ living room couch. This time I was just me, present day, but my parents looked down at me like I was still only four feet tall.

  Dad was talking, saying I was blowing things out of proportion. He morphed into Mr. Ames for just as second as he said, “Quit playing the victim.”

  Mom asked me questions, asked me how Mr. Ames touched me and where. When I showed them, when I put my hand to my chest … I knew what was coming next. I knew the words like they were carved into my skin, like the pulse of my heart beat them out in Morse code.

  I waited for them, cringed for them, begged for them because I needed to hear that it didn’t count.

  But instead, my world was filled with Hunt, with his all seeing eyes, with his blistering touch, with his consuming kiss and the words, “Tell me this counts.”

  His hands, large and callused lay atop my chest where the heart beneath had been sanded down to a tiny thing. In my dream, he held my crumbling body, and he told me that it was okay. His touch was soft and perfect and exactly what I wanted, but I didn’t stop crumbling in his arms, no matter how gentle he was.

  That was when the lies I’d built so high that they scraped the sky shattered. Every brick I’d laid between me and that day when I was twelve crumbled as if they were made of something less than sand.

  Because it mattered.

  Who touches you, whether it’s your skin or your soul, matters.

  I sat, huddled alone in bed in that Italian apartment, shaking from a dream that I knew was nothing more than synapses firing in my brain, collecting recent thoughts and putting them together regardless of sense or order. I knew that’s all it was, but things didn’t always have to make sense to be true.