by A. J. Downey
She looked fresh, beautiful, sated, and I smiled at that. I wasn’t done. Not by a longshot, and she wasn’t either. She just didn’t know it yet.
Her eyes had closed as I massaged the tops of her thighs, watching her, letting her come back to herself some before I got ready to enter her. She looked up at me as I shifted, eyes widening in surprise, inhaling a sharp intake of breath as I slipped inside her so easily. She was so incredibly wet, so ready to have my cock inside her, eager for me – I could tell by the way she squeezed down on me, her pelvic floor muscles tightening against my shaft, drawing me in, even as she reached her arms up to me.
I came down to her and she grabbed my face between her hands and dragged my mouth to hers, her long legs winding around my hips, heels pressing against my ass, drawing me in close with her entire body.
I loved it when she was like this. It felt as though I disappeared into her being more than skin on skin. This was deeper than that. Transcending just fucking.
This was the purest form of love me I had ever encountered with a woman and I did. Moving slowly, I set a pace that would leave us both gasping and shaking. I set a pace that would make us both feel good and keep us right on that edge for as long as she didn’t beg me to come or to make her come again.
I loved this, being like this with her. It was mind-blowing, the trust she put in me right now, after what had happened back at the lake. It was as though she forgave me with her entire body. As though she forgave me soul deep… and I felt both grateful and wholly undeserving at the same time.
I should have known. I should have pried a lot sooner. I shouldn’t have taken her at face value, and I felt like a real fucking dick that I’d exploited an obvious weakness in search of my own good time for as long as I had.
It was the first time I felt even a little bit guilty about my loyalty to the club and I didn’t quite understand this power she had over me.
“Maverick,” she gasped, her voice light but strained. She was ready to come again. I knew that desperate little note in her voice, knew when she clung to me like she did that she was getting close, and God, its ramped shit up for me.
Making love to Marisol gave me a feeling of possessing god-like powers and I had to admit, that was a high worth chasing. A high that I hoped would never go away.
I bowed over her protectively, my balls tightening, threatening a release that I so desperately wanted, needed, and I couldn’t help myself. Her orgasm hit, her pussy rippling around the head of my cock and that did it.
I ripped myself from her and thrust hard, slicking my cock between her wet pussy lips, coming in a hot wash over her hip, both of us a hot sticky mess of our love gluing us together.
It was hot. Hot beyond measure for me. Hotter still when she pulled our mouths together and wouldn’t hear of quitting the kiss we shared until our breathing returned to semi-normal and the fluids binding our pelvises began to cool uncomfortably.
“God that was hot,” she whispered against my mouth and I smiled.
“Stay right there, baby. I’ll get us cleaned up,” I murmured.
“Mm, good thing I keep up on my birth control. You know the pull-out method is bullshit,” she said, and her voice held a note of reproach.
“Fuck, yeah, I’m sorry. I got carried away.”
“Mm,” she stretched as I stood up, admittedly shaky, beside the bed. “If I hadn’t wanted it, if I had fought you… would you have stopped?” she asked quietly.
I met her gaze and said, “You ain’t ever have to test me on that. You ain’t even gotta ask. Absolutely, yes, I would stop.”
She looked uncomfortable for a moment, like at any second, she would start to squirm under the weight of my gaze, and I didn’t let up. There was something there and I wasn’t about to let anything slide anymore. Not when she carried the kinds of secrets that she did.
“No more secrets, Zaychik. Say what’s on your mind,” I ordered gently.
She drew a breath to speak, stopped, thought better of it, and closed her mouth. I raised eyebrows at her and stood there, waiting her out.
“Is it fucked up that I think it’s hot?” she asked.
“That what is hot?” I needed more than that.
“When you hold me down. When you take without asking… I like it.”
I sank to the edge of the bed and put a hand on her knee, searching her face.
“There’s nothing wrong with liking what you like,” I told her.
“Having you fuck me against your desk with your belt around my neck was the hottest thing… like the freest I’ve ever felt,” she confessed and she swallowed hard, looking a little ill at having said it out loud.
“Technically it was your belt, and I have no problem doing anything like that with you again if it’s what you want.”
“Right,” she whispered and then said, “Sometimes I want to say no but no isn’t what I mean, you know?”
She put her hands over her face and sighed out, a frustrated sound.
“I get that, actually. Like when you’re a kid being tickled and you’re having so much fun and you yell ‘no, no, no’ but you don’t really want it to stop.”
“Right,” she said nodding, her expression slightly haunted, slightly worried, more than slightly scared, and I felt the weight of this moment keenly.
She was opening up to me. Trusting me with her secrets and I wanted to give her no reason to doubt that I was here for it. I wanted all of her. I wanted to please her. I wanted her to want to please me, and I wanted it with a fierce throbbing ache that I hadn’t felt in a really long time about anything.
“So, you need a safe word,” I murmured.
“A what?” she asked, and I smiled. Sometimes I forgot how sheltered she was in some ways. How young she really was.
“A safe word. A word that is sort of out there that means ‘no’ for real so you can say ‘no’ all you want, and I know you really mean ‘yes’ or that you’re okay.”
“What, like if I scream ‘bananas’ at the top of my lungs mid-thrust that’s it? Everything stops?”
“I would pick something other than bananas,” I said with a slight laugh, stroking a hand up and down the smooth skin of her shin from the top of her foot up to her knee and back down, just loving the feel of her skin beneath my palm.
“Okay,” she said. “Then you pick for me.”
I laughed and shook my head.
“Not how that works. It’s supposed to be your word.” I patted her knee and stood back up feeling stronger. I went to the bathroom and ran the tap all the way to ‘hot’ to get it warmed up, rinsing a washcloth under the stream of water until it steamed.
I cleaned myself up and rinsed the cloth good, making sure it was hot and not just warm so when I brought it to her, it would be just right. I turned around to see her leaning up against the headboard, her expression deeply thoughtful.
I went and sat back down beside her, batting her hands away when she reached for the washcloth and she smiled with a light little giggle that turned into a lighter, sighing moan, as I cleaned her up carefully.
That sound made me instantly start to grow hard and I hoped she was ready to go again because goddamn, I needed her tonight. Desperately.
I leaned forward and kissed her, delighted when her hands came up to cradle my face, when her thumbs smoothed along my jaw, when she let me in when she had absolutely no real reason to that I could see.
“Meatloaf,” she whispered, and I drew back and laughed.
“What?”
“My safe word. Meatloaf.”
“Meatloaf?” I repeated incredulously.
“Yeah, because I would do anything for love, but I won’t do that.”
I couldn’t help myself. I laughed. I laughed long and hard and kissed her between bouts of laughter and chuckling.
Meatloaf.
She was something else.
Chapter Sixteen
Marisol…
I don’t know why, precisely, I had done it, but I had
let go with Maverick. Had let him in like I’d never let anyone in in my life and it was absolutely exhilarating and totally exhausting all at the same time. I slept so hard, so well that night, yet woke ill-rested. As though I hadn’t slept a wink.
It made for a rough day of riding the next day and I collapsed into bed that evening, forgoing dinner in favor of sleep. Maverick, to his credit, didn’t wake me. He simply put my food aside in the mini-fridge and let me rest. When I did wake, it was in the wee hours of the morning. I was nude, I was warm, and I was safe in the circle of his arms, his chest pressed to my back, his deep and even breathing a comforting thing in the dark.
I lay there in peace, eyes closed and dared to dream for a moment of what this could be like if it were to last… but I didn’t dare hope that it would.
“What’s on your mind, baby?” he murmured, warm breath stirring my hair at the side of my neck.
“I don’t know if I should say,” I murmured with hesitance.
“Of course, you should,” he said, arms tightening around me as he nuzzled my shoulder.
“I know I could, but I don’t know if I should,” I hedged.
“Mm,” he grunted lightly in acknowledgement. “You can tell me anything,” he said, and I fought not to roll my eyes at the cliché, but then he tacked on, “Likewise, you ain’t gotta tell me shit. Just whatever it is, I’m here for it.”
I’d never had anyone take that approach with me.
“You’re really fine with me keeping it to myself?” I whispered.
He kissed the back of my shoulder, once, twice, a third time and sighed in what sounded like contentment.
“Do I want to know all your secrets?” he asked rhetorically. “Yes. But I want to know them on your time. I think you've been pushed around enough, Zaychik, and those aren’t the buttons I want to push with you. I want you to trust me. That doesn’t happen on my time. It happens on yours.”
I let his words sink in, food for thought and finally after swallowing hard asked, “You really mean that, don’t you?”
“Damn straight, I do,” he said gruffly, kissing the side of my neck and holding me tight.
I closed my eyes and sank into the feeling, confessing out loud, “I love it when you hold me like this.”
“Yeah? Why’s that?” he asked gently.
“Feels safe and good,” I murmured. “Like you won’t let anyone hurt me.”
He went very still and with his lips against my skin swore, “I won’t. Those days are over for you.”
I closed my eyes and breathed in slowly. I wanted to believe him. I desperately wanted to believe him, but it was honestly outside his control, what other people did.
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” I whispered softly, after a long time.
I thought he had drifted back off to sleep, but he kissed the back of my shoulder one more time and said, “I never do, baby. I never do.”
It was even more food for thought, and something I chewed on until the sun came up outside.
It was our final day of travel back to Seattle, and I wasn’t looking forward to it. I ached, and there was no getting comfortable. Though I loved to ride, especially with Maverick, I was quickly reaching the point I never cared if I got on the back of a bike again… which I was equally sure that feeling would only last around twenty-four hours or until the aches dissipated before I was dying to get back on again.
“Lookin’ forward to today’s wind therapy,” Tic-Tac muttered as he strapped his pack to the passenger backrest of his bike, sitting the squat canvas pack on the passenger seat and winding a bungee cord around it like six times.
“Ready to be home, brother?” Glass Jaw asked.
“Like nobody’s business.”
Fenris slipped out of one of the rooms and grimaced at the sun, flipping his shades off the top of his head and over his eyes.
“You look rough,” Maverick declared, looking the big Viking over.
“Hurt like a bitch,” he complained and put a hand to himself, over his gray tee and the slash across his middle that rested underneath.
Nine laughed. “I thought it was just a scratch.”
“Yeah, well, that scratch took nineteen stitches in areas,” Cipher said, and Mav scowled.
“Say what now?”
“I was there with the bottle of whiskey watching each one go down. Fen, you’re a fuckin’ badass.”
I stared at Fen who wouldn’t make eye contact with any of us. He simply grunted and sat his own duffel on the back of his bike and started to strap it down.
Cipher wandered over and batted his hands away ignoring Fen’s exasperation and finished the work for him.
“Right, let’s get you home where you can rest,” Maverick declared.
“I’m fine, you buncha fuckin’ mother hens, you all acting like I’m some kinda pussy is gonna get old real damn quick.”
“Don’t go thinkin’ I give a shit that Reaver tagged your dumb ass,” Maverick said. “I told you it was a bad idea. No, my motives are purely selfish in nature, my man. I’m gonna need you healed up and in your prime – you feel me?”
The pointed look Maverick gave Fen and the slight head jerk he gave in my direction sent butterflies reeling in my stomach.
When he turned and made eye contact with me, those nerves fizzled out into nothing, though. The look Maverick gave me was a hard one, but not at me – for me. As though he owned me body, heart, and soul and would fiercely protect everything about me to the ends of the earth.
When his indigo eyes met mine? I felt all of that from my hair to my toes. The look telegraphed two things. One, that vengeance was riding back to Washington, and two, nothing and no one would touch me like that ever again.
I desperately wanted everything that went along with that look, but by the same token that very same look chilled me to the bone.
I pressed my lips together, biting them on the inside with my teeth to keep my mouth shut until Maverick and I were alone and could potentially discuss things further. He identified the misgivings on my face and gave me a slight chin lift.
We would talk later and that both was, and wasn’t, reassuring.
The ride helped, and I turned the phrase that had been uttered over in my head – wind therapy.
It was an accurate descriptor. The summertime wind was hot, washing over us, carrying tension and heartache, worries and concerns off us and blowing it back down the highway where it could lay forgotten for the time being.
I relaxed into the rhythm of the bike that carried us and held onto the man who piloted us expertly down the cracked asphalt towards the Cascades, the jagged peaks jutting toward an endless blue sky that was unfathomably deep. I closed my eyes and dreamed of stars and being among them, far from the complications here on earth that I faced.
The turmoil churning in my gut over my secret being out was something awful. I honestly felt so drained, like all I wanted to do was sleep for a thousand years. God, I wasn’t even certain that would do the trick to curb the deep tiredness living in the center of my soul.
I didn’t know if this was a tiredness that could even be cured by sleep.
I held on as we approached the foothills, the bike rising and falling as we crested each one, and I held to Maverick tightly and imagined we rode along the spine of some great, sleeping dragon. That each rise and fall was a breath the great beast took, inhaling as we rose, the slight peak as we crested the hill, and the rush as the great beast exhaled.
It was a story I would tell my little brother. Later. When I could see him again.
Mateo loved my stories… I loved them too. They took me far away from myself and the pain. Gave me an escape when I needed to go somewhere without any actual money or ability to go.
If it was one hard lesson I had learned on this trip, it was that it didn’t matter how far you rode, or how much you wanted to leave certain things behind… you couldn’t. Not when they lived inside your head.
It was a tough and heartbreaking rea
lity and one, which it was time, to face.
I hated riding through Eastern Washington. Just traveling through made me huddle against Maverick’s back even more. He took his hand from the handlebars at least once to place it over mine where they rested over his stomach, giving them a squeeze as if to communicate, I know, it’s almost over.
I didn’t honestly feel like I could breathe again until we started to climb. Until the undulating brown hills started to give way to the unforgiving gray rock of the mountain and the withered grass shot up into deep green conifers.
It was high summer, but up high in the pass, it was much cooler than it had been on the sun-scorched eastern side. The cooler temperatures continued as we made our descent, the gray rock stark against the true-blue sky, bits of white still frosting the tops of the barren peaks around us. The trees provided us a lovely amount of shade and a reprieve from the punishing sun as we descended from Snoqualmie into Issaquah.
There was just something lighter about the western side of the Cascades. Brighter, so full of life with the deep blue waters of Lake Washington reflecting the true-blue skies above. Everything ringed in green and living things – even the buildings just seemed livelier over here.
I felt like I could breathe again, and I had to smile as we crossed the I-90 floating bridge. The wind off the water was refreshingly cool and the boats were out on the lake’s glittering surface. I had to smile when we’d arrived at Lake Eversong. I had said I thought we were going to a lake. Tic-Tac had said we were, and the lake was right there. He hadn’t caught on, but Maverick had and was already laughing when I’d said Eversong wasn’t a lake, it was a mud puddle. It was a mud puddle when you compared it to the likes of Lake Washington.
Too soon, we left the lake behind and climbed the bridge into the tunnels beneath the houses on the ridge. We swept through those tunnels at a good clip, the roar of the motorcycles reverberating off the exhaust-stained walls back at us overbearing. The sound was like being grabbed by the shoulders and physically shaken; jarring and unpleasant. At least to me it was, but to look around at the guys’ faces it made the unpleasantness I was experiencing worth it.
