“Fuck me,” I whispered.
Dean massaged me hard, then bit my neck. I shifted my leg and he toyed with me, skimming his fingertips between my folds and groaning at the silky wetness already forming along my opening. My mind raced with images of last night, of Dean holding my wrists, Ansel licking and sucking me, then the rough fucking that’d followed. My muscles ached, but I didn’t care when Dean’s fingers dipped inside. He nibbled at the nape of my neck to rile me up more, and I raised my hand to curl it around his head and stroke his hair. Once Dean nestled his cock against me, a raspy wheeze tumbled from my lips, encouraging the glide of his cockhead on my pussy lips. I’d missed this last night.
But he’d been off last night. Way off.
“Fuck me,” I said again, louder. I arched up my ass. Dean took his time, dragging himself along me, circling his fingers around my clit and rubbing it to wind me tight. “God, now. Please.”
He mouthed my neck. “Are you sure? That’s what you want?”
Why would he ask? Was there any question? “Yes!”
He used the width of his chest to steer me onto my belly, a quick, forceful move before the hand on my clit pulled out from beneath me. Then he shoved my legs together. I craned my neck to breathe through the smother of the pillows, while Dean guided the head of his cock into the minimal space between my thighs and against me. When he pushed past my entrance, he sank inside so easily I moaned. He grunted before grabbing my wrists and shoving them up over my head. “Don’t you move.”
I laced my fingers together and clenched around his length. Dean sank in, deeper, and I wedged my ass up to meet him. But he flattened both his palms on me, pinning me in place.
“You’re mine, Maya.” He’d said this plenty of times before, just as I’d said I was his. But now, his words were intense. Possessive. They sent a weird ripple through me, the rough slam of his hips urging, his weight holding me there, making it impossible to shift much or do anything but take the plunge of his cock. My back strained at the angle, but in truth, I loved this—the way he took me over with the sounds spilling from his throat like they did now. They were ragged, breathy grunts that came in desperate bursts to my ears, charging me up inside. Dean’s nails cut into my hips with how hard he held on to me. I pinched my eyes shut in surprise, a blitz of sensation swirling with every thrust. He started to pant, fucking me faster, harder, wresting my breath with his force. His words came, a garbled, “Need you. You’re mine.”
“Yes!” I cried. His urgency spun me out. His calves pressed along my outer thighs, completely locking me in place with his heave inside. When he propped his weight on one hand, he slapped the other hard against the side of my ass. I squealed before he did it again, then reached up for my shoulder as he kept his cock implanted. He gave a tug to draw me up, my ass in the air, my arms over my head. My cheek chafed against the sheets with his speed, the pounding somehow harder and deeper, stretching me until I thought I’d break. He groaned and circled his arm around. His fingers were rough on my clit, amplifying my pleasure while he slammed inside. I moaned, as turned on by his intensity as I was thrown by it, his breathy words spinning me off into space.
“Come for me, naughty.” He bit at my back when he drove again. The pressure seized my senses, summoning cries from deep inside. “For me, Maya,” he croaked. He felt amazing, but something in his voice washed up nerves in me. Was he jealous? My teeth dug into my lip as he plowed forward again, but my arousal spiraled alongside my attempts to think. Was he? That didn’t make sense. He’d been game. Right? When he thrust again, he dug his fingertips into my clit. The pressure struck so perfectly that I threw back my head.
“Oh, God!” A torrent of bliss raged through me. I shuddered.
Dean increased his pace, his fingers dragging up my belly and onto my breasts, gripping flesh before he clawed both hands back to my hips. He grasped them, hard. “Yes. Mine.” His sounds grew savage, his thrusts impaling. I couldn’t think anymore, and I gritted my teeth and gripped my fingers tighter together, gasping into the sheets with such pleasure. The drives of his cock split me into pieces. I loved when he got carried away like this, his thrusts penetrating stabs.
I growled, “Yes. Harder, Dean. More, yes!” He struck the side of my ass again, sharper, making me buck back against him in surprise. “Yes!” I howled, and then he uttered a cry, burying himself inside and coming with his teeth clamped on my skin. I tried to regain my breath but lost it with the quick way he drew up his chest to take a blistering strike of my ass cheek with his flattened palm. “Shit!” It was harder than he’d every struck before, the sting shooting through my pelvis. I flinched and jerked forward, almost all the way off him, but with the quakes of my body, I eased back. I needed him deep again.
But Dean froze. His hands flew off me and left my skin cold. “Fuck. I’m sorry. You okay?”
When he withdrew, the emptiness was too sudden. I angled my head to see him through the spin of my head, confused by his awkward prop at the end of the bed, his hands floating midair. “I’m good. Why did you...?”
He backed off the bed, standing awkwardly behind me. His hand slipped straight into his hair and he pinched his lips tight. Aftershocks fuzzed my vision, but I tried to comprehend. Was this meant to be some sort of tease?
“Dean?”
“I’m sorry.” He changed directions, instantly crawling up the bed and curving an arm around me.
“What—”
In a second, he’d tugged me onto my side, yanking me against him to clutch my body like he was trying to comfort me.
What the hell?
I sucked in a heavy breath, my flesh sensitive, my face numb. Abrupt endings were not us, and the drip of his come out of me and onto the sheets was nothing but a reminder of this. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” he murmured.
I brought my palm to my forehead, starting to come to, not sure what to make of him. Were we done? I wiggled my ass but he wasn’t playing, and our wet spot nagged my hip. “Scoot over.”
He did, silent, nesting me in his arms all over again once we moved a few inches farther from the center of the bed. I freed my arm to curve a hand behind me, grazing the back of his thigh. His quiet reminded me of last night and the weird, unexplained brawl he’d had with Ansel. I didn’t like this—the weight of silence reverberating around us with no explanation. I rubbed the arm he held looped around me. “I’m going to need you to talk to me, Dean.”
“Can we just lay here?” He kissed the top of my head and squeezed me tighter, a reassuring gesture that was somehow supposed to make me ignore the discomfort in his voice and his obvious avoidance of whatever the fuck was going on. When he scooped his foot under mine in the familiar way one of us often did, irritation trickled through me.
“No. I think we need to talk about it.”
“There’s nothing to talk about.” His arm loosened, and at his scoot away, the sheets tugged roughly beneath my skin.
“You’re kidding me, right?” I rolled to face him.
Dean looked tired. “Maya, please...”
“Please what? Why aren’t you talking?” He didn’t answer and I hitched myself up. “What the fuck is going on?”
“I don’t need this right now.” Dean threw off the covers, the mattress heaving as he rose and rushed off to the bathroom. When he slammed the door shut, my jaw dropped open.
This is bullshit.
Frustration wreaked havoc on my body. I didn’t like the silence permeating his hide in the bathroom, or in the entire room, between us.
I didn’t like it at all.
The noise of cars outside grew louder, as did that of people moving about elsewhere in the hotel, upstairs or beside us, I couldn’t tell. Checkout couldn’t be all that far away. I stood and found my bag to check my cell for the time. We had an hour to get out, and beyond the bathroom
door, Dean turned on the shower without a peep. The water fell onto the tub, grating like knives on glass.
I fell back to the bed and glared at the ceiling, and waited for him to get out.
* * *
Sunday morning traffic from the city back to Alameda shouldn’t have been a problem, but the universe had made abundantly clear that it was trying to play a sick joke after the morning we’d had.
The Bay Bridge was jammed up in the way only the Bay Bridge could be, an accident in the right lane slowing everyone way down. Warmer weather had crept in off and on over the last week; now, the sun glowered its brightness over a blanket of cars and trucks, too many of them fighting to switch lanes without caring that it was an impossible feat, at least for the next couple of miles. The left lane could sort of be called in motion, but the middle ones were nothing but stalled. I stared out the window at a blue Honda crammed full of teenagers next to us, all of them grooving to the trip-hop that oozed out through their closed windows while they wiggled and passed around soda bottles and bags of chips.
They were having a better time than we were, since Dean’s car felt like a hot box of irritation. He’d turned the air on, but I was sure the stuffiness of the cab wasn’t due to the temperature outside, and rather, the volcano of frustration we both had to feel, smoldering hotter the longer we were stuck on this godforsaken bridge.
“Can you see it?” Dean asked.
I glanced at him. We hadn’t exchanged more than ten sentences between us after he’d gotten out of the shower at the hotel, his hair wet and his fist clenching the towel tight around his hips before he’d done a magnificent job of avoiding my stares. I’d stormed off to take my own speedy shower not two minutes later, shoving my dress in my overnight bag afterward and slipping on the casual clothes I’d brought, all while trying not to reveal how quickly my frustration flared in my chest. When we’d reached the front desk for checkout, the sparks between us were nothing like the ones we were supposed to share. They were angry zaps of barbed annoyance that even the desk clerk had to have sensed. He’d taken awkward peeks into our faces and asked clipped questions about whether or not we’d enjoyed our stay at their fabulous establishment.
Like I said, the universe had a shitty sense of humor.
“See what?” I asked.
Dean peered at me, then pointed toward the right side of the bridge. “The...accident?” His borderline sarcasm wasn’t lost on me, nor was my budding fury, which tripled with the radio tunes he’d chosen to drone out our silence thus far. Every speck of excitement over the sizzling moments we’d had in the last twenty-four hours?
Gone.
I tilted toward the window, trying to see up ahead. The whole section of the lane nearest the jam had become a row of huge semitrucks. “Not really. Just the emergency lights flashing. Those trucks are blocking it so I can’t see.”
“Amazing how this bridge backs up, isn’t it?”
“Yep. But I hope it’s not too bad. For their sake.”
“I agree.”
That droll exchange flowed into more silence while emergency vehicles drove up on the shoulder, and I lifted my elbow on the door to prop my cheek on my palm. Since the left lane was moving, we shouldn’t be stuck too long. Hopefully.
“I’m hungry. Maybe we should’ve grabbed a bite before we left,” Dean said.
His level of denial had me curling my fingers into a fist beneath my chin. The original plan had been to hit a fancy brunch bar down the street from the hotel before we headed home, but that had been set yesterday, before...well, before this utter fucked-up mess. Dean met my eyes and I caught the hint of frustration still burdening his. He hadn’t shaved for our evening out, and a day later, his cheeks were covered in the dark shadow of hair I loved.
I wasn’t an angry person, but as he stared at me, my anger hit teakettle whistle hot.
“When are you going to tell me what’s going on?” I said, trying my hardest to reel my tone down to a respectable, diplomatic firmness.
I knew I hadn’t succeeded.
Dean jerked as far to his side as he could and pressed his fingertips into his temple. “Is that your strategy? Force me to talk when we’re trapped in a car?”
“Force you? For fuck’s sake, Dean. Communication, right? You don’t get to act this fucking weird and not explain what’s—”
“Shit!” Dean slammed on his brakes, and both of us lurched in our seats. The car in front of us had managed to change lanes, but in attempting to zip forward, Dean had nearly hit the idiot who’d tried to sneak in our place. Dean slammed on the horn, breathing out a huge gust of air.
“People should learn to drive,” I muttered.
Dean glared at me.
“I meant him,” I said, throwing my hand out toward the windshield. God, were we this messed up? I summoned as much calm as I could. “I feel like I’ve been extremely open and honest with you. I know I struggled in the past to tell you my...” I rubbed the side of the ponytail I’d thrown my hair into and tongued the word, “stuff. But at this point, with what happened, we really need to talk. I need you to be open with me. Please.”
“Stop. Please. Let it go. What happened, happened. You enjoyed it. Everybody’s happy. Let’s be done with it.”
I scoffed at him, and he clenched the steering wheel before looking away. “What the fuck does that mean?”
“Enough, Maya.”
“Fine,” I snapped. Could this car be any goddamn hotter? I adjusted my vents and cranked the fan up a notch before folding my arms over my chest. “If you won’t talk, I’m not going to deal with it.”
“Fine.”
We’d moved up on the road, the police cars visible ahead on the right. They’d blocked off the area, which somewhat started to alleviate the congestion. Even as it lightened, my stomach was a bag of knots. I propped my head back up, watching the traffic and the light blue of the sunny sky, wishing I could focus on something other than the incessant, looped replay of last night and this morning while I tried to figure out whatever it was stabbing between us.
Ansel had been a...well, “stallion” was an apt description. And Dean had seemed into it until the weird pull away. Then there was that fight, Ansel storming out, and Dean’s desperation this morning that had, admittedly, been a little needier than I was used to, followed by the smack he’d taken that’d been way harder than normal. It wasn’t a big deal, but he’d freaked out all over again after that.
I frowned. I had to stop torturing myself. This was his problem, not mine. I adjusted my sunglasses and closed my eyes.
“Yes. There we go.” When I peeked, I saw that Dean had managed to drive into the left lane to start accelerating past the horde of traffic. “That’s better.”
Not really.
I stewed as the freeway opened up and we made it to my exit, then into my condo complex in record time. After Dean parked, he grabbed my bag and followed me in. He set it on the floor by the kitchen and headed back to my room, which I assumed was for the bathroom, and I went straight for the fridge. I heard my bathroom door shut while I pulled out sandwich fixings and threw them onto the counter, then came the sound of the toilet, water running and the swing of the door opening again.
When Dean came in, he folded his arms over his chest and propped himself back on the stove behind me. I pulled out the cutting board to make salami sandwiches. “Lunch?”
“Sure.”
Cool. Now we can eat in silence, too. I chewed my lip.
“You’re pissed still.”
“Well, a million clever points to you,” I sassed.
“Maya...”
“What?” I dropped the block of cheese I’d picked up from the counter, and it landed with a thud before I spun around. “Of course I’m pissed. We had this ridiculous, hot night—or what I thought was supposed to be a hot night.
Then you turn into an ass and start, what, brawling with your friend? The one you’d just sat by to watch fuck me? What the hell was that? Why won’t you tell me what the fuck happened?”
His cheeks reddened and his eyes darkened. But all I got was, “Maya, please...” He reached for my wrists but when he caught them, I used them to shove him back.
“No. No, ‘Maya, please’!”
Stunned, Dean watched me, his grip softening on my wrists and his face burdened, like I’d punched him in the gut.
Except I felt punched right now, with this stupid quiet of his bringing a tear to my eye. That pissed me off even more, and I swiped at my cheek before I jerked my hands back and shook them in the air. “Fucking talk to me!”
Dean grabbed for me, this time trapping me in his arms, his touch soft, his voice low while I fought the slightest bit against his chest. “I’m sorry.”
I held my breath, trying hard to be patient as he attempted to tug me farther into him. He was trembling. Why was he trembling? His chest lifted and fell in heavy, restless breaths.
“What is going on?” I whispered.
“I... I got pissed. At Ansel. But it wasn’t his fault.”
“What wasn’t?”
“He didn’t know. It was mine.”
I shook my head, trying to lean back to see his face, but he held me tighter, like he couldn’t bear to part with me. His lips pressed to the top of my head before he continued.
“Kendra.”
What?
“She died because of me... We had a fight, after Ansel was over.”
“Over?”
“Like...we were last night.”
Ansel was over?
He and Kendra had a threesome with Ansel?
I clenched my hands into balls between us, feeling the furious race of his heart on the sides of my fingers. I was shaking now, my jaw locked shut.
“I was jealous because they...got along so well. She stormed out, and when her car broke down, she called me for help. But I was pissed. I couldn’t drop it. Some guy came to help her. I told her to... I was awful. I... I told her to...go ahead and fuck him, too.”
The Discipline Page 22
