She felt suspended for a second, her breath catching in her chest, unable to inhale or exhale, unable to cry out as her orgasm hit her hard and fast. Her fist slammed down into his arm as her body clenched over and over, a sensation so strong that her entire body started to shake. "Xander," she strangled out finally, his thrusts becoming wild as her body slowly continued to grab his cock.
His fingers crushed into her hips as his hips thrust once more into her, deep... deeper than before, pushing against the back wall as his body tensed then shook as he came. "Fuck, Ellie," he ground out between clenched teeth, his hands keeping her hips pressed roughly against him.
Ellie collapsed onto his body, her face buried in the crook of his neck. She felt completely and utterly drained. Her bones felt liquid. Her muscles were spent. Tears sprang to her eyes as she struggled to even out her breathing. If that was what an orgasm was, she had never actually experienced it before. She had always gotten to that point, that point right before, that feeling of suspension, an all encompassing awareness... but she never knew what it was like when you pushed forward through that and crashed downward.
Fireworks. Those were the fireworks women always talked about. No description she had ever heard even came close. It was a completely alien sensation of being out of your body and yet, somehow, more in your body than you ever have been before. Every nerve ending had practically vibrated with her orgasm, leaving every inch of her tingling afterward.
No wonder people loved sex so much.
If her legs weren't shaking, she would want to do it all over again. She had been missing out for years. Her entire life.
Beneath her, Xander's heart was slamming against her chest. His skin felt feverish and sweaty. She took a deep breath, breathing him in, wanting to remember exactly what that moment was like. His hands moved up her back, stroking up and down her spine. She closed her eyes and just... felt.
Xander fought the urge to fall asleep that way... her covering him, straddling his waist, him still inside her. He felt completely spent. Every bit of strength had been drained. Damn if she hadn't been one of the most satisfying sexual encounters in his life. There had been plenty of nights at Lam, full of too much drinking and flirting, women all-too willing to fall into bed with him. Fast, punishing sex. Kinky sex.
But sex with Ellie felt... explorative, like she was experiencing everything for the first time, like each sensation was new and exciting. And she so openly enjoyed herself, so fully threw herself into the feelings that he had to bite hard into his lip to keep his demanding orgasm at bay.
Finally, he patted her butt and pushed at her hips until she rolled off of him, her eyes small and sleepy. She moved onto her side facing him, her legs pulled up toward her chest, her hand slipping underneath the pillow. Her hair was a wild mess around her face and her cheeks were flushed. He leaned down, kissing her quickly on the lips. "Beautiful Ellie," he said to himself, but she felt the words with a fluttering in her belly.
He climbed out of bed, fully naked, without any kind of self-consciousness and walked into the bathroom.
Ellie brought her hands up to her face, wanting to squeal with whatever feelings were trapped inside her. She rolled onto her back, kicking her legs against the mattress, feeling the sex-sedated weight of them and smiling wider. She heard the water in the bathroom. Scooting the blankets down, she slipped under, rolling back onto her side. Like nothing had happened. Like she didn't just have a little victory dance.
Xander walked back in, glorious naked Xander, tilting his head to the side at her. Because she was still grinning her silly grin. He walked over to the bed, moving the blankets aside and climbing in next to her.
She had expected him to roll away from her and fall asleep. That was her experience in the past. But then he moved down on his side next to her and his arms were reaching toward her, pulling her against his body, his head coming down on top of hers.
And he just... held her.
Ellie snaked her arm around his back, holding on too tightly and not caring. It felt too nice to be held to worry that she might seem needy or clingy. His arms only squeezed her tighter and she nuzzled her face against his chest and felt herself slowly start to drift off to an exhausted sleep.
Fifteen
She woke up groggy. Squinting into the bright room, she was completely at a loss for what time of day it could be. Morning? Afternoon? When had they finally fallen asleep?
Sometime during the night, Xander had rolled onto his back, pulling her with him. She had been sleeping pressed up against his side, her face on his chest. One of her legs was wrapped across his waist. The blankets were at their feet.
Xander was still beneath her. She glanced up to make sure his eyes were still closed before she started running her fingers over his skin. She lavished over the hard knots of muscle, the dips by his hips, the strange smoothness of scars. Her fingers stroked the big, nasty-looking one up his side when she felt his arm squeeze her tighter.
How long had he been awake? Knowing she was just... really into his scar? She felt her face heat at the idea, her fingers faltering. Feeling the need to explain, she took a breath, and asked, "How did you get this?"
Xander took an exaggerated breath underneath her, yawning. His hand moved down her arm to her wrist, pulling off her hair band and stroking the mark he found there. "I'll tell you that," he said, sounding half-asleep still, "if you tell me how you got this."
Ellie's hand froze, hovering over his skin. Because she wanted to tell him. She actually wanted to take a breath and tell him every awful, sordid thing that Nick had done to her while she lived with him. What he did when he caught up with her on occasion. All the horrors that weren't physical scars but hurt just as much.
Xander kept stroking the scar, waiting. "I know there is more to the stalker story, baby," he said, hoping it might open up the line of communication.
Of course he did. Because he was good at what he did. He knew stalkers. He knew victims of stalking. And she didn't fit that mold.
She bit into her lip. She could tell him. She could tell him without actually telling him. He didn't need to know who. That would only make it more complicated. But she could tell him the whats: the things that made her look over her shoulder, the things that made her scream in her sleep. She could tell him that. And, more, she wanted to tell him.
"He was my first boyfriend," she started, her voice small, making him strain to hear her, "and he was older and sophisticated. He showered me with gifts and compliments. And within a few months, he asked me to move in with him."
"How old were you?"
"Eighteen," Ellie said, shaking her head slightly. So naive. So easily persuaded. "I stayed with him for two years despite..." her voice trailed off, feeling the shame in a heavy, strangling wave. Because there was no good reason. No reason that, looking back, she could pinpoint. There were no children. There was nothing to keep her there but herself.
"It's okay," Xander said, his hand moving up her arm, "tell me."
"He beat me," she said, her voice sounding tear-soaked, though her eyes were dry. "For no reason really. And, at first, not all the time. Just when he thought I was being... disrespectful or ungrateful. A backhand in an alley because I didn't do what I was told. A broken rib in our bedroom because I didn't wear the necklace he bought me..."
Xander's arms went up and around her, holding her tighter. He had known a lot of scumbags in his line of work: low lives, people who hurt other people for a living, people who hurt other people for fun. It never got any less horrifying. But there was always something worse about a man who put his hands on a woman, about a man who took advantage of a woman who trusted him. A man who used misused his strength.
And the idea of little, fragile as a bird, Ellie being assaulted in an alley and attacked in her bedroom made a tight feeling settle in his chest. She had been so young. And she had put up with it for years.
"I knew better," she said, thinking of her father, thi
nking about the statistics, thinking about the PSA's she had seen, the articles she had read. "I knew all about domestic abuse. But I thought I loved him. And he said he loved me. And there were good days or weeks. There were vacations and picnics in parks. He knew what he was doing. He isolated me from what few friends I had. And my family. He had me quit my job and drop out of college..."
Once she started, the words just started tumbling out. She barely got a chance to censor the details of Nick and his business before she was mumbling away. "These," she said, holding up her wrists and looking at the scars, "are from the first time I tried to get away. I had just found out I was pregnant. I... I couldn't risk losing the baby because of the beatings. Or, worse yet, raising a baby with him. If he was willing to hit me, he would be willing to hit his baby too. So one day, I just made a run for the back road..."
Xander tensed underneath her, knowing she must have gotten caught, trying to not feel the hysteria that she must have felt when she saw him coming.
"I didn't get very far. It had been too rash a decision. I hadn't planned enough. He found me within fifteen minutes and dragged me back to the house," she recalled, still able to feel the sting in her scalp from him pulling her back to the house by her hair. "He threw me in the basement in... handcuffs. And left me there for a long time. Some days he came down to beat me, others not." Silently she added: he killed my father.
And she felt the tears then. Hot and furious.
He wanted to tell her she didn't have to tell him. He wanted to tell her to push the memories away, focus on the present. But she needed it. He could feel the urge in her, the need to bleed the poison out. How long had she been keeping it all bottled up?
"I lost the baby in that basement," she added, taking a long strobe-like breath through her tears. "I think he only let me out because I got a really bad infection." She remembered the fever, the bone-deep coldness that the cool cement walls and her ripped clothing did nothing to stave off as she hung by her wrists and shook, teeth chattering, sweating uncontrollably. "I was hallucinating with a high fever," she remembered. The hallucinations being the only bright spot in her world at the time. Images of her happy and safe with a squishy pink baby in a new town with new people. Her father was by her side. One of the worst feelings in the world was coming down from that fever and realizing it was all fake, "And I was thrown into the maid's quarters for them to fix me."
Was that too much? Too close to the truth? Revealing too much about him? But there were plenty of abusive men with money. Nick could be one in a million.
"As soon as I got better, I started working on a real plan. For months. Then I ran. And I never stopped running."
"Until now," Xander said, squeezing her tighter.
"Until now," she agreed. For now. It wouldn't last. She would have to run again. She always did. But, perhaps for the first time since she had to leave K, she felt sad. Not just sad, completely devastated at the idea of having to go.
Xander let her have her silence. He let her put her guards back up. She sniffled and wiped her tears. If he was being honest, he needed a minute too to pull himself back together, to push the anger away, to process what she had said.
It was, in ways, exactly what he had expected: an abusive relationship. But it was worse. It was so much worse than the scenarios he had worked up in his mind where he imagined some kind of brute of a boyfriend who just liked to push her around. And became a little too infatuated.
If, like Faith suggested, Ellie's ex was a crime boss, he was a different kind of monster. The kind of man who could break bones of people who didn't settle their debts or kill people who threatened the organization was a lot more dangerous than the neighborhood drunk with an anger problem.
Because it wasn't the same kind of anger. It wasn't the red heat that made you lash out. This was the cold, calculated kind of anger, the kind that made you have a place in your house where you could truss up your girlfriend for a weeks and no one would call the police, ask questions, freak out.
He was the kind of man that when he was done torturing the woman he claimed to love, he could throw her at the help and they wouldn't report him. They didn't help her escape. They just did what they were told and patched her up so she could continue to get beat.
But she had escaped, he reminded himself, almost choking on his disgust. She had planned and calculated. She had withstood beatings while she waited for the right moment. And she had managed to get away. And stay away.
If she had been eighteen when they met and she was with him for two years... she must have been on the run for four or five years. He tried to imagine that life: different apartments, different jobs, different paths to walk, never making any connections, never setting down roots, never being able to reach out to the family and friends you left behind to tell them you're okay, that you're alive, that you got out.
Five years was a long time to be looking around corners and checking the locks.
But she must have never slipped up, gotten sloppy. Because she managed to slip away. Narrowly maybe, he thought, recalling the night she came to him bruised and bleeding. But she always escaped.
And he never gave up.
Was it pride? Why would a man who was obviously rich and powerful chase after his ex-girlfriend for years? To save face? In front of his friends, his connections? People who had seen them together over the years. Wouldn't it just be easier to say she had an accident? She started talking too much? He took care of it.
But, no, he kept looking for her, taking off to new cities to find her when he thought he found a trace.
That was obsession. Or possession. She belonged to him. She wasn't allowed to leave him. He would find her and he would drag her back.
He needed to figure out who he was. He couldn't help until he knew.
And he didn't want Ellie to leave. He wanted her to stay right where she was... wrapped up in his arms...
What the hell? Xander shook his head. He wanted to help her because she needed help. No other reason. He certainly didn't want her to live with him forever. Definitely not.
Xander's hand slid down her arm and to his side where she stroked his scar. "This," he said, making her jump because they had both been silent for a long time, lost in their own thoughts, "is from one of my first jobs. I wasn't exactly licensed at the time. But I had a reputation..."
"How old were you?" she asked, unable to think of Xander as anything other than the giant, hulking, dangerous-looking figure he was now.
"Probably about... twenty. There was a stockbroker who heard about me. He grew up in this neighborhood before he got his life together. He had a son who used to come visit here, see old friends. But as they got older, the friends started joining some of the local gangs. And you know how teenage boys are," he said, thinking of himself, "always full of displaced anger and testosterone. Drawn to all things stupid and dangerous, no matter how comfortable their lives are. So he decided he wanted to join one of the gangs."
"And his father wanted him out," Ellie guessed.
"Not at first. He came to me and asked me to keep an eye on him. I think he thought the gangs would be like the gangs he had grown up around: vicious and with no tolerance for rich kids who wanted to play ghetto on the weekends. He thought his son, Derek, would piss the members off, get his ass kicked, and be sent home with a bruised ego."
"That didn't happen?"
"No. It was weird actually. The existing members acted like his best friend, taught him some of their secrets, took him out to bars and clubs, got him laid, made him feel like part of the group. But it was all just an act. One night I got a call from the dad who told me one of the guys had called him asking for ransom for Derek back. There was a video, Derek with his face all messed up."
"He didn't want to pay?" Ellie asked, not wanting to believe a parent would prefer to keep their money and let their kid be beaten.
"He would have paid," Xander said, smiling a bit at the memory. "But that wasn't t
he point. The point was..."
"He hired you," Ellie said, propping herself up on his chest and looking down at him, smiling. Headstrong Xander.
"Exactly," Xander agreed, reaching down and putting his hands on her ass. "So I did some looking around, found a group of them hiding down an alley. They had him stashed behind a dumpster, half conscious. So, young and invincible as only a twenty-year old guy can be, I barreled into that alley and took them all on. One of them got this one me," he said, looking down at the scar, "before I knocked him out."
"You got Derek back home to his parents?"
"Mmhmm," he said, remembering the huge chunk of cash he had gotten. "Derek still keeps in touch. He calls if he needs any help with anything. He's a lawyer now."
"Good job," Ellie said, leaning down and planting a kiss on his chin. Xander was silent, watching her for a moment. "Guess what?" she asked, a strange glint in her eyes.
"What baby?"
"I think it's your turn to be in charge," she said, rising up onto her knees and enjoying his eyes raking over her skin. She moved and settled down on the bed, waiting.
Xander chuckled, reaching across her for the condoms before kneeling down by her knees. "Spread your legs," he said, looking down at her. Her legs fell open on either side of his legs, unashamed.
He lowered himself down on the bed, grazing his teeth over her inner thighs. Her hands reached down, grabbing at his hair. His tongue found her clit fast, stroking in slow circles, barely a whisper of a touch, making her hips rise up to meet him, begging for more as her hands reached down and fisted in his hair.
"Oh, my God," she panted, her feet running up and down the sheets impatiently. One of his fingers slipped inside her, tilting, crooking to stroke the sensitive spot on the front roof of her depths. He rubbed against it in fast swipes, his tongue on her clit spinning in quick circles. A desperate plead escaped her lips and Xander pulled suddenly away, looking up at her with a wicked smirk. "No," she ground out, trying to push him back down to finish. She was so close. Just another couple seconds and she would be falling over the cliff.
Dark Mysteries Page 14
