Ever After (Dirtshine Book 3)

by Roxie Noir

  He takes the joint back. Bites my nipple again, tongue lapping at me through the fabric, pulls away to take another hit and the wet spot from his mouth is cool against me, puckering the nipple rock-hard. I run my hands through his hair, over his shoulders, his neck, his chest, watch him as he lets the smoke leak out of his mouth and holds the joint up for me.

  “One left,” he says, and I take the hit right from his hand, then sit, head back, eyes closed for a moment. I’m still half-sloshing, half feeling as if my separate body parts are all drifting away if I don’t open my eyes and watch them, but I don’t really mind. It’s oddly nice to no longer be bothered with having to keep track of my hand, my toes...

  I open my eyes, exhale as Liam stubs the end of the joint out right on his counter, not even looking at it. He grabs my shirt, pulls me in and I squeal, nearly falling off the counter, only his solid frame to steady me.

  “Careful,” he mumbles, his lips already against mine.

  “That was your fault,” I say into his mouth.

  He chuckles, puts one hand around the back of my head, runs the other up under my shirt. Pinches my nipple and it’s like I’ve been zapped with electricity, sparks flying through my whole body, my back straightening as I moan.

  “As long as that’s my fault, too, I’ll be all right,” he says, and pulls me off the counter.

  I nearly fall, but Liam doesn’t seem nearly as affected by the pot or the alcohol as I am, and he catches me, rights me, grabs me by the hips and pushes me against the kitchen counter. We’re moving fast but it feels slow, like as he runs his hand up the inside of my thigh I can feel every ridge of every fingerprint on the soft skin there, like when he strokes my lips with the back of his knuckles each one causes a separate earthquake.

  “Jesus,” he mutters into my mouth, and I gasp for air.

  “What?”

  “You don’t hear yourself?”

  I ignore him, duck my head under his, press my lips against his neck, his shoulder, his chest, the urge to have my mouth against Liam overwhelming, unfathomable. I push him backward against his kitchen table, tracing the dark lines of his tattoos with my tongue, moving lower.

  I grab his cock as my knees hit his kitchen floor, and I realize he’s got a fistful of my hair, his breath quick and ragged, and I drag my nails down one thigh just because I want to hear him gasp.

  He does. He growls the word fuck and then I open my mouth, slide my tongue along the velvety-soft underside of his shaft, flatten it over the ridge, close my mouth around him and listen to his groan.

  Now his other hand’s buried in my hair, too, pinpricks along my scalp making my eyes water but it feels good to feel like this, like every nerve in my body is being used. I grip the base a little harder, slide my lips down his cock slowly, purposefully, relishing the sensation of his warm, soft skin against mine until he’s at the back of my mouth and I pull back, running my tongue along his underside as I do.

  I look up. He’s watching me, breathing fast and hard, like he’s trying to sear this into his mind forever, and I pause at the tip, swirl my tongue, push my lips down again as Liam groans.

  It feels like I’m going slow enough to be glacial, but I’ve completely lost my sense of time. I might suck Liam’s cock for a minute or it might be an hour. I just know that he’s got his hands in my hair, I’m relishing every second of this, listening to him moan and growl, trying to memorize every millimeter of how he feels in my mouth.

  Finally, I pull back and he holds me there, tilting my head back, cock bouncing an inch from my lips. His hands on my head are the only thing anchoring me to reality, otherwise I think I might float away, and as he looks at me without speaking I run my hands over my body, grabbing my breasts, pinching my nipples between my fingers.

  “You didn’t finish,” I whisper.

  “I didn’t yet,” he says, a wicked glint in his eyes.

  Before I know it, I’m standing, then I’m in the air and I yelp out loud, the sound echoing off the stones of his little cottage. In seconds we’re out of the kitchen and in the bedroom, where Liam tosses me onto the bed, everything a blur of motion.

  Then he’s on top of me, pinning my legs wide, mouth rough and needy against mine. I kiss him once and then shove him off, roll him onto his back. He lets me, grinning as I straddle him, my hands on his shoulders.

  I can hear my own heart thumping, desire rattling through my veins with every beat: I want, I want. He runs his hands down my back, grabs my ass in both fists.

  “Fucking tigress,” he growls when I let his mouth go. “I ought to let you have your way all the time.”

  I kiss the side of his neck, lips under his ear. The world swirls, turns, the only solid thing in it the two of us so I reach down, grab his cock.

  “If I am, it’s your fault,” I whisper, stroking him.

  He smacks my ass with one hand, hard, the sting zipping through my body as I bite his neck harder, suck the skin there so he doesn’t go forgetting where he’s been.

  “I can live with that so long as I go on reaping the rewards,” he murmurs.

  I bite him one more time and then lean back, guiding him into me as I sit on him, my hands still on his chest as I gasp.

  “Jesus fucking yes,” he whispers.

  I sit back until my weight’s on him and he’s hilted inside me. I feel like I’m floating somewhere in the clouds as Liam grabs my hips, squeezing me hard, and I start rocking back and forth without even pulling out, just letting his cock move back and forth.

  “Just like that,” he says, his eyes at half-mast. “Fuck me slow and hard just like that and it’s perfect.”

  He’s right. I think I say something back, but even as I’m speaking my mind is ahead, elsewhere, leaning back with one hand on his thigh and he thrusts lightly, slowly, and it hits a spot deep inside me that nearly makes my body go limp.

  “More,” I whisper, the only word my brain can form right now.

  He does it again, hands rough on my hips, breathing ragged.

  “Like that?” he whispers, his voice rough. “Is that how you want to fuck me, Frankie?”

  I can only nod, every ounce of my attention completely focused on this, the intersection of our bodies, the way we fit together so well and I didn’t even know it.

  I feel like a virgin getting fucked for the first time. I feel like a college girl who’s just gotten her first vibrator, like sex is completely brand-new. He keeps fucking me, slowly, and I keep riding him, our bodies moving together in a perfect rhythm that I never want to end.

  His hands are everywhere on me. Liam grabs my breasts, sliding his fingers around my nipples, pinching them as he does. Each time our movements get a little harder, faster, more frantic, until at last his fingers are around my clit, slippery with our juices.

  I last one more second and then I come, fingers closing around Liam’s thighs, head back, half-screaming. It’s like I’ve come in from the cold to a warm bath, a total shock to my system, every fiber of my being lit up and wailing.

  I shake. I convulse. I’m mindless, coming and bucking, feeling as if my skin’s melting and my body’s coming apart at the joints and then Liam grabs me, pulls me down. His body goes rigid and even though I’m coming as hard as I am, I suddenly feel him stiffen and jerk inside me while he shouts, head back, every muscle in his body tensed.

  I bend forward, hinging at the hips, pressing my face to his, finding his lips with mine. Even as I move off him, let him slip softly out of me, I’m still craving him. I feel strangely like I need him to put me back together as we roll onto our sides, still in each other’s arms.

  At last he tucks my head under his chin, one hand stroking my back as I breathe against his collarbone, half thinking about how odd it is that under our skin is just blood and muscle and bone, half looking at an old tattoo of a roaring lion that he’s got right there, the lines slightly blurred and faded.

  “D’you remember asking me what I’d get you to say if I wanted you to talk dirty?”
he murmurs, the thick burr of his voice vibrating through the top of my head.

  “You wouldn’t tell me,” I say.

  “You got it right anyway,” he says, a smile in his voice. “Just shout my name over and over while you come, it’ll do nicely.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Liam

  I wake up before Frankie again, fairly hungover and with that dried-out-husk feeling that I always get after smoking, but it’s nothing new. Nothing I’m not used to.

  I lie there for a long time, watch her sleep sprawled out on my bed like a face-down starfish, half her face squashed against the pillow. It’s raining and foggy today, and somewhere in the back of my mind I think about how the weather matches the inside of my brain, only the inside of my brain feels like there’s a man trying to knock out a partition with a sledgehammer inside it.

  As shitty as I feel, it’s comforting, somehow. Feeling this way is bloody awful but it’s a bloody awful I’m well familiar with, a bloody awful that I don’t have to guess at how to fix. Deep down — far down, mind you — there’s a voice inside warning me off, reminding me that I know where this path leads and there’s a bridge over train tracks at the end, but that voice is tinny and hollow and a fucking bore.

  When Frankie wakes up, she’s in my shirt again. She comes into the kitchen, and I hand her a glass of brandy, honey, and water.

  This time, she doesn’t even say I shouldn’t, just drinks it and then kisses me, still tasting of alcohol.

  This time I make toast before I’m too drunk while Frankie’s on her knees, scrounging through my fridge, narrating its contents aloud to me, coming up with something we won’t have to leave the cottage to make. We eat the toast standing at the kitchen counter, a slight ashen smudge where I stubbed out the joint last night.

  When we’re done I stand behind her, grab her bare ass, lean over her.

  “You’re not going anywhere today, are you?” I ask into her ear as I run my hands up her sides, feel her arch into me.

  “Not if you’re gonna give me a good reason to stay,” she murmurs.

  I do.

  Afterward, we finish off the brandy and smoke a second joint while we sit in my bed. There’s only one left, and my restless brain starts wondering what else I can find in Shelton.

  Pot is easy. I found heroin again and again in countries where I didn’t speak the language, hunted it down however I needed to — I could find pot deaf and blindfolded. Everyone knows about the Chinese place in Brougham that’ll even deliver, but what I don’t know is anything harder.

  Which was the point, of course. After three times in rehab, clear-eyed and sober, I was smart enough to recognize I couldn’t be trusted. I’ve never met a temptation I didn’t give into, so I moved here, where I knew nothing and no one.

  Not heroin. Of course not heroin, but ecstasy’s not addictive. I could do coke once, maybe twice, and it would be fine. It wouldn’t be so bad.

  Frankie inhales, holds her breath, blows smoke toward my ceiling. Her eyes are slightly pink, but it just makes the hazel look greener, makes the sultry way she looks at me seem even wickeder.

  “I was just thinking,” she says, arm slung casually across one knee. We’re both stark naked, heat in the bedroom cranked up near as high as it’ll go.

  “What on earth for?”

  “Bad habit of mine, I guess,” she says, a smile breaking across her face. “If the Winsteads come looking here for the car I stole, I’ll take the blame.”

  I just look at her, not sure what she’s on about.

  “I’m not really supposed to have that car I drove up here in,” she reminds me. “Technically it’s stolen, and Alistair’s probably pretty pissed at me right now.”

  I tilt my head against the wall behind me. After six months I feel like I’m back home, half drunk and half high, only this is better than any way it was before because Frankie’s here and she’s half drunk and half high with me, and this time there’s no chasm approaching. I’m not going to fuck myself over again, slide down that long hill.

  Tomorrow I’ll wake up sober and I’ll stay sober and then we’ll figure this thing out. Tomorrow.

  “I do hope you told him off,” I say. “Told him precisely where he could stick that giant ugly ring he gave you so you could show it off to his friends.”

  She laughs.

  “I wish,” she says. “I wrote him a note so he couldn’t talk me out of it, left him the ring, and got out of there.”

  Couldn’t talk me out of it. I take the joint from her and inhale long and deep, wanting to black those words from my brain.

  “I ought to key his car,” I say.

  “Don’t,” she says, but she’s smiling.

  “Piss in the trunk?”

  “Ew.”

  “Plant some sort of illegal evidence there, get him in proper trouble,” I suggest.

  “You think we could outsmart the justice system while blitzed and blazed?”

  “You’re no fun,” I say, and lean over, kissing the top of her head.

  She doesn’t respond, not right away, and even though we’ve been fucking nearly nonstop for thirty-six hours, I wonder if I’ve crossed a line. If I’ve suddenly gotten too intimate.

  “I just want to be done with him,” she finally says. “Just leave the car at the train station, go home, not think about Alistair anymore.”

  “If you remember anything about him, I think I’m doing this wrong,” I tease, and she laughs.

  We get another bottle of whiskey and one of rum. Bless the invention of the telephone and the willingness of people to deliver anything in exchange for money.

  We’re properly drunk, properly stoned and it feels fucking perfect, like it’ll stay this way forever. Just Frankie, naked in my kitchen. Frankie, kneeling over my face while she moans, my tongue in her pussy. Frankie, kneeling over the side of the bed, shouting and sobbing my name into the mattress while I fuck her right there because we couldn’t make it to the bed.

  And finally, Frankie, falling asleep in my bed as her hair falls over her face, her breathing evening out as her back rises and falls. A stupid, naïve beacon of hope beating in my chest.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Frankie

  I wake up with a start at 5:12 a.m., wide-eyed and completely sober. My mouth is so dry it’s sticky, and my head feels like it’s filled with cotton made of pain and a jackhammer, like a pneumatic press is squeezing at my temples.

  I roll over and my stomach rebels, bile rising in my throat so fast that I clap both hands over my mouth because I’m afraid of what might happen. My arms and legs feel like they’re made half of cardboard, half of lead as I bolt to Liam’s bathroom, slam the toilet open, and puke my guts up.

  It feels like I puke for an hour, I swear. By the end I’m just drawing up stomach acid, then dry heaving, retching with nothing coming up like a giant hand is wringing me out. Finally, it stops and I rest my forehead on the toilet seat even though I know it’s probably disgusting, trying to breathe and stop shaking.

  What did you do, I think to myself. What the fuck did you do?

  I’m freezing. My whole body is quivering, and I feel worse than awful. Slowly, I uncurl from where I am, sit on the ice-cold tile floor, lean back against the wall. I swallow convulsively, again and again, because my mouth tastes beyond foul.

  The past few days are a blur, like a film with a broken projector that speeds up, slows down, speeds up. My memory is either too slow or two fast, time bent and broken. I reach out and flush the toilet, watch my former stomach contents swirl downward because I’m too exhausted to look away.

  I left Alistair.

  Right. I know that. That part’s kind of unforgettable.

  I left him in a letter, leaving my ring behind, probably the shittiest possible way to leave someone you’ve been with for three years. Jesus, someone you were engaged to.

  And got drunk and fucked someone else. Not two hours later. Oh God.

  Who the fuck does that?


  Not me. I mean, even in my less-than-pristine current state I know that I did do that, but thinking about it is like thinking about another person. Someone more daring than me and more fun than me who does crazy things like go on a two-day bender with a hot English guy she barely knows.

  And I don’t feel good about it. Maybe I will someday, but right now my mouth tastes like vomit and all the distances in this tiny bathroom seem wrong, not to mention that my stomach is still rolling and I feel like someone’s stabbing an icepick into my cerebellum.

  I force myself off the floor before I freeze to death, wash my hands, splash off my face. I walk back to the bedroom and peek around the door frame, looking at Liam, uncovered to the waist since the heat in his room must be turned all the way up.

  I have no fucking idea what the truth of the matter is. Everything is too tangled up in my head for me to make sense of it, here, in some strange cottage at five o’clock in the morning. Deep down, I know that everything’s not resolved with Alistair — I left him a damn letter, it can’t possibly be that easy, it’s never that easy — and I feel like now I’ve dragged Liam into this, the day after he got fired for being nice to me.

  Jesus. This is going to get around too, and then I’ll really have fucked him over.

  I rub my eyes, another wave of shivers and nausea passing through me, and suddenly I know exactly what I want.

  I want to go home.

  I need to go home. I’ve been gone for a long time, and nothing here in this stupid country makes any sense, least of all me, and I’m tired of it. I’m tired of trying to figure out whether British people are joking or not, whether I’m being made fun of, or whether they’re just like that.

  I’m tired of driving on the wrong side of the road. I’m tired of calling fries chips and chips crisps, and I’m tired of everyone here acting like the thing they call biscuits are in any way equivalent to cookies.