“Fuck. They’re in the side pocket of my duffle bag.”
I found one easily. He had plenty, thank God.
I held the packet in my teeth as I climbed over him.
“I never ever ride bareback, Danika, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
I decided not to point out that riding bareback was just what he was trying to do, which made it pretty unlikely that he never did it.
“Please, let’s not argue about it,” I told him when I’d moved to straddle his thighs, the packet falling from my mouth. “I’m not doing this without one. It’s not negotiable.”
He let out a noisy breath. “Okay. I’m sorry. I was being an ass. I just want us skin on skin so bad…”
I ignored that last part, opening the wrapper of the condom. I held the tip as I rolled it on, loving the feel of his hardness as it jumped in my hands. I stroked him a few times for good measure, before he waved my hands off.
“I’m not coming again until I’m buried inside of you,” he groaned.
I loved the sound of that.
I climbed up his long body, rubbing my wet sex along his cock, readying us both to ease him inside of me.
I rose high on my knees to position him at my entrance.
I circled my hips in a sultry display before I began to impale myself onto his length slowly. He shut his eyes, and the look on his face was beyond gratifying.
I eased myself onto him, one slow inch at a time. There was no other way to do it, considering his size. I was slick with moisture, but I still felt a nearly painful stretch as I bore down on his length, the last few inches very nearly too much for me. I didn’t let that stop me, though. I was intent on rocking his world, and a bit of discomfort wasn’t going to hold me back.
His breath came in hard pants as I started up a relentless rhythm, my eyes on his face. I bit my lip as I pushed down hard enough that it felt like I’d bruised my insides.
I was gratified when I saw how fast I was taking him over the edge.
His neck arched back, and he almost shouted with his release.
I kept moving, riding out each spasm of his pleasure. Watching him lose it was almost as good as losing it myself.
His hands moved to my hips, and he looked almost angry as he met my gaze.
“Okay, that’s not happening again.” His voice was low and almost mean.
I was caught off guard. “What do you mean? Didn’t you enjoy it?”
“Of course I did. You saw that. But that isn’t happening again. I’d rather not get off at all than have you suffer through it, more concerned with impressing me, than enjoying this. It’s not a fucking competition, Danika.”
That threw me for a loop, and I found myself blushing hotly.
“Okay, new ground rules,” he growled, dislodging me with two firm hands on my hips.
“New ground rules?” I repeated. “What do you mean?”
“No over-thinking this, first of all.”
I knew exactly what he meant. I had been more in my head than in the moment, and whether we were dancing, swimming, or having sex, he could always seem to tell.
“Okay. Fine. What else?” I squared my jaw as I said it.
“I’m in charge.”
“Excuse me?”
“Because I don’t want this to be calculated for you.”
“What do you want, then?”
“I want you to let go. I want you to submit. I want to make you lose your mind. I want you to be so far gone that the only word left in your vocabulary is my name.”
A shot of pure heat ran through me. I licked my lips. “How are you going to do that?”
He rolled me onto my back, looming over me. His brow was furrowed, as though in deep thought. “It’s really too bad we don’t have any restraints around.”
My eyes widened. He liked to find new and interesting ways to surprise me.
“Do you have some sort of fetish? How did I miss this before? Aren’t there supposed to be warning signs for this sort of thing?”
He chuckled as he rose from the bed. My eyes stayed glued to him as he went into the bathroom, gloriously buck-ass naked.
“Are you going to find me some restraints, Master?” I called out.
“Oh, shush,” he said, and I could hear the smile in his voice.
I just lay there for the minutes it took him to clean up and join me again.
My eyes widened into huge saucers as he set more foil packets beside me on the bed.
“One. Two. Three. Four…” I counted, wondering if it was even possible we’d need them all.
He smiled, a flash of his straight white teeth. “I was being conservative. I can always get more out of my bag, when we come up for air.”
“Okay, now I know you’re shitting me.”
He laughed hard. “Such a pretty girl…such a dirty mouth.”
I stuck my tongue out at him, and his face turned serious as he bent down to kiss me.
“I was serious, Danika. I’ve wanted this from the moment I laid eyes on you, and we’re not stopping any time soon.”
I tried to process that, but my mind wasn’t working at top speed, as his mouth moved down to my neck, and his body slid hotly along mine. I could feel his sex, already rock hard again, rubbing hard into my thigh.
I snaked a hand down, wanting to touch him, but he stopped me with a firm hand on my wrist.
He pulled that arm up high above my head, then gave my second arm the same treatment. “I was serious about the restraints, too. If I had something here, you’d be tied to this bed already. You lost touching rights when you pulled that stunt back there.”
“It wasn’t a stunt—I was just trying to make it good for you—”
“You were keeping score, turning this into something ugly by taking your own pleasure out of the equation. That’s not happening again. I’ll be doing the touching from now on.”
“You did the same thing, yesterday. You took your own pleasure out of the equation, too.”
“You’re lying to yourself if you think I didn’t enjoy that just as much as you did, and I sure as hell wasn’t suffering through it.”
That shut me up, that and the fact that his mouth had wandered south.
Delicious shivers shot through me he made his way down my body with feather-light kisses.
“Are you going to let go for me, Danika?” he breathed against me.
“I’ll try my best,” I gasped.
“You don’t have to try, sweetheart, you just have to submit,” he murmured, right before he set to work on me in earnest. Somehow, his words had the intended effect, and I found myself relaxing into his hold. Even when his hands moved away from my wrists, I left my arms where he’d put them.
His mouth was relentless, his hands everywhere at once, rubbing, stroking, driving me wild, and making me weak.
I submitted to him, my restless mind went quiet and dark, and it was the sweetest feeling in the world to let him take control of it all.
Something inside of me, in the way I’d been shaped, made it so hard to change the way my mind worked, and the way it worked was twisted. I felt so much shame when things were out of my control, and that control had always included sex.
For the first time in my life, I trusted someone enough to take that control from me, I gave him that control willingly, and that trust healed something raw and aching deep inside of me.
He had me wet and quivering before he poised himself at my entrance, the heavy warmth of his body sliding over mine. He held my legs wide as he entered me, easing in much more easily than the last time.
“See,” he rasped into my ear, “we fit just right.”
“Yes,” I gasped.
He began to move, slow, heavy strokes that had my hands flying to his shoulders, scratching mindlessly.
“I swear to God, I’m finding something to tie you up next time,” he grunted, gripping my hands back above my head firmly, his chest rubbing mine as he thrust, grinding into me, harder, faster.
I felt myself clenching around him right before I lost it, my head pushing back into the bed, a rough, desperate cry escaping my lips, as I came.
I knew that he followed me as his mouth latched onto the pulse in my neck, his breath escaping in a raw gasp of a noise, his hard length grinding right into the end of me and holding himself there, wedged deep, his length pulsing with his release.
“You feel so good, sweetheart. I swear nothing’s every felt better in my whole fucking life.”
I felt my body go limp as the powerful tremors eased, and his words made me literally melt. I had the oh so stupid girl thought that if I could just have Tristan, I’d never need anything else, not ever.
I had the crucial and inescapable realization that I wanted him. Not just in bed. Not just as a friend, but all of him. Every piece of the puzzle. I’d never wanted anything so badly in my life.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
He left me briefly, presumably to take care of the condom, but I didn’t even lift my head up to look. For what I mused was the first time in my life, I felt well and truly sated.
I’d never come with a man inside of me. Hell, before yesterday, I’d never even had an orgasm with a man in the same room. Tristan always liked to joke that he had magic hands, but I was beginning to lean towards the idea that he had magic in every part of his body.
Turned out, feeling sated made me talkative, and so I found myself spouting out revealing little confessions between bouts of sex.
“That’s the first time I’ve ever come with a man,” I told him as I felt his weight on the bed. My eyes were closed, and I didn’t think I’d moved even one inch since he’d left me.
His hand went to my belly in a light caress. “You want to tell me what that’s all about?”
My breath trembled out in a long sigh, and I very deliberately didn’t open my eyes. “Do you really want to know? I’d hate to unload on you if you don’t feel like hearing my life story.”
His hand went still on me, and my eyes shot open, going to his face.
He was glaring, and it made me flush. “Please tell me you know me better than that, Danika. Seriously. That hurt my feelings. Of course I want to know. Tell me.”
I just nodded and closed my eyes, not wanting to look at him while I spoke.
“Sex…didn’t start out good for me. In fact, it was pretty horrible.” My voice was almost cold as I told it. Just stating facts, I told myself. It was the old you. Nothing to cry about now. “I was,” I searched for the right word, the word that made me sound less like a victim, “coerced.”
“Coerced?” There was already clear rage in his voice. God, the man could get worked up in a heartbeat.
“There’s a bit of a backstory, but it’s boring—”
“Danika,” he said darkly, censure in every syllable. “You know me better.”
I did know better. He’d always been a great listener, a great friend.
“My mother disappeared on me and my sister when I was about fifteen. We tried to hide the fact that she was gone. We were good at covering up for her. I can’t remember a time when we didn’t have to, for one reason or another. She was an addict. Hardcore. Opiates had her basically bedridden for my entire childhood. She wasn’t a functional person; she probably didn’t even know what that was.” I’d spent a lot of time trying to forgive her for that, but it hadn’t been easy, and I still wasn’t sure some days if I even knew what real forgiveness was.
“When she wasn’t bedridden, she was gone, doing God knows what.”
He’d grabbed my hands, rubbing the stress right out of them as I spoke. It helped. It felt good, distractingly good, which was what I needed. I hadn’t told this story in a long time, and it wasn’t an easy one to tell.
“We hid it for about a month before social services got wind. I suppose it was with good intentions that we were placed together into a foster home. It wasn’t much of a home, it was a trailer actually, and the family we were put with was…not ideal. It was an older couple, poor as dirt. The wife worked. She was gone a lot. The husband wasn’t.”
His hands tightened on mine briefly before starting up again.
“There might be people with good intentions that help with foster care, but that system is broken. So broken that it puts young girls with old perverts without a qualm.”
“God, Danika.”
My voice was calm and steady as I continued, just stating facts, “We weren’t there long before he started…coercing me. He knew which buttons to push, as predators tend to. Lucy told me that. She’s helped me work through it.”
“He told me that he liked young girls, younger than me, in fact. My sister Dahlia was the perfect age, he told me. But he could be nice, he said. He’d let me be a good big sister and take her place, and if I cooperated, and didn’t tell, and didn’t complain, or cry out, or scream, he’d leave my baby sister alone.”
“How long did this go on for?” Tristan asked softly, something dreadful in his voice. I was thankful that dreadful thing wasn’t for me, but it still made me shiver to hear it.
“It felt like eternity, but it was just over a year. It happened often. In the middle of the day, in the kitchen, anywhere he wanted. He loved to pounce on me in the washroom. He’d bend me over the washer a lot, and I couldn’t make a peep.”
I couldn’t believe that I was telling this to him while I was lying on my back naked, but I didn’t feel the need to cover up, as though I just trusted him that much.
“Long story short, my sister walked in on us. I wasn’t fighting him, in fact I was cooperating, so she thought it was something I’d wanted. That ugly confrontation revealed that he’d lied about not touching her. He’d pulled the same routine on us both. I was a shitty big sister, and I’d failed miserably at protecting either of us. She ran away, haven’t spoken to her since. No idea where she is, but I know that she hates me for what happened to her, and what she saw. She was pretty clear about that. I tried to explain myself to her, but she didn’t want to hear it.”
“God, Danika…”
“He didn’t hurt me.”
He made a choked noise in his throat that told me he took strong exception to that statement.
“Well, what I mean is, he didn’t hit me or anything, but it did hurt. It was horrible, in fact. It’s hard to describe, but when someone takes that choice out of your hands, even takes away your choice to struggle, well, it kills something important inside of you. I’m still struggling to find that something I lost. I struggle every day with it. To feel whole. To feel a sense of self-worth that Lucy tells me everyone should have. It colors every little thing I do, if I’m honest, but one of the most obvious results of that ugliness is that it’s important for me to feel in control.”
“I got a boyfriend when I was about seventeen. He said he loved me, seemed to mean it, and I was so ready to love somebody that I fell for him hook, line, and sinker. I probably rushed into the sex part of that, but it was actually my idea. I wanted to get it over with, especially doing it with someone my own age. It was never about liking it. It was about…enduring it, and feeling like it was my choice. My next boyfriend was a slight variation of pretty much the same damn thing.”
My voice had stayed steady, my breathing even, as I told the embarrassing mess of a story, but Tristan’s wasn’t. His breathing was uneven, and messy, and spoke clearly of temper.
“Where does he live?” Tristan asked very, very quietly.
“Who? The old man?” I’d never say his name, not ever.
“Yes. Where does he live?”
“What? You making plans to go kick his ass?”
“Or kill his ass.” He sounded so deadly serious that I opened my eyes to study him.
“He died of a heart attack when I was seventeen. Been in the dirt for years now. No need for murder.”
I was teasing him, but he didn’t look amused. He looked troubled, and it was the kind of t
rouble that didn’t go away with teasing.
“I didn’t mean to kill the mood, but that’s it, that’s why I think sex hasn’t been good for me.” My tone was flat, but I felt so vulnerable, so open, and ready to be wounded again, and I strongly suspected that wound would come from whatever his reaction might be.
Words seemed to pour out of me in a jumble, as though I couldn’t say them fast enough, because I’d clearly rather wound myself, than have it come from someone like Tristan, who could really do some damage. “Probably not the sort of thing you want to hear about someone you’ve slept with. I’ll totally understand if you don’t want to do anything else with me. The things I’ve done are…disgusting. Believe me, I know that better than anyone.”
He was on me, angry and domineering, before I’d finished speaking.
He slanted his mouth over me, his movements angry, but his kiss so soft. When he pulled back to speak, his words were soft too. “You could never be disgusting, sweetheart. Never. I’m so sorry for what happened to you. You deserve so much more than what life gave you, and I wish to hell I could go back in time and kill that sick old man before he ever hurt you.”
“Thank you,” I told him, my voice thick. He’d hit all of the right nerves with a few short statements, soothing my wounds, instead of inflicting new ones. I should have had more faith in him. “But I really will understand if you don’t want me anymore.”
His answer was to move down my body with soft, feather light kisses, the contact sweet, his intent just the opposite.
He buried his face between my legs, eating me out with enthusiasm and skill. Skill and…talent. He had me gasping out his name, just on the edge, before he pulled back, turning me onto my stomach.
He pushed my legs out and up, until my knees were bent, my thighs spread. I tensed as I felt him positioning himself on my back.
He rubbed my lower back, and murmured soothingly. “Relax and arch your back for me a bit. I’ll make it good, sweetheart, I promise.”
“Are you putting on a condom? I can’t see.”
Bad Things (Tristan & Danika #1) Page 18
