Rowan

by Tilly Delane

  “I’m that fucker’s best friend and brother,” he adds. “Pleased to meet you.”

  He nods sharply at my tunic.

  “You’re risking getting fired for that wanker?”

  I nod slowly and suddenly a naughty smile spreads across his face, one that definitely does touch the eyes and, fuck me, remodeled nasal cartilage aside, he sure is a handsome man. Model handsome.

  “You’re a fucking idiot,” he says. “But to each their own.”

  He takes his hand off my shoulder to sling it around the redhead’s waist and draws her to his side.

  “This is Grace.”

  Grace and I nod at each other and I cock my head with a smile.

  “You’re with this asshole?” I ask her.

  She grins back at me, my accent clearly falling into place for her.

  “Sure am. I’m his yank.”

  She flicks her head at Silas. I raise my eyebrows.

  “To each their own,” I reply dryly.

  She laughs, and a second later I find myself in a full-bosomed hug, surrounded by a soft woman who smells of vanilla and cinnamon and a little of car journey sweat.

  “Don’t fuck this up, Roe, I like her. We’re keeping her,” she says over my shoulder to the man who until this morning was nothing but an illicit affair.

  Then he brought his family to meet me.

  Rowan

  We hole up in Christine’s room pretty much all day, occasional food runs notwithstanding.

  Eventually, we need to leave for the obligatory communal gathering in the therapy centre at the end, during which the therapists blow smoke up our arses in front of our families.

  I hate that as soon as we leave Christine’s sanctuary Raven immediately becomes untouchable again. It’s been the first time that I’ve had her all day long, to love and hold and sit on my lap, while we’ve been chewing the fat with Silas, Grace and Christine, and it feels right.

  She didn’t say it as such, but I knew she had been nervous about meeting Grace, so it’s a relief to find that they get on like a house on fire.

  Christine is a marvellous host and makes us all feel totally carefree. I can see that she will be great at her job as head nurse here, once Raven is gone.

  I think about it as I lie in bed that night, Raven snuggled up against my side, one leg thrown over mine, and gently snoring across my left pec. She wore the stockings underneath all day, as promised, and I can smell how turned on she was, can feel her cream against my leg.

  But my girl is a lightweight, it turns out, and two glasses of champagne hours ago mean I won’t be getting any tonight.

  But I still get to sleep in her room and, though my dick is painfully hard, that’s plenty enough.

  I hug her closer when the thought hits me that this will end soon. Two weeks behind us, two weeks to go. But I already know that no way on earth am I letting this one become the one that got away. All I have to do now is to convince myself that I am worth it. And then her that we both deserve some happiness.

  I get the feeling the real work for me here has only just begun.

  Under the light of the bedside lamp, that she didn’t manage to switch off before she conked out, I trace the feathers of her tattoo with my fingertips and feel around the multitude of straight, long scars on her back that it covers up. Like splits from being whipped. She hasn’t told me what they’re from and I haven’t asked. She’ll tell me in her own good time.

  The way I will tell her my stories in my own good time. The only difference being that in mine I’m rarely the victim, and even less seldom the hero.

  I swallow hard as an image of Mum flashes through my mind. Not a significant one. Just a still frame from some regular morning, getting ready for school, her face slightly frazzled but still smiling as she hands me my lunch bag, her warm brown eyes, the male version of which I look into in the mirror every day, full of love for the world. For me.

  As ever, I can’t really bear it, so I concentrate harder on the woman in my arms, on the details of the bird in the storm on her back. It’s so much starker than my ink. So much more meaningful. I feel her skin pebble under my exploration.

  Her breath hitches as she burrows deeper.

  “That’s nice,” she murmurs, making my hard-on quiver at the prospect that she may be waking up to us.

  But she drifts off again and I shuffle awkwardly, so as not to disturb her too much as I reach over to switch the light off.

  She slides her hand across my chest to sit over my heart as soon as the darkness envelops us. Guess she’s not gone back to sleep after all.

  “You are hurting,” she says, and it is not a mumble.

  I think about Lewin and our last session before the weekend, when the good doctor told me to make the best of halfway day. And I was sitting there in my therapy chair wondering how I could possibly make amends to a dead woman.

  ‘Easy,’ I hear my mum whisper through the darkness as clear as if she were standing in the room with us.

  “I trade you my scars for yours,” Raven’s voice cuts through the echo of a voice long gone, and I take a deep breath.

  “What was your favourite toy as a child?” I ask her in a low murmur, half hoping she’ll go back to sleep, so we don’t have to go through this.

  There is a pause long enough for me to think I might have got my wish before she answers.

  “I dunno. I didn’t get to keep anything long enough for it to become my favourite,” she says soberly, but then I can feel her smile against my skin. “But I used to draw faces on my fingertips and the gang on the right would sometimes go and visit with the gang on the left. If it was a big party, my toes would get involved.”

  She snickers.

  I let it hang while I hug her closer, in awe not just of the woman she is now but of the child she is telling me about. I don’t wait until she asks me back, though. I don’t think I could tell her the truth if I waited for that.

  “I had a marble run,” I start.

  I can feel her hold her breath and I know she can sense that what’s coming is big.

  “Not one of those crappy plastic ones but a wooden one, old. Mum bought it at a flea market for me. Lots of pieces, lots of different ways to set it up. It was my pride and joy. Just fascinated me. I’d come home every day and as soon as I was in the door, I’d start setting it up.”

  I swallow.

  “Our house was pretty small, two bedrooms, one living-dining room downstairs, so I had to share with both my half siblings. It was ram packed with stuff all the time, so I often set up the run on the landing. I was allowed, as long as I tidied everything away by dinner. Mum would moan about having to step around it, but she didn’t mind, really. Sometimes, if I had enough time before dinner, I’d set it up, so it went all the way down the stairs. And that is exactly what I did that day. I couldn’t even tell you what weekday it was. It was that ordinary. Came home from school, set up my marble run, played for a couple of hours, until Mum shouted up that dinner was in twenty. So I whizzed around, collecting my shit and throwing it in its box. Like every day. Washed my hands, went down to the living room, where my brother and sister were playing. My sister was still so little she was in her playpen. My little brother was building a tower with Duplo in front of the TV. James, their dad, had just come home from work and was still in his site clothes. He was a builder and self-employed, and he was filing invoices. When I came down, he went up to have a shower. I helped Mum lay the table and then she asked me to put Sammy and Adam in their highchairs, while she went to let James know it was time to come down. I remember her steps up the stairs and her knock on the bathroom door to tell James dinner was ready. Next thing I heard was the sound of somebody taking a tumble. There was no scream. Only a gasp just before it happened, loud enough so we could hear it downstairs. I clicked Sammy into her chair and then ran out into the hallway. And there was Mum, limbs everywhere at funny angles, eyes wide in shock but not blinking any longer.”

  I stop talking while Raven
shuffles up higher, her hand wandering over my chest, upwards to land on the side of my neck. Her thumb caresses the soft stubble on my jaw. My instinct is to bat her hand away because I don’t deserve her tenderness, but I don’t want to hurt her feelings. So my voice turns rough instead.

  “It’s a joke, right? Leaving a marble on the stairs and somebody breaking their neck. Well, it’s a joke until it isn’t. My life is a fucking warning story that old wives tell little children.”

  She clambers on top of me fully, her knees left and right of my waist, her butt hovering over my dick and her left elbow by my ear while her right hand keeps stroking my face. My brows, my stubble, my ears, my lips.

  “What colour was it?” she asks softly after a while.

  “Yellow,” I answer without hesitation, and feel the atoms of grief and guilt rearranging themselves inside my soul.

  Such an irrelevant question and yet somehow, apparently, the one I’ve been waiting for all my fucking life.

  There are only three people in the world who I told about the little glass ball I found at the bottom of the stairs that night before I pocketed it and pretended to the world, to myself, that I didn’t know how she had fallen.

  From Silas, I got understanding.

  From Lewin, I got fact.

  From Raven, I get the forgiveness that lies in the detail. Talk about nailing it.

  I hardly get time to process before her soft lips meet mine.

  Raven

  I have no words of comfort for him, but I have my body, and ─ appropriate or not ─ it’s awake again now and it craves him. I might not be able to heal his mind, but I can sure as fuck assuage the pain by making him forget for as long as it takes us to chase our next orgasm.

  I lower my ass onto his still semi-hard cock, trapping it between me and the hard slab of his abs. The movement brings me away from his face level and he lifts his neck off the pillow, straining so he doesn’t lose contact with my lips.

  He parts them with his tongue, delving deep inside my mouth to devour me in that way that is uniquely Rowan. He reaches up to slip a hand under my hair and cradles the back of my head, tethering me to his kiss. I grind over him as he already goes rock-solid again, bucking against me with a subdued groan, the long ridge of his cock pressing hard against me, all the way from my butthole to my clit. I extract my tongue from the tangle it is in and draw back enough to whisper against his lips.

  “Roll me over.”

  I feel him go very still, sense the frown forming between his brows.

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah, Rowan, I’m sure. Help me forget.”

  “What if...”

  “Just make it dirty enough and there won’t be a ‘what if’,” I answer with more confidence than I feel.

  “You want kinky missionary?” he asks with a grin in his voice, and actually rolls me onto my back until he looms above me, pinning me down. “That I can do.”

  Despite propping his weight up and shifting it a little to the side in order not to crush me, he’s still heavy. So much heavier than Tom ever was. So totally different in feel and width and everything that I have to laugh at myself for thinking it could ever be comparable.

  “You okay there, lady?” Rowan asks through my low chuckles, while he lets a hand wander between us to position his cock’s head by my entrance.

  “Yeah. I’m perfect,” I answer as he smoothly slides inside of me.

  One stroke, gentle but true. Until he’s hilt-deep. Then he takes my left leg and makes me hook it over his shoulder, so I can feel his balls resting against the underside of my ass. He runs a gentle hand around to my backside and palms my buttock while he slowly starts rocking into me.

  “Good?” he growls.

  “Uh-huh,” I answer. Because I can’t find the words for ‘fucking amazing’. Nobody has ever been this deep before and it’s fucking magic.

  His mouth finds my ear and he nibbles the lobe.

  “Anyone ever played with your arse, Raven?”

  “You,” I mumble back. Because it’s true. He’s been gently skimming and probing all week and it’s been amazing. But he’s been waiting for me to give him the full green light, I think. I hear him blow out a breath across my ear.

  “No, I mean really. Anyone ever gone in?”

  He’s not breaking rhythm throughout this conversation even once, his hard length going in and out of my dripping pussy like clockwork, rubbing a semicircle over my clit each time his root meets my mound, while his balls slap gently against my perineum, and just the suggestion he’s making is having me clench around his dick.

  The pleasure is intense and I can’t concentrate, so I just garble an answer, but he hears the ‘no’ in it.

  “No, you don’t want it. Or no, you haven’t had it,” he growls into my ear.

  “Not had it,” I manage to reply through my panting. “Want.”

  “You are so my woman,” he grunts then withdraws and slips his hand around to gather up some of my juice with his whole palm in one lewd, scooping motion. I whimper at the sudden loss of him but spark at his fingers and palm sliding over me. I cry out as he rams home again, chuckling.

  “Shhh. You’re gonna wake the others. So impatient. Just getting nice and slippery for you.”

  He starts rubbing the juice he’s gathered around my butthole with his middle finger in gentle circles, going deeper and deeper until he’s suddenly all the way in. I feel full, nerve-endings sparking fucking everywhere, little lightning strikes of pleasure firing inside me relentlessly. And through it all, I hear him groan in my ear as he starts pumping his cock into me for real.

  “Oh fuck,” he presses out. “Fuck this is so hot. I can feel me inside of you. Do it for me, honey, please.”

  He’s begging. Rowan Hadlow-Fuller-O’Brien, The Python, is begging me to stick my finger in his ass and fuck me if that doesn’t drive me right into another dimension of turned on. So I slip a hand between us, gather some juice around his pistoning dick, and then I grabble around for my target.

  His butt is so tight I don’t think I could get even my pinkie in without hurting him, but then he begs again, and somehow my index finger pops right inside.

  “Oh fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” he mumbles as he finds my mouth and we fill each other in every single way possible, all at once, until we come together in one glorious explosion.

  Afterwards, we lie tangled and breathless for a long, long time, clinging to each other for balance.

  “Kinky enough?” he asks, laughing, when we’re recalibrated.

  I sigh deeply.

  “Yup. I think missionary is my new favorite position.”

  “Good,” he says earnestly and kisses the top of my head. “Mission accomplished.”

  I shake my head at the lame joke.

  “You’re a sex god but, really, don’t give up the day job for comedy any time soon.”

  He hugs me tighter.

  “That burns, beautiful, but, hey, I’ll settle for sex god.”

  I slap him playfully.