by Tarin Lex
“Killy…”
“Last call,” the server says, appearing at our table and prompting us to order another if we’d like.
“None for me.” I look at Kate, who shakes her head. The server fishes out our final checks and I take both.
“You don’t have to…” Kate starts.
“Let me.” So she does. When the server leaves with my credit card, I put my arm over Kate. “Do you wanna keep talking?”
“But everything’s closed.”
“I know, mo chroí,”—my heartbeat—“come home with me.”
Kate’s pretty hazel eyes lock onto mine when I say that. My pulse pounds like the very first time I took a big leap and asked her out eight years ago. I’m not nervous like I was then—a realization which pleases me. I just greedily want her to say yes. I want her tonight.
Without asking she takes my brew and finishes the last sip and then licks her lips and my cock lurches, hard and throbbing against my jeans. Does she think I ever forgot how she looked at me when she wanted sex?
I damn near groan in her ear when Kate whispers, “Yeah, Killy. I’d love to.”
Kate
It’s weird to discover that Killian’s kept an apartment in the city this whole time. Weirder is the fact I drive past it every day on my way to work. This whole evening has me feeling electrified. Conversation flowed so comfortably. And, yes, I admit I’m a little bit buzzed—nice and relaxed. It’s refreshing being with him. So easy.
And…scary, because just like that, I’m falling in love all over again.
I wrap my jacket tighter around me as we walk, bracing against the late-night chill in the air, and Killian takes me under his arm and pulls me in close.
“I’ve got you, babe.” He rubs his hand up and down my arm, warming me.
“I know.” I smile. All of a sudden I realize this may be my last chance with Killian Ashe. Someday soon he could be super famous, if he’s not already after tonight, and girls will be fawning all over him. Who knows, maybe they already do. Is that what I am? A second-chance conquest?
He leads me to his front door and I swallow my doubt. I’m just feeling insecure. Maybe nervous too? I need to get out of my head…and get his head out of his jeans.
“Make yourself at home,” he says.
There isn’t a single touch of femininity when we walk in. Killy’s apartment is all man, from the black and gray…everything…to the framed posters of his heroes—Lee, Silva, Pacquiao. There’s one framed family photo on the fireplace mantle. I survey his mom’s, dad’s, and twin sisters’ faces. My former future in-laws.
So he’s a fighter. He’s also a man—an incredibly sexy, funny, good man. I can honestly say I’ve never felt remotely as connected to anyone else as I feel with him. Even after all these years. My body knows it; my heart knows it. Life with him could be…amazing.
What was I so afraid of before?
Killian wraps his arms around me from behind, and I grip his forearms, resting my cheek against his arm. “You look good in my home,” he coos.
“I do?” I giggle as he kisses my neck, the warm touch sending my heart into a tizzy. My pussy clenches tight. I shut my eyes as we slowly sway in a circle in his living room. His touch, his heady scent, his voice…all so familiar to me, and simultaneously brand-new. I want to fall, and this time, I don’t even care if I get back up.
When I open my eyes again, I’m facing a bookcase which houses some of his medals, journals, and a big black binder that for no apparent reason draws me toward it like a magnet. “What’s that?”
“Come see. You’ll get a kick outta this.” He fetches the binder and pulls me down on the leather couch, next to him. He opens it to a picture—someone captured the exact, gruesome moment his shin tore, his whole lower leg and foot severely torqued in a way that inspires my own leg to burn just looking at it.
“Killy. Why are you showing me this?”
He turns the page. Completely oblivious to how I’m feeling right now. It’s a coffee-stained photocopy of his hospital admissions report. Broken tibia. Nerve damage. Requires emergency surgery. “I kept everything.”
“Wh-why?” Dread comes over me, manifesting as cold shivers and a manically beating heart. My breath shudders. My fingers tremble as if I’m reliving the tangible moment, and all those horrible months that followed, all over again.
“It helps to think about it sometimes,” Killy says. “I shouldn’t have let it happen to me, but instead of crumbling over it, I kept going. I never gave up.” He smiles at me as if I’m supposed to smile back.
He has no idea how it makes me feel, does he? Does he even know why we broke up?
All this time, Killian’s made every attempt to encapsulate an experience I’ve tried so damn hard to forget. I do manage to smile, weakly, even as every buried anxiety flares in my chest. He turns another page and I press my hand down to cover the x-rays I don’t want to see.
“I can’t.” I shake my head, standing up.
“Can’t what?”
Tears sting behind my eyes. “I can’t.”
“Now just hold on a second.” Killy stalks after me. “Talk to me, Love.” He tugs my arm. At the front door, I shove him back. “Kate. Speak.”
“I can’t.”
Five
Killian
Not sure What The Fuck just happened. In the span of two hours I went from hopeful to horny to hurt. Confused. We were talking, what gives? Not like the accident happened to her.
So what the feck did I do wrong?
I shouldn’t pursue her down the street. She wants to leave, I should just let her leave. Don’t ask questions. Don’t put up a fight. Save those for the Octagon… but that’s old logic circling back, and it didn’t work out well the first time I let her go. I’ve wisened up.
I’m not letting her go again.
It doesn’t take long before I catch up. She’s out of breath, which could work very well in my favor. I can do a lot of talking and she can listen. But for all the questions I have spinning through my mind on my way to her, I fall mute the moment I have her full attention.
We stand there, observing each other. I don’t know what to make of Kate’s expression, or her silence after she catches her breath and still says nothing, and maybe that’s my problem all along. The fact that I can’t read her mind.
“You’re gonna have to tell me what happened back there, Love. Don’t make me guess.”
“I…” She struggles holding her gaze to mine. Looking everywhere except my face. “Um…”
“I let you go.” If she’s lost for words, fine, I’ll fill the silence with my own. “I let you rip yourself from my life five years ago, with zero explanation on your part, zero effort on my part to convince you to stay.” I unleash those, but I have to bite down on further resentments. Not just toward her. The resentments I feel toward myself. She has to know how it’s been for me. “Don’t you know it’s hell without you? I’ve been a mess.”
She rolls her eyes, dryly grinning. “I watched your debut. You seem to be doing quite alright.”
“On the mat, sure. But relationships? Pff. There’s no one in the world like you, Kate. No One In The Fecking World. And now I’ve found you again.”
“You…were looking for me?”
“No, Kate. Not once.” I sigh, humorlessly. She looks guarded, hurt. She has no fuckin’ right to be hurt. “Not on purpose, anyhow,” I admit. “I let you turn my world upside down for no good reason, and I did nothing. Nothing!”
I grit my teeth, harnessing my temper as well as I’m able. She won’t listen if I’m fired up. I ball my hands into fists, and squeeze, squeeze, and then let go. Every knot of tension springs release.
“Now you’re here, Love.” Mo chroí. “You know where I live,” I say, softening my tone the best I can. Which is to say, not all that soft. “To be honest with you I’m a little bit jarred.”
“Honest,” she echoes, rolling the word around her mouth, feeling it out.
I narrow my eyes, pinning her with them. “You won’t do that to me again.”
She looks up at me, her eyes saucered. I’m frightening her now? Good.
“I had my reasons,” Kate says.
I huff a laugh and cross my arms. “Care to elaborate, babe?”
“You were…” She crosses her arms, a mirror of me. Except that she’s pretty where I’m coarse. Soft in places where I’m hard. Pure, sweet, ravishing, even when she’s pissed at me. “I was…” I watch her swallow and flick her gaze askance again. She can’t hide tears threatening to drown those bewitching hazel orbs. “I thought…”
Suddenly all of the gears nock into place, and the wheel spins. Fucking Christ, I’ve been an eejit. Now I get it.
I uncross my arms. I use them to uncross hers. She gasps when I pull her into my chest, but she doesn’t resist, and I hold her there, as close to me as I possibly can.
“I don’t know what it is you’re feeling, but I know it’s something big, something very, very real to you…” I stroke her hair and her breathing slows, matching my own. “…but you have no idea how to express that to me.”
A long silence comes after that. Followed by sobs.
“I can’t unwrap this, Love,” I whisper. My best attempt at soothing her. “I can’t guess meaning from only your face and tone of voice. Maybe I’m foolish—”
“You’re not.”
“Maybe other men could—”
“Stop,” she says, castigating. She looks up at me, her unrestrained tears tracking mascara down her cheeks. My heart tips. “I’ve never been good at expressing myself,” Kate admits. “Half the time I don’t know what I’m feeling until it’s passed. And when I do, I don’t always have the words to…color that in.”
She sobs more, disarming me. This is far, far from my arena. I feel hopeless, helpless.
“It isn’t your fault,” she says. “I-I’m so sorry. That…I could never explain myself to you.”
“Do it now, then.” I hold her face. “Tell me what the fuck, Kate.”
She inhales shakily and cries some more before she can take a steadying breath. No, she’s not getting out of this one. Not out of my hold. Not out of my life. Not out of my fecking sight. Not tonight.
“You…” Kate wipes her tears, all on her own. “You love to fight.”
Eh? “I’m not fighting you now, Love. We’re talki—”
“That’s not what I mean.”
I shake my head. “I didn’t choose MMA over you. I chose not to give up on a dream I had.”
“Even when it killed me?”
“It killed you?” I grind out. “You killed me!”
“It was so hard to watch you get hurt!” She pushes back from me, impressively, actually. “Talk about hell? It was hell to see the guy I love go head-to-head with bigger men, stronger men, more experienced fighters. Sure, you overcame, a lot—and then you didn’t. And in that moment I realized how truly hard it would be for me if anything worse ever happened to you. If that ever happened to you again.”
“Worse things will happen, I assure you, Love. That’s the game.”
“It wasn’t a game to me.” Kate tosses her hands, ruefully. “That was the difference,” she cries. “I love you, Killy! And you love fighting!”
“Is that what ye think?” I reach for her face again, her chin this time, and move in close, leveling almost every inch of space between us. I tilt her face so her eyes see mine, and nothing else. “Fighting is who I am, a ghrá, a chroí”—my beloved, my heart—“I don’t love fighting. I love you.”
Her eyes go wide. Her breathing snags. Love—she said it, now I said it.
“I have always loved ye.” I dip my head to claim her mouth.
Everything spins.
Six
Kate
I feel lit to my toes when Killian kisses me outside his apartment building. I don’t even realize that I never forgot the way he tastes until his lips are on my lips, his mouth slowly opening me in every way, his tongue diving deep to tangle with my own. My fingers curl in his thick black hair, such a familiar texture. He holds me closer by my waist; I jump up to sling my legs around his hips. He catches me and my core catches fire. He needs to take me back inside before his neighbors see way more than they bargained for. My dignity and self-control are crumbling, hard, fast.
Holding me steady in his brawn, brown, whipcord arms, Killy carries me back to his place, barely ungluing his mouth from mine. His tongue teasing, tasting, provoking me, senselessly. We step over the threshold and he kicks the door shut and presses me against the wall, holding my cheeks almost too firmly with both hands.
He pins me with another stern, measured expression.
My heart scuttles up to my throat.
His dark-dark gaze darkens even more. Is that anger in his eyes, or…yen?
He says, “I’m so goddamn angry with you.”
Well that answers that. I’m still wrapped around him, my hands circling the back of his neck. He doesn’t lower me to my feet. I don’t dare let go.
“Five years,” he says, gruffly.
“I know,” I answer, softly.
“Never. Again.” He kisses me, hard. “You understand me?”
There’s always been a blurry, muddied line separating Killian’s ire from his desire, but he’s never taken it too far with me. Not once. I love him. I trust him with everything. My heart included.
My future too.
My breathing steadies, a little. “Yes, Killy. I know that.” I hear my own resolve in my voice. MMA is his passion, no more or less than I am, but altogether different. I love him, and that’s that. I tried to stop loving him, tried so very, very hard, but that didn’t work.
I’ll love him no matter what.
“Kate, baby.” Tenderly now, he swipes a feral strand of hair out of my face. “We have a lot of making up to do.”
And there goes my heart again. “Yeah we do.”
“I love you, Kate.”
I love you too. It’s right there on the tip of my tongue, but he already knows it. “Show me,” I whimper.
Killian’s wicked grin makes me wonder if I shouldn’t have said that. “I’m warning ye, doll.” I’d almost forget his accent if it didn’t thicken with his emotion. He skates a finger down my face and neck, to the sensitive hollow beneath my throat, and a swirl in my belly twists lower.
My heart pounds. My mouth dissents like a bad little girl. “Show. Me. Killian!”
Another intense, one-sided smirk.
God help me.
Shivers coil down my spine as Killian’s mouth slowly descends, marking my skin with savage nips and hot kisses as he explores, peeling away every stitch of my outfit. He jerks my pants down past my ankles as he glances up, surveying every curve from below as he licks his lips.
“Don’t you look exquisite…” he says, taking his precious time down there, “…all grown up.”
I exhale a rush of air.
When he comes back up, he does it as slowly, with both hands skittering up my bare legs, proffering one long, tortuous lick up my inner thigh, damp for every imaginable reason, until his tongue touches me there, his mouth open and hot, wrecking every raw nerve when he wraps his full lips and warm, warm breath over my center, indulging a generous taste of my sticky-wet rose. So tender in its neglect. So…satisfying. When Killian suckles harder on the concentrated bundle of nerves, I can’t help but writhe beneath him, my back to the wall as I mewl with pleasure.
Killian smiles, languishing there, trying to annihilate me. I admit, I’ve been with other men since him, but never like this. Convinced no one could do it like Killy. Oral sex is so much more intimate to me than fucking. The one thing I kept sacred. I could never be so vulnerable with someone else.
Looking back, maybe a part of me always knew, or hoped, we would find our way back to each other.
And it took way too long.
Now his velvet tongue sliding up and down my slit and pausing just to lavish my throbbing pe
arl for long moments that fire me into delirium is almost too much. I reach down to hold the back of his head, not pushing him closer, but steadying me.
How many women has he been with since me? I can only guess. I picture an army of them—young, thin, pretty. Better than me… Worse is the fact the sudden insecurity has reared its ugly head at all.
Am I really doing this now?
What the hell, Kate!
It feels miserable when he stops, and I gasp at the abrupt separation. But then he stands up, removing all of his own clothing, and holy hot damn! A broad expanse of hard, new muscles shape his chest and shoulders, and damn near everyplace else, in swollen, rippled sinew and dense fibrous tissue I’m tempted to bite down on. So I do.
Killian groans in response. I bite into his thick neck and nip my way lower, taking another big bite or twenty of his pecs, and when I slightly bend my knees preparing to return the gesture and damn near swallow his cock, or try to anyway, Killian stops me with his hands against my face.
“C’mere,” he says.
As if I’m going to say no.
I stand up facing him, and next thing I know that insecurity reappears. He’s just so darn handsome…I look away.
“Stop that,” he chastises, angling my chin so I stare in his eyes.
“Stop what?” I shrug.
“You think I don’t know when your thoughts are spinning?” He claims another wet kiss, this one flavored with my own syrup. He unleashes a graveled sigh, and pulls back an inch, where his dark eyes see straight through mine. “It was always you, Kate. My first love.” His gaze sweeps my face, so close, so intimate. “My last love.”
This is it. I know it for certain. Forever starts right now.
I can put off freaking out over that. His payback, too. Because right now Killian’s fabulous cock is pressed up against my center, and I’m dying to be filled by him.
“Okay,” I yield, to him, to us. All the things.
He reaches down to stroke his shaft, glowering with anticipated pleasure, and with his eyes closed he lifts me up by my ass again with one hand.
