My feet planted on the mattress, my hips rising up with each thrust of his fingers, trying to drive myself closer. But then he was lifting his head up, moving over my body again, his lips teasing mine for a minute as his fingers kept up their slow torment. "You sure?" he asked, his voice a gruff whisper as he pushed up to look down at me.
Looking up into his eyes, I had never been more sure of anything before. "Yes," I said, moving a hand up to cup his jaw like he did to me and he turned his head and kissed my palm gently before pulling his fingers from me and moving off the bed. He opened a drawer in his bedside table, pulling out a silver condom wrapper and slipping his shorts down his hips. I got my first glimpse of his hard length as he stroked it once, bent slightly forward as he slid the condom down himself then turned back toward me, kneeling at the edge of the bed for a second before slowly moving over me again.
"Nervous?" he asked as he settled between my spread legs and I felt his erection lay against my sex. There was that, in the coiled sensation in my stomach, in the erratic pulse in my throat, wrists, temples. But, more than that, there was want, there was curiosity. I felt my head nod a little and he leaned down and kissed the tip of my nose. "I'm gonna take good care of you, baby," he murmured and his hips rocked, making his hardness stroke over my cleft, hitting my clit in a delicious new sensation. I felt another rush of wetness as my hands slapped down on his shoulders, curling in slightly as his hand slid between us, grabbing himself and positioning at the entrance to my body, holding there, just a firm pressure before the pressure became slightly more, a pinching, a burning sensation that had my body jerking upward. "I know," he murmured, leaning down and kissing my lips gently. "Breathe, honey," he instructed as the pinching, burning sensation intensified and I felt him sliding inside me. I exhaled a breath that shook as my fingers stopped gripping his back and moved to press against his shoulders, not sure if I wanted to push him away or hold on.
His hand released himself and I felt his finger move up to circle my clit again. He pressed forward slightly, bringing another wave of pain that he quickly distracted me from with a swipe of his finger. He paused halfway in, leaning down and taking my lips. "You okay?" he murmured against them, rocking his hips in a way that they never quite pulled away or thrust forward, just created a friction inside that dulled the ache.
My eyes opened slowly to see his face, a slight tension around his eyes, a heat in the green depths. And I realized I was. It hurt. It was a foreign, uncomfortable sensation that was half-pain and half-unfamiliarity, but it wasn't like I had been expecting. It wasn't the blinding, shattering pain my college roommate described experiencing when she was sixteen, losing her virginity in the backseat of a car to a boy who didn't know or didn't care about her discomfort. This was the twinge of newness, of my body stretching to accommodate someone who was taking the time to allow it to do so.
Unsure how to explain, I let my lips curve up slightly and his did the same. "You feel good, darlin'," he murmured, the rocking becoming more of a movement than before and I felt him press slightly forward every few strokes, but the friction was doing something, was creating a kind of straining need that eased and overpowered the pain. My knees closed around his hips; my hands moved toward his back, digging in again. Another thrust forward and I felt his hips press against mine and he gave me another smile. Mine matched his when I realized he was fully inside me, the feeling something I couldn't quite describe, like a foreign fullness that my body had ached for all along without me realizing it, like my body had been waiting for it. My legs wrapped around his hips, driving him a little deeper on a throaty gasp.
"Johnnie," I whimpered, knowing he knew what I needed, knowing he was waiting for permission to give it to me.
His lips claimed mine and he gave it to me. It was slow at first, mindful of the soreness, increasing only when my hips ground into him, begging for more. He released my lips, watching my face as his hand slipped between us again, moving over my overly sensitive clit and I felt my sex clench around him. "Come for me, Amy," he demanded, his body tense with the need for his own release. I wasn't sure I could, but then his finger swiped again and the tightening threatened painful as his hips rocked again and I... crashed. My entire body spasmed at impact, my sex convulsing on a wave of pleasure that felt intensified by the fullness there.
"John... nie..." I choked out my fingers raking into the skin of his back.
He made a sort of growling noise, thrusting through, his finger just as unrelenting until my body collapsed back onto the mattress and he buried deep, his face pressing into my neck, and groaned out my name as he came. His weight came down on me for a long minute as his strength slowly seeped back through his system. His lips kissed my neck as he slowly lifted up, his finger moving across my cheek. My heavy eyes fluttered open to find him looking down at me with a gaze that held a weight I didn't understand. "Baby..." he said, his voice filled with something that was akin to wonder.
That was when I felt it break- the little piece of a guard I had left. It simply shattered. I felt a tear slip out of my eye, moving down my temple toward my hairline. Johnnie's hand moved upward and brushed it away. "Sad tear or happy tear?" he asked, maybe struggling to understand my emotions as much as I was.
"I don't know," I answered honestly and his face softened as he slowly moved out of me, giving me an apologetic look when I tensed. He moved away for the barest of minutes, disposing of the condom before he moved into the bed beside me, rolling onto his back and pulling me until I was resting across his chest, my head tucked under his chin. One of his hands went heavy across my hips, the other moved up to stroke softly through my hair.
"Know what I do know, angel?" he asked softly and went on when I shook my head. "I know that that was the most meaningful sex I've ever had."
Meaningful.
That word held a lot of weight.
It was meaningful. It meant something to him.
It meant something to me too, but that was to be expected.
It meant even more to me that it meant something to him.
Maybe it was worth the shock of my shields crumbling to feel how I did right that moment: content, safe, borderline happy, maybe a little... cherished.
"You okay?" he asked, and if I wasn't mistaken, there was a trace of worry there.
I swallowed past the lump in my throat and kissed his chest. "Yes."
"Hurt," he observed.
"Yes," I agreed because, well, it did.
"Still perfect."
"Yes," I agreed again because, well, it was.
"You don't regret it?" he asked and the worry was there again.
Hearing it, hearing a man like Johnnie say it, someone as laid back and carefree as him sound worried, it made me want to ease it. I pushed up on his chest, my hair falling like a curtain until his hands moved out to stroke it behind my ears. "I'll never regret that," I said in a voice that was mine, but wasn't. It was sweeter, more vulnerable.
The tension slipped from his face and he gave me a very Johnnie grin. "She can cook," he said, talking to the ceiling. "She can bake. She can look at all this," he said, gesturing toward his body, "and say, 'eh, don't see what the big deal is'. She can be hard and prickly and soft and sweet and she can love me like that... fuck..." he finished his little speech, shaking his head.
Something deep inside me violently tensed at the word love, like it was fighting against it, like it was trying to deny the very existence of the word.
He didn't mean it like that. He would never mean it like that.
"Uh oh," Johnnie said, his hand going up to press into the lines between my brows. "She's thinking again."
I huffed out an airy laugh that wasn't really a laugh. "I do that sometimes."
"Well knock it off," he said teasingly, lifting his brows at me.
This time, the laugh was a laugh and I lowered myself down on his chest, my ear right above the steady thumping of his heart.
The silence stretched for a long time, his hands sift
ing through my hair tirelessly, my body relaxing into the sensation. "Tell me about your parents," he said softly a while later, the question making me jerk in his arm, but he held me against him. "Angel, I'm already in. Stop trying so hard to keep me away."
I felt my breath hiss out, the urge to tell him stronger than anything I had felt in a long time. And he was right; he was in, in every way imaginable. What more damage could it cause by sharing? "My mom wasn't always a drunk," I started easily, the moment she picked up a bottle with the intention to drown something in it being the springboard for most of my life story. "Up until I was six, she was just a normal mom. She cooked and baked. She helped me with school work. She waited on my dad hand and foot. Then one day, she picked up a bottle. And she didn't put it down except when it was empty. It was gin. That was her drink of choice. Gin straight out of the bottle. I always remember thinking her breath kind of smelled like Christmas... you know... because of the juniper berries," I explained and his hands just kept their stroking. "Anyway. She drank and drank and drank. She forgot to cook and clean and bake and help with homework. And she did nothing but fall at my father's feet and cry." I swallowed hard at the memory that was coming, the bad one, the one that made me never want to feel that way again.
"Then one night, I walked out to find her like that, her hands wrapped around my father's leg, sobbing, as he just kept walking toward the door, dragging her with him. And I saw that he had a bag in his hands. Not his briefcase for work, a big suitcase. And I was little and I don't think I fully comprehended what was happening except I knew that bag was for when you were going away. He was going away and... and he never told me he was going anywhere. And my mother just kept crying, saying he couldn't do that to her, he couldn't leave her, that if he loved her, he couldn't leave her. He yanked back from her, getting his leg free. His hand hit the doorknob and his head jerked up to see me standing there. He stared at me for a second and then... then he was gone."
His hand stop stroking, but only because both of them moved to wrap me up tight. "What happened after?"
I felt my shoulder shrug. "Nothing. Everything. Life went on. I guess child support checks came in because we never needed to move. The lights never got shut off. Mom always had booze money. She kept searching for answers at the bottom of empty bottles and I kept on... keeping on. I went to school and did my homework. I tried to keep anyone from finding out the truth."
"So you kept anyone from getting to know you at all," he guessed correctly.
"Yeah."
"Baby..."
I shook my head at his sympathy. I couldn't take any more goodness out of him. "Then I was eighteen and angry and confused and on a mission to understand..."
"Understand what?"
"Addiction? What, exactly, had allowed my mother to throw her life away and, in a lot of ways, mine as well. I was so hateful and resentful and I wanted to not feel that way."
"You got there, baby," he said with a squeeze.
"Yeah. But by that time, mom had drunk herself into an early grave," I said, the words coming out almost dismissively and I winced at them.
"How old were you?"
"Twenty-one."
"Baby..."
"It's fine," I said, shaking my head, trying to shake it off. "Plenty of people had it worse. Johnnie, you had it worse."
"Amelia, it ain't a contest," he said simply and I realized that was how I always viewed it. Like, yes, my mother was a drunk, but at least she didn't whore herself out for drug money like so-and-so's mom; or, It sucked that my dad walked out and left me with an addict for a mom, but at least he didn't stick around and molest me like so-and-so's dad. I was always trying to belittle my story because someone else had a more horrific one, as if trying to convince myself that my damage wasn't as worthy of acknowledgment.
"How come you came out so well adjusted?" I asked out loud, not meaning to.
At that, I got a small chuckle. "Baby, I shoot people for a living. What about that suggests I am well adjusted?"
"That's not what I mean..."
"What do you mean?"
"Johnnie, your dad knocked out your baby teeth. He made your life hell for fifteen years. How do you not greet every morning with anger?"
"Honey, what he did to me, that wasn't about me; that was about him. I ain't taking his damage on as my own."
"But doesn't it bother you that he did that? That he took of his pain or anger or whatever on you when you were too young to defend yourself?"
"Sure. And when I was younger, I took that shit out on the dickheads in town who dared try to tease me about it. I took it out on them; though it wasn't about them. Just like my Pops did to me. And I didn't stop doing that until I got away, until I met Break, until I saw there was more to life than the anger and resentment."
"So you could just... magically let it go?" I scoffed.
"Might have helped that Break employed me to help bust faces for a while. Anger creeps up, you bleed that out so it doesn't poison you."
"You think I let it poison me?" I asked, suddenly too concerned with his opinion of me.
"I think you want it to poison you," he countered, making me stiffen. "I think you want it raging through your veins so that if anyone tries to get under your skin, it gets on them too." He paused, his fingers squeezing me as if to soften the blow of his words. "I think you spend your life walking away first, before people... before men come to the conclusion that you aren't worth staying for. I think you learned that lesson from your father young and I think you believe it; I think you put your faith to rest in it; I think you can't imagine a world where a man could want to be with you."
I closed my eyes tight against his words, against the truth of them, against the knowledge that he, once again, got me.
I was in so, so much trouble.
God, it was going to hurt when he became one of the ones I had to walk away from first.
"Come on baby, that's enough of that for today," he said, knifing upward suddenly, taking me with him and I whimpered against the soreness the jostling caused. Johnnie winced, kissing my forehead in apology as he gently set me on my feet. "You wanna take a shower?" he asked and I nodded. "Alone?" he asked, knowing that was what I wanted, but I nodded anyway. He patted my ass a little with a nod. "Try as much as you want, honey," he said, slipping into his shorts again, "but those shields are in pieces. You ain't getting them back up."
I felt the tears pool behind my eyes and rushed into the bathroom, slamming the door before he could see them. I brought my hands up to press the heels of my palms into my eyes as I let the first waves of emotions rush through me. I turned slightly, looking at myself in the mirror and taking a deep breath. "Pull it together," I demanded my reflection, moving to turn the water in the shower on.
So I showered.
And I pulled it together.
Sort-of.
When I got out of the shower, I wrapped the towel tight around my body and went in search of new clothes. I had just shimmied into the only other pants I brought with me: jean shorty shorts (why I even owned so many shorty shorts when I hated my thighs was beyond me, but I did) and a plain black tee, when I heard male voices. Meaning, not just Johnnie's. I finger-combed my hair and made my way to the doorway, pausing to listen for the barest of seconds, trying to make out if it was a familiar voice or not. Everything was muffled through the door so I reached for it and walked out, trying to look like I hadn't heard any voices ahead of time, like I was just innocently walking out of the bedroom.
But I was barely a foot out of the doorway when I froze.
Because it wasn't just two voices in the living room. No. It was five voices. One of those voices belonged to Johnnie; another voice was Cash's; yet another was Paine's; the fourth was Breaker's; the final voice belonged to a giant hulk of a man I had never seen before with a dark beard and freakishly light honey-colored eyes.
And those eyes were on me.
In fact, all five sets of eyes were on me.
And five set
s of lips were quirked up at the same time too.
There were five incredibly attractive men with their whole bad-boy auras in the living room watching me with knowing gazes.
I think my heart froze in my chest.
Holy hot-guy overload.
"Angel," Johnnie's voice reached me and my head jerked in his direction. "Come here," he said, sitting on the arm of the couch and patting his knee. I hesitated, already feeling like everyone knew a bit too much about what transpired with me and Johnnie. They didn't need to see me all perched on his lap too. "We have some stuff to tell you," he said, and there was a collective tension in the air again. And, well, I needed to hear what they had to tell me. If that meant I needed to sit on Johnnie's lap to hear that, well, that was just a perk. I mean... a necessary evil.
FIFTEEN
Shooter
Amelia showered while I stared out at the street. Something happened back in that bedroom. It wasn't as simple as being her first time. Though as I told her, it fuckin' meant something to me that she wanted me to have that, that she trusted me to do it right. It happened sometime after I watched the last of her defenses fall away. She let me in. And, in a way that I hadn't ever felt before, I wanted to stay in. I was just about to contemplate what, exactly, that meant when I saw them form a small circle out front of my apartment: Breaker, Cash, Wolf, and Paine. I guessed the word had been spreading and they had all pitched in.
Savages Series Boxed Set Page 38
