Fractured Freedom(43)
“You can be whatever you want, Lilah.”
He said it with enough conviction that my throat clogged before I replied, “Sometimes, I wish we’d continued to talk through my college years.”
“Are you admitting that your issues with me stopped you from reaching out?” He asked the question barely above a whisper, and I contemplated acting like I hadn’t heard him.
Instead, I opted for lying. “I don’t have issues with you, Dante.”
“Is that so?” He pushed his thumb into a tight spot on my neck and then rolled a stone into it.
“Jesus!” I tensed under the pressure and tried to move away from him touching that spot. He didn’t let up. Instead, his body pushed harder into mine, making it so I couldn’t wiggle away.
“Relax,” he commanded, the rock still pushing into that area, but I tried to listen to him and let out a breath. As I did, he dug in harder, and I hissed at feeling my muscles being worked out of a knot they’d probably been in for months. I practically orgasmed from the feeling. Somehow, it was painful pleasure; the line you walk between agony and pure bliss.
“Dante, that feels amazing,” I moaned as he continued working. “I should be embarrassed by the sounds you’re pulling out of me.”
He rolled the stone over me again, and I gasped and wheezed. This time, his hands were lower on my back, and I knew I couldn’t ignore what I was starting to feel. My pussy had been wet from the start, and now I knew for a fact I would end up orgasming and making a fool of myself if we kept this up. I knew it was wrong, that he didn’t want me that way, but my body still reacted to him like we’d slept together, like it was desperate for him, and like I’d masturbated to thoughts of him more than once.
My body didn’t lie.
I willed myself to bring my hands up toward my shoulders so that I could try to lift myself from the bed. “I don't think this is a good idea, Da–”
He shoved me back down. “Delilah, you need this. Your muscles are rigid. You’ll go crazy with the amount of anxiety and pain you’re bottling up here.”
“I bottle a lot up.” Most specifically, my sexual desire for him. “That’s beside the point. I can go to a masseuse.”
“They won’t do it right.” He sounded irritated.
I hummed. His hands were like magic, and they hadn’t stopped. “They’ll do it just fine. Plus, this is bordering on the limit of what my body can take.”
He chuckled. “Really? I seem to remember your body taking a lot more than you thought it was truly capable of.”
I narrowed my eyes and looked over my shoulder at him. “If that’s a joke about that night—”
“What night? The one where I fucked you over and over again?”
“When did you start thinking it was okay to bring this up all the time?”
“Since the moment it happened. You just never give me a chance. You haven’t been to a block party or a Christmas that I’ve been to in years, Lilah. And if I see you, you’re hiding some turmoil I can’t understand.”
I counted up all the times I’d gone home, and most of them had been around holidays. “I don’t think it’s been that long, and I’m not in turmoil around you.”
“You think lying to a guy who pulls lies from people for a living is a good idea when I’m on top of you with my hands near your neck?”
He wrapped one hand around the column of my neck, and the other worked a shoulder muscle. My core was responding like I couldn’t believe. I knew my panties were drenched at that point, and I was having a hard time not rolling my hips into the bed to try to relieve some of the desire that had built up. He worked my shoulder until I melted like butter in a hot pan.
Instead of responding, I tried my best to focus on anything else.
We let the traffic outside and the waves from the nearby ocean fill the air. They were the only things that could be heard other than Dante’s hands rubbing over my back.
I wondered if silence made him antsy or if it was something he used in his work. As a nurse, we were told to get used to it, to utilize it as a tool when we needed a patient to communicate.
Humans, by nature, didn’t function well without communication, and I think as we evolved, our attention spans got worse. So silence acts as a tool to pry information and communication from even the quietest person.
Were we both so stubborn and well-trained in that quiet technique that neither of us would break?
I hoped so until I felt Dante’s breath near my ear as he chuckled. “You’re better at this than I thought you’d be.”
“Better at what?” I grabbed for the change in subject instantly.
“Avoiding the elephant in the room.”
“What elephant?”
His thumb dug into another tender spot he’d been working on. I swear he used it to his advantage to punish me for me not cooperating. I hissed, but he kept on. “The elephant that kept you from me all these years, from the moment you sent me that Dear John email. This elephant is going to keep bothering us like this little knot in your back here until we work out the kinks. You and I both know that.”
“Sometimes those knots are pretty big, Dante.”
He’d talked of my pain, but it was a devastation that had rooted itself deep within me and made me cold to the world for a long time. I’m sure he felt my muscles bunch under his hands as I thought about it. Devastation had a way of seeping out and showing itself, even if you didn’t want it to.