Ripped (Real, #5)(43)

It was such a genuine act of tenderness, I surprise myself when I nuzzle his throat, still feeling oddly playful as I drop one last kiss to his lips, wanting to surprise him by saying something he’d never expect to hear. “I really like the way you come.”

He grabs my head and looks at me in shock. “You being serious right now?” He searches my face.

I lick my lip and love that his eyes fall there. I’m feeling the best I’ve felt in a long time as I peer up at him through my lashes. My body is lax against his and I feel . . . good. Happy. Content with the world. He smells like a man—like the only man I’ve ever been with. He smells of my memories and my dreams, and my childhood and teens. Of the boy who drew me out enough to make me feel carefree.

He frames my face and searches my expression with complete intensity, his textured voice prickling across my skin. “I don’t just like the way you come, baby—I get off on it. The way you fight your orgasm but it takes you over and you can’t keep your eyes open. The way you can’t bite back the sounds you make, and you grip me like you don’t want to let go. Do you feel me?” he demands in my ear, clutching me close. “I’m stiffening up inside you and you’re still slick and hot, like a fist around me. Do you feel me?”

I close my eyes and shudder as he begins caressing me under my top with one long-fingered hand, relaxing against me as he slides down against the metal door and we stay there for a while.

A flick and the scent of tobacco filters through my daze, and I angle my head to see the tip of a cigarette glowing in the dark as he gives it a hit. He expels the smoke quickly and offers it to me. “What is it?” I ask, narrow-eyed.

“Camel. Just normal tobacco. I’m not into drugs. Guess they ruined my f*cking life already through my dad.”

The smoke trails out of his lips and I watch it, impulsively bending to inhale it. I cough and laugh, and he laughs and slaps my back. He smokes several cigarettes in a row and I wonder, dazedly, if this is his life. So I ask, “This is what your life is like?”

He looks at the mess around us and smokes lazily. “Yeah.”

“Do you like it?”

He shrugs.

Suddenly I realize that even if he still wanted me, even if he hadn’t broken my heart, there would be no room in this life for me. And if there were, I wouldn’t see Magnolia. He chose this over me. And I choose mine over this.

It makes me sad.

But I don’t want him to know that, so I groan and squirm free from the heavy arm he holds around my shoulders, saying, “You’re sweaty.”

“So are you.”

I try to put some distance between us, but he puts the cigarette out on the cement floor and looks at me, dragging his hand through his hair before laughing. “Do I have to be inside you to be touching you? Do you need to be f*cked to be touched, babe?”

“I hate displays of affection. They’re silly.”

“Nobody’s here but me. And this is silly.” He tugs the pink strand of my hair with a playful smile.

I sigh and yield to the impulse to press against him, acutely aware of our shoulders touching.

“Living with the band gets too noisy almost,” he says as he studies the ceiling, absently playing with my hair and making me feel childish and wonderful, just like he used to before. It worries me—a lot—but not as much as I love feeling childish and wonderful.

“Do you get away to be alone sometimes?”

“Not as much as I’d like.” He drags his hand over his hair again as he meets my gaze in the dark. “I think about you, Pandora. About us.”

We look at each other for a moment.

My lungs—what is up with them today? It’s an effort to pull in air, and all the while I’m trying to disguise it.

“I guess every time you make a choice, you wonder if you made the right one,” he explains to me.

“And . . . ?” I ask, needing to know his thoughts more than my lungs need the oxygen.

“And what?” he prods.

“Was it the right one?”

“You tell me,” he shoots back, his eyebrows slanted slightly in assessment.

“No, you tell me.”

“No. Because it wasn’t really my choice.”

I stare back with my own frown because, suddenly, it’s too much. This conversation. Him saying he didn’t choose to walk away. Fuck that!

“Mackenna, I can’t do this.” I try to rise, but his hand clamps on my wrist to stop me. I’m so hypersensitive, the touch sizzles down my nerve endings. “Kenna,” I say, and my voice falters.

Will you come to me tonight?

Always . . .

God, I wish I could get a brain enema and wash my every memory away so that it stops hurting like this, but instead, every memory of our past is with me—with us—as he starts laughing over my quicksilver temper, tugging me back to him. “Come here,” he coaxes.

I’m humming with so much feeling it’s indecent. Thrumming with life. It’s too much, it’s not enough. It’s torture.

He’s torturing me. Prolonging the moment until I finally, finally, fall—straight into his lap. Then his hand spreads against the back of my head, his lips on my neck. The gesture is soft. Tender. He follows the arc of my throat and shoulder. Words, thick and sexy, reverberate against my skin. Spilling in my ear. “God, I can’t get enough of you. You’re such a vixen.”