Stealing Cinderella(60)
“Thor.” I kiss his forehead and comb through his hair with my fingers. “I’m not going anywhere.”
His fingers curl into my robe, holding me hostage as I comfort him the only way I know how. Touching him softly, I kiss his face with a reverence I truly feel. Even in his darkest moments or his cruelest, he leaves me spellbound, and I don’t think he has any idea. But I want him to.
“Min Gud,” I murmur into his ear, using the phrase I learned on Google today. If I am his goddess, then he is most certainly my god.
“Ella.” He holds me in a bruising grip. “Don’t ever leave me.”
“Don’t make me,” I whisper.
He reaches up to cup the back of my skull, forcing my lips to his. He tastes of akevitt and fire, and I’m feverish, working to undo his pants while he parts my robe and shoves the material aside. A frenetic, desperate hunger swirls between us as we come together, and I sink down onto his cock. Thorsen groans into my neck, and I force his head back, so he has to look at me.
When our eyes collide, there’s no other way to describe it. It’s a clash of thunder. A coup de foudre. Electricity crackles in the air between us, and my heart soars. It’s intimate, and it’s raw and more powerful than any reckoning Mother Nature herself could stir up.
He moves me. He shatters my world. And I understand it at that moment, clearer than the stars in the sky above us. Somewhere along the line, I fell in love with this beautifully broken man. It’s liberating and terrifying, and I think I know deep in my soul this is a suicide mission. He’ll never be able to love me back.
Can he see it in my eyes? Can he understand what I’m experiencing as we become one on the terrace under the Norwegian sky?
“I feel you.” I place his hand over my heart. “In here.”
When he freezes, I cover his lips with my fingers and shake my head. “Don’t believe it. Don’t even acknowledge it. I just had to say it before it poisons me from the inside out.”
He watches me with an intensity that makes my racing heart smolder as I rock into him, easing his head back and falling into the only comfortable rhythm we know. Blood pulsing, hearts pounding, flesh on flesh. We live for these stolen moments. Whether it’s punishment or passion, this is our therapy. The seconds turn into minutes, our eyes locked on each other, neither one of us brave enough to look away.
He comes for me, and I keep fucking him until I shatter around him too. When I finally collapse against his shoulder, I’m too exhausted to move, and Thorsen doesn’t ask me to. I wrap my arms around him, and he holds me back, and we stay there like that for so long our limbs go numb, and the cool air prickles our exposed skin.
“Aokigahara Forest,” I whisper into his neck. “Tell me you’ll never go there.”
His body turns to steel beneath mine. “How do you know that name?”
“It was in your calendar.” I close my eyes and shudder. “And today, I looked it up. I know what that place is. I know what people do there.”
His fingers dig into my jaw, and he leans closer, inhaling me as he closes his eyes. “You could never understand.”
“So make me.”
He stills, the sound of his breath the only thing between us. It feels like we crossed an invisible barrier tonight, but I don’t know what to expect. He could shut me out, and a part of me is already bracing for that, but he chooses not to.
“My brain is like a radio constantly trying to find the right channel,” he says. “An ad commercial, lyrics, static. It never ends. But I can make it stop.”
“No.” I squeeze his face and force him to listen to me. “I won’t let you.”
“You don’t know me as well as you think you do, gudinne. You see something in me that doesn’t exist.”
“Then let me in,” I beg. “Trust me enough to tell me something real. Give me a chance to prove that I won’t betray you.”
“Something real?” His throat works. “What does the fire-breathing goddess want to know?”
I tap my fingers against his chest, working up the courage to say the thing that might provoke him the most. But he’s just drunk enough, and tired enough, and well fucked enough that I think he might finally tell me.
“Who hurt you?”
A cold laugh reverberates from his cavernous chest, and he shakes his head, eyes empty. “Nobody, Ella. I was lucky.”
“Lucky how?” I ask.
“Lucky enough to have a woman teach me the ways of being a man. Her lessons were thorough, and it turns out you can cure a speech impediment with savagery.”
My stomach churns as I start to make sense of his words, and my lips are so dry, I have to lick them before I can form words again. “How old were you?”
“Ten.”
I barely hear him. He’s drifting away, falling asleep, and I can’t let him go.
“Thor.” I smooth my fingers along his pinched brows, and he opens his eyes again. When he sees the despair in mine, he shifts beneath me, his muscles tightening.
“I was joking.”
“No, you weren’t.” My voice shakes, and the floodgates of my emotions crash open before I can contain them. The image of him as a child, abused in that way, cuts me so deep it feels as if I’ll bleed to death right here. A trail of tears begins to fall down my cheeks, my heart splintering as I grieve for him.