Hard Beat(91)

She won’t look at me, though. And I can’t have that. Can’t have her trying to shut me out now, so I still my hips when I’m buried to the hilt in her, leveraging her weight against mine, and bring my thumb and forefinger to her chin so that she’s forced to meet my eyes. Only when she holds her face steady, emerald eyes drowsy with lust but glistening with tears, do I continue the slow withdrawal from her body and then the bittersweet thrust to join our bodies again.

She comes in a violent shudder, her muscles tensing around me and my name on her lips for the first time since we started, but her voice sounds thick from the tears lodged in her throat.

“Beaux.” I groan her name as a blinding flash of heat surges through my body and possesses my movements so that when I grind into her one last time, I lose more than just my orgasm to her. Oh f*ck. I lose so much more, but thank God I’m blinded by my climax so that I can’t think about it just yet.

We remain motionless for a moment, our bodies connected in the most intimate and carnal of ways, our arms wrapped around each other and our heads resting on opposite shoulders as we try to come to terms with what just happened and what I feel deep down I know is going to happen next. I’m afraid to speak, afraid to move, because once I do, I know I’ll never get this moment back.

“Beaux,” I murmur into her shoulder, “please… I need to understand.”

“We shouldn’t have done this,” she whispers. “You need to go.”

“How can you say that? How can —”

“Just please go. Forget I ever existed.”

I snap my head up painfully, eyes searching hers for answers she won’t give me as I try to dredge up the promise I made to myself before I walked onto the flight: to walk away and never look back if she rejected me. The hard thing is my feet are rooted in place, just like my heart.

“I could never forget you. Never.” I grit out words that have never been more true in my life. My hands come up to frame her face tenderly, her bottom lip trembling with the emotion I feel but don’t think I can show her because then I’d just give her another piece of me I’ll never get back.

And she already holds too many pieces of me as it is.

“I’ll walk away, Beaux. I’ll walk away and never look back if you ask me to… if that’s what you want. It’ll kill me because I don’t understand, but I’ll do it for you. God, I’d do anything for you right now,” I plead as my voice breaks with the weight of what I’m saying to her. “Just please tell me this wasn’t all a lie. Please tell me the nights we spent on the rooftop and the laughs we shared and the sex we had wasn’t just a joke to you. I need to leave knowing that what was between us wasn’t all in my head.”

“Tanner…”

“Can you give me that? Can you answer me so that I have something to hold on to?”

In an unexpected move that startles me, she takes my hand and places it on her chest over her heart with hers on top of mine. “Can you feel what I’m thinking?” she asks as her heart beats an erratic staccato beneath my palm. When she looks back up, her eyes are filled with tears, and one slips off her cheek and hits our connected hands. I bend my knees so that we’re face-to-face and she can’t escape from answering me with words. “I meant what I said about everything,” she whispers, and it makes my mind whirl.

About loving me? About not being able to be with me? About what? I want to shake her shoulders and insist that she answer all of my questions, but I know it’s no use. I know how stubborn she is, know how she’ll close down. Well at least I think I do, because I thought she loved me too and now she’s pushing me away.

My jaw is clenched, and my pulse is pounding a useless tempo because I’ve lost her. I close my eyes for a brief second to gather the wherewithal to walk away, angst slowly giving way to anger and resentment that she gets to make all the decisions here. “Don’t do this, Beaux,” I whisper more for myself than for her.

“If you ever loved me, you need to do this for me. Walk out the door and don’t look back.”

“I lov—”

“Shh! Not now. Not like this,” she says as she puts a fingertip to my lips, her head shaking side to side. “You need to go.”

There are so many words I want to say to her, so many things she needs to know, but as I start to lower my hands from her face, disbelief burns like a cannonball in my stomach. I grab her cheeks without warning and press my lips to hers in a kiss teeming with need, want, desire, desperation, and good-bye.

Once I break off the kiss, hoping it tells her everything I haven’t said, because I know I could keep at it forever, I stride from the house, heart on my sleeve and a hole in my chest. All without meeting her eyes for a last time or saying another word.

Let her think about that kiss on the nights when she’s lonely.

My feet eat up the sidewalk. Then finally I slide into my car and bang my fist against the dashboard. It would be so much easier to walk away if the sex had been savage and carnal and full of spite. A quick f*ck to work each other out of our respective systems so that we could move on. A little piece of physical satisfaction to mask the anger and hurt vibrating beneath the surface. It would have screamed that we weren’t meant to be together. That we were a f*cking flare of desire that had already hit the high point and was crashing to the ground, burning itself out.