Rule (Marked Men #1)(70)

“It scares me too Rule. I’m not used to ordinary either and I never thought I would have that with you, never thought I would have anything with you at all so it’s okay to get a little lost in your head as long as you come back and we can talk about it. I’m not going to ask you to give anything you aren’t comfortable with. People have done that to me my entire life and I’m sick of it.”

I exhaled a hard breath and unclenched the fists I hadn’t been aware I had curled up at my sides.

“What if I ask you to give me everything Shaw, what if I want it all? Won’t that make me just like all the rest of them?”

She made a noise in her throat and then broke into a smile that nearly killed me on the spot she was just so lovely and pure. “No because you don’t have to ask for anything, all of it is already yours. You’re the only one I’ve ever wanted to give it to.” This girl was going to be the end of me. She put a hand on each of my sides, one splayed over the angel one splayed over the reaper and I thought my heart was going to pound out of my chest.

“You have to promise not to bail on me when I get lost, Shaw. You have to promise to just wait it out until I can find my way back. I need to know you’re at the end of the tunnel when everything goes black.”

“I know how to wait for you Rule and I don’t mind doing it as long as you promise not to shut me out. I can’t do this with you, be so wrapped up in you and what’s happening between us if you’re going to close the door on me when it gets to be too much. My heart can’t take that.”

“I know.” But I wasn’t sure that was a promise I could keep. My default was to return to what I knew and that was distance and space so that I could protect myself. “I can do my best Shaw but I told you all along I’m not real sure how to do this whole relationship thing and I’m scared shitless I’m going to do something to screw it up.”

She leaned forward and let her hands glide up around my back and across my shoulders. She pressed a soft, open mouthed kiss to the center of my chest and it made my entire life zero in on that tiny point of contact.

“Well you can be scared alone or we can be scared together. I prefer the second option but if you need some space to get your head around it and figure out what you want I can make that happen. I want to be with you Rule, but I’m not going to be here with you if it makes you hurt and makes you freak out. We both deserve better than that.”

I wasn’t sure at this point it was about what I deserved or not but I wasn’t stupid enough to let what I had with her get demolished under the weight of doubt I couldn’t control. I finally reached out and pulled her to me in a suffocating hug that pressed all her length against all my bare skin. I had spent plenty of time with her this morning, making her beg, turning myself inside out but that didn’t seem to matter, my c**k reacted under the towel letting her know that whatever was going on inside my head had no bearing on how my body felt about her. “I’m just messed up Shaw. I’m sorry that I get this way but the last thing I want is to chase my tail all alone.” I kissed her, letting her feel the things I couldn’t say as they burned through my blood. I wanted her always and the idea of that made my knees weak.

She let me devour her mouth, let me get my hands all tangled up rough in her hair, let me press her up against the closest wall and press an insistent erection against her all without complaint or argument. There was no gentleness, no concern for skill or whether or not I was making it feel good for her, all that existed was a blinding need to get inside her, to make her feel the emotion that was making me go crazy. I needed to syphon off some of the want and need and the only way to do it was to get it out of me and into her. Her head made a dull thunk against the wall and I felt her suck in a tense breath and still none of it gave me pause. The towel hit the floor and my t-shirt offered no resistance as I rushed through getting both of us naked. Somewhere in my head I knew I needed to slow down, needed to get control back that my hands were too hard on her, that my mouth was going to leave marks but I couldn’t pull it in.

She whispered my name, tried to get me to slow down but I didn’t care. I was ready to just move in her, to burry all the fear and uncertainty blindly inside her warm body but this was a girl that knew all my tricks, knew that I was operating from a place where I probably wouldn’t even remember what I was doing in the morning and she wasn’t going to let me turn her into another faceless conquest that I used to find silence. Since I no longer had hair and was so much bigger than her she had to resort to digging her nails into my scalp and pressing her teeth down on my invading tongue to get me to jerk back and give her some breathing room. She struggled to catch her breath and pushed away from the wall by planting her hands in the center of my chest and giving me a hard shove.

I stumbled back a step and shook my head back and forth. “Casper,” I wanted to apologize, wanted to tell her I would never devalue all that she was coming to mean to me on purpose but she didn’t give me a chance. She stood up on her tiptoes and put a small hand over my mouth. Her green eyes were big and there was a mixture of desire and trepidation in them that twisted my heart into a knot. This girl just simply understood me and wasn’t going to blame me for all the crazy that I had built up inside of me.

“Just don’t, Rule.” She moved her hand and kissed me with a million more levels of care than I had just shown her. “You need me to take care of you right now so I’m going to do it but I’ll be damned if you don’t know its me.”