KING(95)

The only love.

If things were different, I’d put a ring on her finger. A baby in her belly. We’d have Max. We’d have Preppy. We’d be the family I always wanted but never knew could exist.

Because it didn’t exist.

Preppy was f*cking dead, and my girl was about to return to the life of privilege she was born into.

I told her I loved her with each thrust of my hips. I told her I was sorry. I told her that I wanted her to stay forever. I told her I wished she would have my child. I told her everything with sex that I dared not speak out loud. I told her that if things were different that we would be together forever.

Forever.

I’d never spoken the word in my life, but looking down at Doe, still half-asleep as I brought her to the brink of another orgasm, I saw what forever would look like.

And it was f*cking beautiful.

A wayward tear dripped from my chin. I reached out and caught it in the palm of my hand before it had a chance to wake Doe from the state of sleepy ecstasy she was currently in.

Before she could find out how I really felt.

Before she was gone.

Forever.

The next morning, for the first time in my life, I made love to a woman. I didn’t f*ck. I didn’t have sex.

I kissed her the entire time. I held her as close as two people could be. I told her she was beautiful. That I loved everything about her.

I waited until she was in the throws of her orgasm to whisper, “I love you.” I don’t know if she heard me, but I was saying it more for me than for her.

I needed to say those words while I still had the chance.

I think a part of me loved Doe from the first moment my eyes landed on hers. Haunted, beautiful, scared. I wanted her, body and soul.

I would only have her for a few more hours, and I was going to spend every second of that time, inside my girl.

While she still was my girl.

*

Doe

Every time I woke during the night, King was touching me. It was like no matter how close we were, it wasn’t close enough.

I dreamt that he told me he loved me. Once before, after finishing my tattoo, he’d told me to shut up and let me love you. But what I heard in my dream was the real deal.

There was something wrong. I felt it in my bones. I’d asked him what was bothering him, but he brushed me off and just kept making love to me.

For hours.

Maybe, he was lost in thoughts of Preppy, and just needed me to be there for him.

So, I was.

Out time together that morning was so unlike anything I’d experienced with him before.

I told him over again that I was okay after Isaac forced himself on me. It was a moment in life, a horrible one. But I know I’d be okay. As long as I had King, I would be okay.

It would all be okay.

I was helplessly, passionately, in love with the complicated man who touched me like I was a thin square of glass, and he was afraid I was going to shatter.

He whispered to me how gorgeous I was as he dragged his cock against my clit. He pulled out of me and rubbed against my sensitive bundle of nerves when he thrust back in.

I was alive with sensation, and full of questions.

He whispered how much he loved being inside me. How much he wished he wasn’t so much of an *. How I deserved the world. How he wasn’t good enough for me.

And then it hit me like a f*cking freight train with no brakes, and my heart seized inside my chest.

King was saying goodbye.

*

The sun was already high in the sky by the time I woke up and got dressed. At any second, I expected King to burst through the door and tell me he wanted me gone. It was a horrible thing to be waiting for. I was going to pack, but there was nothing there that was truly ever mine.

I threw on some clothes and headed outside to find King. Rather than waiting around with my neck stretched out on the block, I went in search of the executioner. I found him outside, rocking in the swing I’d recently convinced him was the only thing missing from the porch.

“What’s going on?” I asked him. “Something’s wrong. Tell me.” He buried his face in his hands.

“Everything, baby. Everything is wrong,” King said, looking up over the porch railing.

I walked over to him and he ran his hands up and down my arms. I sat on his lap and draped my arms around his neck. He burrowed his nose into my chest.

“Tell me. Please,” I begged. “I can help.”

“You can’t. Nobody can.”