Fuck her. Fuck her perception and her round tits and the way her mouth trembled and the way she’d turned into a woman before he could detach himself properly. Fuck her for that – for becoming someone he wanted when he still loved her for the little girl she’d always been.
He felt his muscles leap, felt the dangerous tension wind through them. “Youarea child,” he said, coldly on purpose. “You’re seventeen goddamn years old, Ava, and you don’t even have sense not to get tossed outta school.”
His insult struck home, as hoped. But when she surged to her feet, she came around the table toward him, a move he hadn’t counted on.
“Stop!” she said as the tears started to pour down her cheeks. “It’s not fair! You know what you’re doing. You know how I feel…” She closed her eyes tight, the anguish in her doing devastating things to his self-control. When she opened her eyes again, they were bright and wet. “And you…you tease me. It’s fun for you! It’s not fair – you know I love you and you throw it in my face–”
She sucked in a gasp as he rose to his feet. Mercy was moving faster than he could think. He stood and he gathered her arms up in his hands and pulled her in close to him. He hated the crying so much. He hated being the cause of it.
“Stop,” he said, giving her a little shake even as he tucked her into his chest. “Hush, stop doing that.”
“You’re doing it again!” She struggled a moment, her efforts comical, and Mercy was this frustrated knot of protector and soother and suitor as he bent to kiss her cheek.
She was five-five, but that still left her a foot below him, and he did indeed have to bend. Her face was hot and damp with tears, her skin like satin against his. She went utterly still as his lips touched the tearstains. And without even breathing, she invaded him.
The clean smell of her shampoo. The taste of her tears. The feel of her body pressed to his. The faint thunder of her pulse against his own where they were skin-to-skin.
She loved him, and he’d known it for a long time now. Just like he knew that there was a deep place carved in her heart that she would leave open for him, waiting, hoping. She hadn’t chosen to feel the way she did. All those years, all those talks, all those moments her father had abandoned her into his care. This, her against him like this, was nothing like the coy invitation of the groupies, the dare of the thrill-seekers who wanted to snag a piece of a bad boy. This was the little girl he’d helped to raise growing up and flowering into a woman with a sex drive who didn’t want anyone to touch her but him. She was beautiful and fragile and ferocious. And she was honest – Ava was maybe the only honest thing in his life. And he’d watched her for too long, and he’d wondered too much, and she was this precious creature whose safety had become the point around which his existence pivoted.
“Mercy,” she whispered, and it was his final undoing.
He turned his head and captured her startled mouth with his own, his hands coming up to cup the delicate back of her skull, crushing her silken hair as he latched onto her and felt the most acute lust of his life burst with molten fervor in his veins.
She gasped; he felt her breath against his lips as he pushed hers wide and dove between with his tongue. Her mouth was so hot, so slick and wet. It was too sudden and uncertain and he’d let things build for too long – he couldn’t be slow and delicate and patient. He clutched her close to him and invaded her mouth, pulling her up higher, bending lower. God, he attacked her, without a shred of rational thought.
But then he felt her hands, clumsy with nerves and excitement, tangle in the front of his shirt. She stretched up on her toes. She was the one who tilted her head and changed the angle, giving him deeper access, opening her jaw wide to accept him.
He had to have her. He was volcanic with painful, frantic need. And she was giving herself to him, without a shred of reservation. He could read it in the way her body pressed to him:Please. Please, I need it too.
Please.
Please…
An image of her at age ten flooded his mind, with her hair braided and her smile pleading as she asked to ride on the back of his bike, just to the end of the street and back, not very far at all, pretty please.
Mercy shoved her away, violently. She gasped again, this time as their lips broke apart, and he watched her clutch her mouth, her eyes liquid with desire and huge with panic. He was so aroused that the sight of her like that almost propelled him back to her.
But he backed away, one step and then another. “No. No, no, no. Jesus. No.”
Ava reached for him. “Mercy–”
“No!” Distance, he needed more distance. Snatching his jacket and cut off the back of his chair, he shrugged back into them both at once, his back to her. “This is fucked up,” he said without looking at her. “Beyond fucked up.”
She took a shattered breath that pulled at him hard.
But he walked to the back door. And then opened it, stepped halfway through it. “Lock this behind me.” He finally risked a glance toward her, saw her standing with one arm banded around her middle and a hand still pressed over her mouth. She looked shell-shocked. “You hear me? Lock this door behind me.”
He stepped out and slammed the door. Took a pained, pitiful moment to brace a hand against it and collect himself. He didn’t move until he heard the deadbolt slide into place.
Ava closed her eyes tight and pressed her forehead to the cool painted wood of the door. Her pulse was beating at a pace that robbed her of oxygen, throbbing hardest in her breasts and between her legs, stirring urges in her that were elemental and hormonal, and didn’t need experience to fuel them. She felt weak, like her neck wouldn’t support her head, or her legs her weight. She braced her palms on the door and concentrated on breathing.
His mouth against hers. The way he’d all but attacked her.
Oh, she wanted to dissolve right here and now. She didn’t want to take one step away from this door and know that he’d kissed her like that, and then walked away from her.
She waited for the sound of his bike starting.
Instead, she heard his voice, just on the other side of the door. “Ava.”
