I lay her back on the bed and bracket myself over her the way I want to cover her in life. Shield her from anything that would hurt her.
And I will. If only she’ll let me in.
Wren
The irony isn’t lost on me.
That, as Luca peels off my sweater and runs his hands lovingly over my skin, I’m thinking, again and again,I’m fucked.
I’m so fucked.
And not just in the literal, physical sense. Not just in the way he nudges at the bottom of my chin like a cat so he can press his hot, insistent mouth to my collarbone. Not just in the spread of his large, strong hand over my hip, or in the hard, solid feeling of his erect cock against my thigh.
No, I’m not just well-fucked like I have been over the past months.
I’mfuckedbecause I’m falling in love with this man.
Luca smells like fresh cotton and clean air, any sort of fragrance that shows an open window and a gauzy white curtain. His warmth, his weight, are both familiar to me.
Is it even possible to fall in love this quickly? My father sure made it seem like that, diving straight into the deep end of whirlwind romances that usually left him with nothing more to his name than a manic episode and whatever underwear he could leave his last tryst with.
But this love is nothing like that.
“I don’t want you marrying anyone else.”
I know I’ve helped to create—and maybe even lead the charge on creating—this strange dynamic between us where we can’t talk openlyaboutwhat’s going on between us. This thing that started, I think, at his family’s Christmas, and has continued to balloon until it’s pressing up on all sides of me, under my skin, making itself known.
But we don’t talk about it. About the fact that there’s not really a good reason for us to keep this up. For me to be at his place every night, for us to watch movies and talk about the team and make love and wake up next to each other with my head on his chest and his fingers running through my hair.
“You’re loyal, brilliant, intelligent, funny, beautiful.”
As he kisses me, Luca reaches down my stomach, and trails his fingertips over my skin, presses his palm flat into the inside of my thigh to spread my legs. I melt under his touch, like I always do. He grinds the heel of his hand into me, a mute sort of pleasure that sends wanting searing up through the rest of my body.
He knows how to touch me, how to send me from nothing to a puddle in his hands in minutes. Luca knows how I take my coffee, has bookmarked every Italian beef place in the city for us to try. In the mornings, he helps to check the back of my hair after I straighten it, makes me Denver omelets, suffers through my jokes about it being a cultural dish for him.
“In what world would you not make a good wife?”
Luca knows me. And yet, he doesn’t know me. Doesn’t know how much havoc I’ve caused. Things I’ve stolen. People I’ve pretended to be. Moments I thought I really might not make it out of the situation with my life. His instincts told him not to trust me because of the person I was before I met him.
There are fundamental differences between me and him.
If he’s saying he would ever want to marry me, or that he imagines a life with me, there are things I’ll have to tell him. And restrictions he would never have imagined—countries I can’t visit, businesses I can’t patron. All sorts of watch lists and check-ins he’d never have to deal with if he was with a normal woman.
A woman without my past.
“Wren,” Luca whispers, his voice rough. And when my eyes find his through the dark, I realize that he’s stopped moving. “Are you okay?”
Everything that hangs between us is so real and so heavy that it’s like we’re staring through it all as we hold eye contact. We’re touching in almost every place two people can touch, I’m breathing in the scent of him, and I feel at home.
“Yeah,” I say, actually feeling—at least mostly—that it’s true.
I don’t have to grapple with the reality of what a future might look like right now. That’s the thing about Luca—he pulls me into the present and away from my past. Gets away with making me believe it might not always haunt me the way I think it will.
“You sure?”
I nod, reaching down and wrapping my hand around him, closing my eyes against the heat there, the velvety heft of him. He makes a noise in the back of his throat and I lean into it, stroking him, feeling him grow even harder in my hand.
“I’m sure,” I whisper, “but I’ll feel better once you’re inside me.”
