My whole body suddenly turns, leg grasped to pull me round to him until both of them hang over the end of the table. “We have a bargain, Alice. I’ll talk about fucking whenever I want to. I don’t need permission from you.”
It’s true. He could just do it. There’s no way I could stop either his frame or his hands from doing whatever he wanted to. He’s bigger, stronger, and a damn sight more dexterous with those hands than I’ve ever had on me before, but I don’t think he will. Not without the pills inside him anyway. “Maybe not. But I think you’d like it, Malachi. I think you’d like me to want you.”
Guess we’ll find that out, too.
He rises and runs his face straight over my crotch, hard features pressed deep into my jeans and skin until he’s run up to my navel. I don’t know how I feel about any of it. Part excited with clear thought around the potential, and part exhausted because of the full night I’ve been awake worrying about him. Whatever it is, it’s mutually agreeable because he stops before taking it any further, his forehead resting on my stomach, and sighs.
My hands thread into his hair of their own volition, loosely holding him there, as my eyes close. I don’t understand that, but it’s that part of me that’s still with him. It feels him, makes me feel like I’m with him in every mood he’s in. That mood is currently drained and overwhelmed, weary and defeated. I don’t like it at all. Frankly, I prefer freak.
“You’ll bleed for me, little Alice. You’ll bleed and I will, too.”
Maybe, but not yet.
I move slowly, pulling his head up with me until we’re face to face in a room filled with silence. There’s just that low, dull beat somewhere downstairs. That’s all. Maybe the occasional sound of the wind outside shaking the archaic windows and glass. It’s pretty – the silence. After all the noise and the raging hormones and the world down there below us, this is calming, peaceful.
It’s so slow. Our faces just get closer, lips a hair's breadth away from each other. I can taste him before I’ve got there, as if he’s embedded somehow even though we’ve never done that – or maybe we have. I don’t know, but the feel of his lips pressing to mine, of the strength and clear control of the kiss, is as overwhelming to me as this silence is.
His hands go under me to lift me from the table, and he walks out and down the hall slowly – still with our lips teasing each other. I try getting out of his hold, giving him a chance to move on his own without the need to carry extra weight, but he doesn’t let me. He sushes me through our mouths, makes me stay quiet and still in this silence, possibly so he can appreciate it.
I’m eventually taken to a large lounge where he finally breaks our locked lips. It looks familiar in a blurry sort of way, but not enough for me to clarify being in here. He nods at some doors on the other side of it as we approach them and I push on the handle, opening them. A bedroom. Off a lounge. Interesting. It’s like in those films where you see a room of a meeting room, the ones where the high powered boss fucks the secretary whenever he feels inclined.
“Handy.”
“As is that knife you’re carrying.” He stares, no interest in the threat it might wield. “But be quiet for now, Alice. I’m enjoying the peace.”
Before I know it we’re through the opulent space and into another room at the far end of that, one that houses the largest shower and bath I’ve ever seen. He nods again, as he steps into the shower cubicle, and I turn the faucet. Heat and steam pummel down on us both in seconds, our clothes drenched within seconds. Shame, I quite like the jeans. At least the boots are still in the dining room.
Wherever that is.
He lowers me after a while of just standing in it, and starts stripping his own jeans off. No top to worry about obviously. And the boots must have been kicked off somewhere else because they’re not on his feet either. He’s glorious. All of him. I can’t help stare at him as he moves me around and starts yanking at the jeans on me. Water ripples and cascades over his skin, his back, and his shoulders to create waves of intrigue to trickle and flow. It isn’t until he’s managed to get me naked that I realise he’s fully naked too.
My head stays upright, eyes levelled at his rather than dipping below that line. I’m not ready for that yet. I don’t even know how I’m ready for this much, let alone his manhood on show. But this feels more intimate than that, anyway, as if acknowledging that might spoil this somehow. I don’t know, but I’m not looking at it, and that way we don’t have to deal with it until we’ve slept.
He slides the sliver letter opener in between his teeth as he finishes undressing me, keeps his eyes on mine until strong hands turn me away from him. They pick up mine to plant them on the tiles, and then the knife gets slid under my fingers.
“Keep it with you,” he murmurs. “Stay still for now.”
That’s it. That’s all. And I trust that. I do. Oddly. He’s not going to take anything from me unless I ask him to, and the sponge suddenly on my back proves it. Long strokes flow. My back, my neck, ass. My stomach and breasts, where he lingers his hands for long enough that I know he’s felt the marks of my past, and then my legs down the floor and back upwards. He stops short of between my thighs, though, holding back as if respecting that line like I am with him. Seems silly. We’re two adults. Two adults who have already been pretty close to this before from my limited memory of freaky situations.
I crane my neck, eyes searching his in the steam. He must know if we have or not. He gave me the pills, and has lived on them according to Gray. He must be immune in comparison to me, able to remember what he has and has not done. He says nothing, just keeps washing himself while I stay where I’ve been told to stay and watches me watching him. No smile. No sense of happiness or even control. He’s just flat.
By the time he turns the water off, both of us have been washed thoroughly, and the room is filled with so much steam I can barely see him in it. A hand drags mine to the towels, and he proceeds to dry himself and me. It’s nothing like I expected - none of it. He’s calm, considered, and almost reverent in the way he’s holding me, moving me.
It isn’t until we’re in bed, and he’s switching off the bedside lamp, that I begin to question what it is that I am going to do when we wake up. My mind starts whirring through what I’m supposed to do for him, how I’m supposed to help. Not only am I nothing to him, but I don’t even know him. And yet here I am in a bed with him, my eyes gazing at opulence and luxury I haven’t even dreamed of, let alone actually been in.
“Tell me about the tattoos,” he says.
“What about them?” I reply, sleepily.
“Why?”
I don’t turn. I stay where I am, body stretched out and head nuzzled into the pillow. “They’re just pictures on skin, Malachi.” They’re not. They cover the scars of my past, make something that was repulsive look attractive again. As good as it can on my body anyway.
“And the scars?”
I shake my head and turn away, not even contemplating that conversation. Truths I can tell if that’s what he needs, but not that – not yet.
“Tattoos are never just anything,” he mutters, as he pulls me to his side.
