Page 84 of Live for Me

I waited until she picked her place in the truck bed before I climbed up myself and laid back on the opposite side, leaving as much as space as possible between our bodies to just stare at the sky.

“Utah?” she asked after a few minutes of silence.

“Hm?”

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to be looking for. Or at?”

I laughed.

“Don’t laugh,” she said and smacked me in the stomach. “Doyouknow whatyou’relooking at?”

“Stars.”

“Okay, so that’s ano.”

“I’m not the one who said I hadn’t been stargazing like I was missing out on something big,” I said and laughed again. “I don’t have to care about what you want to try or what you want to see to make it happen for you.”

“Utah—”

She stopped talking the very second that I turned to look at her, and she looked away as soon as our eyes met. I let her just sit with whatever thought she was trying to process. Pushing her for anything at all when she wasn’t ready for it only resulted in her retreating inward. That much was obvious at this point.

“It’s louder than I thought it would be,” she said after another few minutes.

“What? There’s no one?—”

“No, it’s a different loud,” Memphis interrupted. “Back home, it was constant vehicle noise. People everywhere, always talking, yelling, moving. There aren’t people or cars or city noises here. But are there reallythatmany bugs in Indiana to be makingthismuch noise? Thinking about how many it would take to make this kind of noise makes my skin crawl.”

“The things you’ve been able to do in life, and you’re going to sit here and tell me you’re one of those girls who’s afraidof bugs?”

“I’m not exactly a woodsy kind of soul, Utah. Does this look like skin that’s spent a lot of time outside?” she asked while she held out her arm and laughed. She wasn’t wrong. She was absolutely the palest creature I’d ever seen in real life. And it was flawless, even with everything she’d scarred into it herself for one reason or another in the form of tattoos. I’d never seen anything more stunning.

“Looks like the kind of skin I could spend a lifetime trying to memorize, just to have to accept that a lifetime still wasn’t anywhere near enough.”

The wind picked up when she sat up beside me.

I was right back to believing that she had to be something from another world. How else could I explain the fucking atmosphere shifting with her mood? Not that it was overly surprising. She was the kind of woman that they named hurricanes after; the category five kind.

The way that she looked at me had me worried that I’d upset her, though. What I felt wasn’t exactly something I’d been trying to hide from her, especially the last few days. Any person in possession of even a single one of the five senses would be able to tell that I wanted her. I wanted every weird as shit piece of her. I wanted to touch her, taste her, feel her around me. But more than that, I wanted her to want it, too.

“Sorry,” I said and shook my head at myself, thinking this was where she’d drawn the line. I brought her to an outdoor bed and told her it was to look at the stars just to hit on her. She had to be thinking I was just doing this one to get laid. “I wasn’t trying to?—”

She shrugged her way out of my flannel then pulled her tank top over her head, and I suddenly didn’t have access to the English language anymore. I couldn’t do anything to stop myself when my eyes moved from her face, down her neck, and across the most delicate little collar bones I’d ever seen on a human. Everything about her was so perfectly little. My hands would dwarf her already small breasts, but the only thing I could fucking think about in that moment was how badly I wanted the little black posts that were pierced through her nipples in my mouth. How easy it would be to make her squirm and writhe beneath me if I started there. I’d seen the little revolver that dangled from her belly button before, but that didn’t stop me from staring at it for a few seconds, like it was somehow holding the key to my salvation, too. Her skin nearly glowed in the darkness, even the parts that were covered in tattoos. Everything about her was perfectly unique. Perfectly her.

Then I realized that I hadn’t fucking done anything but stare at her in silence like a maniac. I had to wonder if she wanted me to take control of what happened next, or if she needed to work up the nerve to do it herself. I didn’t give myself much time to consider it from there. I’d wanted this since the moment I laid eyes on her. I was up on my knees and towering over her a second later.

I could hear thunder in the distance the moment that her face was in my hands; because apparently, I needed more proof that she wasn’t human at all while the weather crashed around right alongside her emotions. Her hands shook when they landed on my hips that time while she tried to raise up a little taller to get me to kiss her. It took everything in my power to prevent myself from smiling about it.

She wasn’t fragile, by any sense of the word, but I was prepared to calculate every move I made ahead of time—she absolutely was a flight risk when something spooked her. And any kind of contact, physical or emotional, seemed to spook her. So, I kissed her like there was a chance my lips would shatter her entire body if they touched her too hard. Until she’d squirmed all the way against the front of my body, and she worked up the nerve to dig her fingernails into my hips. I pulled back for just a second to make sure there wasn’t anything on her face that said I needed to stop, and the tiny whimper that came from her had my dick scraping its way up the front of my jeans to try to get to her faster.

After that shit, I kissed her like I might find every secret she’d ever kept if I could just get deep enough, like I could draw out every piece of herself that she’d ever kept hidden from the world. I wanted those pieces of her all to myself. I’d free them from her, so she didn’t have to carry their weight anymore, just to lock them back away safely inside me. They’d still be hidden from the rest of the world that way, just like she wanted, but they’d never hold any power over her again if I was the thing keeping them caged.

Her hands weren’t shaking anymore when she started trying to tug my shirt off, and there wasn’t a damn thing unsteady about her when her fingernails raked their way down the muscle of my chest. Her eyes followed her hands all the way down the front of my body. She hesitated at my belt buckle to look back at my face though. If she was afraid of what was under there, I couldn’t very well lie to her and tell her it’d be easy for someone her size to take me just to make her feel better about it. I smiled instead and kissed her again.

“Give me a minute, angel,” I sighed with so much annoyance about having to interrupt this moment. “I’ve got condoms in the truck.”

She shook her head and tried pulling my head back down to hers. An adorably frustrated little groan came out of her when I didn’t let that happen.

“Gonna need more than a head shake to tell me how to interpret that, Memphis.”

---