Page 123 of Go Luck Yourself
My whimper this time isn’t pathetic.
It’s downrightgroveling.
I couldn’t be more desperately needy if I was on my knees, but I nod—fuck.Fuck.Yes. To not have to decide anything. To not have to make any choices, no mistakes, no possible regret or guilt…
“Yes.” I clutch his hand around my throat, the muscles in his forearm gone to marble. “Whatever you want, Loch. Whatever you want with me.”
A jagged gasp tears out of him. A slurred, hissing “Jesus Christ.”
He kisses me again, eating at me like he can consume me, and I hope he does. My pulse is going so fast I can feel it in places I never noticed before, my ankles, the inside of my elbows, I swear there’s sensation in the tips of my hair when Loch unwinds his fingers from my neck to grate across my scalp and pull.
The paint on his arm and hands is all down my neck, spreading across my body in the wake of his groping. The idea of being marked by him like this wrenches a groan out of my core.
He echoes it and closes his eyes to breathe in deep—one long, slow inhale, his forehead fixed to mine. “Kris,” he speaks against me, a catechism. “I need my mouth on you.”
I nod. Nod again.
His fingers trail down my arms, link around my wrists, and yank my hands above my head, pressed to the wall. I pant at the force of it, breathing rough and unsteady as I meet his gaze in question.
“Stay,” he hisses, then he’s gone, dropping to his knees at my feet.
There is no shame left, not after the noises I’ve already made, so I look down at him with unabashed desire. Those fingers are hooked in the edge of my pants like when we were in the kitchen, only this time, my belt snaps open, button and zipper next.
His eyes grasp at mine as he wrenches my pants and boxers downmy legs. The air hits me like sandpaper, my hard dick bobbing in front of him, and his gaze travels from my lifted hands to my chest palpitating in rippling breaths to—
His brows pinch, the intensity in his eyes folding into something new and back again, emotional origami as he looks at the tattoo on my left thigh.
I knew he’d see it.
But it grates even more than the air on my bare skin, more than the rawness of having my hands over my head.
The light touch of his fingertips to that ink makes me jump, startled by the softness. His thumb rubs soothingly, like he knows he spooked me, knows fully well he altered the mood.
“What is this?” he asks in a matching soft voice.
I look up at the ceiling, heart a battering ram against my ribs.
Sure, I could brush it off. I could tell him I don’t want to talk about it.
But I’ve stripped so much of myself tonight. Holding this back would cheapen that.
“A scene fromBridge to Terabithia,” I say to the industrial piping of the ceiling.
The tattoo is a forest with thick, lush trees, vines and plants and little glimmers that might be fairy dust. At the center, a rope hangs from the largest tree, the silhouette of a boy in mid-swing over a deep, endless black chasm. Halfway across, past where the arc of the boy’s swing will take him, a bridge is caught in mid-formation, grand and glistening and straight out of a fantasy.
“This is you?” Loch touches the boy on the rope.
I hesitate before nodding.
“You’re going to fall,” he states. It isn’t a question.
I glance back down at him. He still has his finger on my silhouette. Or younger-me’s silhouette.
“How do you know?” I whisper. Not trying to deny that he’s right, but honestly curious how he figured it out. Few people have guessed that. I tried to be flippant when I described what I wanted to the artist; I couldn’t bring myself to have Iris design this one.
Loch’s lips twitch in a shadow of his usual confidence. “Please, Kris. Art is what I do.”
“It was the last book my mom read to me before she left.” It’s out of me like buckshot and I gasp, biting down on that show of emotion, but it serves as a spotlight. Might as well screamthis is deeply emotional for me.
