Page 29 of Trade
“Come here,” he growls, but he doesn’t daremakeme do it. I might stop.
I smirk and rest my palms on his hard stomach, rocking, chasing the pleasure coiling tighter and tighter inside me. This isn’t me, but then again, I’m not me anymore, am I?
He folds his arms behind his head and tries to look amused, but his hips are pumping, and he keeps biting his lip, realizing it, stopping, then biting it again seconds later.
“Does it feel good?” he asks.
I hush him.
He grins. “Come back down here.” He reaches for me but doesn’t grab me. His hands hover over my shoulders like he can make me come closer through some kind of telekinesis.
Maybe he can. I bend forward, and he catches my lips with his. His hands wander to my ass, fingers digging into the cheeks, as he pumps his hips harder. Our foreheads rest against each other. His kisses soften.
“Tell me it feels good, Gloria,” he says, breathless.
“Don’t tell me what to do.” I’m so close. I want more, but I don’t want to break this moment—this feeling of being on top.
“Come on, Gloria,” he pleads, teasing and playful but serious, too, and I close my eyes and grind harder, stalking the pleasure I shouldn’t be having on top of the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen under a pink tree that shouldn’t exist. “Let me watch your face when you come.”
“You’re not the boss,” I say, and because I can—because I am that other Gloria now, and I want to feel good, but I want to feel powerful much, much more—I jump up, brush off my coveralls, and wander off a few feet before turning to watch Dalton push himself up on his elbows. The crease between his eyes is deep.
One of his knives is lying in the grass by the toe of my boot. I duck, grab it, and shove it into my pocket, crushing my leaf collection. I feel a tinge of remorse.
He raises a dark eyebrow and smirks as he catches his breath. “You like to play games, Glory?”
“No one calls me Glory.” Not anymore. That’s what Mom and Dad called me when I was little, but then Mom died, and Dad started calling me by my full name. It made me cringe at first since I was only called Gloria when I was in trouble.
Why am I thinking about that now? My mind is falling apart.
Dalton’s smirk disappears. He hops to his feet and buckles his belt. When did he undo it?
He straps his machete back to his leg and reattaches his knives, all except the one sticking out of my pocket. He slings his backpack over his shoulder. He’s not staring at me. He’s sneaking glances at me from the corner of his eyes.
When he’s got himself back together—all but his erection, which is still poking through his pants—he sighs and holds out his hand. “Come on, no-one-calls-me-Glory. It’s going to get dark soon.”
My skin is hot. My nerves are raw. His hair is a tousled mess.
I take his hand. He leads me away from the copse and back to the way he’s making through the hilly meadow toward the faraway lake.
We trudge through the tall grass in silence for a while, but then he points to a particularly tall tree shaped like a flame.
“That’s a cypress,” he says. I’ve seen them before in a painting in an art book. I thought it was surrealism with the swirls and bright colors, but the artist wasn’t making it up, not much. The tree’s needles are that green, and as daylight fades, the sky is that blue.
My heart breaks a little to mirror my broken brain.
All of this was here the whole time.
And the total mindfuck is—if my husband hadn’t ruined my life, I would’ve never known.
* * *
Dalton’s demeanor changes as night falls. He grows quiet and urges me to walk faster. He hasn’t let my hand go except to scratch his nose or adjust his dick. His face is grim, and when he hears something he doesn’t like, he stops in his tracks, squeezing my hand so I’ll stop, too. I don’t know what specific sounds alarm him. There are so many chirps and hoots and snaps and honks.
I thought there weren’t any animals except for the birds and squirrels, but it’s clear from the racket that the woods and fields are teeming. When it’s almost too dark to see two steps ahead, Dalton veers off course and leads me down a slight slope to a small clearing nestled against the side of a steep hill.
I have no idea how he found it in the near dark, but the way the nook is positioned, it’s protected from the wind and surrounded on almost all sides by the hill or trees.
“You can sit,” he says, dropping his backpack and cracking his neck. “We’ll sleep here.”
