Page 60 of Played
He lifts his beer for another sip, and I set my fork and knife down on my plate next to my half-eaten steak and decimated baked potato.
Leaning back in my chair, I tilt my head, studying him just as closely as he appears to be looking at me.
“What am I doing here?” I bluntly ask.
He watches me over the bottle, several beats of silence pulsing between us. It’s so loud; this room seems like an echo chamber, bouncing it back to us over and over again.
“Because I want to spend some time with you.”
“You mean you want to fuck.”
“Yeah.” My whole body damn near flinches at his bald honesty. He leans back against his chair, hooking an arm over the back while he continues to toy with the beer in his other hand. “You’ve seen yourself, ma. I don’t need to tell you you’re fine as fuck. Your sick body—those perfect tits, the ass that made even those ugly-ass uniform pants sexy, thick thighs ... then there’s that face. Your body gets my dick hard, but that face?”
He shifts in his chair, and for a second, the flex and bunch of muscle in his arms, along his chest, snatch my laser focus from his mesmerizing words. But as sensual as that display of power wrapped in flesh is, nothing can distract me for too long from his words. His raw, dirty, and utterly lovely words.
“That face could make a man pray again. Because only something that fucking beautiful could be God created.” He licks his full lips, and I almost whimper. Order him not to do that, not one more time. Order him to lickmylips. “So yeah, you being you, it’s impossible not to wanna fuck. Doesn’t mean I was happy about it. Doesn’t mean Iwantedto want to fuck.”
“So what changed? When?” I murmur.
Because I’m here, in his house. A house, he admitted himself, that he allows only a select number of people to visit. And I’m not naive enough to believe he asked me to “come to him,” as he put it, just to talk.
The question is, Am I willing to take it there? Take it there, knowing he’s going to hurt me. That one day I’ll be relegated to one of those nameless, faceless women he’s fucked in the last couple of years. That his heart, his soul, is owned by a dead woman, and all I’ll get from him is a nut.
No, I won’t walk away from him unscathed.
And yet I don’t get up and run from this house back to the safety of my own. Loneliness hurts, but not in the same way of the kind I’m courting.
“I love my wife.”And there it is.I battle against the urge, the desperate need to glance away from him. But my pride trumps my fear of him seeing how that statement of fact disturbs me. Jabs a wound in my carefully guarded heart. “Never say never, but other than Khalil, I don’t know if I’ll ever love anyone as much as I do her. No cap, I don’t think I want to love anyone like that again. But that’s not what this is.”
“Right.” I try to hold in the serrated chuckle, but it escapes. And the food I’d just scarfed down sits at the bottom of my stomach like my body’s weight in lead. “I’m a fuck. We’ve established that, thanks.”
He doesn’t blink at my sarcasm. As a matter of fact, for a long, long moment, he doesn’t move at all. Then, in one sinuous motion, he lowers his arm from the back of the chair and straightens. Leaning forward, he props his arms on the table, bracketing his nearly empty plate.
Though he doesn’t touch me, I’m still pinned by that green gaze, the force of it heaving on my chest, my neck.
“I said I want to fuck you. But if that’s all you were, ma, trust and believe, you wouldn’t be in my chair, at my table, with food I cooked, in front of you. I wouldn’t go to all this trouble for pussy when it’s so easily available for free.”
How pathetic am I that his words loosen the suffocating weight on my chest? That I’m soaking up his almost vulgar assurance that I’m more than forgettable ass to him? I can’t lie; shame slinks on its belly through me. Shame that I won’t, again, get up and walk away. I’m settling for crumbs, and I know it. I know it, and there’s a part of me who’s willing to gather those measly remnants and hoard them. Because they’re all I have of him.
“Cool. Great.” Yeah, I’m done. Shoving my chair back, I shoot to my feet, the napkin I’d spread across my lap soundlessly tumbling to the floor. “Thanks for ... this. It’s been real.”
Too muthafucking real. God, I wish he’d try to lie to me sometimes. At least it wouldn’t make me feel like a walking vagina.
I round the end of the table, but before I can make it to the kitchen door, the sound of his chair scraping across the hardwood precedes his big hand cuffing my upper arm, halting me midstep.
“Wait.” I jerk my arm, and he lets me go. But he doesn’t move back. No, he shifts closer, and the wide wall of his chest grazes my shoulder. “I didn’t finish. Yeah, I want you. We’ve already established that. But that’s not all there is. Shit would be a lot easier, a lot simpler if it were. I can’t get you out of my head, ma. Not from the moment I walked into that conference room. And I’ve tried. God knows I’ve tried. But I like ...” He pauses, and his frustration and ... andneedseem to bleed out of his pores, cascading over me like the sweetest fragrance. Or pheromone. “I like how I feel when I’m with you. I like how shit quiets in my head. It could be that you have my head so gone and my dick hard that everything else fades into the background. I don’t know. I don’t give a fuck. All I care about is the pressure cooker inside me that’s been on ten since ... for years ... eases. I’ve missed feeling fucking normal, Adina. You’ve given that to me, and on some real shit? I don’t want to give it up. Not right now.”
My breath heaves out of me on loud exhalations. Or maybe they’re deafening only to me in this too-quiet room.
His lips brush the top of my head, and I can’t suppress the shudder ripping through me. Almost hesitantly, he lifts his hand, and it circles around my neck. Just like the first time he did it at the firehouse, my heart stutters in my chest, then races as if there’s a gold medal at the end of a track. The air that had been leaving my lungs in loud puffs snags in my throat, trapped by the not tight but firm grip on my throat. That heavy, big palm and the long, thick fingers brand me. Moisture slips out of me, and I know my panties are in a sorry state.
Even as I mentally yell a warning to my body tostand still, I unconsciously lean into that hold, pressing his hand harder against mywindpipe. Urging him to ... yeah, no point in denying it. Urging him to tighten his grip, threaten my ability to drag in air.
Like he has the handbook to my body, he does just what I’m silently begging for. And the groan rolling up from my stomach all the way to my throat sounds like a ragged, wrecked thing in the room.
Just as I’m ready to throw all caution—and my drawers—to the wind and ask him to lay me out on this table next to my half-eaten steak, he releases me, and this time, my whimper is in disappointment. His fingers pinch my chin, tipping my head back. I lift my lashes and meet his gaze that seems to glow green fire.
“You feel that?” His hips roll against me, and I swallow back a gasp at the steely, huge length pressed to my hip. My pussy contracts so hard I’m wondering if a vagina can have freaking labor pains. “That’s what you do to me. That’s what I can’t wait to pry that pretty little cunt open with.”
