Page 51 of Reaper
I don’t know when I finally fall asleep. But when I wake up and see Adriana sleeping beside me, with a peaceful smile etched onto her normally harsh, vengeance-seeking features, I have to get out of bed.
Am I giving myself a real chance with her? Could she be a way to start over and have a new life? Or am I just making things worse?
I slip out of bed, and she stirs.
Her eyes go right to me. Her smile grows. It makes me sick with how caring and beautiful it is. The woman inside Adriana that hides behind her spiny shell of violence, vengeance, and grim determination, makes my heart ache.
“Good morning,” she says. There’s a lightness in her normally hard voice.
“Morning,” I say and turn away, hoping that if she can’t see my face, she won’t see the truth of what I’m thinking, because I want to hold on to this feeling of something like peace, and something deeper, warmer, than even that, for as long as I can.
But she is smart, perceptive, and I am not a very smart man for thinking I could hide anything from her.
“What’s wrong?” she says. There’s so much care and compassion in her voice that, at first, it sounds like she’s speaking a foreign language.
I blink, pause, breathe, and realize the shocking fact that, for the first time, no one in this room wants me dead. Not her, and not even me.
I turn back to face her, and she's sitting up now, the sheet pooled around her waist. Her hair mussed from sleep, and there's something vulnerable in the way she's looking at me that makes my chest tight.
"I'm just thinking," I say, which is the truth, even if it's not the whole truth.
She tilts her head, studying me with those brown eyes that seem to see straight through all my bullshit. "About what?"
About how I don't deserve this.
About how you're going to hate me when you find out the real story.
About how I'm already falling for you, and that scares the hell out of me because everyone I care about ends up dead.
"About breakfast," I say and force a grin. "I'm starving."
She doesn't buy it. I can see it in the way her expression shifts, becomes more guarded. The walls are going back up, and I hate that I'm the one putting them there.
"Ricky." Her voice has lost the soft quality from moments before. "Don't do that."
"Do what?"
"Shut me out. Not after last night." She pulls the sheet higher, and I realize she's protecting herself from me now. From whatever she sees in my face that's making her retreat.
I sit on the edge of the bed, close enough to touch her but not quite doing it. It’s torture. Every part of me wants to reach out and touch her. "I'm not shutting you out."
“Was it just a game to you? I let you in, let you eat my pussy, suck your cock, ride you, let you come inside me, and it was all part of some sick manipulation of yours? Do you just want to hurt me more so maybe I’ll, what, kill you?”
“That’s not it,” I say. “I don’t want to hurt you. It’s just that — ”
She sits up and puts a finger into my chest. “I really don’t want to hear it. If you’re going to go on about your wanting-to-die bullshit, or anything else, just shut the fuck up about it. I don’t deserve it. You don’t deserve it. And you don’t deserve me. But I am choosing you, just like I chose to fuck you last night. Don’t fight me on this. Choose to live and do the right thing, so that I don’t feel like I wasted my fucking choice and hours of my life having sex with you, when I could’ve just masturbated by myself and had just as great of an orgasm as the ones that you gave me last night. If not better.”
I laugh. “‘If not better?’”
“I know what I want. I work hard. I practice. So, yeah, I meant it — better.”
I put my hand on her thigh, feel the warmth, the smoothness, feel desire burn itself up my arm with the fervent want to bury myself deep inside her. Maybe she’s right. Maybe she isn’t. But that question can wait, because there’s something else on my mind: her challenge.
“You’re wrong.”
She moves her leg just a little, opening it, and her eyes flash with challenge. “Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
