Page 59 of For a Goode Time Call…
I curled up into a ball on his huge body, which was an odd combination of hard and soft—hard with deep, powerful muscles, but just a little soft, too. So perfect. A perfection I hadn’t known I’d always craved, this particular, specific sensation of hard and soft all together. Soft embrace, gentle and sweet, but beneath it was a well of unutterable power. Vibrantly masculine strength—masculine without being at all macho. Just confident. Male.
I thought of him last night—shaking as he slid into me. Just…shaking, like I’d never felt anyone tremble before. And I knew, with total surety, that he’d been shaking with the effort of holding back. I’d been so delirious with the sheer breathless wondering shock of the way he felt inside me to do anything about it last night, or to even fully understand it. But now, as I lay here with a sore sex, knowing that he’d been in complete control, holding back…what seemed to me likeeverything, I knew I wanted—needed—to know what it would be like to feel him lose that edge of control.
He hadn’t hurt me.
If anything, I’d wanted more. Even then, drowning in the incredible out-of-this-world feel of him inside me, more than I’d ever even guessed was possible, fitting in me as if whatever artist had created this world had created Ink and created me and created us to fit together like two pieces of a puzzle—even then, I’d wanted more. Wanted to feel him move. To be gone for me, as I was gone for him.
The one thing that hurt in a not so nice way was my leg.
It hurt like a bitch. Throbbed with soul-shearing agony.
The muscle, the bone, the screws and plates. Everything. It justhurt. Reminding me that I’d been slacking on my mobility exercises. Slacking on my whole post-PT rehab routine. If I wanted to be able to walk without a limp, to run, to even think about dancing again, I had to work on it.
And I hadn’t been.
But I couldn’t.
What was the point? There was no point.I, as a person, had no point.
Ink’s heartbeat was all that kept me from shattering into tears on the spot—duh-DUM—duh-DUM—duh-DUM. Solid, steady, reassuring.
Damn him, though, he knew.
“Cass.”
I shook my head, clenching around him, clawing into him, every muscle paralyzed as I attempted to shut down and hold back the breakdown.
“Let go, babe. It’s okay.”
I shook my head again, swallowing compulsively against the hot lump in my throat, trying to swallow the burn and sting in my eyes.
He rolled to one side, bringing us to our sides, and he curled up around me. And somehow, I was wrapped in a warm solid sheltering cocoon of Ink. He was everywhere. His heartbeat was loud all around me. His heat was like a kiln on full blast, like standing over an open oven. His power was all around me, a visceral presence.
And he just…held me.
I curled tighter, tighter. Into a woodlouse ball.
“It’s okay, Cass,” he murmured. “It’s okay.”
I wondered if he knew I’d never really grieved for everything I’d lost?
How could he know that? I’d held it together until Mom showed up, and then when I’d seen how delicately she was holding herself together against some mysterious tension of her own, yet was there for me, worrying with frantic desperation about me, as only a mother can, I just…kept holding it together. We got here, and she was clearly deliriously happy to be with Lucas, who sometimes grated on my nerves and annoyed the shit out of me, but Mom was blissed into nonsensical incoherency when she was with him and I just couldn’t anchor her down with my sob-sob bullshit pity party.
But I wasn’t okay.
I’d never really cried.
Not for the trauma of the accident itself. Not for the vicious pain I’d been in afterward. Not for the realization that I’d never dance professionally again. Not for the way Rick had treated me, in the weeks after the accident. Not for the way he’d dumped me, so coldly, so callously, so indifferently. Not for what I’d discovered about him recently. Not for any of it.
I’d never cried about any of it.
I wasn’t a crier. I’d cried for a couple of hours after Dad died, and then I’d pulled it together to be the steady one in the family, the emotional rock my mom and sisters needed. I’d never truly grieved that, either.
Shit.
I’d never really dealt with any of it, had I?
But it all came out.
