She tapped the bed next to her and it was enough to startle a laugh out of me. I dropped the towel and let her molten gaze travel over me. There was appreciation there and something deeper that hit me hard when I grabbed her ankle and pulled those long legs apart. She hissed out a breath and it was my turn to raise an eyebrow. She was pretty and polished all over. Everywhere I touched, she was smooth and silky, and I knew she tasted like cinnamon and sugar. She looked so right in my bed, I had a hard time remembering what it was like before she became a regular fixture there.

I ran my hands up one of her smooth legs and tickled her knee. She narrowed her eyes at me and I grinned down at her.

“What?”

“Stop playing with me.”

She had a flat tummy that curved delicately in between her hip bones. I bent down and kissed her right below her belly button, and then I trailed a wet path to right above her slick folds and stopped and heard her swear at me. She threaded her fingers through my still-wet hair and bent her legs up to my ribs.

“I want to take care of you the way you took care of me.” I kissed her again, this time lower, and I heard her gasp and swear at the same time. Her thighs tensed next to my head, and I ran the top of the barbell that was in the center of my tongue over her clit and felt her entire body spasm under the delicate contact. It made me chuckle, which had her pulling at my hair.

“My God, Jet, you’re going to destroy my idea of what sex should be like.” Good. She didn’t need to know what sex was like with anyone but me from now on, and I wanted it to be better with me than it had ever been with anyone before.

I used my tongue on her again, this time deeper and harder and curled it around her, and sucked on her until she bowed underneath me and her skin quivered everywhere we touched. Her nails dug into my scalp and I brushed my bruised and torn knuckles across the velvet peak of her breast until she whispered my name again and started to come apart under my hands and in my mouth. Ayden came like she did everything else, sweet and smooth. I could eat her up all day long for the rest of my life, but she was impatient. Clearly, the taking care of each other portion of the night was over, because she wiggled out from under me and I let her shove me over so that I was on my back. I stacked my hands behind my head and watched with heavy eyes as she leaned over me to fish a condom out of the bedside table.

She was always extra careful when she worked the latex over me. I think the metal down there still kind of intimidated her. I knew she enjoyed it, loved the way it made her feel, but she was always extra gentle when she touched it, like she still wasn’t sure exactly what to do with it. There were no words for how badly I wanted her to put her hot little tongue around it, to taste it, feel the metal in her mouth. Not that I could complain; she wasn’t shy and I loved what she did to the rest of me. I liked it when she lost control and dug her nails into my back, when she forgot to keep a lid on all that passion and hunger that boiled and frothed between us and used her teeth just a little too hard or pulled my hair a little more roughly than I think she meant to.

She swung a long leg over my waist and rose above me. All I could see was amber glowing down at me. She dug her teeth into her bottom lip when I grabbed her hand and squeezed it hard around the tip of my dick. Both her eyebrows shot up and I saw concern flash across her flushed face. The ring throbbed in the best way possible and I smirked up at her.

“Giddy up, cowgirl.”

She flushed a light shade of pink and sank down on me, which made both of us groan. We fit. That was all there was to it, we just fit. She leaned down to kiss me, and the contact of her pointed nipples on my own made both of us hiss out in pleasure. She pressed her forehead against mine and found a rhythm that had me digging my fingers into her hips and swearing under my breath. Every time she lifted up, her swollen flesh pulled and tugged against mine in a way that made me want to explode. We were both pretty sated from all our earlier fooling around, so this slow build up, this tenuous climb toward orgasm had us watching each other intently.

It was far more intimate, far more personal than any sex act I had ever been part of before. I could see it filling her, could feel her inner muscles flutter and drag against me, but it was her eyes—those eyes I wanted to drink in over and over again—that pushed me over the edge. For once I could see her, see that there was something there for me, and I pulled her over into a climax that had both of us sweating and scrambling for air and boundaries as soon as it was over.

She collapsed on top of me, crossed her hands over my heart and propped her chin on them. I moved one hand to her hair and threaded the dark strands between my fingers.

“I beat the shit out of my old man today.”

I saw her eyes go to the cut on my face and linger.

“Why?”

I couldn’t meet her gaze, so I looked up at the ceiling and let the events of a lifetime drift through the pleasant aftermath she had woven around me.

“He sucks. He sucks as a parent, he sucks as a husband, he sucks as a man, and he sucks as a human being in general. He has it in his mind that knocking my mom up somehow derailed the awesome party his life was before we came along, and has spent years and years blaming both her and me for it. He wants to drink and party and act like he’s eighteen, all while making her feel worthless and awful. I left home to get away from it and I’ve always tried to keep him in some kind of check, but today he was drunk and he hit her. I lost my goddamn mind when I saw it. He hit me first, but then I saw her with a black eye, and all I could think about was killing him. I’m pretty sure I broke his nose and he had to get hauled off to the hospital, for a second I thought I might have killed him, but the cops told me I wasn’t that lucky. But, the worst thing . . .”

She didn’t say anything, just watched me talk and listened to my heart beating under her hands.

“The worst thing is that she got in the ambulance and went to the hospital with him, while I got carted off to jail. She took his side and told the cop I started it, she blamed me. I just can’t do it anymore and that makes me feel like shit.”

She lifted one of her hands and used the edge of her nail to trace a line around my mouth, which had turned down in a hard frown.

“The extent to which we can sacrifice our own lives for our families has to have some kind of end point, Jet. You can’t be angry and hurt forever because she won’t let you help her. At some point, you need to recognize that she made her choice, and it clearly isn’t you.”

Ultimately, that was what hurt the most.

“I have a court date in a couple of days. He pressed assault charges.”

“He hit you first. Claim self-defense.”

I would, but the fact of the matter was, had the police not shown up when they did, there was a good chance I would be facing a homicide charge instead. I sighed when she pulled my fingers out of her hair and placed a delicate kiss on each of the raw knuckles. I didn’t know what it felt like to heal, but I knew enough to know that was what she was trying to do for me. It tempered some of that angry blaze that always hovered so close to the surface in me.

“We can’t pick our families or where we come from, Jet. All we can choose is who we want to become in spite of them, and because of them.”

I curled my palm around her cheek and ran a thumb over the pronounced bone. To me, she always looked elegant and refined, like she was something expensive to be savored and enjoyed as a reward for really good behavior. I never understood when she hinted that it might all just be a carefully crafted front.

“Why don’t you ever talk about where you’re from or your family? I don’t mean just to me. Cora says you hardly ever say anything about what your life was like before college. Was it that bad?”

I saw the walls go up and the gates close, even though we were still naked and intimately connected. Her mouth got tight and all the warm fuzzies I had put in her eyes dwindled. I thought she was going to try to pull away from me, so I locked my hand around her neck, under her hair and held her in place. She scowled at me but didn’t try to leave. She dropped both her hands and let her head fall, so that her cheek was pressed against the snarling face of the death angel on my chest. She put her hands on my rib cage and answered the wall instead of me.

“It wasn’t that bad, but I was.”

“What does that even mean, Ayd?” I soothed my hand up and down the curve of her spine. No matter where I touched this girl, there was no place I felt it more than in my dick.

She huffed out a breath that made my skin pebble.

“It means I wasn’t a very good person not too long ago. There were too many boys for too many bad reasons. There were drugs and a general disregard for the law and the only use I had for anyone was what they could do for me. I used whatever—and I do mean whatever—it took to get what I wanted, and I didn’t care who it hurt or how it made me look to anyone. I was a mess, and the only real reason I had for being that way was because that’s what folks there expected. No one thought I was smart. No one thought I was going to ever get it together enough to leave, and if one teacher hadn’t taken an interest in me and forced me to get my act together before it was too late, chances are they would probably have been right.”

She was describing a stranger. That person sounded so far removed from this dynamic girl draped all over me that I couldn’t even picture them in the same room, let alone the same body.

“I don’t even know what to say to that. I don’t know that girl.”

Her thumb was skating along my ribs and rubbing at the skin stretched in between each one. It was soothing; she was soothing, and all I wanted was for her to be the balm that put out the fire in me once and for all. I could tell by her tone, tell by how she still couldn’t look at me, that forever and me didn’t go hand in hand in her mind, no matter how hot we were in bed, or how deeply we affected each other out of it.

“No, but she knows you. She knows you make me feel wild and out of control and that I don’t ever want it to stop. She knows that because of you I feel like I’m willing to do whatever it takes to have you, and damn the consequences and whatever gets in my way. Because you get to me like no one ever has and you’re more addicting than anything illegal I ever messed with in the past. Mostly, she knows that when I’m with you, all I think about is you and me, and how quickly we can find someplace to get naked, or how long it will be until I can curl up in your arms and let you sing to me. I don’t think of the future, or school, or all the other important things I need to work on to have a life for myself. You could own me, Jet, and I don’t want that to ever happen.”

I curved my hand over her ass and pulled on her thigh so that she was sprawled over me. I needed to get up and take care of business, but I didn’t want to move. The arm that had Dali’s clocks on it was wrapped around her shoulder, and once again I couldn’t help but think that every minute I spent with this girl was a minute that was going to have to last me a lifetime when she was gone.

“What if it doesn’t matter? What if I cared about her as much as I care about this version of you? I don’t want to own you, Ayd, I just want to be with you.”