I no longer felt too full with Heath inside me.
I felt perfect.
He stopped moving. “Polly?” he demanded in concern.
I sunk my nails into his back again moving my palm to his ass to yank him closer into me. He let out a hiss.
“Don’t stop,” I breathed.
“The Devil himself wouldn’t stop me,” he rasped as he started moving again.
And my hips started to move with him. My body. Everything responded to him. The pain was a dull ache, still there, still insistent, but it was drowning in the sea of sensation Heath had thrown me into.
Chapter Three
It had been hours.
We hadn’t left the bed, apart to meet basic human needs.
I would’ve forgone food entirely, but Heath was insistent of the fact that I needed to replenish my energy.
And to be fair, he’d used up a great deal of it.
I was quite happy for him to use up all of it.
For him to use up all of me.
Because I wasn’t falling for him.
I’d fallen.
Hard.
“You know, I thought this was a modern-day fairy tale,” I said, spooning ice cream into my mouth. “But I don’t think the princes do the things to princesses like you just did to me.”
I was wearing his tee, sitting on his counter, swinging my aching legs as he leaned against his fridge, watching me.
Shirtless.
Wearing sweats low on his hips.
Commando.
And he had just done things.
Things I didn’t think my body could handle.
Things I didn’t know my body craved.
He was silent for a moment after I spoke, then he moved taking the spoon from me just as I’d been about to put it to my mouth. He ate the ice cream on my spoon with a smirk before setting it and the tub aside.
He pushed my legs wider so he could step between them. My core responded immediately, despite the dull ache.
“You want a fairy tale,” he murmured, playing with my hair. “See, that’s your problem. You want something that someone’s already written for you. And that ain’t you, babe, I’m fucking pleased to tell you. The person you are, the story you live, it won’t fit in a book. It’s not ever going to be flattened down to live in some two-dimensional world. You’re too big for that. You’re too bright. You’re sunshine in a life that has always been midnight.”
I blinked away the prickling of tears at the back of my eyes. Because his words were unbelievable. They were not something you uttered to a girl that you met at a bar, the girl who gave you her virginity for reasons unknown.
But maybe they weren’t unknown. Because no matter how free-spirited I was, I wasn’t a girl to give something so precious to just anyone.
Not to the boy who rented a hotel room on prom night.
Not to the boy who wrote a love song about me.
Or the one who inscribed our initials on a tree.
No.
I was going to give it to a man who told me I was his freaking sunshine after knowing me for twenty-eight hours.
Yeah, I was counting.
“How do you know me when you’ve only known me for twenty-eight hours?” I whispered. Then I realized I was vocalizing the fact that I knew the exact number of hours we’d been together for. “You know, approximately,” I said quickly.
“Can’t tell you how I know,” he said. “Just know that I do.”
Silence echoed between us with the power of the truth.
“You say you live in a world of make-believe yet somehow you’re the realest person I’ve ever met,” he murmured, eyes roving over me.
“Maybe everything was make-believe until I met you,” I whispered.
“Fuck,” he hissed inches from my mouth. “You can’t say shit like that. We can’t say anything else. It’s too dangerous.”
I knew what he meant.
Because I felt it too. Every word we said meant something. We were sharing things. And tangling ourselves in each other in impossible ways. Impossible because we both knew this had an expiry date.
“So let’s not say anything else,” I said against his mouth.
And then I kissed him.
But that was much more dangerous.
“Can I ask you something?”
I didn’t know how long we’d been lying there in the shadow of the full moon.
It wasn’t lost on me that it was a full moon. The full moon had power. It poured energy into the world and amplified both good and bad experiences. I was a believer in such things.
But I couldn’t believe it was the full moon that gave power to this particular experience. The one that had my body aching and sated and thrumming with the sheer amount of worship set upon it.
No, that was all Heath.
His arms tightened around me. I liked that. A lot. That when I spoke, he had to physically pull me closer to his naked body before he answered.
“You’re asking me if you can ask me a question?” he teased. “You’re naked in my arms, Sunshine. Know how sweet your pussy tastes, know what it’s like to be inside it. Think you can just go straight ahead and ask whatever you want.”
I giggled. “Don’t be crass.”
He pulled me farther up his body so I was all but splayed upon his chest and tilted my chin up to meet his shadowed face. “I seem to recall you enjoying me being crass,” he murmured against my mouth.
Even though the area between my legs was tender, it pulsed with the sex in his tone, needing more of him.
I smiled. “I seem to recall the same thing. But it’s a little foggy. Maybe you’re going to have to refresh my memory.”
“Fuck, baby, you’re gonna wear me out,” he growled, catching my bottom lip in his teeth.
His hands moved up and down my back. “And you’re testing all my willpower. ‘Cause I know you’re hurting, so I’m gonna wait. It might fuckin’ kill me, but I’m waiting.” His arms tightened around me once more. “So how about you ask that question to distract me.”
“You’re on short leave, right?” I asked.
He was right, my question did distract him, and it wasn’t even the real question. It was the precursor to the question. But nonetheless, his body froze around mine, and I felt the change in his demeanor instantly.
“Yeah, babe,” he said. “Wheels up on Monday.”
I ignored the dull burn in my throat that came with this knowledge. Not just that he was leaving and I was likely to never see him again, though that sucked, but because he was going somewhere violent. Somewhere he could get hurt.
Die.
Best-case scenario had him coming back a little less than he was before. A little less than he was right now. Because war took from everyone. And I couldn’t stand the thought of it taking from him.
“So you’re stateside for three days?” I clarified.
“Yeah, not including flight time. Hardly worth the trip, but it’s better than the alternative, which was stayin’ put.”
“And when you got here, from a war zone, you came to a shitty bar in West Hollywood to listen to a crappy band and drink warm beer,” I said.
“There a question in there, Sunshine?”
I traced lines with my finger on his pec. “You know there is.”