I tried to push all the thoughts out of my head, but they overwhelmed and consumed me.
“What’s wrong?”
I pressed my eyes closed and reached for Danny. “Nothing, come here and kiss me.”
He took my face in both hands, tilting it up. “I’ll kiss you, but I won’t do a thing more until you tell me what’s going on.”
“I started to think about what would’ve happened if I hadn’t left.”
“And it depressed you?” he prompted, his tone telling me he didn’t understand.
“We might have stayed hating one another or worse, gotten back together and your father found out.”
“I’d like to think the universe had a plan for us. For you and me, to bring us to where we are now. We had to wait for our souls to be ready.” He kissed me again, and then I knew I’d never be the same again.
There wouldn’t be moving on. Danny had my heart and he was home. We belonged together, as silly or as cliché as it might seem, our souls were tied.
“How easily you make me soft with words.”
He reached between us. “Don’t feel soft to me, Av...”
I pushed into his hand. “My heart is soft for you, my cock is hard for you, bodies are confusing.”
He poked my chest. “Feels hard here too.”
I grabbed his hand and bit it. “Get inside me before my heart gets hard and my cock gets soft.”
“Impossible, your cock will always be hard for me. Even when you hate me.” He shoved me again, this time towards the bed. “Get naked.”
Danny didn’t have to ask me twice. I shed my clothes faster than Jim Carrey in Bruce Almighty.
“Impressive.” He grabbed me by the cock and stroked. “Do mine.”
I took my time with the rest of Danny’s. Reacquainting myself with his body properly, and taking the opportunity to touch as much as I’d wanted to until we stood there, both naked, for the second time today.
“You look at me like you’ve never seen this before,” he said softly.
“I’m happy I get to.”
“Don’t be the ‘I’m just privileged to be here’ kid.” He laughed, picking me up by the ass and tossing me onto his bed. “You’re so much better than that.”
I didn’t have a snarky response as Danny crawled across the mattress towards me, a little like he was going to have me for dinner. Our bodies met.
Nothing else mattered.
“Tell me you have condoms.”
“I do, but I should make you beg for them.” He nipped along the sensitive skin in my armpit, kissing and sucking there before finding his way to my nipple.
“I have to beg? Mean!” I planted my hands on his chest and pushed until he lifted.
He stared at me. “What?”
“Up.”
He sat back on his heels. “What's wrong.”
I opened my knees, one hand grabbing my cock and the other my balls, showing him it all. “Are you going to take what’s yours?” I rolled over onto all fours and looked at him over my shoulder.
“Jesus, Avery, you sure know how to get what you want.” He had a condom and lube on in record time, positioning himself closely behind me. “Are you going to be okay?”
“Get inside me.”
Danny didn’t need to be urged again, but he did take his time working me open with his cock. Our bodies were made for one another, and he had me on the edge of orgasm in minutes. I dropped to my stomach, a moaning mess, grabbing his ass and thighs, physically begging him deeper. Then Danny finally fell over me, burying himself to the hilt.
We moved together, reveling inside the moment, whispering things we’d missed, things we wanted. Deep dark secrets wrapped in love, then exchanged quietly through moments laced with pleasure until we both found our release.
“What made you come back?” Danny asked, stroking his fingers down my spine.
“I guess I didn’t want to be alone for Christmas, I felt like I had no one left in San Francisco.” Slipping back into our honesty threw me. Such a strange feeling to be so raw with someone.
I’d never been this open with anyone but Danny, and I didn’t think I would be again.
“You don’t have anyone else there?”
Chin resting on chest so I could look into his eyes as I spoke, taking comfort in the softness there. I’d never understand how so much kindness could come from such a hostile upbringing. Danny was kind in a world that gave him nothing but violence for years, and I loved him more for it.
“No, it’s a bit of a long story.”
“Do you have to run off, back to Ellie?” he asked.
“No…”
“Then?”
I let out a heavy breath. “As I said, we met in college, and I couldn’t bring myself to look at another person, but she was the right mixture of patient and insistent. It was easy to be with her. After a little while I thought that maybe that’s how love was going to feel after us. It was never fire like it was with you and I’m not saying that because we are lying here naked. I did love her, that’s not what I’m trying to get at, but it was never sparks and fireworks.”
“I understand.”
“Do you?” I asked with sincerity.
“I tried to date women, even other men, but I never felt it. It’s why I gave up on relationships and kept to hookups for the last ten years or so.”
I flinched. He laughed.
“I don’t much like the idea of you sleeping with someone else either, Avery...”
“Sorry, I know I have no right.”
He leaned down and brushed his lips over my forehead. “I have murderous thoughts about your ex touching you, then having the audacity to hurt you even though I’m the one benefiting from it now.”
I laughed. “It’s much better for you, had she not left me the way she did I wouldn’t be here.”
“You’ve got to explain that. I don’t know how you live in a place for that long and end up with no one.”
“So, she is this heiress to a box company I won’t name.”
His brows went up, but he didn’t question.
“And she chased me. I started hanging out with her and her friends more and more, she got restrictive, and it only got worse the more serious we got. We were that obnoxious couple who went everywhere together. We were never not together. I think she was obsessed with me for a little while. I was the toy that pissed her parents off, the small-town boy she’d taken out from under all the other girls grasp. She told me one time half her sorority wanted to date me, I don’t know how true it was. Probably only because I was fresh meat and not from their normal clique.”
“You are so naive.”
“What?” My brows pulled together.
“You are hot as hell, then and now. I bet they were falling all over themselves, more so because you weren’t interested in anyone. You were the game and she won.”
I lifted my lip, making a disgusted sound. “The longer our divorce stretched on the more I felt like that. The toy who’d outlived its amusement value. I had a couple of her friends hit on me during the divorce too. The ones that didn’t take her side or just stop speaking to me.” I played with the hair at the back of his neck. “Little by little I saw I was going to be ostracized. I’d been accepted into her circle, but I wasn’t one of them. Ellie wouldn’t be going to school with their kids anymore, and the people who still talked to me, I felt like I was an agenda scalp to them, so by the end I found I had no one. Not even the people I’d seen as my best friends the year before. One of the reasons I started to talk to Aiden, actually. I messaged him on a really bad day and he was nice enough to talk me off a cliff.”