Deeper (22 page)

“Need me to slow down?”

I nod, moving my thighs slightly so I can feel them against his. I don’t know how to slow this down so I need him to do it for me.

“Okay princess.” He sits up, still straddling me, still looking down at me with that possessive look in his eyes. Like he owns me. Maybe he does. At this moment, with the way he makes me feel, I don’t mind if he owns me. He plants a hand on each side of my head and moves back so that he’s over my legs, not directly on my hips. A little more distance. I hate that distance. I hate William for making me stay distant.

Knight is going achingly slow now. He runs a finger softly over my shoulder and along my arm. I thought slow would allow me to think more clearly, but it’s even more overwhelming, because it gives me time to study his gorgeous face, his eyes which are dark and intense with what he’s feeling, his lips that are full and slightly open as he watches me.

When he reaches my hand, he picks it up, holds it with one hand while he traces the palm with the other. Brings it up to his mouth and kisses the soft part between the first and second knuckle, and fire lights up inside me. That shouldn’t feel so good. It’s like he’s kissing me somewhere else. He sucks on it a second longer, then moves to take the tip of my index finger in his mouth. He looks down on me as he takes it in, and the tip tingles as his tongue moves over it. Then, as his eyes seem to burn, he sucks it, hard, a shock wave runs from my hand to my heart, down and out over every part of me.

He’s lighting me up, as if there’s a dead circuit board coming to life in every port for the first time. I feel more of me coming alive as he moves to each finger. I begin to writhe against him, suddenly needing to be closer.

“Nope.” He takes my hand out of his mouth. “Slow.” He sets down my hand, leans down to kiss his way up to my shoulder, slowly igniting each nerve with his mouth. When he gets to my neck he skips it, and runs a hand down my other arm. He starts to do the same thing to my other hand, and I moan. It sounds so stupid that I bring my hand up to cover my mouth. But it also turns me on. Hearing my own voice and realizing he made me make it. It’s hot. It’s so hot. Knight.

Can we do this forever? Just never go home and face this? The minute we sit up, we’ll have to talk about it. The moment we stop, we’ll have to ask if this was enough, or too much, or talk about what it meant. And I don’t know. Right now I’m just a nineteen year old girl having her first sexual experience, and while I won’t betray William and let it go further than it should, I deserve this. I want it. Just this once.

He makes love to my hand, to my arm, to my shoulder. Now he works his way down the line between my breasts, avoiding them, though they ache for his attention, and down to my stomach. He stops, and I don’t feel anything for a moment but both of his hands caressing my waist as if I’m the most precious thing in the world to him. But how would that be possible?

Then his tongue dips into my belly button, and a whole different level of fire and light erupt inside me. What is he doing, and how can it feel like that? And why does he have to keep making those light caresses to the sides of my hips while he’s doing it? It’s too much. Too much, and something’s going to happen, what, I don’t know, but something. Something I want. Something at the peak of light and fire.

We’re chasing it, and though it feels it might hurt my heart when I get there, I’m not stopping him. He uses a hand to pull me up against him as he kisses my stomach once more, and I arch. My moans come faster now, still quiet, but hard like they’re being ripped from my throat. Like I’ve lost control. Like I’ve given it all to Knight. I start to writhe, fighting something. I don’t know what. I want it and I don’t, and my movements become more frantic until he pulls away with his tongue and his hands.

He’s breathing hard, and he waits a moment, just watching me. I start to calm, but my heart is still racing. Whatever was about to happen, never happened, and I’m both sad and relieved at the same time, because I don’t want to betray myself. Or William. One should only be allowed so much happiness when one is a murderer. I feel like today, no, in all my time with Knight, I’ve had enough to be grateful for the rest of my life.

“I’m sorry, hon,” he says, leaning over, pulling me to him, holding me to him in a way that keeps me warm but doesn’t stoke the fire I don’t want stoked right now. “I went too fast. So hard not to go fast with you. You’re so hot.”

“You are too.” I stroke his back, wondering what I’m missing right now because of my stupid trauma. “Was there something else?”

“Yes.” He kisses the top of my head. “Something wonderful. Something I’d love with you. But I don’t think we should. It’s more to the side of sex.”

Damn.

“Rain, I think I’ve made a terrible mistake.” He rests his head against my shoulder.

“What do you mean?”

“I think I love you,” he says quietly.

I freeze against him. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what he wants me to say. That’s his mistake? Falling in love with me? Maybe a mistake because I can’t give it back, but no one said he couldn’t. He doesn’t owe William anything.

“Knight. Thank you.” I push against him a bit so he sits up. I sit up too and lean against him. My heart is slowly calming, returning to a resting pulse.

“For what?” He puts an arm around me.

“For that. For everything. For being so patient. For making me feel so good. For being willing to stop before I got hurt.”

“Hey, that’s what I’m here for,” he says quietly.

I laugh and bump against him, and he bumps me back. It almost knocks me over even though he did it gently. He’s just so much bigger than me, and I really, really like it.

“Knight, do you think we went too far?”

He looks at the ground, then back at me, then back at the ground. “I don’t know, Rain. I don’t think so.”

“Are you sure?”

“Rain, I don’t know what you want me to say. Are you saying you did more than you wanted to?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

“I guess. I don’t know much about sex. I didn’t think I needed to, since I wasn’t going to have it.”

“Rain, that’s insane.”

“I mean, I know the mechanics, but how much counts? Like, is what we did sex?”

He laughs, he actually laughs out loud. “No, Rain. Not even close. I could make you feel a million times better if we actually had sex. I hated preventing you from feeling what I know you were about to feel. I wanted you to feel that way and I wanted to be the one who gave it to you. Your first.”

I blush. It’s still warm inside from the passion between us, and even memories of William can’t drive it out.

“Rain, I know you said you can’t love me, I understand. But I think I deserve to know why. What happened. You know all of my crap.”

He’s right. He deserves to know. I sit back on my hands. “Can we go back out on the beach? I can’t think here, alone with you.”

“Fair enough.” He picks up our stuff and helps me stand. My legs feel like Jelly and I somehow stumble forward and back out onto the beach. Far down the way a man is playing fetch with a dog and throwing his ball into the beach. Beyond him a girl sits reading. Both little dots in the distance.

We place our towels a ways from the water where we’ll have a good view but still be able to hear each other and sit side by side.

“When I was a guard at my last job. I killed someone,” I say, before he’s even done adjusting his position.

He freezes, stops breathing for a split second. I can feel it against my side. Then he resumes, waiting for me to explain further.

“My boyfriend. We were breaking rules. We made a chain on a slide.” Each word from my throat feels like a dagger I’m heaving up just to throw it into my own chest. “I was the one who let it break. It collided, he went flying. Sixty feet onto pavement.”

“Rain…”

“I know, I’m heinous. I’m a murderer.”

“Rain.”

“He’d just asked me out that day. He’d switched trainings just to be with me.” I know Knight is probably creeped out right now by my stone cold face. I know I probably look like a robot. I reach up to scratch my eye and discover tears. I’m crying for William. I’m finally crying for him, not just because of a sudden grief wave, but because I’m finally acknowledging it all. I’m finally facing it, and I hate it. I don’t want to.

“Rain.”

“I know.” I know what he’s going to say. He’s going to say I’m horrible for even allowing myself the wonderful time we’ve had together today. Then he’s going to say I’m an idiot for making pledges William didn’t ask me to make.

“Come here.” He holds out his arms and gathers me into his lap, where I sit, crying and feeling stupid and small in his huge, muscled arms.

I have no right to cry against him. He has bigger losses than mine. He actually loved Camille, whereas I was just hoping to love William eventually. I never got a chance. In a way it was kinder that I hadn’t said yes to him sooner. But if I had said yes, maybe he wouldn’t have been at that training. Maybe he wouldn’t have died. Death at seventeen leaves so many what ifs.

“Rain. My Rain. I’m so sorry.” His voice is deep and gravelly, and I can tell he’s in pain for me. With me. He holds me tight, so tight it’s like he knows I’m about to burst into a million pieces if he doesn’t hold me together.

He isn’t lecturing me about my rules. About the way I chose to cope. I know he probably will. He won’t be able to deal with it when he realizes he can’t talk me out of it. Can’t therapy me out of it. I can’t break my word. I won’t.

“Knight. I can’t just break it,” I say. “I know you’re thinking I’m stupid, I know you think you can change my mind. You can’t. I’m going to live this way.”

“But it is stupid. I’m sitting here offering you love, and life, and you’re going to refuse it because of some kid who died when it wasn’t your fault?”

“He wasn’t some kid! If he hadn’t died, we would have been together. Don’t you get that? And it was my fault.” I want to tear out my hair. I could tear it all out and scream in his face and he still won’t know how crazy I feel, every day, every minute every second. The guilt tears me apart.

I wasn’t strong enough to hold his handle. I wasn’t strong enough to just reject him sooner. I wasn’t strong enough to tell them all to stop the chain.

I hate myself for the person I was, who simply went along with things I knew were wrong. These promises I made to myself, they’re the first things I’ve been able to keep, no matter who pressured me to change them. I can’t give up on them. They hold me together. They make everything make sense.

This whole thing isn’t fair to Knight. I’m going to have to be the one to end it. This sweet, hot, strong man who has said he loves me, would probably stay with me, wait for me, hope for me. He has a habit of hoping for things that are hopeless. I’m going to have to be the one to kill those hopes.

One more session like today and I might end up fulfilling his hopes and destroying mine. My hopes of a life with integrity, where I’m not a doormat anymore, one who gets talked into dating and then talked into killing the person they are dating. I need to be unpersuadable. Rules are rules, and if we just follow them, no one gets hurt. It makes sense.

But I just want to hold him a little while longer. I could let him hold me forever. This safe space with him, with the sun, and the smell of the sea air, mixed with his own unique, masculine scent, something like rain and waves and beach wood.

I’m going to memorize it, hold it inside me for moments when I’m feeling weak and want to give in. When I selfishly want to be happy more than I want to keep my promises, I’m going to remember moments like when we were in the water together. When he was taking me somewhere wonderful and promising to stay there with me forever.

I want to go there with him, but there’s a huge wall in my head and I’ll never get over it. I need to free him so he doesn’t remain behind it with me.

“Knight, I think we should break it off.”

“You what?”

“Break it off. I can’t do this anymore.” I summon the strength to pull myself out of his lap, ignoring every fiber that seems to be breaking as we pull apart. I stand, arms crossed. Feet planted firmly in the sand. If I just hold myself tight enough, my heart isn’t breaking.

My heart can’t be breaking, because I can’t be in love with him. I’m not in love with him. I just care for him, as a friend. It has nothing to do with the times he’s saved me, when we’ve saved each other. It has nothing to do with the way he held my hand in the dark and told me about the girl who broke his heart into a million tiny pieces.

It’s not the way he glared down on me on that bed in Chad’s house, after pulling Chad off of me when no one else cared. It’s not the way he dumped me because I refused to take care of myself and put others first. It’s none of that. He’s just hot. Just hot with tats and I’ll find another like him, some day. I’ll stay with them until they fall in love and leave them when I need to.

It’s a horrible thought, but a steadying one, and I start to head back to the car. I stumble once, and Knight comes from behind to steady me, but I push him away. I’m already distancing myself from him in my heart, and I need that distance. He needs to stop being wonderful, or he’s going to ruin my life.

William’s spine. His spine stuck out of his back. The thought makes me dry heave for the first time, and it’s a relief, because it’s what a person should be feeling at a time like this. If my stomach wasn’t empty except for seawater, I’d probably be able to empty it here, right in front of the boy I’m not in love with.

“Rain, wait. We can make this work.”

“We can’t. I know we can’t. It’s not fair Knight.”

He stops fighting me and we get to the car, I get in and let him load things. I don’t even know or care if he got everything off the beach when he followed me. I could really care less. I left more than my stuff there on the beach today. Stuff I’ll never get back.

There’s nothing I can say. Nothing she’ll listen to. She’s right, I am stupid. I did hope I could change things, even as I agreed to her terms. How could I help wanting more? She’s wonderful. She’s strong. With her, my world isn’t dark anymore. I need her.