I nod. ‘It’s just… can I see your tattoos?’ I suddenly feel small and awkward, and I can’t help but look away from him. ‘I don’t want to be a tease, and it’s not like a fetish or anything, I just?—’
‘Lucy,’ he says, gently interrupting me. ‘It’s fine.’ He reaches over his head and pulls off his T-shirt, muscles twitching and flexing as he does. ‘I’m not going to complain about gettingmorenaked with you.’
Good God, he’s a beautiful man. I mean, if I think about it,beautifulseems too soft a word for all that inked skin and muscle, but nothing else seems to do him justice. I can’t believe he’s really here, half-naked in my bed. I feel like I’ve fallen asleep in front of an action film, and I’m having a really vivid, reallyhotdream about one of the heroes.
He lies back on the mattress, and I lift a leg to straddle him, my fingers finding the lines of his tattoos while his rub slowcircles on my thighs. I trace the outline of them– the stingray that wraps over his shoulder and up his neck; the array of rock pool creatures that span a full arm; the octopus that wraps around his left side, its tentacles curling in all directions– up to his collarbone, across to his other side, down around his hip. One goes even further, disappearing underneath his waistband. My finger follows it, dipping behind the elastic a little way before I overthink it and pull my hand away.
When I look up at him, he’s watching me from under hooded lids.
‘You,’ he grits out, cool hands stilled on my legs, ‘are going to be the death of me.’
I shift slightly, and that’s when I feel him underneath me, hard as a rock and trying like hell not to move. A rush of guilt rattles through me.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, my brow creasing. ‘I’m not meaning to tease you.’
But he just huffs an almost-laugh. ‘It’s not a criticism,’ he says, with a small smile. ‘I’m enjoying the dying process a great deal.’
I shake my head. ‘It’s not fair on you though.’
‘Don’t worry about me,’ he says. ‘I’ll probably have to take a hundred cold showers before I go to sleep, but I’ll survive.’
My frown deepens. ‘Bram…’
‘I’m kidding.’ He reaches a hand out to cup my face. One thumb strokes my cheek. ‘I’m a grown man, not a teenage boy. You say stop, we stop.’
I open my mouth to argue, but he shakes his head before I can. ‘Trust me,’ he says, slowly, like he’s saying something important. ‘I want you so badly that it hurts. But when I rock your world– and believe me, I willrock your world– I want you to be ready. Ok?’
My heart swells as I think, not for the first time, about the assumptions I made when I first met him, and exactly how wrong I was. I don’t care what I’ve heard and read about him, Bram’s good. I know it.
‘Ok,’ I reply eventually, almost a whisper. He smiles in return.
‘Good.’ He pulls me back down for a kiss, and I melt into him. ‘Now, let’s get some sleep. It’s been a long day.’
I nod, but I don’t stop kissing him. Not until those tattooed arms wrap around me and roll me to the side. I land on the mattress with a bump, giggling as I turn away from him and burrow down into the familiar softness of my sheets.
I mean to keep teasing him, but what actually happens is that he curls himself against my back, his kisses little more than whispers on the skin of my shoulder, and I feel something I’m not at all familiar with. I’ve always felt a little out of place my whole life. Always felt I never quite belonged. But right here, cocooned in Bram’s inked arms, I feel like I’m exactly where I should be, protected from the dangers of the world.
‘You’re the dangerous one,’ he mutters then, voice heavy with sleep, like he’s read my mind somehow. But I don’t have time to ask him what he means before his whole body relaxes around me and the tiniest of snores rumbles through him.
And it’s so calming, so peaceful, that I can’t help but give in to it too.
It’s light when I wake up, and the clock by my bed reads 8:03. I turn over and have to stifle a giggle. I thought on that first morning that Bram was tangled up in his sheets because the tiny sofa made for a restless night’s sleep, but he’s just the samenow: limbs flung out like a starfish, bedclothes everywhere. God knows how he was able to get into that position without disturbing me. On a normal night I wake up at least a couple of times, but last night I slept like the dead.
I take a moment to sneakily eye him up, just like I did that first morning, but it feels different now– now that I know the man behind the torso. I don’t feel a single ounce of shame as I take in the ridges of his abdomen, the angle of his hips, the fine smattering of hair across his chest as it rises and falls with his breath.
I look at his skin, the tattoos of sea creatures drawn across the pale surface of it like a story. My eyes follow the form of the octopus around his body, trailing a tentacle I didn’t notice last night– one that curls around his sternum, close to his heart. There’s something different about this one, an irregularity to the pattern which isn’t on the other tentacles, and as I look closer I notice that the negative space forms letters. I strain to focus on them.
Forever the wind in my sails, the words read.Forever my anchor in the storm.
My chest tightens. He’s from a seaside town, so sailing metaphors make sense, but there’s something more about the words– the way they’re worked into the texture of the octopus’s skin, almost hidden– which makes them feel significant. Like a secret hiding in plain sight.
I feel a hand close around my hip, and Bram’s weight shifts in the bed beside me.
‘Are you watching me sleep?’ he asks, his voice deliciously gruff, and when I look at him, he’s looking back at me through one eye, like a sleepy, unfairly hot pirate.
‘Yep,’ I chirp, sinking back down to the mattress and nestling in beside him. My hand strokes a brazen trail across the skin of his chest. ‘Got a problem with that?’
He laughs, closing his pirate eye again as he turns to gather me in his arms. His lips find my neck, the graze of his teeth against it sending shivers down my spine as his arms pull me in. Even my faint but lingering concern about those teeth isn’t enough to stem my happiness at this moment. I think if I were given the choice right now, I would be quite happy to spend eternity exactly here.