In a shaky breath, I peeled the hair back from her face and lowered my forehead onto hers, spreading her legs under the pressure of my weight.
“Daphne?” I lifted her just enough to wrap my arms around her waist, using one to tangle through her strands and the other to play along her ass. “I am sorry,” I warned before melding my skin into hers. I wanted her, and not gently.
My soul was a shattered thing, clambering about my insides like a loose chain on a hot wire! To make it move. To make it feel! It demanded more than what I permitted… It required her.
I exhaled, breathing into her mouth before I angled my cock in so deep I felt her stomach clench.
“Me, too.”
I smiled. What in the hell was she apologizing for?
It didn’t matter because I let go.
All the things I kept hidden, shoved down inside myself, became real.
The monster dispersed into thin, inky strands, filling my body until it lodged itself in my muscles. I held Daphne in my gaze while it fucked her senseless, pulling punishing, bruising, twisting unfamiliar noises from her throat.
She needed to know the truth.
And I needed to know she could fucking take it.
“Thay,” she grabbed at my neck, her wet lips tilting toward mine.
My body split in two when she closed her legs around my hips, locking me dead center.
Fuck. Me.
“Thay?” she bit at her arm, needing somewhere to put all that sweet pressure.
She was so pretty.
I watched Daphne’s eyes for a glimmer of fear, but all they did was burn bright when she pulled my face closer.
“Thay,” she pleaded, but she didn’t run, and I swear for a split second, we were in Seattle, in my shitty little bed with the world screaming outside the window. But only for a moment, until it became a glimpse, a curtain blowing in the breeze, handfuls of ash falling around us like rain.
My body slammed into hers, but she was spinning, the way she did whenever she dragged my ass into the first snow, the edges of her white nightgown twirling under the shine of a dying streetlamp.
Then she ran from me into the space where life and death negotiate terms, whispering into a birthing mother’s ear like a fearless, goddamn angel who never stops fighting.
I wanted her.
That smile.
The messy way she eats toaster waffles, all the fucking syrup running down her chin.
I wanted to mouth along her spine when she let me fuck her against the window. And all the fucked-up poetry she creates that never quite sits right inside pentameter.
My kiss fell into hers like a gunshot…
And…
And…
Everything exploded into slow-motion circles, making the ghosts within me scream.
“Oh, fuck,” she held onto me, her eyes bursting, while I roared against her tongue. My vision blurred, the salt of an entire lifetime streaming down my cheeks.
She tasted of snow.