To be loved—to be told that I am loved, to be shown, physically, to have it demonstrated the way she so bravely does…it fills the hole in me that I hadn’t even realized was there.
Quietly, holding her asleep in my arms, I let myself cry with that realization.
I’m not embarrassed. It’s not emasculating. It’s real. It’s human.
She loves me.
She’s not demanding anything from me.
I fall asleep, eventually, still wondering at the marvel that is the woman in my arms.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Delia
I wake slowly, but my senses tell me I’m not in my home. I’m somewhere unfamiliar. It’s the scent in the air, the…feeling.
But then I wake more fully, and memories flood me. Even before I open my eyes, I’m smiling. Because as awareness of my surroundings picks up, I feel him.
Which means all those memories were not dreams. I didn’t dream any of it.
I let my eyes remain closed and let the smile hover on my lips and I revisit last night.
Coming home, exhausted but excited to be going home to Thai. The candles. The rose. A whole box of signed copies of my favorite childhood books. The best sex of my entire life, bar none, by several orders of magnitude.
All the sex I ever had before him was, cumulatively, a small firecracker going off. Not even an M80, just one of those cheap crappy ones you get from a roadside stand. Last night, bare, with Thai? That was a nuclear detonation.
I sigh, remembering.
And I initiated it. I feel proud of that. I wanted him, and I took what I wanted. I didn’t wait for him, I didn’t hold back, I didn’t shy away from myself, from my own needs. I didn’t hide.
I’ve always pushed what I want and need behind the veil of what I have to do—work. That always came first. The company. Dad. Taking over, all of it. Thai blew into my life and knocked all the pieces of my life askew and awry, but it helped me reprioritize.
I matter. What I want matters. What I need matters.
Thai has helped me see that. Showed me that.
The bath, and the things he told me about himself.
The massage.
God, the massage.
The orgasm at the end was…beyond words.
He’s behind me, arm flung low over my hip.
As I consider turning toward him, he twists to face away—and I realize I have a certain need which cannot be ignored any longer. A quick trip to the bathroom—including a rinse of my mouth with mouthwash—and I’m back in bed, bladder relieved and hands washed. This time I snuggle up behind him. Press up behind his big hard body, curl against him. Wrap a hand around his waist.
I don’t quite doze, just rest like that, not quite sleepy but perfectly content to lay holding him.
After a time I couldn’t put a number to, he stirs. I feel him waking. His hand covers mine.
He rolls to his back, and his eyes fix on me. “Hi.”
I smile. “Hi there, beautiful.”
“Isn’t that my line?”
I shake my head against the pillow. “Nah. You’re beautiful to me, so that makes it my line.”
His hand covers my face. “Waking up with you is…”
“Pretty much the best thing ever?” I suggest. “Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
A frustrated expression crosses his face. “I don’t wanna move.”
I huff a laugh. “But you have to pee.”
“So bad.”
I push at his shoulder—it’s like shoving a brick wall. “Go. I’m not going anywhere, promise.”
He hesitates. “You better still be here naked in my bed when I get back.”
I pinch his chin between finger and thumb. “Naked in your bed and thinking dirty thoughts about you.”
That gets him out of bed in a hurry, which leaves me laughing. I only laugh harder when I hear him pee—I have never in my life heard a urination of that length or force. I hear him rinse his mouth too, and then he’s swaggering back to me. And I watch every move he makes on the way, hungrily.
“You’re looking at me like I’m something to eat,” he says, lifting the covers and diving in.
“That’s because you are.” I reach for him, catch his hip, pull him closer.
He slides up against me, and we’re on our sides, facing each other. I throw my leg over his hip, slide my hand under his neck and play with the hair at his nape. My other hand drifts between us and finds him already growing for me. His eyes search me, and the way he looks at me…it’s like he’s seeing the sunrise for the first time. Like he’s been blind and given sight.
His palm runs from my underarm to my hip, and then he fondles my breast. My breath catches at his touch, because he doesn’t just grope…every touch is a caress. Worship.
“Delia,” he murmurs. “I can’t even deal with how sexy you are.”
I laugh, shaking my head. “Feel free to tell me that all the time, Thai.” The laugh fades, and I give some vulnerable truth. “I’m not gonna lie: it feels really good, hearing that from you.”
He pushes me to my back and leans over me. His mouth dips kisses to my flesh, shoulder and throat and breastbone, the valley between my breasts. I cradle his head and treasure the warm wet touch of his mouth, his worship of my body.
But his worship doesn’t end with his kisses.
“Sexy isn’t even close to the right word.” Another kiss, to the outside of my left breast.
“Lovely.” His tongue slides over my nipple.
“Divine.” He nuzzles the underside.
“Heaven itself made flesh.” His breath huffs hot on my belly.
“Perfection.” My ribs, now, under my right breast.
“An angel.” Another kiss.
“Your skin is starlight. Your eyes shine with the light of the moon.” My right breast, now.
I hold his head, playing with his hair. Listen to his words, his descriptions of me, and I hear the truth in them, and my heart swells, fills every particle of me.
He’s not done.
“Every breath I take is for you,” he says. “What wouldn’t I do for you? Walk a thousand miles? Cross an ocean? Pluck a star from the sky for you?”
“Thai…” I whisper.
“I’ll go anywhere for you, Delia. Do anything for you.”
“Thai.” I palm his cheek. “Just be you. Just be mine.”
He finds my mouth, then, and claims it. His tongue slashes into my mouth and his lips are strong and firm on mine. His hands clasp in my own, fingers twining, pressing my hands to the pillow above my head and he’s above me, knees between my thighs. I hook my thighs around his hips and cling to him, lift up to meet him.
It’s a kiss without end, breathing for each other—breathing each other. Tasting, delving, subsumed.
For a long moment, there’s nothing but the kiss. Hands joined, lips locked, tasting each other.
But I need more, and I need him and I know how I want it.
I roll into him, leverage him to his back. Our hands still joined, I slide astride him, and now I’m sitting on him, his hands pressed to the pillow. I slide against him, stroking his hard erection between the lips of my sex. His moan is raw. I tease him with this, slowly rubbing myself on him, almost taking him inside me but never quite doing so—rubbing the head of him against my clit until I’m gasping and biting my lip and grinning with glee and wild delight, and still I tease him. He just crushes my hands with his powerful grip and holds still for it. Grunting, moaning. Grind his thickness between my nether lips, back and forth, my wetness coating him, making the slide slick and smooth.
“Delia, god, my god Delia—what are you doing to me?”
I press my weight onto our hands, leaning forward. Brush the tips of my breasts against his face, tease them against his lips, over his eyelids. Torture him with them, until he growls and nips at me, suckles my nipple into his mouth, but I laugh and pull away from his hunting, questing mouth, and go back to brushing them against his mo
uth, his lips, his cheeks. Then, finally, I let him have them, lowering myself so he can glut himself on me.
He’s throbbing against me. I’ve teased him—and myself—long enough.
I grasp him and guide him to me. One hand braced on my chest, I lift up and nestle the broad round head of him to my seam. Tease him up and down the slit, until he’s nuzzling in between the lips, and I sink a little closer to him. Take a tiny bit of him. Teasing us both. He’s not breathing, jaw gritted, brow furrowed, chest lifted, hips flexed upward, abs taut. I brush him up and down, slowly bringing him into me, slowly letting myself drift lower—millimeter…by millimeter…by millimeter.
“Ohmygod, Delia,” he breathes. “What are you doing to me?”
I don’t answer. I have about half of his length inside me, and I want all of it. But instead, I flick my hips backward, so he nearly falls out of me. My hands are both braced on his chest, now. I use only the roll of my hips to tease him, to torture us. Flit up, away, and slowly, slowly lower myself around him, gradually take him again, inch by inch.
His hands roam up my thighs to my hips, cling there, and the fierce grip of his fingers in the flesh of my ass tells me how badly he wants to haul me down hard, to drive deep.
But he doesn’t.
He barely moves, waiting for me.
He loves this torture as much as I do—and our eyes lock, as I pause. Just the plump tip of him splitting me open, just inside me.
I flutter there, light quick rolls of my hips.
He moans.
I do this until he’s gasping and his groans are maddened and rough.
And then I clash my mouth over his and slam down onto him all at once, and we both groan into the kiss.
Away, then. Into the wild rhythm of hearts lost together, of love being made with crazed abandon.
He drives up into me and his hands grip the bell of my hips and helps me crash down onto him, and then he’s holding me apart so he can slide deeper and I’m leaning forward cradled in his arms and he’s using his hips and thighs to drive into me and I’m whimpering every time he enters me, deeper and deeper. Cry with the beauty of us. At the perfection of all that we are, together.
“Thai!” I cry out.
“Delia,” he responds, in a rough snarl.
I lose track of everything but him slamming inside me with beautiful perfect strength, filling me until I ache with the nascent explosion, until I blossom with the sunfire heat of climax. There’s nothing but us. But our union, our bodies so made for each other crashing together.
I topple over the edge and falling screaming into climax, crying his name and dripping tears onto his golden flesh and still we move together, and I’m quaking with orgasm still when he finally lets go.
There’s no screaming in this—there’s only my voice lost in breathless awe, only him too shattered to even whisper my name. He bursts into me and I’m filled with the hot flood, and I ride him for more, and now it’s my movements that are desperate and wild, driving more and more out of him, until he’s trembling and gasping and slips out of me, spent.
Finished, panting, sweating, I collapse onto him, and his hands explore my body, scratching gentle patterns from shoulders to buttocks.
I’m breathing against the side of his throat; I feel his pulse hammering crazily against my nose. “I remember what I said last night,” I whisper. “And I meant it.”
He palms my cheek, brings my face up so our eyes meet. “I am totally, absolutely, one hundred percent, head over heels in love with you, Delia McKenna. It scares the absolute hell out of me, and I’m okay with that.”
I smile, my lips curving against his cheek. “Matthais Bristow loves me.”
“Yes,” he murmurs. “I sure as hell do.”
There’s nothing else to say, so we just hold each other.
Breathe together.
Bask in the afterglow, and glory in the lush atmosphere of possibility—the potential of what our lives together can be, will be.
Beautiful, I know that.
Filled with a lot of incredible sex, I know that too.
And most of all, filled with love.
THE END
Dell
Fuck everything.
Seriously.
I walked away from River Gulch with nothing but the clothes on my back.
Okay, well…that may not be exactly true. But it feels like it.
I have no real home—the thing with the model fell apart pretty quickly and I’ve been bouncing around pretty aimlessly ever since.
I rented a condo in San Francisco for a while.
Got bored.
Went down to LA, rented an apartment down there.
Got bored.
Then everything with Dad happened, and…my life, such as it was, fell apart.
Listen, okay? It’s not like I was sitting around waiting for dear old Pa to croak so I could get my grubby little mitts on his pile of cash. He was my dad. I loved him. I may have had a fucked-up way of showing it, but I did—do—love my father.
I regret—and will regret to my dying day—that I wasn’t there when he passed.
I wake up in a cold sweat, every single night, a monstrous weight of unspent grief lodged behind my eyes. I see him, in that moment when I’d known I was too late.
I listen to his voicemail every fucking day.
The money doesn’t mean shit.
I’ve got my trust and that’s plenty. Especially when I didn’t do shit to earn anything I have.
It’s the way he tried to trap me that bothers the hell out of me. He tried to manipulate me. Like, didn’t he realize I never wanted that life? I don’t know what else I could have done to make it clear that I wasn’t interested in that fucking company.
I’m angry.
All the grief I don’t know how to cope with, how to expel…it sits inside my chest like a demon, acid dripping from its fangs and claws. Poisoning me.
The poison of grief transmutes into anger.
I have my Louis Vuitton overnight bag with some clothes, and that’s it. I have more shit in a storage locker in River Gulch, but none of that means anything without somewhere to have it.
And I’m fucking lost.
Right now, literally.
I sold my fancy half-million-dollar sports car. I sold all my watches except the Phillipe Patek Dad bought me for my twenty-fifth birthday, which I wear all the time, now. I sold nearly all the shit I spent my life up until now accumulating.
The clothes in my bag are from a department store at a nowhere mall, off the rack. Cheap.
My sunglasses are from a kiosk at that mall.
I’m driving a 1993 Range Rover with over a hundred thousand miles on the odometer.
I’m somewhere in…I don’t fucking know. There are cows and horses and silos and wheat or grain or corn or some shit. I don’t fucking know. I just know I’m super, super lost. Been driving for hours, took a wrong left turn at Albuquerque—yeah, yeah, I know that’s in Nevada, and I’m in Illinois or somewhere. Wait—New Mexico. And maybe I’m in Missouri. Don’t know, don’t care.
I stopped caring, stopped keeping track of miles, and I never had a destination. Most nights, I sleep on the back bench of my Range Rover in the back of a Walmart parking lot or somewhere like that.
I’m just driving. Going nowhere, trying to run away from myself. I know it won’t work. But if I stop running, I’ll start drinking, so running is better.
I’ve already pickled my liver pretty damn well by this point, and if I go and grief-drink now, I’ll never stop.
And I…want a life.
I just don’t know what it looks like. Where it is. What to do. How to find it.
My engine sputters and dies, and I pull the big beast over to the side of the highway. It rolls to a stop, and just like that, I’m stranded.
Did I sell my phone, too? Yes I did.
No way to call anyone—not that there’s anyone to call. I wouldn’t call Delia for help, mainly because I think she’d r
ather watch me suffer than actually help me. I know that’s neither fair nor true, but I already said I’m angry, okay? Nor would I call Mom, because she’s essentially gone too, pining after Dad.
Thai?
He stayed in touch after Dad’s funeral. Called once a week, we exchanged texts. Thai was all buddy-buddy. But god, I’m fucked up. He knows it. And he knows he can’t help me fix it. We’ve been best friends our entire fucking lives; when I’m ready to come back, he’ll welcome me with open arms. I know that, and in some ways, that anchor, the reassurance that at least I’ll always have Thai to rely on…it’s what keeps me going, way out here. He fixed himself. He figured his life out. And if he can do that? If Matthais Bristow, playboy, fuckboy, itinerant douchebag, can settle down and be a career man in our hometown with my sister? Then surely I can fix the mess that is Cordell McKenna.
And yes, I know they’re together. I smelled that drama coming a mile away, him and Delia. I suspect they’re happy little homemakers by now, and I don’t wanna be around to see that shit.
Gross.
My best friend and my twin sister?
Shudder.
But also…it’s sweet, and redemptive, and all that gross, sappy, gooey shit that I’m too bitter and angry and sad to be around.
So, here I am. Middle of absolutely nowhere. No gas. Miles from anything. No gas can. No phone.
It starts to get hot in a hurry, so I get out of the SUV and lean against the hood—there’s a little bit of a breeze, at least, so that helps.
A semi passes with a tornado of wind, honking its loud-ass air horn. Another, after a few minutes. Neither so much as slows.
A Porsche 911 whips past, way too fast.
An old guy on a tractor—and that tractor takes a full twenty minutes to from one end of the horizon to the other. He just tips his dirty John Deere hat in something like an apology and keeps going.
When someone does stop, it’s a pickup older than me.
It’s being driven unironically—not because old trucks are cool, but because it’s all the person has.
It’s red, but how much is paint and how much is rust, I don’t know. There are bales of hay piled high over the cab, pressing the back end down over the wheels.